How Hostplus uses social listening and engagement to improve member responsiveness

“While we have customers of all ages, many of our clients skew younger,” explains Stuart Wilkinson, who leads strategy and transformation at Hostplus. “These younger member cohorts have different needs and expectations than the generations before them.”

Wilkinson and his team at Hostplus wanted to put in place a customer experience management solution that would help the firm not only meet those expectations, but exceed them. They wanted to enable them to easily and securely engage with and serve members and prospects on their preferred social channels, while also staying abreast of relevant online conversations.

Hostplus needed a solution that would:

• Generate real-time, actionable insights to help the team develop engaging content for their members and prospects
• Allow them to serve their members on their preferred channels through secured conversations
• Enable seamless reporting for fast, data-driven decision-making
• Future-proof the organization with a reliable tech partner that continues to invest in best-in-class functionality

“The breadth and depth of functions that Sprinklr offers is really amazing,” Wilkinson explains. “I’ve worked with a lot of different CXMs, and Sprinklr, for me, is by far one of the most comprehensive tools.”

Increased efficiency with social listening and automation

Hostplus implemented Sprinklr Insights, which helps them to listen to and glean insights from online conversations, including those that take place on member review sites. With Social Listening, Wilkinson’s team is able to pick up on trending topics, understand what messages are resonating, and incorporate those insights into content development to achieve a better return on marketing campaigns.

“Having a 360-degree view of these interactions, no matter which channel they come from, has really helped us,” says Wilkinson. “With the click of a button, you've got a full audit trail. And that auditability gives a different level of governance compared to what we had before.”

Automation features from Sprinklr’s Sprinklr Social product suite enable better governance and improve the ease and speed of social media management. The ability to have analytics in one centralized place, posts scheduled across channels, and fully-governed approval workflows streamlined has enabled Hostplus to increase the number of social media posts by 300% with the same resources.

Peace of mind with Smart Alerts

​​Sprinklr’s AI-powered Smart Alerts from the Sprinklr Insights suite enables a modern, proactive communications strategy, which is critical to a member-focused business like Hostplus. Wilkinson’s team is able to tune into relevant online conversations in order to stay abreast of both news and trends and be prepared to respond. When the Australian government announced during the pandemic that Australians would have early access to money in their superannuation funds, for example, or when there is new legislation, like the country’s recent “Your Future, Your Super” Act, Hostplus can now rely on real-time notifications, enabling it to swiftly identify member concerns and pain points, respond to them proactively, and quickly halt unfavorable trends.

“Smart Alerts give peace of mind to the team,” says Wilkinson. “We don’t have to be monitoring conversations manually around the clock because we know that Sprinklr is managing it. And when any new event happens, an alert comes through, so that we can jump on it straight away. This trusted capability enables our team to invest additional resources only when it’s required.”

Improving regulatory compliance and marketing efforts with real-time reporting

When it comes to managing the retirement savings of more than one million Australians, it’s critical to maintain visibility of digital conversations and response times. With Sprinklr Marketing, Hostplus’ marketing team can monitor campaign performance in real time across paid, owned, and earned channels.

“As soon as we see a spike or anomaly in traffic, we can find out why it’s happening and whether it’s something to worry about,” Wilkinson explains. He also likes the flexibility within Sprinklr Marketing that enables him to quickly gain insight into a campaign’s performance.

“It’s really important to be able to test and learn with our campaigns, and Sprinklr allows us to see the direct impact of certain decisions we make, which is insightful.”

Meeting customer needs quickly and efficiently in a secure environment

Hostplus also implemented Sprinklr Service, empowering customer service agents to serve customers efficiently and within the superannuation industry’s strict compliance regime.

Monitoring members' sentiment across social, web, and chat, then routing engageable cases to the right agents to resolve issues promptly has not only been a huge time saver, but also ensures that members are heard and supported. When working a case, agents are able to see members’ full conversation history, while the intuition capability enables supervisors to quickly categorize, triage, and resolve all inbound member messages and inquiries.