Top 10 Social Customer Service Software in 2024

Customers expect quick responses to social media inquiries. In the US, ~45% of customers expect businesses to reply within one hour, while ~75% of them expect a reply within the first 24 hours.¹ Interestingly, there is a significant disconnect between client expectations and business performance since only 50% of organizations can satisfy customer response time criteria.²

Figure: Expected response time for social media questions or complaints

A satisfied customer who receives a rapid response from your social customer service platform might become a brand advocate, promote your brand positively on social media, and increase your market presence. On the other hand, a dissatisfied customer who had poor communication with your customer service teams may be discouraged from making future purchases.

While selecting the most suitable social customer service tool, it is difficult to comprehend the distinctive features of each solution. Thus, to help companies during their B2B buying journey, we have prepared a detailed comparison by highlighting the top 10 social customer service software on the market.

The guideline will cover the following key points for each social customer service software:

• An overview of the software
• Top features 
• User ratings 
• Pros and cons 
• Ease of use and the quality of support index
• Pricing

Top 10 social customer service software

Disclaimer: Sorted in descending order by total number of reviews, except the sponsors (Zendesk Support Suite and Salesforce Service Cloud), which are listed at the top.

*Based on the total number of reviews and average ratings on the G2, Capterra, and Gartner software review platforms as of 10/18/2023.Average ratings are aggregated on a 5-point scale.

**Based on G2’s ease of use and quality support data evaluated over a 10-point scale.

Vendor selection criteria

We evaluated businesses that satisfy the given criteria:

• Number of reviews: 1,500+ total reviews on Capterra, Gartner and G2.
• Average rating: Above 4.0/5 on Capterra, Gartner and G2.
• Total number of employees: 150+ employees on LinkedIn

Top 10 social customer service software

1- Zendesk Support Suite

Zendesk is a customer support software for delivering customer support using social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. 

With Zendesk Interactions on various networks may be instantly transformed into tickets, enabling agents to handle and respond to concerns from any channel. Zendesk also allows agents to choose customer conversations between public chats, tweets, messaging, or emails by collecting customer data in a single spot for a personalized customer experience.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• Gartner: 4.3/5
• G2: 4.3/5

Pros

• User interface: Various options are provided to configure the panel design, making the support operation more efficient.³

• Ticket filtering: Quick filtering simplifies and streamlines the ticket management process.⁴

• Customization: Users appreciate the fact that they can customize features on a per-user basis, such as establishing shortcuts or removing fields, buttons, or actions.⁵

Cons

• Call routing: The calls either were not routed correctly or failed to alert the support agent who was receiving the call.⁶
• Learning curve: Getting used to the administration panel takes some time.⁷

• Customer Support: Technical support is insufficient for enterprise customers.⁸

2- Salesforce Service Cloud

Service Cloud has built-in integration with cloud-based customer service applications and social media tools. It is a case management solution with a knowledge base that helps users streamline services, improve workflows, and identify relevant subjects to assist the service agent.

With Salesforce Social Customer Service, users can convert social media postings into cases or leads. Agents may respond to social media postings from the Service Console, allowing your organization to engage in consumer discussions on social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• Gartner: 4.4/5
• G2: 4.3/5

Pros

• Ease-of-use: Service Cloud is simple to use while tracking incoming emails and forms.⁹

• Add-on options: Some of the add-on options, such as digital engagement, are quite limited.¹⁰
• Functionality: Service agents can quickly and easily record and bill service activity.¹¹

Cons

• Functionality: Service Cloud does not offer straightforward use cases.¹²

• Cost: The upfront cost can be expensive for smaller businesses.¹³

• Usage and customization: The platform is complex, and customizing the system can be difficult for early tech adopters.¹⁴

3- Freshdesk

Freshdesk includes an entirely separate area dedicated to social media called Social on the menu bar. Freshdesk Social allows you to communicate with social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook from one interface, converting shares, comments, and inquiries into visible tickets.

It has an AI-powered Social Signals tool that scans each social media post that references your organization. A social signal tool finds, learns, and gives feedback about important posts using its built-in machine-learning technology. These posts are transformed into filtered tickets, ensuring that the support team does not waste time on unnecessary topics.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5
• Gartner: 4.4/5
• G2: 4.4/5

Pros

• Ease-of-use: User-friendly and simple, allowing users to handle issues, track customer interactions, and collaborate on solutions with ease.¹⁵

• Customer Support: The support agents are helpful and experts at finding the answers to user questions.¹⁶

• Workflows: Users can take chat, phone, email, and portal support requests efficiently, and workflows apply quickly.¹⁷

Cons

• Flexibility: More flexibility can be offered while creating multiple widgets on the dashboard.¹⁸

• Ticket management: Ticket navigation and merges are not separated, which creates difficulties in ticket management.¹⁹

• Pricing: Pricing for Freshdesk can be relatively complex as it will offer numerous add-ons.²⁰

4- Intercom

Intercom is a social customer service platform that uses automation and bots to help organizations improve their customer experience. Intercom’s intelligent AI bot Fin, powered by a combination of large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, answers up to 50% of your customers’ inquiries from social media channels.²¹

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5
• Gartner: 4.1/5
• G2: 4.5/5

Pros

• Chatbot: The chat routing bot is simple to set up.²²

• Add-on features: The capability to manage add-on features (such as social media integrations) is useful in allowing users to customize the system.²³

• Inbox panel: The Inbox feature is useful for providing quick and simple support; users can gain insight, offer promotions, convert leads, and provide support from the panel.²⁴

Cons

• Integrations: Social media integrations are buggy, which creates communication gaps.²⁵

• Pricing: The pricing model is confusing; some users couldn’t understand how active they are being charged.²⁶

• Synchronization: The synchronization feature is insufficient for social networks and mailing systems.²⁷

For more information about Intercom and its alternatives please check out our data-driven and transparent Intercom Alternatives Article.

5- Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk can operate numerous social media interactions while enabling users to like, comment, and post on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram directly from the Zoho interface.

It can integrate with the Zoho Social tool, a social customer service platform. With this integration, Zoho Desk can respond to incoming messages, create tickets from social media updates, and collaborate with the support team in real time.

Also, a customized view feature can monitor new tickets received from social media channels, allowing users to set specific response time targets and track them using the SLA dashboard to enhance social customer service.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5
• Gartner: 4.4/5
• G2: 4.4/5

Pros

• Customer Support: The customer service team responds to user inquiries and resolves any problems quickly and effectively.²⁸

• Ease-of-use: The system is simple, easy to navigate, and intuitive.²⁹

• Self-service portal: Users consider the self-service portal a notable feature, allowing them to find answers to common questions and save time.³⁰

Cons

• Ticket automation: An automatic ticket-closing function can be added.³¹

• Customization: It is not as advanced as other service desk software; it lacks customization, which can be limiting.³²

• User interface: The user interface could be improved.³³

For more information about Zoho Desk and its alternatives please check out our data-driven and transparent Zoho Desk Alternatives Article.

6- Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social customer service tool for managing customer engagement in a single interface for advertising, sales, and support teams.

Sprout Social enables users to communicate with their audiences across social media platforms, allowing them to focus on creating connections with their brand’s top followers. 

The platform integrates with numerous social media sites, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. 

With Sprout Social, Grammarly’s customer service team has achieved an 80% reduction in the average first response time.³⁴

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• Gartner: 4.3/5
• G2: 4.4/5

Pros

• Customization: The ability to fine-tune and schedule content for different social media platforms is efficient.³⁵

• Reporting features: Reporting and analytics are simple to use and share across several platforms.³⁶

• Performance: Daily use of Sprout is productive, and live chat is constantly accessible. Tracking campaigns, sentiment, and content is easy.³⁷

Cons

• Tagging performance: Tagging accounts on Facebook is inefficient. It takes a long time to load, and profile photos don’t appear.³⁸

• Publishing posts: Some users cannot tag or schedule individuals in posts on Sprout.³⁹

• Feedback: YouTube-related data options can be improved to have better feedback.⁴⁰

7- Front

Front, a US-based social customer service platform with $16 million in revenue in 2022, centralizes your inbound messages through email, social media, SMS, and voice channels into a single place.⁴¹

Front’s inbound communication capabilities can comment internally on customer messages and pull in customer history, past conversations, and account information. The platform can route, tag, and assign messages automatically to individual owners based on availability, expertise, or workload. Front also helps customer service supervisors have an overview of customer loyalty insights while creating reports based on individual or team performance.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.5/5
• Gartner: No information is available
• G2: 4.7/5

Pros

• Customer service: Front’s customer service performance is efficient.⁴²

• Functionality: Organizing incoming messages or previous communication is easy.⁴³

• Collaboration: Users can simply collaborate with Front by tagging files in the comment box and sharing them.⁴⁴

Cons

• Pricing: Their pricing structure could be improved; monthly subscription models with different seat, feature, and period options can be added to have a more flexible pricing model.⁴⁵

• Learning Curve: There is a steep learning curve with Front.⁴⁶

• Emails: Email collaboration can be enhanced; some users end up with the same email in two or more places in multiple conversations.⁴⁷

8- Reputation

Reputation is a social media listening, publishing, responding, and analytics platform to improve an organization’s brand presence. 

With Reputation’s customizable social posting features, users can access data on many social media systems, determine the optimal times to post and the content, and keep track of follower numbers.

The solution uses real-time analytics to measure customer experience and make immediate adjustments. The analytics also help to leverage competitor benchmark reports to compare your mentions, share of voice, spread, and reach.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• Gartner: 4.0/5
• G2: 4.5/5

Pros

• Automation: Reputation’s NLP (natural language processing) feature is robust, it excels in what the customer says.⁴⁸

• Ease-of-use: Reputation is easy to navigate.⁴⁹
• Reporting and analytics: The analytics tools are useful when viewing trends.⁵⁰

Cons

• Social media publishing: Some users have failed to add new posts on a few social media platforms.⁵¹

• Knowledge base: Self-explanatory set-up guidelines can be added for new adopters.⁵²

• Connectivity: Disconnections can occur regularly.⁵³

9- Genesys Cloud CX

Genesys Cloud CX is a cloud-based technology that assists enterprises of any size in managing customer service interactions.

The platform’s social media customer service capabilities allow users to personalize customer service operations across messaging apps and social media tools. Its emotional intelligence feature with sentiment and actionability analysis, assists users in prioritizing the most critical issues to your customer support team automatically.

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.4/5
• Gartner: 4.4/5
• G2: 4.3/5

Pros

• Performance: The system is quick, simple to use, and customizable.⁵⁴

• Knowledge base: It has diverse documentation available on the resource center, and its community and developer forum is interactive.⁵⁵

• Integrations: Integration capabilities with several third-party apps, including CRM systems and labor management tools, are efficient.⁵⁶

Cons

• Emails: Email handling options are relatively limited in the out-of-the-box solution, and additional app options are limited.⁵⁷

• Functionality: Some aspects of user management are impractical and complex.⁵⁸

• Audits: Audit Viewer does not provide sufficient data to comprehend user insights.⁵⁹

10- Tidio

Tidio is a customer support solution used by 300,000+ businesses. Tisio helps customer service agents answer customer queries from multiple channels, including social media.⁶⁰

Tidio provides social media customer service functionalities that offer live chat conversations with up to 50 users (in free trial), intelligent chatbot conversations with 100 users, email support (in free trial), a ticketing system, 3rd party apps integration, and a JavaScript API.⁶¹

User Ratings

• Capterra: 4.8/5
• Gartner: No information is available
• G2: 4.7/5

Pros

• Tidio has an easy-to-use, organized, and customizable interface.⁶²

• The offline email notification feature is beneficial since it allows users to get questions from visitors to their website immediately.⁶³

• With a no-code drag-and-drop interface, users can navigate the platform without any programming knowledge.⁶⁴

Cons

• The monthly subscription fee gets hush with paid features such as chatbots.⁶⁵

• The app does not run smoothly on Windows 11.⁶⁶

• There is no added integration with Twitter and WhatsApp.⁶⁷

What is social customer service software?

Social media customer service software is a technology that assists you in properly managing your interactions (etc. tracking and replying to customers’ queries, feedback, and concerns) with customers on social media networks like Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Key features of social customer service software

All of the features below are provided in the top 10 listed social customer service software.

1- Social listening

“Social listening” is paying attention to what your customers are saying on social media. It empowers your company by facilitating long-term customer connections. Customers who are emotionally connected to a brand have a ~300% higher lifetime value (LTV) for remaining customers of that company (~5 years for those who are emotionally connected and ~3 years for those who are not).⁶⁸

Social listening provides you with an in-depth understanding of what your customers think. You can observe (with the help of social media analytics) the way customers communicate about your company and its services. When an issue arises, you will be prepared to respond since you have monitored your customer’s emotional thinking.

With a social listening approach, companies can measure:

• Brand health: Measuring the public’s view of your brand 
• Industry insights: Examine social media metrics and trends
• Customer Insights: Discover  what users are expressing about your brand in real-time
• Competitor analysis: Analyzing another company’s brand or product

2- Chatbots

A chatbot is a conversational platform that offers customer support through text messages, voice commands, or both. Chatbots are used on brand web pages and social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook messaging.

Chatbots can respond to consumer inquiries instantly, allowing organizations to provide 24-hour support. They can capture customer data from social media channels and identify the customer’s key concern areas to develop personalized answers, allowing you to provide a customized customer experience.

Chatbot also improves brand-customer engagement by:

• Sharing rapid responses on discounts
• Solving a customer complaint 
• Providing a systematic response to a question
• Addressing the appropriate support agent for a specific topic

3- Customer profiling

75% of buyers are prone to buying from a company that knows their buying habits, remembers them by name, or suggests product or service recommendations based on previous purchases.⁶⁹

Customer profiling is a data-driven form that defines buyers’ personas. It works by pooling and analyzing purchase patterns, problematic subjects, and behavioral data to create profiles. A customer profile can assist you in identifying types of customers that share characteristics so that you can target them in your social media customer service strategy.

4- Multi-channel support

Multi-channel support is the process of communicating with consumers through a combination of indirect or direct communication channels: internet sites, messages, email, and mobile.

Some clients may prefer a phone call if they want a fast response to a query. Other client inquiries may not require quick attention, and they might just send an email. The purpose of multichannel support is to allow consumers to communicate with the firm through the channel that they are most familiar with. Individual preferences might shift depending on the circumstances, and having several alternatives guarantees that customers are not dissatisfied.

Firms that have multi-channel integrations can:

• Improve brand recognition
• Reach out to the potential consumer
• Create qualified leads
• Increase their marketing ROI

5- Self-service options

Customer self-service is a support approach where companies offer customers a knowledge base to solve their problems using methods such as interactive voice response (IVR), chatbots, FAQ sections, and forums.

Self-service may improve social customer service by:

• Increasing customer satisfaction through knowledge management
• Reducing expenses by minimizing the number of repetitive inquiries that agents spend time answering (and that customers frequently ask)
• Growing your community by reaching potential leads
• Enhancing customer service by freeing up agents’ time for other organizational objectives

6-Chat widgets and live chat

60% of customers are more likely to return to a website with a live chat feature, and more than 65% are more likely to purchase from that website.⁷⁰

A chat widget is a panel on a website that allows potential customers to engage with the company. It normally appears as a button at the bottom of the screen to acknowledge visitors and provide help.

When a website visitor clicks on the button, a live chat widget session launches, and the visitor can communicate with a service agent or chatbot.

7- Canned responses

Canned responses are stored messages that support agents can use while replying to customers. Instead of having to create every answer from scratch, agents can leverage direct message templates to address particular concerns, such as “Thank you for doing business with us” or “Your purchase has been shipped”.

Transparency statement

AIMultiple serves numerous tech companies, including Zendesk and Salesforce.

Further reading

Read our transparent, up-to-date articles to learn more about social customer service alternatives and customer engagement automation.

• Top 5 Tools for Customer Engagement Automation in 2023
• Top 4 Zoho Desk Alternatives for Customer Service in 2023
• Top 5 Intercom Alternatives for Customer Service in 2023

You can also check out our data-driven list of customer experience software.

Contact us to find out more about social customer service:

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