The go to platform for brilliant customer service
We used Sparkcentral to engage & reply to customers' enquires, Sparkcentral helped us a lot in reducing the first response time, the …
Overview
What is Sparkcentral (discontinued)?
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The…
Recent Reviews
Pricing
N/A
Unavailable
What is Sparkcentral (discontinued)?
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product…
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Would you like us to let the vendor know that you want pricing?
Alternatives Pricing
What is Freshdesk?
Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer service software that helps businesses of all sizes to deliver customer support. Freshdesk converts requests coming in via email, web, phone, chat, and social into tickets, and unifies ticket resolution across channels. Additionally, Freshdesk lets the user…
What is Sprinklr Service?
Sprinklr Service is a cloud-native unified customer service platform powered by AI that enables seamless customer & agent experience across 30+ digital, social and voice channels, and delivers real-time actionable & scalable insights. Sprinklr Service – Enables customers to interact with a brand…
Product Details
- About
- Integrations
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Sparkcentral (discontinued)?
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
Sparkcentral (discontinued) Features
- Supported: Intelligent Routing
- Supported: Seamless Escalation
- Supported: In-App Messaging
- Supported: Social Channel Customer Service
- Supported: Text Customer Service
- Supported: Reporting & Analytics
- Supported: Customer Profiles
- Supported: Customer Personalization
- Supported: Knowledge Base
- Supported: Macros
- Supported: Contextual Engagement
- Supported: Omnichannel
- Supported: Transcripts
- Supported: Pop-up Chat
- Supported: Co-Browsing
- Supported: Targeted Emails
- Supported: Conversation Archiving
- Supported: Team Inbox
- Supported: Visitor Activity
- Supported: Help Desk
Sparkcentral (discontinued) Integrations
- Salesforce Service Cloud
- WhatsApp Business
- Messenger
Sparkcentral (discontinued) Competitors
Sparkcentral (discontinued) Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
| Supported Countries | Global |
| Supported Languages | English Interface, Software can accept any language |
Frequently Asked Questions
Sparkcentral was a social customer care solution and cloud-based customer engagement platform that catered specifically to customer care teams within large enterprises, enabling them to deliver real-time social customer service. Sparkcentral was acquired by Hootsuite in January 2021. The product has since been discontinued.
Verint Messaging, Khoros Care, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (retiring) are common alternatives for Sparkcentral (discontinued).
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Sparkcentral (discontinued) are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(27)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-16 of 16)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
We used Sparkcentral to engage & reply to customers' enquires, Sparkcentral helped us a lot in reducing the first response time, the automation feature & the ability to automatically remove all the unwanted interactions from the queue got us more productive & we were able to focus more on our customer's inquiries. the reports are very detailed as well.
- Customer Service response time is brilliant
- Reports are extremly detailed
- Queue management & the interface of the platform is very user friendly
- Allowing users to connect more social media platforms
- Having a mobile app is extremly essential as the website is not mobile friendly
November 04, 2016
Sparkcentral Review
Sparkcentral is being used by our digital customer care team. It helps provide transparency to energy customers in regards to their contract as well as provide them with information regarding inquiries.
- Sparkcentral provides great customer support.
- Love the user feed.
- Knowledge Base.
- Better Reporting.
- More targeted insights.
- Developing specific user profiles as to give Sparkcentral users-targeted insights regarding customer interaction.
November 04, 2016
Best Review Ever
We currently utilize Sparkcentral for our social media care platform. This platform allows us to engage with customers via Twitter and Facebook to answer questions regarding their accounts, or future accounts, with us.
- Our team enjoys the fact that if there is an issue with the site the developers provide an update across the top of the platform. This allows us to receive real time data and plan accordingly.
- The knowledge base updates which allow you to have a personal and default collection work great! This allows us to have uniform information for any important disclosures that need to be provided for customers, but also allows us the option to have our own way of providing customers information.
- Customizing reports is key for us. There are different pieces of information needed for various reports we pull to show what we do. This allows us the option to build what we need as we go.
- In the beginning our team had the option to see what another user was typing as they responded to a post. With the latest update, this was taken away. That feature was key for us to shadow agents remotely who are still in training to provide real time feedback.
- Our company has a number of different brands that we manage. Having a truly unified queue would be a great addition for us!
- The bulk resolve should allow the option to select on the posts that you wish to resolve instead of selecting a time frame for bulk resolve. Often we find that marketing posts generate more volume in the evening. However, there are sometimes posts where the customer needs assistance during that time. So, if we were to bulk resolve for a certain number of evening hours we would potentially miss a customer's concern through that option as it is currently. But, if the option was to go through and select on all marketing posts and then bulk resolve you would ensure that you are not missing a post where a customer needs assistance.
October 28, 2016
Delightfully Satisfied
We use Sparkcentral to manage Facebook and Twitter pages for multiple clients. It has allowed us to cut down or handle time, making it easier to handle larger volumes in a shorter time, compared to uses of previous software. It has also allowed us to provide our clients with reports and breakdowns of what type of volume they are receiving, while previously we were only able to offer sentiment reports. The tagging system has given us the opportunity to tailor these reports uniquely to each client, and even each platform.
- Allows for automated tagging, while also giving the option to disregard these.
- Customer service is very responsive, personable and helpful.
- Allows for users to respond completely within the platform, making work load more efficient.
- The biggest con I found while using Sparkcentral, has since been resolved. Which was that it wasn't able to do retroactive bulk resolving.
October 28, 2016
Sparkcentral is the solution we were looking for
Primarily, Sparkcentral is used by our social media support team, within customer support, to monitor all incoming mentions of JetBlue from Facebook and Twitter and to engage with our customers. In addition to that, our customer insight team uses Sparkcentral's reporting and several other stakeholders have access in order to see social mentions in real-time or check reports.
- It's an excellent tool for collaboration. The UX is friendly and intuitive and our team loves the internal chat.
- The workflow is seamless and provides easy-to-use features for the team and leaders to do what they need to do.
- The integrated knowledge base is easy to manage, search and use.
- We could always use deeper and richer reporting features! It would be nice to have a way to easily set up notifications for other departments.
October 25, 2016
Sparkcentral is the best! If you want a easy to use tool to manage social media, choose them!
At the company I work for we really enjoy using Sparkcentral as the tool to manage our social media posts. We have several different pages we currently manage and this tool makes it so easy to access them, and assist our customers quickly which is really important to us. I also like how organized this tool allows everything to be with the tabs and different features. Thank you Sparkcentral for this amazing tool!
- Love the tabs for each brand our company manages on social media. We manage several so it keeps things nice and neat.
- Love the easy to use layout.
- Love the boomerang feature. It is helpful when we need to follow up on something since it will come back in our feed at whatever time we set as a reminder, so we don't forget about it.
- Bringing back the option to see not only who is responding to a customers post, but actually seeing the response as they are typing it out. That was a neat feature to have.
- It will timeout, which is a bit annoying sometimes but not a huge deal.
October 25, 2016
Sparkcentral is the smart choice
We currently utilize Sparkcentral in our digital care department here at Direct Energy. It allows us to quickly aggregate content and engage with our customers on social media, throughout all of our brands, and assist with any needs they may have.
- Sparkcentral makes it incredibly easy to manage queues, and assist repeat customers without losing any efficiency in the conversation. Agents are able to see a constant flow of the conversation so they are able to better respond and assist the customers.
- Agents are able to set up reminders so they can better follow up with customers. This allows them to either ensure resolution was achieved as expected, or surprise and delight the customer with a follow up several weeks or months out.
- The workflow is one of the greatest features of Spark. It allows you to avoid agent collisions by pushing conversations to the next available agent versus agents choosing them and potentially responding twice. Agents are also able to see when a co-worker is working on a post and can move on to the next or assist if needed.
- The only drawback for my group with Sparkcentral is the lack of a unified queue. We manage 19 different social pages and counting, and are unable to see all of the traffic in one location. Agents having to go between 19+ pages to check for content can make it less efficient on time.
October 25, 2016
My Sparkcentral Review
We are a social media agency as a whole. It is being used by myself and another social media manager for engaging and reporting. I never miss a thing because it catches everything, even if we have our organic FB settings displayed to not show certain things like curse words/red level items. It really aids in reporting with the tagging feature.
- They catch everything that is posted to your brand's Facebook and Twitter page.
- They provide a boomerang feature, so with high volume or weekend checking you're not forgetting certain conversations.
- They let you add details about each user who interacts with your brand.
- I would like to see a scheduling feature for FB and Twitter. I know there are programs such as Buffer and Hootsuite, but it would be nice to be able to schedule on Sparkcentral. "One stop shop."
- I would like to have retroactive automations. I know they are coming, but I feel like they are important to have as we occasionally get spammed or run contests with hashtags that take up our queue.
October 24, 2016
Respond quickly and efficiently
We use Sparkcentral to track and respond to customers who contact us via Facebook and Twitter. Sparkcentral allows us to respond individually to customers in a very organized and professional way. It's used solely by our Social Media Support Team who consist of about 30 work-from-home crewmembers.
- It pulls in customer mentions in real time.
- Collects data through tagging that used for market research.
- Queues messages to crewmembers. Avoids overlap.
- Allows us to monitor real-time what's being sent out.
- Improve reporting functions.
August 09, 2016
Sparkcentral Sparkles for Social
Sparkcentral is used by the Social Customer Care team, a subset of our Technical Support department. It addresses customer services on social media, solving issues for customers & receiving feedback over social media channels.
- Sparckcentral has amazing customer success reps and account managers. They are very communicative and quick to help resolve any issues.
- Sparkcentral has a robust system for keeping track of customers' account information. Everything we need to keep track of is already included.
- The Secure Authentication feature in Sparkcentral helps establish a secure relationship with our customers; it shows that we take their security very seriously and that they can trust us.
- It would be good to see some more robust metrics/reporting details
December 03, 2015
User-friendly, could use a bit of polishing up!
Sparkcentral is being used by our organization across a team of 10, separated by two states. It helps us respond to customers via social networking channels ,Twitter and Facebook.
- Sparkcentral is user-friendly and easy to learn.
- Sparkcentral leaves room for notes to be left about your customer, so you can remember information for the next time you talk.
- Sparkcentral's topic feature allows us to filter out easier questions to newer team members.
- I'd like to see Sparkcentral work out their kinks. Our team often has small bugs that aren't resolved after reporting that we just work around.
- I'd like to see a feature where we don't have to log out/in between Twitter accounts to favorite a Tweet from a specific account or view a direct message from that account.
April 30, 2015
Sparkcentral has taken Brussels Airlines' social media customer service to a whole new level
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sparkcentral is used by the Social Media team of Brussels Airlines to provide customer service to our passengers on the go, via the channels they choose. Thanks to Sparkcentral we have significantly improved our response times on Twitter and Facebook and hereby increasing customer satisfaction and managing our reputation in a more efficient way.
- Sparkcentral lets us have a super efficient overview of customer requests via social media. Multiple team members can work in the tool without the threat of double answers to the same request.
- The assign option within Sparckcentral allows you to implement the tool throughout your organization and assign questions to the concerned departments, which is extremely important when you're in a complex business like aviation.
- Sparkcentral allows you to see the entire history you've had with a customer, so you never have to worry about giving an embarrassing answer and most importantly, it allows you to have an even more personalized conversation with your customers.
- It would be great if Sparkcentral could capture all our online customer requests and reviews, meaning aviation and travel forums. That way we could manage the conversations with our clients even better
- The reporting functionalities could be improved, so that KPI's can be evaluated better, but I know that Sparkcentral is working on this. Their teams are constantly working on improving the product.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sparkcentral is mainly being used by our customer service agents at the contact center. They capture all relevant tweets and have the possibility to answer directly or to easily transfer it to another colleague elsewhere in the company.
- Very user friendly (ease of use) there is no need for a difficult set up or user training. It is very intuitive and has no difficult or useless buttons
- It performs faster than other tools, it is the fastest in capturing messages and dealing with them.
- Reporting services are very limited, but is not a social media listening tool, but there could be more data in it.
January 23, 2015
For companies serious about social media customer care - there is nothing quite like Sparkcentral.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
In late 2013, we embarked on a mission to split our social publishing in half. Our existing setup was to have our customer care team, and our social media marketing team both work within Hootsuite. While Hootsuite performs very well, it is not the best option for either of our needs; publishing or customer care.
Within our company, we offer 24/7/365 customer care in social media using a team of 20 trained agents. Our main issues in Hootsuite for customer care were the lack of a good workflow management, weak customer interaction history and lack of basics like locking customer cards to prevent duplicated replies. We also experienced agents who would sometimes pick and chose which customers to reply to, sometimes delaying replies to inquiries that need some extra work. Additionally, we could not always determine which agent was responsible for a reply.
Within our company, we offer 24/7/365 customer care in social media using a team of 20 trained agents. Our main issues in Hootsuite for customer care were the lack of a good workflow management, weak customer interaction history and lack of basics like locking customer cards to prevent duplicated replies. We also experienced agents who would sometimes pick and chose which customers to reply to, sometimes delaying replies to inquiries that need some extra work. Additionally, we could not always determine which agent was responsible for a reply.
- The biggest advantage of the Sparkcentral platform is its "inbox zero" philosophy. With this, our customer support requests are queued within the app, and agents need to work down the queue to keep it empty.
- The app is designed from the ground up for customer care - instead of taking a generic social platform, and sprinkling in some customer care tools. Everything about Sparkcental is designed for helping our customers.
- Sparkcentral allows us to do much better CRM. We can make customer notes, see recent interactions, determine who helped the customer (and when).
- Mobile is lacking entirely. While the site is responsive, it is not possible to use Sparkcentral on the go with a mobile device smaller than a tablet.
December 30, 2014
I don't know what our company would do without Sparkcentral. An excellent product that serves all our needs.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Sparkcentral is currently being used between both our Customer Service and Marketing departments as a means to offer 24/7 Twitter Customer Support and engage with fans who comment on our product. SparkCentral offers a means by which to organize, distribute, track and index our engagement through Social Media as well as open access to our employees without given them the "master key" to our accounts.
- Sparkcentral has a simple interface that makes internal training an easy and time saving process.
- With Sparkcentral, we can easily distribute access to our Twitter handles and track the performance of agents.
- Dealing with a large amount of customers, Sparkcentral is great for finding past interactions on Social Media.
- We've been with Sparkcentral since the early days and I honestly can not think of a single thing with the current app that I am disappointed with.
March 21, 2014
Sparkcentral - the king of community management tools
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Our Social Media team uses Sparkcentral to track and respond to conversations about our brands online. With multiple people and brands to manage, it makes it easier for us to all work together. We haven't missed a mention of our brand, and with the history of conversations it stores, we've been able to build a closer relationship to our fans.
- User interface and experience is top notch.
- Conversation management tools make it easy for multiple users to work together on the same account.
- Reporting & Statistics are super helpful when following your team members use of the software.
- Still need to integrate Instagram tracking into the software.