Hootsuite acquires Sparkcentral to unify and empower brands deliver customer service via social channels

Hootsuite today announced it has acquired a digital customer engagement platform, Sparkcentral, to bring advanced customer care conversations to its platform for a unified customer journey.  The total amount of the transaction was not disclosed.

Founded in 2011 by Davy Kestens and Matthew Finneran, the Hasselt, Belgium, and New York City-based Sparkcentral empowers brands to deliver customer service via social channels. Sparkcentral is a leading SaaS provider enabling the future of digital customer engagement through 1:1 conversational messaging channels including Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, WhatsApp, WeChat, SMS, and Chat.

Today, consumers engage with brands and companies on social channels by sending tweets and messages stating their customer service needs openly and publicly. Many companies choose to respond to these consumers via the same channels in order to address their concerns.  The Sparkcentral Platform helps customer support teams manage large volumes of social inquiries in a streamlined and efficient manner.

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. Sparkcentral’s client roster includes Delta Air Lines, Emirates, Netflix, Nordstrom, Dropbox, Uber, and T-Mobile. The company’s client portfolio includes Uber, Dropbox, Delta Air Lines, Netflix, Jetblue, Discover, Nordstrom, and many others.

“Our world is digital—social and messaging platforms have increasingly become where people are looking to engage with brands and organizations,” said Tom Keiser, CEO, Hootsuite. “Our customers have been asking for more capabilities in the area of social customer care and we’re excited to expand our offering with this new acquisition.”

Hootsuite’s latest research found over half the world’s population is now on social media. The global pandemic has proven to be a rapid accelerator of digital transformation, driving customer care to surpass traditional marketing as the primary focus for brands to meet customer needs.

“Brands and organizations 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 organization’s workflow across all customer-facing departments—marketing, sales, customer support, finance, etc.,” said Keiser. “With Sparkcentral joining Hootsuite, we enable brands of all sizes to create a holistic, agile, and effective experience for their customers.”

The core of Sparkcentral is an automated message distribution platform, complete with virtual agent functionality for a highly efficient customer care workflow—enhancing channel alignment and communication orchestration between marketing, customer service departments, and their stakeholders.

“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,” said 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 organizations of all sizes in providing their customers with the highest level of customer care at scale.”

Hootsuite is the global leader in social media management with over two-hundred thousand paid accounts and millions of users, spanning brands and organizations of all sizes from the smallest SMBs to the largest Enterprise, in every corner of the world. Hootsuite’s unparalleled expertise in social selling, social customer care, and social media management empowers organizations to strategically grow their brand, businesses, and customer relationships with social.