Sprout Social Develops Bot Builder for Automated Conversational Workflows

by Brittany Martin
June 20, 2017

Last year, there were an estimated 34,000 chatbots in existence–most in response to a growing need for automated assistance in customer care. As chatbots evolve to better support business’ needs, Sprout Social is introducing Bot Builder: a new set of tools that empowers brands to resolve customer issues at a faster rate and offer unique marketing experiences for their customers and followers.

The new offering enables brands to create, preview and deploy Twitter chatbots in a matter of minutes. No longer will brands need to rely on their most tech-savvy teammates or on outside contractors to develop bots. Instead, they can follow the Bot Builder setup wizard in a few steps, thereby limiting internal friction and helping brands develop a quick and simple way to streamline customer conversations.

“Sprout’s Bot Builder is built on the belief that great customer experiences come from real conversations. Automation should not replace human agents, but augment their workflow to result in better and faster outcomes,” said Aaron Rankin, CTO of Sprout Social. “We developed self-configurable bots to do just that. Brands can rely on the bot to quickly and consistently collect customer information, so the agent has context even before their first interaction.”

Sprout’s Bot Builder enables brands to streamline conversations and map out customer experiences based on simple, rules-based logic. With the bot’s Welcome Messages, which greet customers as they enter a Direct Message on Twitter, and predetermined Quick Replies, brands can set their social agents up for success by providing quick context for every conversation.

"Sprout Social has long been one of our favorite solutions for businesses who want to get the most out of engaging with customers on Twitter,” says Ian Cains, Group Product Manager at Twitter. “We’re really excited that they're keeping up their leadership by being the first to market with a scalable, simple Bot Builder designed for customer service teams."

Several Sprout customers across a range of industries have enjoyed exclusive early access to the Bot Builder including Evernote and Monarch Airlines, which are all successfully using Twitter chatbots to better engage customers over Direct Message.

Since using Sprout’s Twitter Automation Tools, Evernote has helped 80 percent more customers on Twitter per week and seen an 18 percent decrease in replies sent per conversation.

To learn more about Sprout’s Bot Builder, click here.

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