When and how should I use Cases in Sprout?

If you need to:

• Group messages into conversations, threads or cases
• Assign conversations or cases to individual agents or teams
• Keep conversations with a single agent as it unfolds

Then leveraging Sprout’s powerful case management solution helps you to solve those problems. This guide walks you through the process of setting up the case management features in Sprout at a high-level. Relevant how-to articles that break down each feature are hyperlinked throughout this guide, so you can open those articles, favorite them and come back to implement the features when you’re ready.

Additional Resources

This guide walks you through setting up case management workflows for your care team. But if you're more of a visual learner or would like to get hands on, we have two self-paced learning courses.

Check out:

• Social Customer Care for Care Team Members and/or
• Social Customer Care for Care Team Leaders

And earn your Care Expert badge today! You must be a Sprout customer to access these learning courses.

Scenario

Let’s pretend you’re the manager of Sprout Ice Cream’s care team and you oversee social customer inquiries for several brick and mortar stores as well as a line of at-home ice cream makers. Your social profiles are all connected for the shop locations and ice cream maker product. You need to ensure messages from customers are quickly triaged and routed to the right team to keep customer satisfaction high.

Let’s get started

Configuration is key to a successful case management strategy and experience for your team in Sprout. Using Sprout’s Teams feature along with Automated Rules ensures your case management runs smoothly, without any hiccups. 

When we think about creating customer care workflows, the first thing we need to establish is our swim lanes and the amount of teammates, inboxes/rules, and support types we might need. In order to do so, we need to know what questions our customers have for us. 

First, let’s configure your User Teams

Think of User Teams in Sprout like their own queue. Each Team becomes a queue for Agents to claim cases from the Cases tab.

You may want to create Teams based on products, departments, geographic locations or agent skills.

For Sprout Ice Cream, you create the following four teams, adding the appropriate team members to each:

As the manager, you also make sure you’re a part of each team:

Create and order your Automated Rules

Now that your Teams are set up, you can start defining which conversations need to become cases. The goal is to configure Automated Rules to create cases for each conversation that needs a reply automatically, so that they don’t require manual, time-consuming triaging. You can also create cases manually for any message that needs a response but was missed by a rule. 

Adding Priority order to your Automated Rules is a game changer for your team’s productivity and your customers’ experience with your brand. The rule order runs each message through one rule at a time, in the order you specify. Once a message matches a rule within the Ordered Rules section, no other ordered rules are run, ensuring your messages are routed appropriately.

For Sprout Ice Cream, you start with a basic noise reduction rule to mark messages as spam and move them out of the Smart Inbox.

You want to make sure your VIPs receive quick responses, you create the High Follower Count next. You mark these messages with a VIP tag and as Complete to get them out of the Smart Inbox, then trigger a Critical Case to get created automatically for your Product and General Support Team.

Sprout Tip: It’s important to make your rules as specific as possible so you’re not creating spam cases.

Sprout Tip: Marking messages as complete when they meet your Automated Rules criteria is a great way to get the message directly to a Team, rather than leaving it in the Smart Inbox to get re-triaged. 

From there, you can create the rest of the Automated Rules so that all messages that need a response are routed to the right Teams.

Let’s head over to the Cases tab

Now that your Teams are set up and Automated Rules are ready to go, you can head over to your Cases tab to see everything come together.

Each Team has their own queue automatically created within the Cases tab so they can quickly see what cases are unassigned and ready to get picked up.

Your Care Agents can quickly reference the Case ID, Team, Category, Status and Priority of each case with additional details about when the case was last updated.

When an Agent clicks into a case, they can assign it to themselves and get started. Once a case gets assigned, your Agents won’t step on each other’s toes when responding and triaging. Agents can then add any relevant Tags to the case and click into the Thread to reply to your customers. Agents can also update the status of their cases as Open, On Hold or Closed.

By default, Agents have a My Cases view that’s broken down by Open, On Hold, Close and All. Agents assigned to cases also get notifications of follow-on messages from end users.

An added benefit? You can automatically have CSAT surveys sent when cases are Closed, too.

As the manager, you have access to the All Cases view with the Filter Menu. You can set up filters to quickly review all cases and create your own Custom Case Views for better insight into your customers’ experiences with your team and brand, so help you make better decisions. 

Reporting on your team's success

Once your team is up and running, tackling cases and delivering outstanding customer experiences, you can provide data to your stakeholders with the Case Management Report.

Let's say you want to measure the efficiency of your team in handling high priority Support cases over the past month.  Set your filters and select your date range in the Filter Menu to get an overview of your case volume.

Then toggle to your Case Efficiency tab for the insights you're looking for. You can dig in to find out how much time on average it's taking to resolve cases, how long your customers are waiting for replies and understand if problems are solved during the first interaction without follow up.

Send a PDF copy of the report to your stakeholders and identify areas where you can better enable your team to improve their response and resolution times.

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