Author Details:
- Name: Darrell Harrison
- Title: Community Manager, Specialist Business Strategy - Digital Support
- Company: Bell Canada
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Bell is Canada’s largest communications provider, connecting millions of customers throughout the country on our powerful wireless and fibre networks, and delivering compelling content to national and local audiences on our leading TV, radio and digital platforms. Our team of more than 50,000 reflects the diversity of the Canadian population and includes employees living and working in communities of all sizes across every province and territory.
Bell Let’s Talk began in 2010, together we’ve created the world’s largest conversation about mental health. As a result, Canadian organizations large and small in every region have received new funding from Bell Let’s Talk and from governments and corporations that have joined the cause.
Bell Let’s Talk funds Canadian mental health initiatives and organizations all year long that are creating real change in their communities each and every day. Since 2010, Bell Let’s Talk has committed $139,588,747 to Canadian mental health initiatives.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
The Business Support team within Bell Canada focuses on driving the best digital (online/app) experience for our customers. Whether the customer has questions, curiosities or requires technical, account, product or sales/activation assistance; the Digital Support team creates and develops the digital pathways to connect the customer to self serve, peer to peer or service support through all available digital channels.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Our Brand and Bell Let’s Talk teams charged the Digital Support/Bell Community Forum team with the monumental task of putting together an in-house solution for Bell Let’s Talk Day on January 24th, 2024 with 9 days notice. The teams were facing three specific challenges:
- Functionality – For 2024 our Brand and Bell Let’s Talk teams wanted to expand the conversation and capture active responses from Canadians and others around the world to the Bell Let’s Talk question “Tell us what you plan to do to create change in mental health for yourself, your community or your workplace, today and all year long.”
- Cost – The cost to find a platform capable of allowing user & anonymous user registration, posting abilities and metric/KPI data collection was growing, running in the tens of thousands of dollars.
- Time – Time was short and we, the Bell Community/Digital Support team had 9 days to deliver a viable and functional platform.
Within the first 3 days the Digital Support/Bell Community team had built a mock-up, demonstrated and delivered on functionality and metric/KPI’s, all essentially at no cost to the teams as we leveraged our Khoros Community to build a custom Blog page, separate from the rest of the Community, but utilizing all the community functions and features has to offer. Specifically; allowing anonymous blog comments, building event specific keyword and smut filters, isolating Page View and Visit metrics, exporting comments and engagement data from Khoros Care.
What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved.
This was a huge win for Bell Let’s Talk 2024 and in the future as the Digital Support/Bell Community team was able to prove in a challengingly short time that we can innovate and change the way we use the Khoros Community platform. The versatility allows us to manipulate it’s functions and features to serve specific needs and adapt to challenges as they arise. Whether we are working with Branding, Marketing, Product or Sales teams, we have shown that no matter the challenge put forth, the Bell Community Forum can align to those opportunities, meet the challenge and alleviate time and cost constraints for all teams involved.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
The number one outcome for the business was the efficient use of time. This time efficiency allowed the Bell Community team to extract further value and use from the Community. The financial value achieved was the decrease in spend by tens of thousands of dollars, all by using ‘an in-house’ solution. As before, the versatility of the Khoros Community platform allowed our team to flip standard use cases on their head and pivot on how we traditionally used Blogs. Between the two; English Bell Let’s Talk and French Cause pour la Cause we generated just over 480 comments in the 24 hour campaign.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Bell Let’s Talk day lasts an entire 24 hours and within that time period the 2024 Bell Let’s Talk blog totaled:
- 8% of all the day’s Page Views across the entire Bell Community
- 82% of all Blog Page Views in one day vs. an entire week’s average
- 6.7K total Page Views
- 2.7K Visits
- 2.1 Unique Visits
- 480+ individual posts in both English and French
Through Khoros Care, our alternate social channels Bell Let’s Talk 2024 generated:
- 22.7K Mentions
- 209M Impressions
- 20.2M total Reach
- 18.8K Bell Let’s Talk Hashtags
What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved?
Not only was the immense cost savings such a large part of the Khoros Community being the main differentiator in pulling off a hugely successful Bell Let’s Talk 2024; but the ability of our developer and management teams to work and collaborate so effectively through the Community Stage environment. Having a backend like Stage allowed us to build the structure, design and layout the page, give and receive feedback, demonstrate the changes and functionality, etc. all quickly, easily and internally. Without Khoros Community’s Stage, we simply could not have delivered to the degree that we had and with such a short turnaround.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Our Community Manager has over a decade of experience with Khoros Communities and our Developer Natalie has been working with Khoros Studio and Stage since launch in 2021. They both know what the Community platform is capable of, what its limitations are and how both of those can be pushed, stretched or customized. Khoros has and continues to hold workshops, courses and webinars throughout the year(s) and we encourage your to register, participate and apply what you have learned in them. Khoros has built a platform for you to address the digital challenges your company faces.