Running a small business can feel pretty isolating, can’t it? The long hours, endless decisions, and constant second-guessing—all while flying solo. It's easy to feel like you’re the only one navigating this wild journey. But here’s a little secret: you don’t have to go it alone! 🙌
Why Small Business Owners Often Feel Isolated
The day-to-day grind of running a business means you're wearing multiple hats—owner, marketer, customer service, and more. And while it’s rewarding, it can leave you feeling like you’re on an island. The pressure is real. There’s no “team” to bounce ideas off of, no co-workers to share the wins and struggles with, and the weight of every decision falls squarely on your shoulders. This kind of isolation isn’t just frustrating, it can hold you back. But here’s the good news—community can change all that.
Why Community Matters for Small Business Owners
Having a community of like-minded entrepreneurs around you is one of the most powerful resources you can tap into. Not only does it help ease the feeling of isolation, but it gives you a support system to lean on, learn from, and celebrate with!
Feel Connected: It’s amazing what happens when you connect with others who get it. Sharing your journey with fellow small business owners can instantly make you feel less alone and remind you that many others are facing the same challenges.
Get Out of Your Own Head: We’ve all been there—stuck in a loop of second-guessing. Sometimes all you need is someone else’s perspective to find clarity and boost your confidence. A community can be the perfect sounding board for your ideas.
Receive Encouragement and Support: Whether you're celebrating a win or feeling stuck, having a group of peers who can lift you up or provide feedback is a game-changer. Your community becomes your cheerleaders, mentors, and problem solvers—all rolled into one!
Actionable Ways to Overcome Isolation
Ready to start building a community of your own? Here are a few steps to get you started:
Join Online Communities: Online spaces are great for connecting with other business owners from around the world. (Psst, have you checked out the AWeber Community yet? 😉) Whether you’re looking to chat about marketing strategies or just want to vent about the entrepreneurial rollercoaster, online communities are a goldmine for connection and support.
Attend Local Meetups or Networking Events: Face-to-face interactions can do wonders for fighting isolation. Look for local business meetups or networking events where you can swap stories, learn from others, and maybe even spark some collaborations.
Find Accountability Partners: Having an accountability partner is like having a built-in cheerleader. Find a fellow small business owner and check in regularly to share progress, challenges, and goals. Sometimes just knowing someone is in your corner is all the motivation you need!
Connect with Experts and Mentors: Don’t hesitate to reach out to industry experts or mentors for advice. Webinars, online coaching, and even quick chats with seasoned professionals can open up new perspectives you may not have considered.
Introducing the AWeber Community
If you’re feeling isolated, stuck, or just need a little extra support on your small business journey, we’ve got the perfect solution—introducing the AWeber Community! 🎉
We designed this space for small business owners like you to connect, learn, and grow together. Inside, you can:
Gain inspiration from fellow entrepreneurs and hear about their real-world experiences.
Learn from marketing experts to help take your email campaigns to the next level.
Ask questions, share ideas, and find support for all the unique challenges you face as a small business owner.
Get involved in shaping the future of AWeber with feedback that we value and listen to!
Don’t Go It Alone—Join the AWeber Community Today!
Your next big idea could be just one conversation away. So, why wait? Jump in and be part of a community of small business owners who are passionate, driven, and ready to help each other succeed. 🚀
Our Amazing Customer Solutions Team
And don’t forget, our in-house Customer Solutions team is here for you! Whether you need help setting up your next campaign, optimizing your email strategy, or just have a quick question, our team is ready to support you every step of the way. Reach out via live chat, phone support, or email—whichever suits you best!
What are you waiting for? Let’s build something amazing together!
When you think about social media customer service, there are probably two encounters that come to mind: the best experience a brand ever provided…and the worst.
Maybe you’re completely loyal to the airline whose customer service rep found you the perfect flight. Even in the face of price increases and flight cancellations, you’ll never book with another airline again. That’s the power of customer care: turning a great customer service experience into lifelong loyalty.
On the other hand, you’ve stayed furious at the furniture company that delivered the wrong items to your home and refused to refund you. Even after five years, your brand boycott persists..
These contrasting experiences leave a lasting impact, even if most interactions with the brand were average. Responsive customer service can be a major differentiator: The 2025 Sprout Social Index™ found that 73% of social users will buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social.
Brands that go above and beyond for customers receive enviable brand loyalty. In this article, we’re breaking down essential metrics to track so you can deliver exceptional customer service and care. Your customer service approach is more reactive, covering the basics and helping customers when they need it. Customer care dials this up a notch—being proactive and personalizing your approach to specific customer situations. You need a comprehensive set of metrics to understand and improve both.
As customer service inquiries continue to increase on social networks, tracking and fine tuning your efforts will help you future-proof your business and stand out from your competition.
What are social media customer service metrics?
Social media customer service metrics are data points that help you tell the story of how well your customer service and care efforts are satisfying your customers. These metrics uncover what your social customer care team is doing well, where there are opportunities to improve and what tools are needed to fill those gaps. Social customer service metrics can be grouped into three categories: speed and efficiency, volume and team productivity and sentiment.
Social customer service data also reveals how your service and care strategies on social fits into the omnichannel customer experience your brand provides. Using data empowers you to answer questions like:
Where are our customers most likely to make service inquiries?
How satisfied are our customers with the support we provide on social? How does it compare to other channels?
What are our customers’ most common questions?
Where in the funnel are our customers most likely to get stuck?
How to use customer service metrics to improve performance
Tapping into customer service metrics will help evolve your approach to customer care. With these insights, you’ll be better equipped to cultivate an emotional connection with your audience, build brand loyalty and foster customer retention and advocacy.
But the use of these metrics goes beyond improving customer satisfaction and experience. Social media customer service metrics have the power to transform the way you do business—from refining product development to improving your team’s efficiency.
Papa Johns, for example, manages 600+ customer service cases a week. Using Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox, Papa Johns consolidated multiple communication channels into one space. This allows the team to better monitor individual cases and respond faster. This has saved 2 days worth of work per week for the Papa Johns team—830 hours a year. Thanks to streamlined workflows and the time saved, the company has seen improvements in customer satisfaction scores. To see how features like Sprout’s Smart Inbox can strengthen your own customer service strategies, check out a free 30 day trial of Sprout Social.
Papa Johns is not alone in applying social data to customer care strategies. 2025 Index data shows over half of marketing leaders use social interactions as a KPI to gauge success.
Let’s get into the top social customer service metrics you need to monitor, and how you can track them with Sprout Social.
Average first reply time
Average first reply time (or first response time) refers to the time it takes for your team to send out the first reply to an inbound customer message within business hours.
How to calculate average first reply time
You’ll need two pieces of data to calculate your team’s average first response time: the time taken to respond to open and respond to a customer’s request during a set period, and the total number of responses sent during that period.
You can use the following formula to calculate based on seconds or minutes. For example, if your platform tracks interactions in minutes, you can add all the response times together in an hour long period to get a total number of minutes for all cases.
Sum of First Response Times / Total Number of Cases = Average First Response Time
Sprout Social makes this even easier with a built-in chart in the Inbox Activity Report called “Time to Action.” This shows you your average first reply time for each day of the week. Sprout used our own platform to improve our customer service strategy, and this metric played a key role. In conjunction with the heatmap of incoming messages in the report, we were able to understand how to adjust our approach to better meet our customers where they are. Based on the data, we identified specific, knowledgeable support team members working overnight hours who could tackle customer inquiries during surges.
Why average first reply time matters
Even when issues require multiple interactions to resolve, customers want a quick response. Three-quarters of the respondents in our 2025 Sprout Social Index expect brands to get back to them in 24 hours or less. It’s important for your customers to feel quickly acknowledged and seen, no matter the reason for their outreach.
Average reply wait time
Measuring the time to your first response is just the beginning. Average reply wait time reveals how long customers wait in between responses until their issues are resolved, which is equally important.
How to calculate average reply wait time
This metric is another simple average. For example, if it took five minutes for you to reply to a customer’s first message, and 10 minutes to reply to their second, the average reply wait time for this particular customer would be seven and a half minutes.
To calculate the average wait time for all customer messages in a set time period, add all the wait times together and divide by the total number of inquiries in that period. You can use the below formula:
Sum of Total Wait Times / Total Number of Cases = Average Reply Wait Time
Why average reply wait time matters
The goodwill built from a fast initial response can quickly be diminished if your team’s follow ups drag out. So much of social media happens at a breakneck pace, and customers expect your brand’s customer service to keep up. Even if it’s just to note that you’re still working on a solution, be sure to keep your customers updated.
Service level agreement adherence
A social media service level agreement (SLA) outlines terms of service, responsibilities and expectations between a company, its social team and their clients regarding quality of service.
Departments within the same organization can also have SLAs. Regardless of the parties involved, SLAs establish commitments and guidelines for standards, protocols and key performance indicators. Guidelines will vary by company, but social media SLAs can include response time guidelines, issue resolution protocols and a crisis communication plan.
How to calculate SLA adherence
SLA adherence refers to the percentage of customer queries resolved within the agreed-upon time frame specified in the SLA. For example, let’s say an SLA sets a goal of responding to inbound inquiries within three hours or less. If the company responds within that timeframe for every inquiry, the SLA adherence would be 100%. Simply subtract the total number of inquiries that didn’t meet the SLA goal from the total inquiries for a set time period to get your percentage.
Why SLA adherence matters
SLA guidelines exist for a good reason—they serve as a barometer of the health of your social media customer service team and strategy. Adhering to SLAs is also important to maintaining intra-departmental partnerships and client relationships by doing what you collaboratively agreed to do.
Customer abandonment rate
This is a social customer service metric where you want to see a low number. Customer abandonment rate refers to the percentage of customers who abandon their support requests before receiving a resolution.
How to calculate customer abandonment rate
Choose a set time period, and tabulate your total abandoned customer inquiries. From there, divide this number by the total number of inquiries from that time period, and then multiply by 100 to get a percentage.
For example, if you had 5 abandoned customer inquiries in a single hour and had 20 total interactions in that hour, your abandonment rate is 25%.
Why customer abandonment rate matters
High abandonment rate can indicate poor customer support, leading to unsatisfied customers and lost business. Tracking customer service metrics like abandonment rate can help you identify areas to improve.
Total received messages
The number of total received messages indicates how many total customer messages landed in your inbox. This can be for a set period on a single social channel or across all your social customer service platforms.
How to calculate total received messages
This one is simple math: just add together all the messages your customer service team received in the time period you’re interested in (whether an hour, a day or month).
Why total received messages matters
The number of messages your social customer service team receives in a given period can reveal insights about your broader social media strategy. If you notice a spike in messages in a certain time period, consider what events may be contributing. A product launch may have been happening or a new social ad campaign could have rolled out. The response volume can help you understand customers’ reaction to these events.
The amount of incoming inquiries can also be affected by world events or customers’ social media posts about your brand (which is where social listening tools come in handy). Additionally, you can track total replies or response volume alongside this metric to add more context to the work your customer service team is doing.
Response rate
Response rate is the rate that brands respond to messages or comments they receive on a daily basis. Not every single comment or message will need a response, and the amount you need to respond depends on the needs of your customers. Social media response rates vary by industry.
How to calculate response rate
For the time period you’re interested in, add together the customer comments, messages or both that your team responded to by the total number of messages received. Multiple by 100, and you’ll have your percentage.
Why response rate matters
Though not every message calls for a response, you’ll want to make sure your customer service team is responding to all the ones that do. Sprout used this metric for our own customer service approach and uncovered ways for our social team and customer service team to better collaborate and improve response rate and handle times.
Resolution rate
For those messages that do call for a response, your goal is typically to reach a positive conclusion. Resolution rate—the percentage of customer inquiries that are fully resolved—reveals how equipped your entire company is to address customer inquiries.
How to calculate resolution rate
This metric is calculated by dividing the number of total actioned messages or completed interactions by the total number of messages.
Why resolution rate matters
Your resolution rate illustrates how well your internal teams collaborate to find solutions for customers in a timely manner. Customers reaching out on social media want their problems solved, and this metric shows how well your customer service team meets those expectations.
Average handling time
Average handling time (AHT) refers to the average time it takes for a customer service representative to handle a customer inquiry from start to finish. This can involve a single interaction or span multiple messages over an extended period, depending on the complexity of the issue.
How to calculate AHT
To start, you’ll need to add together all time spent working through customer interactions and responding to messages in your chosen time period. This should include actual time responding as well as work done in between responses to solve the issue. From there, divide that number by the total number of customer service interactions to get your AHT.
Why AHT matters
Calculating AHT can help teams ensure inquiries are addressed and resolved in a timely manner. It can also illuminate opportunities to streamline case management workflows and identify which support scenarios require more attention.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) measures satisfaction with a company’s product, service or interaction on social media platforms. CSAT is measured individually through surveys with questions like “How satisfied are you with your experience today?” and “How would you rate our product/service?” CSAT data is gathered via surveys typically sent soon after an interaction is complete.
How to calculate CSAT
Once you’ve collected a solid amount of CSAT surveys, you divide the total number of positive scores (those in the 8-10 range) by the total number of customers you surveyed and then multiply by 100. Here’s a handy formula:
Why CSAT matters
CSAT is a powerful customer support metric because it enables businesses to gauge customer satisfaction while gathering actionable data to further improve the customer experience. Additionally, you can also consider CSAT vs. workload. This metric refers to the comparison of customer satisfaction scores with the overall workload of the customer service team.
Customer effort score (CES)
Customer effort scores show you how much effort customers feel they had to expend in order to get their request solved or a question answered.
How to measure CES
CES can be easily added to your CSAT surveys. Pose a question like “How much effort was involved for you to get this request resolved?” and offer a scale for responses. The higher the number in the response, the more effort the customer felt was required. You can then add these responses up and divide by the total number of responses to get an average CES.
Why CES matters
Ideally, your customers should feel like they don’t need to put in a ton of effort to get their questions answered. Low CES scores can point to more satisfied customers overall.
Positive, neutral and negative sentiment
Through sentiment analysis, you can learn a lot about what your customers think about your brand, products and services. Overall, sentiment can be described as generally positive, neutral or negative.
How to calculate sentiment
To get a true picture of customer sentiment, consider customer service messages, social media comments, customer posts about your brand and more. While you could use a manual qualitative approach to categorize messages as positive, neutral or negative, AI-enhanced sentiment analysis tools will save you major time and effort.
These tools calculate sentiment based on a variety of methods. For example, Sprout Social uses a Deep Neural Network (DNN). When Sprout’s DNN reviews a block of text to evaluate for sentiment, it provides a probability score that the text is positive, negative or neutral. Sprout then selects the label with the highest probability.
Why sentiment matters
Although that doesn’t encompass the full context of a customer’s experience or opinion, monitoring sentiment trends helps you track and maintain a healthy ratio of positive sentiment. Be on the lookout for changes over time.
Most used quick replies
If you use a chatbot to optimize customer interactions on social, most used quick replies refer to the most commonly selected options.
How to calculate most used quick replies
In many cases, the AI-customer service platform you’re using can keep track of quick reply usage and share stats with you.
Why quick replies matter
Use this data point to identify customer support trends, and optimize your customer service process to address these common requests quickly. This metric can also highlight customer issues that may be happening more frequently.
Most received topics and subtopics
The keywords or themes that pop up in your inbox often are your most received topics and subtopics. Words, phrases and themes that your customers are using in their social customer service interactions with you all fall into this bucket.
How to calculate most received topics and subtopics
Tracking these topics and subtopics is challenging without the use of a tagging system or machine learning capabilities—however, tuning into them is essential for learning about your audience. A comprehensive social media management tool will have AI-powered tools to help you track this metric.
Why most received topics and subtopics matter
This metric can be the canary in the coal mine for a brewing crisis; an issue appearing in your inbox with increasing frequency can show something coming down the line you may not be aware of yet. Alternatively, most received topics can also highlight what customers love about your brand and products or services they want to see in the future.
Voice of the customer (VoC) data
Social media could be described as the world’s largest focus group. It unlocks an unprecedented amount of voice of the customer data, which helps you get to know your customers’ behavior, pain points, preferences and needs on a deeper level.
This customer service metric is less quantifiable, but nonetheless rich in value. VoC data becomes even more valuable when you can pair social data with data from your CRM for a full 360 customer view—like with the Sprout and Salesforce Service Cloud integration.
How to calculate VoC
VoC can combine a number of different metrics and qualitative information. In addition to your CSAT scores, you can use Net Promoter Score (NPS). Here, you’ll categorize posts from your sentiment analysis into promoters and detractors. Subtract your detractors from your promoters to get a percentage for your NPS score.
Why VoC matters
VoC data helps you see broad, ongoing trends in the ways your customers experience your brand. Most brands aim to create happy customers through their products and services, and VoC data can uncover whether your brand is succeeding or not.
Tracking social customer service metrics in Sprout
Sprout Social offers a number of ways to integrate the above customer service metrics into your strategy. When you receive incoming messages in Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can add tags that indicate the content of the messages. For example, you can tag for audience type or service issue. Tagging your messages helps you visualize trends in your customer service reports.
Sprout users on the Advanced Plan can tap into AI-powered sentiment in the Smart Inbox and Reviews Feed. Posts will automatically be assigned a positive, neutral, negative or unclassified value, making it seamless to isolate messages and even assign Automated Rules according to sentiment.
You can use Sprout’s AI-powered Listening tools to uncover sentiment trends from the Inbox. Listening tools make it easy to track changes in sentiment, which empower you to share reports in a timely manner—and act on negative sentiment before it’s too late.
You can also bolster your Listening queries with our Queries by AI Assist feature, which uses OpenAI’s GPT model to serve up a vast range of suggested terms to include in your tracking.
For CSAT scores, you can configure automated, customized surveys for X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram and Facebook. You can build these by visiting the Customer Feedback section in Settings and choosing Enable Feedback.
From there, you can make selections based on the channel and choose to automate these surveys based on the situation. Then view and analyze your results in the Customer Feedback Report.
Sprout allows you to assign individual messages in your Smart Inbox as Cases. Case Management in Sprout helps ensure the best support team member is assigned to a customer’s inquiry (Case), provide greater visibility into how a customer’s issue is solved and improve insight into how your support team is doing overall.
There are two customer service cases reports within Sprout: the Case Management Report and the Case Team Activity Report. The Case Management Report helps you manage the efficiency and quality of your customer service efforts. In this report, you can track metrics like average first response time, AHT and average reply time for your full social customer service program.
Detailed sections of the report break down case volume and case efficiency, giving you an understanding of the workload your customer service team is handling, how well they’re doing it and how customer services cases are being managed overall.
The Case Team Activity Report goes a step further to highlight how individual customer service team members are excelling, and where they may need coaching or support. Here you can track cases assigned and individual workloads, case completion rate and individual versions of metrics like AHT and average first reply.
Together, these reports provide both a micro and macro review of your social media customer service team’s efforts.
Provide your customers with an unforgettable social customer service experience
Whether you’re part of a social media team handling social support or a customer care professional on a dedicated support team, ground yourself in your goals for customer service.
Then, as you measure performance and social media customer service metrics, you can adjust and better cater to your customers.
