Biggest Benefits of Integrating Social Media With Your Contact Center

If your business relies on social media to connect with customers and grow your brand, integrating these channels into your contact center is a natural next step.

Not only will this streamline communication, allowing you to manage customer interactions from one centralized platform, but it will also improve response times, boost customer satisfaction, and make it easier to access and apply actionable insights from social conversations.

In this article, we’ll discuss the primary reasons you need social media-enabled contact center software. We’ll also share six tools you can use for social media customer service, including Nextiva.

Why Do You Need Social Media Monitoring in Your Contact Center?

It’s worth investing in social media customer service on top of your existing support efforts for the following reasons.

1. Customer expectation

Nearly 70% of participants in Sprout Social’s 2023 Index said they expect a brand to respond on social media within 24 hours. Your call center needs social media monitoring capabilities to meet or exceed this expectation.

A contact center with social media features organizes inbound messages and customer inquiries in a central inbox, which your agents can track and respond to promptly. Social media tools, like Syften or Brandwatch, also allow you to quickly monitor and react to what people say about your brand across multiple social networks, including LinkedIn and Instagram, ensuring a consistent online reputation.

2. Better brand visibility

About 26% of consumers use social media to discover new brands and products. Having an active social media presence on the channels where your audience hangs out will put you in front of prospective customers, making it easier for them to discover, connect, and buy from you.

It also makes it easier to connect with your audience and build a strong relationship that often translates into conversions or referrals. You can quickly share direct product updates, respond to customer queries, and participate in relevant social conversations to build rapport and strengthen your brand image.

3. Seamless omnichannel experience

A contact center with social media capabilities lets you incorporate your platforms into the rest of your customer touchpoints or channels. This allows you to deliver a consistent customer service experience no matter where or when they contact you.

Let’s say a customer contacts you on Instagram and then calls a few hours later to continue the conversation. With social media integrated into your other customer service channels, you can seamlessly pick up conversations from where they left off — as if the customer never switched platforms. For example, you can route the conversation to the same support team agent, ensuring a smoother experience and eliminating the need for the customer to repeat themselves.

What Are the Benefits of Integrating Social Media With Your Contact Center?

Integrating social media channels into your contact center setup leads to:

• Faster customer response time: You can track and respond to social media interactions, including comments, direct messages, and other inbound communication quickly because everything is put into a central contact center platform.
• Proactive crisis management: Social listening and monitoring tools help you track and respond to negative news about your brand before it becomes a full-blown public relations crisis that negatively affects your brand image.
• Unified customer data: You can add social analytics and performance data onto a centralized dashboard to give you a 360-degree view of your audience’s behavior across multiple channels throughout the customer journey. This helps you understand customer expectations better and tailor your strategies accordingly.

Social Media Use Cases for Your Contact Center

Here are three common ways to leverage social channels in your contact center operations.

1. Customer support

According to Sprout Social’s 2022 Index Report, about 60% of U.S. consumers use Facebook for customer service. Similar data exists for other social channels, like Instagram and TikTok.

With so many people relying on social channels to interact with brands and resolve issues, it’s important to integrate these platforms into your customer support process.

That way, you can quickly surface and respond to customer complaints or inquiries through public posts or direct messaging for faster resolution.

2. Brand monitoring

According to Hubspot’s 2024 State of Consumer Trends Report, more than 25% of consumers prefer discovering new brands and products via social media. This is a good reason to monitor what people are saying about your brand on social channels to ensure you’re making the right impression.

Social listening tools, like Hootsuite and Syften, can help you monitor mentions, hashtags, and keywords to track ongoing conversations about your brand. That way, you can address negative sentiments in real time rather than allowing them to harm your credibility and reputation.

3. Customer engagement

According to Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report, brands with mature digital engagement records typically increase revenue by about 123%.

Social media is one of the core channels for effective digital engagement because it allows you to interact with your audience in real time — fostering conversations, responding to feedback, and creating a sense of community.

For example, you can offer personalized recommendations and publicly thank customers for positive feedback. You can also host live Q&A sessions to engage your audience and address common concerns.

Top 6 Tools for Providing Social Media Customer Care

Here are six social media tools that can help you provide on-time communication and support to your customers.

1. Nextiva Contact Center

As an omnichannel contact center solution, Nextiva integrates all your communication channels, including social media platforms, so you can monitor customer interactions from a central point.

It also supports omnichannel routing, allowing you to automatically assign social media inquiries to the most suitable agent for faster resolution.

In addition, Nextiva offers advanced contact center features, like predictive dialing and customer relationship management (CRM) integration, which make it easier to run efficient operations and deliver great experiences to customers and agents.

Top features

• Social listening tools to track mentions and sentiment in real time
• AI-powered analytics to prioritize and respond to high-impact issues
• Uptime of 99.99% for reliable communication at scale

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one platform for social media management and customer engagement. It provides regular features, like scheduling tools and analytics, to help you plan and monitor your organization’s performance across multiple social channels.

It also has customer engagement tools, including consolidated inboxes and message spike alerts, that enable you to track and respond to inbound messages from a central platform. That’s not all; Sprout Social integrates with advanced CRM tools like Salesforce, allowing you to integrate social conversations with the rest of your customer data.

Top features

• Unified social box to monitor all messages from one place
• Social listening tools to track brand mentions and trends in real time
• Detailed performance insights for campaigns, posts, and profiles

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an affordable social media management tool for smaller businesses. Its plans cost about 60% less than SproutSocial’s for the same number of channels and users, making it a cost-effective solution for organizations with tighter budgets.

Like SproutSocial, HootSuite offers scheduling, brand monitoring, and social performance tracking features. It integrates with over 100 platforms and tools, including CRM software and digital asset management tools.

Top features

• Offers team roles, approval workflows, and permissions for seamless collaboration
• Integrates with social advertising tools to manage and optimize ad campaigns
• Has a fully functional app for scheduling, publishing, and engaging with customers on the go

4. Zendesk social messaging

Zendesk combines social media support with a ticketing system, allowing you to quickly assign inbound messages to the most appropriate agents for faster resolution.

Zendesk automatically converts each customer’s message into a ticket. These are then categorized, prioritized, and automatically routed to the appropriate team. The platform integrates with Zendesk AI to provide smart recommendations for agent responses.

Zendesk also stores the conversation history, which can be reviewed to improve agents’ performance and the overall customer experience.

Top features

• Intelligent routing to connect customers with the most appropriate agents
• Zendesk AI which helps agents resolve issues faster and personalize interactions
• Provides response times, resolution rates, customer satisfaction, and agent performance metrics

5. HubSpot service hub

HubSpot provides a comprehensive suite of tools to help you manage customer interactions and deliver excellent experiences efficiently. These tools enable you to scale support across all channels, including social platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

One of its biggest advantages is the integration of HubSpot CRM. This lets you feed social interactions and data directly into your CRM software, creating a central hub for managing customer interactions. The platform also offers features like feedback management and conversation intelligence to boost agents’ productivity.

Top features

• Fully integrated innovative CRM software for managing customer interactions and data
• Mobile inbox that enables agents to stay productive while on the move
• Automated customer service to speed up tasks and response time

6. Front

Front’s social customer service platform offers a simple, intuitive interface designed to streamline workflows. With automated routing and ticket handoff, it ensures workloads are distributed fairly across your team.

By supporting omnichannel communication, including social media, Front enables agents to provide personalized service, as they have access to customer history profiles and in-app note-taking. Robust analytics provide valuable insights into response times, resolution rates, and overall team performance.

Top features

• Includes a centralized inbox that lets you handle all customer interactions from a unified workspace
• Supports omnichannel communication, allowing you to switch between channels while maintaining full context for a seamless customer experience
• Stores records of past interactions across all channels in customer history profiles, enabling personalized and consistent service

Close the Social Support Gap With Nextiva

Managing social customer care separately from your other customer channels can quickly become overwhelming.

Switching between platforms, struggling with disjointed data, and losing context result in slower responses and frustrated customers. That’s why you need an all-in-one customer support solution with built-in social media management capabilities like Nextiva.

Tablez partnered with Nextiva Social Media and Reputation Management to streamline and regulate online customer service and review management. With a single inbox, Tablez could scale online customer care to efficiently handle over 400,000 cases per month and manage all their review sites. Customer satisfaction is now up to 95%, and the Net Promoter Score is 90%.

Nextiva integrates all your customer touchpoints, enabling your team to work smarter, respond faster, and provide a seamless, connected experience that keeps customers coming back. Learn more about how businesses like yours scale social media support with Nextiva’s marketing suite.