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Social Media Integration
Idea shared by Leo Furze-Waddock - October 7, 2014 at 3:33 AM
Under Consideration
Are there any plans to add social media integration features to SmarterTrack?
 
If so, when do you expect to add them to a stable release?

19 Replies

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Yes Please this is very Important to add this feature
God Bless
Elias
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This would also be an important decision maker for us.
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I would also like to see this
Regards
David Weir
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Yes please this feature is very important to add the social media integration
God Bless
Elias
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Hello? SmarterTrack team are you listening?
Zendesk has integration such that questions can be asked in Facebook and replied to from within the Zendesk site. Support is a fantastic way to get our users to join our Facebook community and Facebook pushing posts to our client's news feeds is a great way to keep them engaged and our brand top-of-mind. We use delivr.it to push our Smartertrack news RSS feed to Twitter and Facebook automatically now, but it is still a challenge to get our users to join our Facebook group. Forcing them to use Facebook or Twitter to ask their questions would overcome this problem.
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You can see what they are doing here:
support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661556-Setting-up-your-Facebook-channel
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I agree, we are about to dump smartertrack for another tool.
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We as well will be moving to Front for their seamless social integration. This is now a critical channel to have in a helpdesk software.
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We as well will be moving to Front for their seamless social integration. This is now a critical channel to have in a helpdesk software.
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I have successfully manage social media integration with SmarterTrack using smooch.io. But it was required some extra programming code since it was using ST API web services to be able to connect. 
The smooch also require paid subscription but it can handle FB messenger, Line, wechat, zendesk, Twitter DM and many other stuff. But if ST does not require third party software, that would be great. 
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Hi Bill, what did you do to integrate it, I am interested in how you did it... Can you give more info?
God Bless
Elias
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Hi Elias, since there is no API for live chat integration in ST, i was putting all the conversation into tickets. Ticket API seems pretty solid to build the integration. I just need to create an account at smooch.io then start bridging the process to my social-media account for example the FB page.
This was done with Web Interface (no programming needed).
After the bridge is connected, then i write nodejs script in my server to handle message automation (webhook) so every incoming messages will get converted into tickets in real time. In order to reply from ST, external provider is needed for 'Sent Message event' to trigger extra code from ST to smooch, then it will push the message to the recipient.
About how to write the scipt, you can see full documentation on their site.
Please let me know if you need the technical detail, we can connect through email.
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Hi Bill this is great info, it will be great if we can connect via email, my email is my first name @ mailpatron . Com
I didn’t want to write my email so spammers crawlers don’t grab it... please feel free to drop me an email and we can converse on the details... God Bless... Elias
God Bless
Elias
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Derek Curtis Replied
January 30 at 1:03 PM
Employee Post
Those of you looking for social integration: how are you anticipate it working? Let me give you some scenarios:
  1. Do you use a third-party product like Hoosuite for managing your brand across social channels? If so, would you want a plug-in for that product that allows you to take an item from a channel and turn it into a ticket? What product(s) are you using if different than Hootsuite? SproutSocial? Buffer?
  2.  Would you want to use SmarterTrack to manage social networks, and then be able to turn an item into a ticket from there? 
  3. Would you want to create another item in SmarterTrack from a social post? Like a Task or a KB article? 
  4. Would you want to use SmarterTrack as JUST a monitoring product? So you could see your feeds in SmarterTrack but you wouldn't be able to DM or reply to a channel? 
  5. Beyond the basics -- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ (maybe) -- what others interest you? Amazon reviews? Reddit? YouTube?
I'm just trying to get a handle on how you'd want this to work. Some products simply offer plugins for third-party products, others provide monitoring.
Derek Curtis
COO
SmarterTools Inc.
(877) 357-6278
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Hi Derek, I appreciate your input on this, I do recall we talked over the phone 3years ago when we first deployed ST for our organization... And I recall us asking for this feature for integration since then... Anyway... Here’s how I see ST used or integrated in Social Media for us:

It would be great for ST Agents to be able to see the feed/private messages of people from Facebook at minimum and Twitter, G+ etc... if possible... and reply to these feeds/messages from within ST application not via Hootsuite or others... and we would like if one of the social media messages has an important request, to have the ability to turn it into a ticket and Followup with it... Same like any other ticket...

Would be great to have the Social Media as an additional item that can be tracked for each user, for example: Calls, Chats, Tickets, Social, Tasks, etc...

Again this is a proposal, not sure what’s best scenario to be applied... But I know Sales Desk and Zendesk allows to communicate directly with social media from within the interface... This feature of integration became very imperable and important to the current market, and would like to see ST offering this feature as this has been one of the weakest areas of ST... And a better way to track people via email or phone not just making the email a main item, what if people don’t have an email?

Thanks again for your consideration and looking forward to see how ST can implement this... God Bless Elias
God Bless
Elias
0
Derek Curtis Replied
January 30 at 4:46 PM
Employee Post
Thanks for the feedback, Elias.
Derek Curtis
COO
SmarterTools Inc.
(877) 357-6278
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Hello Derek, on our end, we would like to use ST as the "only" inbox we are looking at. Facebook page messages (not only posts on our facebook pages, but more importantly private Messenger messages sent to our page), Twitter mentions, emails, live chats, Android reviews, etc. and we want to be able to reply IN SmarterTicket. So the goal is to have a single point of service for our agents. Front (and Zendesk and others) are doing this quite nicely (frontapp.com/social). I also consider this the strongest weakness of ST right now. We love ST, but Facebook is becoming a critical channel for customer support and must now be part of any good helpdesk solution in my opinion. Thanks for listening, appreciated.
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Dear Derek, I should also mention that if ST adds the ability for (Social Media Inbox & SMS) ST will be one of the best software, I really like ST, but we have been using 3rd parties with SMS and Social, cause this is been lagging with ST... Please help implement this and thank you again...
God Bless
Elias
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I agree, While we now have SproutSocial, ideally we would like to only have SmarterTrack. We are not interested in smartertrack plugin for other products. That only complicates things and still cost more money to get the features we feel we need. As a customer who pays every year to renew our smartertrack support, we expect new features, not necessarily new pretty layouts but features that help us be more productive and provide better customer service to our customers.

Our focused social networks are FB, T, G+ & Linked in. Youtube would be nice since we do post how to videos and knowing when someone is commenting on those would be helpful.

We would like to be able to respond to all Social media from within SmarterTrack. This would allow all Agents to reply using the linked social profile. Only aggregating the social post may leave an agent unable to respond to the post until the Social media Admin can grant the users access on the social media site. I feel aggregating the social post is just a half banked feature and does not really offer the value that we are expecting. There are already free tools that will aggregate the data for viewing.

We paid over $2,000 this year for SproutSocial, and now we have two tools we have to use. Id rather have one tool and pay less. With having to pay for the social media tool, we now have to evaluate if we want to continue renewing our support for Smarter Track, because if maybe able to pay for another solution that already has all these features instead of paying two vendors. We will have to make this decision before our next renewal.

FWIW, Ive requested a Client Side Chat API in other threads, This is inline with that request. With that API customers could build tools that would pull those social Media Chat into SmarterTrack and then reply directly... But SmarterTools has not even replied to that request..
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