SAS updates Conversation Centre tool to improve social media monitoring

SAS has announced updates to its Conversation Centre tool that helps companies monitor comments about their brands on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The tool is part of the firm's Social Media Analytics platform, and was unveiled in April at the SAS Global Forum in Las Vegas attended by V3.

Among the updates announced on Wednesday is the ability to publish posts to Twitter from within the Conversation Centre tool, rather than having to use the Twitter site or a Twitter client.

SAS has also improved the conversation timeline by adding colour-coded labels for the types of messages being shown, such as tweets, retweets and direct messages. Messages from employees and members of the public mentioning the brand are also displayed with different colours.

Furthermore, the tool now offers the ability to create a system of standard content such as set replies, hashtags and links to ensure consistency of interactions with customers.

SAS has also added automatic case closure capabilities so that the system will end instances where customers do not reply after a set time period.

John Bastone, SAS global product marketing manager for customer intelligence, told V3 that the updates represent a series of "nice to have" features that build on the first version of the product launched in April.

"Some of these updates were not key to the launch of the product but we have now added them to improve staff use of the tool. The use of standard content will ensure a unified system of responses from all staff, for example," he said.

"The ability to reply from inside the tool on Twitter will improve responsiveness from staff, and the improved colour coding system will help avoid confusion between messages by staff and those of the public mentioning the brand using the tool."