How AAA Club Alliance saved over $1 million in annual efficiencies with one unified social platform
The Challenge
Providing customer care for 12.5 million members spread across 20 states, six time zones, and five business units communicating on 75 social media channels is a daunting proposition.
That was the challenge for AAA Club Alliance (ACA), one of the largest club affiliates of the American Automobile Association (AAA), a federation of motor clubs throughout North America. The ACA’s Social Media Center of Excellence (CoE) oversees the social operations with responsibilities that include providing customer care, publishing social content, executing organic and paid campaigns and collecting data.
The CoE was using numerous disparate tools, making it difficult to connect paid resources to analyze customer feedback. “Our team recognized the importance of social, and we were moving fast to incorporate it into our daily operations,” said Lori Seaman, director of social media and digital marketing for the CoE. “But we outgrew the tools that we were using, and that drove us to pursue a more comprehensive solution.”
The team’s listening capabilities, for instance, weren’t robust enough to meet evolving needs. “There was a social listening tool that was overseen by the national office, but we lacked a centralized location for customer care, data, and social listening,” said Trevor Grisby, social media experience manager for the CoE. “We had a way to measure sentiment, but it was insufficient.”
Exacerbating the challenge, when partner clubs started relying more heavily on social media, ACA added even more tools. Many were simply workarounds for the technical limitations of other tools.
“We were running out of bandwidth, and much of that was due to how long it took for someone to build a robust campaign that was segmented across multiple audiences,” Seaman said. “It could take up to a day and a half, and there was much more important work we could have been doing instead.”
Reporting was also a major issue, taking up to two full days to complete. The team was also contending with a mobile app on one of CoE’s most important social media tools that barely worked, preventing them from working remotely.
“Anything they had to do on weekends or while traveling, they couldn’t do,” Seaman said. “We were blind until we could get home and log on. My team would have to bring their laptops everywhere, which was a strain on family time as well.”
Although the ACA team was able to provide a high level of customer care, they knew they could meet goals even more efficiently with:
- A unified view of content and performance to help the team break down silos and use their insights to build targeted campaigns.
- Automated processes to facilitate collaboration among teams — saving precious time, money, and talent from being overly taxed and wasted.
- Better remote work and reporting capabilities that streamlined customer care and response time and took greater advantage of resources.
The Solution
Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform and features enabled the CoE to align all digital efforts in one place.
“When I was looking for something to help us take our advertising and analytics forward, I learned about what other companies were using,” Seaman explained. “A lot of them said, ‘Sprinklr, Sprinklr, Sprinklr.’ They told me that they could integrate marketing channel data with Sprinklr data, customize their environment, and customize their reports — all things we couldn’t do with past solutions.”
With a centralized view of content and performance, the company can break down silos across teams and channels and use insights to build more targeted campaigns.
“I’m able to look at campaigns run by our mid-Atlantic lead that might use different messaging but target the same demographic. I can then go in through the ads manager and adjust other campaigns according to results from previous ones,” Grisby explained.
Through Sprinklr, they can now manage all their publishing, asset management, and reporting with just a few clicks. “Just having that common thread with everything in one place has been a tremendous improvement,” said Grisby. “Because we’ve been able to be more specific with the people we target, our rate of engagement has definitely increased.”
“We no longer have mental limits when it comes to optimizing ad campaigns,” Seaman added. “We now have everything we can imagine at our fingertips. We have a pretty lean team, and Sprinklr allows us to do a lot more with what we have.”
- Provide extraordinary value for partner clubs and members: a customizable, unified platform and monitoring dashboard allows for maximum efficiency, saving the ACA over $1 million.
- A built-in audit trail for customer mentions: the teams can now respond to customer inquiries quickly and efficiently, boosting engagement with their targeted audience.
- Align social media accounts in one customizable unified platform: easily receive, analyze, organize, evaluate, and respond to all inbound messages.
The Outcome
The ACA has saved hundreds of hours of work with the increased efficiency that comes with the Sprinklr platform.
“When I was looking for something to help us take our advertising and analytics forward, I learned about what other companies were using. A lot of them said, ‘Sprinklr, Sprinklr, Sprinklr.’ They told me that they could integrate marketing channel data with Sprinklr data, customize their environment, and customize their reports — all things we couldn’t do with past solutions.”
Director of Social Media and Digital Marketing for the CoE, AAA Club Alliance (ACA)
In one year, ACA has seen $1,163,079 saved in total annual personal efficiencies. That includes 77 hours saved per week planning content ($122,571 annually) and five minutes saved per published post leveraging an asset ($95,879 annually). They also substantially decreased time spent planning social content from 80 hours per week to three hours per week.
With Sprinklr’s organic social reporting, they saved 612 workdays, equivalent to $149,878, with Sprinklr’s organic social reporting. The paid reporting capabilities helped save approximately 1,560 workdays, equivalent to $382,041. That’s almost six years of work eliminated.
“The Sprinklr audience-building tool is phenomenal,” said Seaman. “We’re able to tag, package, and retarget to profiles based on whatever criteria we set.”
ACA also dropped its average response time from two business days to below one hour. For an eight-hour business day that would be a 16X drop. “We’ve been able to go from spending hours taking screenshots and copying and pasting into a PowerPoint presentation to having the template right there,” said Grisby. “We’re talking about tremendous amounts of time saved with reporting itself.”
“Sprinklr allows us to respond to all customer complaints, compliments, inquiries, and comments the moment they are received,” said Amy Cameron, customer service coordinator for the CoE. “Our members are aware that we take their concerns seriously and will work to have them addressed.”
Even when the team doesn’t meet its response time goal, it can identify the exact cases and messages that caused the delay, allowing the team to evolve and improve its processes. And when it comes to crisis situations, the CoE doesn’t have to manually scour the web for brand mentions or rely on listening tools that aren’t robust enough.
“We can quickly set up a listening query, get our executives looped in, and get our arms around an issue,” explained Seaman.
Sprinklr also provides more in-depth reporting and analytics — surfacing insights ACA rarely saw before. “Sprinklr has given me the ability to compare metrics easily from one market to another, one campaign to another, to see what copy or images are working and which ones aren’t,” Grisby said. “I have a global view of all published content and paid campaign performance, which allows me to see both successes and inconsistencies within the landscape of the CoE.”
Sprinklr’s reporting tool is also highly customizable. “It allows us to access the exact data we want,” said Seaman. “We have so many metrics that it feels like anything we want is available. We’re able to pull whatever information the leadership wants to see, and we’ve never run into a roadblock.”