Social media is yet another channel consumers are heavily using for education, research, shopping and brand interaction, and it needs to be part of every company’s CX strategy. Social media touches every part of the CX market ecosystem, including contact center; personalization and optimization; customer insights and feedback; employee experience; customer data and analytics; and customer relationship management (CRM).

CRM giant Salesforce  recently announced a partnership with Sprout Social to allow Salesforce customers the ability to manage their social media presence, including analytics, listening and social customer care via Sprout’s social suite. According to Salesforce Marketing Cloud SVP and COO Ryan Strynatka, “Social media has become mission critical to the future evolution of business. We’re delighted to partner with Sprout. We’re on a journey to empower companies to create a 360° view of their customers, and Sprout’s industry-leading social media management platform will help our customers harness the power of social.”

Social media is a prime engagement channel and helps companies piece together a more complete picture of their customers’ feelings towards their brand.

Focusing in on the role of social media in the customer insights and feedback domain, the move towards digital, accelerated during COVID-19, has resulted in an increased flow of incoming customer data as consumers increasingly interact, shop, and leave comments on digital channels. CX practitioners are needing to meet customers “where they are,” and often that is on social media. Those who leave comments on social media have particularly lofty expectations of response time. According to Emplifi, 52% of respondents expect to get their questions answered within one hour of posting it on a brand’s digital channels (including website, social media) and Sprout Social reports 40% of social media users expect a response within an hour.

CX practitioners who hope to meet the support needs of customers who reach out via social media as well as collect customer feedback for their own internal efforts will need to leverage CX technology that makes social media a critical inbound and outbound channel. There are numerous benefits associated with including social media as a feedback input, with a primary one being it may be the channel that the customer prefers to use. Company benefits and uses include the following:

Social media can be used to gather structured feedback, via surveys and polls, and is also a major source of unstructured feedback that can be parsed through via the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, uncovering insights that might not have otherwise come to light. Many CX technology providers offer insight and feedback solutions that encompass social media into some or all of the customer insights and feedback chain including Emplifi, Medallia, Concentrix and Forsta. With fast response being a need-to-have, the insights to action/closing the loop piece is a crucial component.

Solutions that make it easy to “listen” to social media and deliver alerts to the right people so that an appropriate response can be sent not only to those customers providing negative feedback, but also to those sending positive feedback are important tools for a CX practitioner to have as more customers use social media as a vehicle for communication and engagement.