Hootsuite, a social media management platform, has announced the acquisition of Sparkcentral, a Belgium and New York-based startup offering customer service software. However, the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“Brands and organisations must grow their digital capabilities to connect with their customers on the social and messaging platforms their customers use, not the other way around. These customer engagements need to seamlessly connect into the brand and organisation’s workflow across all customer-facing departments—marketing, sales, customer support, finance, etc.,” says Tom Keiser, CEO, Hootsuite. “With Sparkcentral joining Hootsuite, we enable brands of all sizes to create a holistic, agile, and effective experience for their customers.”
Provides one-to-one messaging channels
Founded by Davy Kestens, and Matthew Finneran in 2011, Sparkcentral is a customer engagement tool that helps customer support teams manage social inquiries in an efficient and streamlined way.
In the process, the platform pulls in the messages from these social channels and presents them to customer care teams via a secure agent console that automatically assigns the messages to the first available agent.
Currently, Sparkcentral works with leading brands such as Air Canada, Slack, JetBlue, Axa, and Careem. So far, the company has raised $37.6M (approx €30.5M) in funding since its inception.
How this acquisition benefits Hootsuite?
With this acquisition, Hootsuite shall tap into the core of Sparkcentral, which is an automated message distribution platform to connect all facets of the customer care workflow. It will enable both the companies to provide better customer care for brands, as over half of the populations of the world are now present in the social media platform.
As businesses continue to shift their process online, digital customer engagement will only become more competitive. Moreover, the global pandemic has rapidly accelerated digital transformation efforts, driving more customer interaction online.
“We have built a robust social customer care platform to enable some of the world’s leading brands with scalable SLA based engagement throughout every step of the customer journey—from the marketing and sales phase to the post-sales phase,” says Christoph Neut, former CEO, Sparkcentral, now VP, Sales at Hootsuite. “Together, our two best-in-breed technologies will be a disruptive force, as we support organisations of all sizes in providing their customers with the highest level of customer care at scale.”
13th acquisition
Based out of Vancouver, Hootsuite has over two-hundred thousand paid accounts and millions of users. It is worth mentioning that Sparkcentral is Hootsuite’s 13th acquisition. Other acquisitions include LiftMetrix, AdEspresso, Sales Prodigy, Zeetl, UberVU, and more.
Appointed new Senior VP
A couple of days back, the company also announced the appointment of Melissa Murray Bailey as Senior Vice President, Global Sales. According to the company, Bailey will focus on high growth, customer value, and retention—brings over two decades of experience in sales, leadership, international business, and winning.
New functionalities on Instagram
Back in December 2020, Hootsuite unveiled a host of new Instagram functionalities that allows users to collaborate with their teams to create and schedule content, engage with their audiences, and track performance in real-time, all in the same dashboard.
The official blog says, “In 2020, Hootsuite made its customers’ #instalife simpler and more secure with new functionalities that enabled scheduling and publishing of photos, videos, Stories, and carousels to Instagram directly from the Hootsuite dashboard.”
