Hootsuite Acquires Leading Digital Customer Engagement Platform, Sparkcentral

Sparkcentral brings advanced customer care conversations to the Hootsuite platform for a unified customer journey

Hootsuite announced its acquisition of Sparkcentral, 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.

Based in Hasselt, Belgium, and New York City, Sparkcentral is a best-in-class social and digital customer care platform, with deep integrations into the core business systems of today’s customer-centric organizations. Sparkcentral works with leading brands such as Air Canada, Slack, JetBlue, Axa and Careem.

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“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.”

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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.”

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