Trello–a global leader in project management software–provides businesses with the collaborative tools they need to meet their goals and work more productively. The tech company prides itself on offering a seamless user experience in and out of its product platform.

Trello’s Product Marketing Manager, Brian Cervino, saw that there was an incohesiveness in how the brand’s Twitter content was being distributed. When people visited @Trello through the network’s mobile app, they immediately saw support-related replies—not the Tweets promoting the brand’s blog content.

Cervino knew Trello could lose new followers and sales leads as a result. The solution: Trello’s marketing team onboarded its customer support team into the social media process and launched @TrelloSupport, a separate Twitter handle that directs support inquiries off Trello’s main profile.

The team selected Sprout Social to implement its revised efforts because they wanted software that shared Trello’s values and could adequately power a cross-functional social customer care strategy.

In three months, Sprout’s Smart Inbox and collaboration tools helped the @TrelloSupport team improve its response rate by 16%, answer more than 2,000 social customer service inquiries and reply to 97% of customer service Tweets within 24 hours.

Benchmarking Success as a Team

Today 90% of people are using social to interact with brands. Since Trello’s audience is tech-savvy, social media—particularly Twitter—is an inherent form of communication for a vast majority of them. Users regularly interact with the brand by Tweeting questions about in-app issues and to provide product feedback and ideas.

Because of this, the team knew it needed social to be at the crux of its customer care efforts. Representatives from across the organization, from Trello’s CEO to members of the support, marketing and content teams, came together to develop a plan and outline key objectives.

The business goals agreed upon were threefold:

  • Be timely: Increase overall response time to inquiries on social
  • Be efficient: Streamline communication by directing all customer care inquiries from @Trello and onto @TrelloSupport
  • Be an authority: Further solidify Trello’s brand identity as a leader in productivity solutions

Sprout’s Smart Inbox and team collaboration tools helped Trello’s team of five customer service agents surpass its initial goals within three months.

The ability to filter out our campaign hashtag in the Smart Inbox was really helpful. The support team didn’t curl up in defeat.
Emily Chapman
Technical Account Manager

Remaining Agile Amid Growing Social Volume

One of the reasons Trello was able to reinvent its social customer service plan and achieve success was because of Sprout and its customizable interface. This enabled the entire team to remain agile as it refined its strategy.

Using Brand Keywords, Trello segmented its inbound messages across multiple social channels. This provided the support team with an accurate representation of its audience’s behavior and social activity.

Moreover, it enabled the team to quantify a precise response time by separating broader marketing initiatives from support-related Tweets. This feature is particularly useful during times of increased social activity.

“A hashtag campaign led to our inbound message volume being 20 times higher than usual,” said Technical Account Manager Emily Chapman.

While the campaign was a success for the marketing team, the influx of inbound messages presented a challenge for Trello’s support agents.

“The ability to filter out our campaign hashtag in the Smart Inbox was really helpful,” Chapman said. “The support team didn’t curl up in defeat. We were still able to answer the questions people had.”

Marking inbound messages as complete helped Trello efficiently collaborate and stay on track.

“Rather than having to guess whether social’s been done, we can see the complete button and stop. At any point, any of us can take over,” Chapman said.

In terms of ongoing support, Sprout’s Reporting tools help the team to quickly inform and adjust its social strategy.

Sprout allows us to build a better product by hearing and engaging from our users and better supporting them.
Brian Cervino
Product Marketing Manager

Sprout’s Sent Messages Report highlighted the responses that perform best for @TrelloSupport and gave the support team an idea of what type of questions were critical to respond to.

Meanwhile, the Engagement Report highlighted response time and rate by date and time. This made it easy for the team to pinpoint peak hours and adjust its staffing accordingly. Chapman has since been using these analytics to inform Trello’s hiring practices.

“We use this data to determine if our outbound messages are increasing and to understand when we should hire,” Chapman said.

Evolving a Product With Social Knowledge

Remaining agile and delegating tasks based on an employee’s role is an important part of the day-to-day wins for the Trello team. What’s most innovative about the team’s social customer care strategy is that it doesn’t lose sight of its long-term business goals.

“Sprout literally allows us to build a better product by hearing and engaging from our users and better supporting them,” Cervino said.

Brand Keywords and Sprout’s Trends Report make it easy for Trello to gain valuable insights into topics its audience is engaged with and Tweeting about.

“Sprout has given us a more holistic picture of what people are doing with the app,” Chapman said.

Findings from Sprout’s platform help the team surface third-party integration ideas, feature requests, content suggestions and have even aided in building influencer marketing campaigns.

Never Missing a Beat

Using Sprout, Trello strategized, enacted and measured a social customer care strategy from the ground up.

Since launching @TrelloSupport in November 2015, Trello has:

  • Identified and replied to over 2,000 customer support-related questions
  • Reached an entirely new demographic of 35-44-year-olds
  • Achieved over 100 URL click-throughs per month
  • Gained 164 new followers and 851 @mentions
  • Increased Retweets by 49%
  • Increased its average response rate by 16%
  • Replied to 97% of Tweets within 24 hours

Now when new or existing users visit the brand’s Twitter they’re greeted with relevant content targeted to their interests. By remaining nimble and monitoring the social conversation, Trello surpassed its goals and solidified its place as an industry leader for productivity solutions.

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