Inbox FAQ

From engagement to sales and support, your social channels are the front door for many different types of customer interactions. That’s why we built Inbox in Hootsuite — to help you delight your customers with faster, better responses.

• What is Inbox?
• What are the benefits of Inbox?
• Where are Hootsuite's data centers located?
• How does Hootsuite protect private information?
• What features are available with each plan type?

What is Inbox?

Inbox is our newest digital-first and proactive customer service solution. We developed it using advanced technology from Sparkcentral, a best-in-class social customer service platform Hootsuite acquired in 2021. This enables customers to deliver exceptional customer service via social and messaging channels including SMS, WhatsApp, X, Facebook, Instagram, and more.

What are the benefits of Inbox?

With Inbox, you can:

• Manage public, private, organic and dark post conversations in one place.
• Use saved replies, auto-responders, and automations that speed up responses.
• Connect to your CRM to enable better service and deeper insights into the value of a conversation.
• Route and assign responses to the right individuals and teams.

These are just some of the advanced features in Inbox. For a full list, see the following section: What features are available with each plan type?

Inbox offers many benefits to teams managing social media and customer service. You can access up to 13 months of Inbox data.

Social media teams can:

• Get a bird’s eye view of all messages and engagements — from private to public, and organic to dark — across platforms, in one place.
• Easily collaborate with multiple internal teams to quickly resolve every type of customer message or engagement.
• Prove social ROI by consistently exceeding customer service success metrics and delivering customer satisfaction.

Customer service teams can:

• Resolve more social customer service tickets faster with tools built to enhance your team’s efficiency.
• Collaborate easily with internal teams and ensure seamless hand-offs of customer inquiries.
• Boost customer satisfaction with quick, accurate, and consistent interactions.

Where are Hootsuite’s data centers located?

Hootsuite’s services are provided and managed by Hootsuite Inc., a Canadian company. Most of our services are developed and maintained from our offices in Canada, but as part of our services we use third-party providers (subprocessors) located in the United States.

We currently store data using one AWS data center in the USA (Virginia). More information on our subprocessors is available on our website at hootsuite.com/legal/subprocessor-list.

How does Hootsuite protect private information?

Hootsuite complies with applicable data protection laws with respect to its responsibilities, including the GDPR and Canadian PIPEDA. Customers should be aware that the parties may act as data controllers or processors depending on the data, and there are different obligations that apply to each party. For more information, refer to our privacy policy at hootsuite.com/legal/privacy.

Our customers are also responsible for complying with applicable data protection laws for the data they are handling. For example, customers are data controllers for the content that they choose to load onto Hootsuite services, and will need to ensure they have the legal basis to collect and use such data if it is related to individuals.

Hootsuite's privacy program includes the following elements that are central to most data protection laws:

• Hootsuite has appointed a data protection officer (DPO) and has dedicated individuals managing the privacy function.
• Hootsuite's employees undergo annual privacy training.
• Hootsuite has implemented a process to promptly respond to, and manage data subject requests, such as requests for access and deletion of their information.
• Hootsuite observes privacy by design principles, including conducting privacy impact assessments and reviews when implementing new product functionality, and new processes.
• Hootsuite has adopted technical and organizational measures to protect personal data.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we manage information about individuals. You can find more details about our privacy and security practices on our website under hootsuite.com/legal/privacy and hootsuite.com/trust-center.

What features are available with each plan type?

Inbox offers a wide range of powerful features to enhance your customer service. See the following sections for more details. If your plan type is not listed in a table, it's because those features are not available to that plan type.

Centralized conversation management

Inbox is one place to answer messages across social networks listed in the following table. You can also view and respond to messages on mobile.

Conversation management features

Social network	All other plan types	Advanced & Enterprise	Advanced Inbox
Facebook (public, private, and dark posts)
X (public and private)
Instagram (public and private)
LinkedIn (public and private)
TikTok (comments on owned videos)
WhatsApp
Hootsuite Messenger (web chat)
WeChat
Twillio
SMS via Twillio
AI classifiers

Message organization and prioritization

Use advanced features like filters, tags, and automations to organize and prioritize your conversations.

Conversation prioritization features

Feature	Standard, Professional, Team	Business	Advanced & Enterprise	Advanced Inbox
Filters Manage asynchronous communication better by filtering for new messages and responses that need your attention, pending messages that you've already responded to, and resolved conversations that you want to close.
Topics and tags Use topics and tags to assign conversations to specific individuals or teams, analyze themes, and prioritize conversations.		Tags only
Automations Automate assigning topics and tags, or resolving a conversation based on rules you create to save time, ensure consistency, and eliminate human error.		Tags only
SLA notifications Get notifications to highlight conversations that fail to meet response time SLAs so they can be identified and addressed promptly.
Prioritization rules Set up rules to prioritize each conversation based on channel, topic, and contact groups, ensuring urgent conversations and priority customers are handled first.

Tools for enhanced response times

Use features like saved replies and autoresponders to speed up message handling and resolution.

Faster response time features

Feature	Standard & Professional	Team & Business	Advanced & Enterprise	Advanced Inbox
Business hours Set business hours so your customers know when you’re available.
Saved replies Save your most frequently used replies to make it faster and easier to respond to questions.
Autoresponders Send automated responses to messages based on keywords and business hours.
Language detection Use language detection to trigger autoresponders in the customer’s language and automatically route conversations to teams with specific language skills.
Hootsuite generative AI chatbot Save time and quickly answer your most frequent customer questions with the Hootsuite generative AI chatbot			( Enterprise only)
AI-powered smart replies Have AI-powered smart replies analyze the content, sentiment, and intent of public conversations and suggest a contextual, on-brand reply to your agents.
Chatbot APIs Connect your own bot to Inbox to automate actions like responding to messages, resolving conversations, applying topics, and setting contact attributes.
CSAT surveys Send a custom CSAT survey at the end of a conversation to request real-time feedback.

Full contact profiles

Add custom contact attributes, group contacts for more efficient routing, and more.

Contact management features

Feature	Standard, Professional, & Team	Business	Advanced & Enterprise	Advanced Inbox
Contact attributes Add custom attributes to your contacts to include details like email, name, account ID, or job title. Use an autoresponder to automatically ask for these details and populate these fields.
Conversation history See your conversation history with a contact for a full picture of your company's interaction with them.
Notes Add notes that are only viewable internally.
Contact groups Group contacts for prioritizing or routing conversations in the queue.
VIP designation Mark a contact as "VIP" to help prioritize conversations.
Salesforce integration Connect social data and conversations from Hootsuite with Salesforce Service Cloud cases
CRM integration Integrate your CRM with Inbox through Tray.io.

Team collaboration

Use message assignments to make sure that someone takes responsibility for each conversation that comes in. Route messages to the appropriate agent based on skills and availability. These features are available to members in a Hootsuite organization.

Collaboration features

Feature	Standard & Team	Business	Advanced & Enterprise	Advanced Inbox
Conversation assignments Assign a conversation to teams, yourself, or a teammate.
Stream assignments Assign messages from Hootsuite Streams to teams, yourself, or a teammate.
Collision avoidance See if another teammate owns a response, or is already answering the message ("is typing").
Skills-based routing Automate sending messages to experts who are best able to answer your customer's question.
Agent availability Allow agents to set when they are available or away to receive incoming messages.

Real-time monitoring

Get real-time insights to optimize workflows and improve performance.

Performance monitoring features

Feature	Team & Business	Advanced & Enterprise	Advanced Inbox
Integrated analytics Use integrated analytics and team performance insights to identify what's working well and what might need improvement.
Data export Export your data for further analysis.
Real-time monitoring Optimize workflows and increase team productivity with real-time monitoring of metrics across users, teams, channels, and topics.

Privacy and security

Hootsuite is GDPR compliant. In addition, you can delete contact information or mask messages to ensure that private or sensitive information is protected.

Privacy and security features

Feature	Standard & Professional	Team & Business	Advanced & Enterprise	Advanced Inbox
GDPR compliance
Contact deletion Delete a contact to permanently remove their conversation history, attachments, and contact attributes from Inbox.
Contact muting Mute contacts to prevent messages from certain contacts from entering the queue. You can still find muted contacts and full conversation histories by searching for a contact's name or conversation content.
Message masking Hide sensitive information like credit card or social security numbers with manual or automatic message masking.	(Professional = manual only)
Audit trails Keep track of the actions performed in a conversation, who performed them, and when, to help you make sure conversations are handled according to your organization’s policies.