Hudl is changing the way sports teams around the world—from youth clubs to professional teams—capture, organize, analyze and learn from film and data. Over 200,000 teams across more than 40 sports use Hudl’s web, app and hardware solutions for performance analysis to help their coaches and athletes prepare for play and make in-game adjustments to maintain a competitive edge.

When Hudl’s customers have questions about or issues with the company’s tech, they want answers fast—it could make all the difference in the outcome of a game. Hudl uses Salesforce Service Cloud to help agents quickly connect with customers, whether they’re contacting the company by phone, email, chatbot or @HudlSupport on Twitter. Hudl uses the partnership between Sprout Social and Salesforce to ensure a full 360-degree customer view.

We wish we’d switched from Social Studio to Sprout Social sooner to handle our customer support. The implementation support was top-notch—the Sprout team made the process a breeze.
Jessie Koenig
Revenue Systems Administrator

Raising the bar on customer support efficiency by switching to Sprout

The need to reduce the amount of tool-hopping for Hudl agents is especially critical during peak customer usage periods, such as during the American football or basketball season. “Our customer support team may need to field between 1,000 and 2,000 support requests per day—primarily by phone, email or Twitter,” Koenig explained.

Customer satisfaction and “speed to answer” are among the top metrics that Hudl’s customer support team uses to track their performance. Streamlining the internal experience for agents on the Salesforce platform helps them improve resolution times, reduce duplication of efforts and serve customers more effectively overall.

Koenig, whose primary responsibility at Hudl is Salesforce CRM system administration, said Hudl’s transition from Social Studio to Sprout at the beginning of 2023 was quick and easy.

“We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year moving from legacy Salesforce tools into Salesforce Flow and increasing automation in customer support,” she said. “The fact that Sprout Social is already in the Salesforce Flow workforce automation solution was huge for us. Many other integrations we’ve plugged in over the past several years are still being built on Salesforce’s legacy automation.”

“The integration between Sprout Social and Salesforce Service Cloud aligns with our goal to unify the internal experience for our customer support reps into a single platform. Instead of having agents log into multiple systems to handle calls, chats and Tweets, we want every interaction they have to happen within Salesforce Service Cloud.”

Easy-to-implement customizations to support preferred workflows

Another benefit of switching to Sprout is the fact that the solution “was very powerful right out of the box,” Koenig said. “Many vendors say their products integrate with Salesforce, but it requires an extremely heavy lift from multiple engineers to create a custom integration,” she said.

Sprout’s integration with Salesforce was quite literally plug-and-play, which is exactly what we were looking for.
Jessie Koenig
Revenue Systems Administrator

Sprout was also easy to customize, according to Koenig. “We wanted a few customizations to suit our preferred workflows, and the Sprout team was very responsive to our requests,” she said.

One customization was skills-based routing. “Depending on what channel a customer message comes through and the product type it refers to, we route the case to a specific rep,” Koenig explained. “We needed to customize the Salesforce Flow for Sprout cases so that we could easily move new cases into specific queues to reach agents with specific skills.”

Koenig said Sprout’s support team walked her through the whole process: “They explained how Sprout’s Flow works, and exactly where I could make modifications to adjust it.”

A phone screen using Hudl to capture a recording of two people playing soccer.

Accurate, actionable social data helps Hudl assemble team lineups

In the few months since Hudl implemented Sprout’s social media integration with Salesforce, Koenig said she’s heard plenty of positive feedback from the customer support team about how much their everyday work experience has improved.

“The team really appreciates the ability to use Sprout in Salesforce to scroll through Twitter interactions just as you would online, and get all that context,” she said. “What did the customer say to this response? What was the flow of the interaction? It seems like such a simple thing, but it wasn’t easy for our reps to see all that detail when we were using Social Studio.”

Hudl’s leadership is also gaining access to accurate, actionable social data they never had before. “When you start implementing different connections to your CRM, that data can get muddy if you’re not careful,” Koenig explained. “One of our top objectives for this year is to make sure that we equip our business decision-makers with high-quality data, including social data.”

My tip for anyone transitioning from Social Studio to Sprout Social is to get ready for some great data coming into Salesforce. Your cases are going to flow through your system much better, too.
Jessie Koenig
Revenue Systems Administrator

Koenig added, “Sprout has really helped us clean up our social data, especially in terms of measuring the sheer number of interactions we have with our customers. It was very hard to measure that with our previous tool and know just how many people we were actually communicating with.”

A Tweet from Hudl that reads: Mac McClung is ready to put on a show at the #ATTSlamDunk Contest 🙌. The Tweet includes a video of Mac McClung dunking and an interview with the athlete.

That insight from Sprout is helping Hudl to create a more efficient customer support function because leadership has a better understanding of how many agents are needed, and when.

“One of the most helpful metrics we get from Sprout is volume—especially, our seasonal volume,” Koenig said. “We don’t train every rep to handle social media work. And in the past, it was very difficult for us to forecast our staffing. The reports we generate from Sprout allow us to gauge when we need to ramp up social support, and when it’s best to guide customers to self-service support and tutorials.”

Sprout’s easy implementation process can help make you an MVP

Looking back on the experience of implementing Sprout’s integration with Service Cloud, Koenig said Sprout’s “top tier” support throughout the process was invaluable. It also boosted her reputation internally.

“I took on this implementation alone at Hudl,” she said. “The way that Sprout structured the process helped me communicate to my bosses where things stood at all times. My bosses were impressed by how few resources were needed for the implementation—and that I was able to do it on my own.”

If you’d like to learn how Sprout’s Salesforce integration can help you manage all customer care from your Salesforce instance, request a personalized demo.

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