Microsoft navigates social chatter to create meaningful customer experiences, at scale
The Challenge
“With a company like Microsoft, one of the largest social command centers in the world being here, there's a lot of social out there,” says Microsoft’s Director of Growth Innovation & Strategy Katrina Munsell. “There's a lot of chatter taking place. So how do we get to the social that really matters most?”
This is the challenge Microsoft was looking to solve: How does a company as large and prominent as Microsoft manage its extensive social media presence? How does it sort through an overwhelming volume of social data — some 115 million mentions a year — to discern what truly matters?
If social is a digital transformation accelerant that drives everything from how a company markets its products and services to how it provides customer care then, as Microsoft’s Tyler Smith says, “If you’re not there to meet them where they are and respond to them and to deliver value . . . then you’re leaving all those opportunities on the table.” Smith is Principal Product Manager, Cloud + AI Commerce and Ecosystems. Microsoft wanted to capture all those opportunities with its team of 75 community managers.
In addition to a social management solution, Microsoft was also looking to consolidate multiple point solutions. Tool overload was disrupting workflows and creating inefficiencies within the social team, requiring them to navigate between various platforms.
The Solution
The Microsoft team implemented Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform.
Recognizing the role of social media in their digital transformation efforts, they consolidated social operations onto the Sprinklr platform, which now powers their Customer Experience Center (CXC), the hub of the company’s social engagement operations. Social publishing and engagement, reporting, and insights are now managed from the Sprinklr platform, enabling community managers to connect with customers and prospects in a genuine way, at scale.
“Prior to Sprinklr, we were using a number of point solutions, but it was causing our team to look here, look there,” says Katrina Munsell. “[It was] all very disruptive, very different than the flow that we have today, which is going into one centralized platform.”
Today, Sprinklr AI enables Microsoft’s social team to respond to customers quickly by filtering out unnecessary messages that would otherwise require manual labor. This solution aims to streamline operations while enabling community managers to handle a large volume of social interactions.
The Outcome
Adopting Sprinklr as a centralized social media management platform has has significantly improved efficiency and scalability, allowing Microsoft to manage a vast amount of social mentions and customer interactions with a relatively lean community management team.
Sprinklr enables them to make genuine and scalable connections with customers and prospects by honing in on the most relevant individuals and topics, so they can connect on a one-to-one and one-to-many basis. With its secure and scalable nature, Sprinklr emerged as a solution that meets the needs of Microsoft's global enterprise.
“We need a technology that's secure, that's scalable, that can meet the needs of our global enterprise,’’ says Smith. "And I put my money on Sprinklr. I don't see anything competing in the marketplace that can do everything that Sprinklr can do nearly as well.’’