• by Colin Kirkland , May 24, 2023

To help marketing teams manage increased customer-service requests on social channels, social-media management site Hootsuite has released an upgraded Inbox product that gives marketers a bird's-eye view of all public and private messages on all networks, as well as comments on Facebook ads.

Inbox provides a centralized platform for social media marketers to manage messaging, with embedded functionalities that make responding to inquiries more efficient without jeopardizing a quality response, the company says.

Hootsuite’s 2023 Social Trends Report shows half of organizations deciding that social customer service is the marketing team's responsibility.

With 40% of consumers expecting brands to provide assistance in their chosen channels –– such as Messenger or Instagram –– marketing teams “now have to manage yet another channel, become customer service agents, and address their customers' inquiries within the social channels they live on,” the company says.

Allowing marketers to view all of their social channel inboxes at once, with the added ability to search through all social messages left by customers, is Hootsuite's solution to this problem.

“Inbox encourages efficient collaboration among internal teams, and offers a suite of features to streamline responses and speed up service,” the company states in a recent release.

These features––accessible only to Hootsuite Business and Enterprise users––include collaborative messaging routing, automated responses, chatbot-integration, performance measurement, CSAT surveys, alerts, mobile access, linked customer profiles and more.

“Our social team polled customers to understand their pain points on social, and what we heard was that our customers' greatest struggle is not being able to engage with their customers and respond to inquiries 24/7,” says Natalia Williams, chief product officer at Hootsuite, adding that the company's Inbox tool was upgraded to help “simplify, accelerate and empower” this process for its customers.