The social media management company Hootsuite has acquired Sparkcentral, a SaaS provider that enables the future of digital customer engagement through personalied conversational messaging channels including Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, SMS, WeChat, and Chat.
Based in Hasselt, Belgium, and New York City, Sparkcentral is a social and digital customer care platform, with deep integrations into the core business systems of customer-centric organizations. Sparkcentral works with brands such as Air Canada, Slack, JetBlue, Axa and Careem.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”