What Your Customers Are Saying Online–And Why Your Agents Should Hear It

Most brands recognize the importance of social media as a marketing channel for reaching consumers, but are you overlooking its critical role in building a unified customer journey? One that connects every channel, every signal, and every conversation?

As social media has become an integral part of everyday life for so many people, it’s frequently the first choice for voicing a problem with a brand, perhaps because a visible complaint on a public platform is more likely to receive a swift response.

This is especially true of certain generations, as McKinsey research shows that 59 percent of Millennials and 57 percent of Gen Z say they would use social channels to reach customer care if the issue couldn’t be resolved through self-service options.

To deliver truly unified customer care, it’s essential to route social media interactions, including platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X, through the same underlying architecture that supports calls, chats, and emails. Every engagement deserves the same speed, context, and attention. Thanks to 8x8’s integration with Meltwater, a global leader in media, social, and consumer intelligence, it’s easier than ever to embed social in your CX activity.

When Social Posts Become Support Caseslink to this section

While there are numerous reasons why a business might want to integrate social listening with its CX platform, real-time social customer support stands out as a top driver.

Imagine an unhappy customer posts a detailed complaint about your product on X. Too often, the social media team isn’t aligned with the CX team – they’re understaffed, out of office, or in some cases, don’t exist at all (believe it or not, some brands still don’t have social media managers). So the complaint could go completely unnoticed, ignored, or simply fall through the cracks in the escalation process.

But, with Meltwater integrated seamlessly into 8x8 Agent Workspace, any complaints that surface on social media are detected through advanced filtering and automatically routed to the right team, allowing them to be handled in the same manner as an email or call. The same applies to technical support requests and other inquiries. These issues can then be dealt with quickly, providing a significant uplift for your UX quality.

Spot the Crisis Before It Catches Firelink to this section

The ability to efficiently spot issues on social media and feed them into your customer care system also plays a critical role in protecting your brand reputation. When a brand is hit by a reputational crisis, social media is almost always where the issue begins to snowball, so monitoring the volume of complaints and identifying trends can help spot the warning signs of a growing problem.

One of the problems social media poses for brands is that a complaint posted by one user can quickly go viral and be seen by a growing number of users, often prompting others to share their own experiences with the brand. So, what starts as a seemingly minor issue can spiral into something much larger.

Sometimes the signals are more subtle, like a steady drop in service quality at a specific retail location. A single comment might seem isolated, but a pattern of similar feedback from multiple customers can reveal deeper issues with the management of that location.

By using analytics to track trends in volume, topicality, and sentiment of social media mentions, it’s possible to identify these red flags early and take corrective action before they blow up into a major crisis that could impact your reputation and your bottom line.

Turn Social Insights Into CX Wins with Meltwater + 8x8link to this section

In today’s digital-first landscape, CX leaders can’t afford to treat social media as a secondary channel. Meltwater’s powerful social listening integrated with 8x8’s omnichannel contact center creates a single, intelligent pipeline for customer engagement across voice, chat, email — and now social media.

“We have comprehensive data partnerships with all of the leading global social media platforms, including those in international markets that you might not have heard of. Our solution ingests all of that global social content in real time, so our integration with 8x8 ensures that whenever somebody mentions your brand or products anywhere online, you’ll be able to respond immediately.”

Chris Hackney

Meltwater's Chief Product Officer

By unifying social data into the same intelligence layer that powers real-time routing, sentiment analysis, and agent workflows, businesses gain the visibility and agility to respond faster, spot risks earlier, and build lasting customer trust.

This blog highlighted just two impactful ways to elevate CX with social listening. For a deeper dive into what’s possible, explore the