Building a better Social Suite: 12 features that fuel your enterprise-wide social media strategy

When you think about your brand’s social media strategy, what comes to mind?

Is it about listening to what your customers are saying about your brand on social media?

Is it ensuring you’re ahead and on top of any negative feedback?

Or, maybe, it’s about engaging with your customers with the right message, on the right channel, at the right time?

For large enterprise brands, the answer is clearly “all of the above, and more, all of the time.”

Social media is now ubiquitous to the customer experience. You must quickly understand what customers are saying, delight customers with new products and personal experiences, and proactively detect and solve problems. There is no one way to think about your social media strategy — you must be thinking about all of these aspects.

Social suites platforms are designed just for this purpose. Forrester defines social suites as “multiple social tech capabilities into a single unified platform, such as social listening, customer response, organic publishing, advertising, influencer marketing, employee advocacy, ratings and reviews management, user-generated content management, and/or social communities.​”

But, not all social suites are the same. Your social suites strategy can easily become disconnected by data silos and point solutions, with different teams engaging with customers in different ways. But, social suites that combine a strong social media strategy with a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform can more effectively drive the value of your social engagement to every corner of your enterprise. Fewer silos and dead ends. More collaboration and communication. Happier customers.

There are four core capabilities that you need in your social suites platform, as well as key differentiators you should look for that can extend the value of your social suites strategy across your entire enterprise. Your unified social suites strategy should:

• Capture actionable consumer insights
• Streamline customer engagement
• Create memorable customer experiences
• Measure and optimize your strategy

Capture actionable consumer insights

An omni-channel social listening strategy is the fuel that makes your customer experience engine run. But, are you putting that fuel into an ordinary automobile or a high-performance race car? Different businesses have different needs, but large enterprise brands need a comprehensive listening strategy that hears customers and enables the business to act on insights generated by those conversations quickly and at scale.

Your brand needs to be able to:

• Provide the most comprehensive data coverage across social, digital, and messaging channels.
• Configure listening searches by topic, channel, website, and other parameters.
• Monitor and analyze results with visual insights that help you aggregate millions of data points in one place.
• Surface actionable insights across billions of data-points by using industry-leading AI for unstructured data.
• Share insights internally and externally to fuel collaboration and innovation across your enterprise.
• Harness machine learning and AI to generate insights, enrich data, highlight anomalies, and recommend next actions.

Three key differentiators to look for

1. Extensive source coverage: how many sources of data does the technology enable, including social, traditional media, web sources, first-party data, as well as integrations and partnerships?
2. Unique AI capabilities: does the technology have AI capabilities built for unstructured data, such as anomaly and trend detection, predictive analytics, and industry-specific AI models?
3. State-of-the-art insights tools: does the technology have powerful tools like smart insights, AI-powered topic clustering, and visual insights to detect and analyze attributes in images?

Learn more about Sprinklr’s AI-powered social listening tool.

Streamline customer engagement

There is a philosophical exercise that goes like this: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? On social media, the answer is a resounding yes. Social listening data is great, but your brand will need to put it to work on a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform to get to the real value: engaging with customers. A strong social media marketing strategy is a cornerstone of a strong social suite.

Your brand needs to be able to:

• Get more out of your social customer engagement data by empowering teams to submit requests for campaigns or content using standardized intake forms.
• Manage marketing plans and workflows by using a centralized campaign planning and content marketing platform.
• Create and distribute organic and paid content aligned with overarching goals.
• Source and leverage user generated content (UGC) by easily requesting approval and automatically storing assets for reuse.
• Collaborate internally and externally with context by ingesting ideas, streamlining tasks and collaboration.
• Manage marketing activities for advocates and influencers by using similar workflows as for any other channel.

Three key differentiators to look for

4. Comprehensive agile marketing workflows: how many channels does the technology support, and does it have purpose-built AI, automation, and collaboration features
5. Personalized, compelling content: does the technology boost return on ad spend by delivering content aligned to the customer journey stage and prior interactions
6. Brand amplification: can the technology help you amplify your brand by engaging employee advocates and influencers to promote content more widely?

Learn more about Sprinklr Publishing & Engagement.

Create memorable customer experiences

There’s a wonderful quote from Maya Angelou: “I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” It’s true about culture, and it’s true about customer experience. The double-edged sword of engaging customers on digital channels is that while you can engage with a larger audience than ever before, it can make individual voices harder to hear and respond to in a human way. But brands with a modern approach to their customer care strategy are changing that by integrating customer-facing functions seamlessly across the enterprise. One vision. One voice.

Your brand needs to be able to:

• Capture and respond to customer needs by engaging across channels to have real and human conversations.
• Identify and enrich customer data across the enterprise by using AI to augment records with social activity, chats, emails, survey results, case history, and CRM data.
• Collaborate internally and externally on response planning, production, and distribution.
• Integrate ratings and reviews with the rest of your social suite.
• Manage your communities by integrating them with the rest of the Social Suite.
• Incorporate machine learning and AI to orchestrate customer interactions and provide superior customer experience.

Three key differentiators to look for

7. Omni-channel customer care: does the technology enable a single, unified view with social activity, chats, emails, community discussions, survey results, case history, and CRM data together in one place?
8. Automation and AI: does the technology automate and streamline workflows with response suggestions, relevant knowledge base articles, and similar cases?
9. A complete view of the customer journey: can the technology combine public data together with your customer data?

Learn more about Sprinklr Unified Care.

Measure and optimize your strategy

Brands are awash in an ocean of unstructured data. And, it doesn’t matter how good that person in accounting is with spreadsheets — at some point, it’s just too much to handle manually. Your social suites platform is not complete without the ability to measure and optimize your performance, and to share that performance data with the rest of the organization. To do that, you’ll need all of your data on a single platform, outfitted with automation, customization, and industry-leading AI.

Your brand needs to be able to:

• Package dashboards and reports by using unlimited filters to drill into, customize, and retrieve insights.
• Support testing and optimization by leveraging AI using standard metrics, custom calculations, and third-party analytics.
• Define and measure brand health by using integrated listening and mapping it back to owned and paid insights.
• Define and measure marketing and care objectives by understanding customer journeys, CSAT, and NPS.
• Define and measure business, company, and revenue objectives by using ROI and correlation analysis.
• Extend data and collaborate internally and externally by amplifying the reporting insights with multiple export and distribution options.
• Unify customer experience across all teams that touch any brand social media property, from corporate marketing to local retail and regional teams, by having them on a single platform

Three key differentiators to look for

10. Real-time, AI-powered automated reporting dashboards: can the technology quickly uncover timely insights across paid, owned, and earned, as well as location insights and product insights data?
11. AI-powered insights and optimization measures: does the solution help you generate more sales with better and optimized content that resonates well with customers?
12. Easy, dynamic presentations: does the technology quickly and easily showcase real-time data in a visually compelling way and keep that data updated automatically?

Learn more about Sprinklr Marketing Analytics.

Drive business value with your social media strategy

Your social media strategy should not be considered a single branch of your overall customer experience — it must be integrated across the enterprise. Making sure your social suites solution is part of a Unified-CXM platform will bring your vision to life by eliminating data silos and making it simple, fast, and consistent for your teams to work together toward one purpose — making customers happier.

A Unified-CXM platform can provide powerful features including:

• Unified customer experience data on a single platform
• Industry-leading AI capabilities that can be adapted to your brand’s specific needs
• Governance, automation, workflows, analytics, security, privacy, and compliance features that empower your teams to work efficiently while protecting your brand

Learn more about Sprinklr Social Suites.