How to Tag Incoming Messages in Sprout Social Smart Inbox | Sprout Bites
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In this Sprout Bites video, you will learn how to tag incoming messages in the Smart Inbox in Sprout Social. You will see how to set up tag collections in Tag Management, how to apply and layer multiple tags to messages in the inbox, and how to use those tags to filter, export, and report on customer feedback — turning scattered conversations into organized, actionable insights.
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Hi, my name is Ashley and I am excited to walk you through tagging incoming messages in the Smart Inbox in this Sprout Bites video. A lot of teams tend to focus on tagging outgoing content, which is great for understanding performance — but that means the Smart Inbox often gets overlooked, even though it's full of untapped feedback and insights like customer opinions, product issues, and suggestions from your audience. Without tagging, that data can get scattered or become anecdotal. But tagging lets Sprout do the heavy lifting, making aggregating, categorizing, and reporting on those conversations automatic. Today we're going to get those tags set up. I'm currently in Tag Management, where I've created a tag collection called Customer Care with sample tags for poor customer service, refund requests, and reservation issues, as well as more general tags like product feedback. You'll see how we pair those later in the Smart Inbox with other tag collections like product type. When it comes to incoming messages, it's often more helpful to have more tags than you think you need — this is how we uncover the kind of feedback we're getting. If we don't have the right tags, we might miss patterns. It's better to have a few too many and remove unused ones later than to miss something early on. Once you've created your tags, head into the Smart Inbox and start applying them to messages. This message looks like a poor customer service experience, so I'll tag it accordingly. This one looks like a website issue, so I can click the tag or type it in directly — both work. And on this last one, it looks like this customer tried the new matcha chai but wasn't a fan. I'll add the product feedback tag, and then pair it with a product type tag for matcha so we can track both together. Now when the product team asks how customers responded to the new matcha chai, we can filter by both the product feedback tag and the matcha product type tag and export that report. You can apply one tag, two, three — whatever makes the most sense. And over in the reporting section, you can further segment by sentiment, high brand risk, customer love, and more. Give this a try and start pulling out those customer insights the next time you're in Sprout.
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