How Hootsuite elevated and streamlined their customer support with SnapEngage Live Chat

This case study tells the story of how one SnapEngage client was able to dramatically increase their customer satisfaction and efficiency alongside exponential growth in support channel volume, all without increasing their team’s headcount at the same rate.

Hootsuite, the most widely used social media management platform, was founded in 2008 and since then has amassed over 13 million customers in over 175 countries, 2500+ of which are Enterprise customers which comprise 800+ of the Fortune 1000.

Teri Bayrock
Senior Manager of Customer Support Operations at Hootsuite
Teri shares her story of integrating live chat into their support channel offerings and the overall impact that it has had on response time, ticket reduction and customer satisfaction.

Chapter 1: The Old Days of Customer Support

Hootsuite has always been proud of their Twitter support. They aim to capture as many customer inquiries as possible (#NoTweetLeftBehind) through constant monitoring of direct and passive mentions of their brand using their own social media monitoring tools. The challenge with Twitter support is that sometimes a resolution requires privacy or more than 140 characters.

Hootsuite connected with SnapEngage in 2014 looking for a way to offer a more private, real-time support channel. Prior to this, there were three main pathways for support: Email (through support tickets within their help desk), Twitter requests serviced through Hootsuite, and Twitter requests brought from Hootsuite into their help desk as a ticket.

Chapter 2: Hootsuite Launches SnapEngage Live Chat

Hootsuite launched live chat in Q3 of 2014, leveraging SnapEngage’s Zendesk integration to centralize all of their support records. Starting out, they limited their live chat offerings, gating availability by plan type and strategically placing chat buttons on specific FAQ articles and ticket submission pages within their Help Center. Incoming visitor chats were split across three widgets, routed to the appropriate teams and tied directly into Zendesk.

The initial results quickly reaffirmed their decision to add live chat to their customer support channel offerings. They instantly started seeing faster response times, faster resolution times, improved agent efficiency and higher customer satisfaction.

Chapter 3: The Gamechanger

After getting their feet under them, they began to branch out, adding live chat into other areas within their product. But the real shining moment came in 2015 when SnapEngage introduced the Hootsuite Plugin. The integration served to further advanced their mission of offering a more private and instant customer support channel by allowing Twitter conversations to be pulled into a live chat.

The seamless transition from Twitter to live chat allows for faster resolution times and higher satisfaction rates than conversations brought into email. All chat transcripts are still sent to Zendesk at the close of the chat, creating a unified survey experience and a resolution path for issues that cannot be resolved in chat after Twitter.

Epilogue: What’s Next?

With live chat accounting for an increasingly larger portion of customer support resources, Hootsuite is now using SnapEngage to gauge demand and forecast staffing needs. They follow a simple, seamless process:

1. Identify a page of interest (i.e. a place they would consider adding live chat).
2. Add a designated offline chat widget to the page, complete with Zendesk mapping. (All requests come through as offline tickets.)
3. They receive an accurate representation of demand for chat on that page. They also avoid overload on customer support advocates if the demand is unexpected and are provided valuable insights into the common reasons for wanting chat on that page.
4. After the pilot period, they swap the chat widget javascript to relate to one of their active widgets.

In the above example, Hootsuite gauges demand for live chat on a page, indicated by the salmon color. Knowing that this would increase chat volume by 15-20%, they can staff accordingly before turning live chat on in that location.

Live chat now makes up about 50% of Hootsuite’s total support interactions and email-only tickets are at an all-time low. But more importantly, customer satisfaction (across all channels) is at an all-time high, while overall support channel volume continues to increase.