Author Details:
- Name: Courtney Koogler Ercolano
- Title: Communications Consultant
- Company: Dominion Energy
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
My name is Courtney Koogler Ercolano and I’m a Communications Consultant for Dominion Energy. I’ve worked in digital communications for 8+ years. I worked on the previous platform and helped onboard Khoros in 2021. Since then, I’ve become a system administrator to ensure the platform works as the team needs it to. This includes training customer care agents and other admins on how to use the platform as well as strategizing on how to use Care to best serve Dominion Energy’s needs.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
I sit under Customer Communications on the Corporate Communications team. I work alongside Customer Experience and Care teams in our local regions to meet our company goals (with a focus on the customer). The corporate team also sets governance for brand responses and creates processes for how to handle specific situations and escalations. We’ve built out a specific process for our customer care agents so that they can focus on serving our customers.
Our goals include reducing call volume as it’s expensive and not ideal for all of our customers. Additionally, we use Khoros to expand our digital care offerings so we can continue to meet our customers where they are (or expect us to be). It’s important for us to be on the channels our customers prefer and to be able to serve our customers on the channel they come to us on. Our goal is to serve them on that channel and hopefully resolve their issue in that channel.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Our challenge was to
- Reduce costs as it’s expensive to have people on the phones,
- Increase resources - digital positions are much more attractive, and
- Provide the digital options customers want.
Our goal is never to get rid of the phone as there are cases that must be handled over the phone and customers who desire that option. One size does not fit all. Our challenge is finding a way to meet customers where they expect us to be and meet their expectations as a brand in general, not only as a utilities provider. The team uses Khoros Care to handle conversations across traditional social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Review channels, and digital channels including Apple Business Chat.
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.
We launched Apple Chat about a year and a half ago, and have continued to expand the offering in South Carolina because it has been so successful. Virginia is our next focus for this channel to help call diversion. Normally, it would be difficult to say whether this channel reduces calls, but because of message suggest, we can see that people chose this channel instead. Message Suggest is a prompt that appears to iPhone users when they go to make a phone call encouraging them to message the business instead. We use a tag in Khoros to track message suggest.
During a storm, customers need to be able to report their outages to us. During one (very recent!) particular storm in South Carolina, our app was not working, our website outage reporting was down, and our IVR was down. Apple Chat was bombarded - but luckily, we had that option. Customers could report their outage using Apple Chat until our other options were back up.
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 primary business outcomes are that we’re able to directly divert calls through Message Suggest, offer chat options directly on our page using entry points, and test how customers would utilize this digital channel to move them away from phone calls in different regions. It’s important that we have data on how customers choose to use our resources so that we show leadership the need to grow channels, or offer new channels. More customers may choose to use digital after using Apple Chat. For example, we noticed a spike in Facebook use in South Carolina following the storm that pushed that customer base to Apple Chat.
In addition, Dominion Energy has a goal of improving customer experience and increasing customer loyalty by delivering timely responses and faster resolution over traditional support channels.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
In the first half of 2024, the team delivered on this goal and saw an increase in agent efficiency by decreasing Median Time to Agent response by 70% when compared to the same time period in 2023. This means our agents were able to respond faster to incoming posts from our customers. In addition, the team noticed a decrease in average handle time by 52%. Lastly, our team uses a message suggest tag to see how many conversations came through Apple Chat that were prompted to send a message rather than make a phone call. We saw a 30% increase in these Apple Chat conversations that would have gone to voice.
- 70% decrease in median TAR YoY (Jan-June 2024)
- 52% decrease in average handle time YoY (Jan-June 2024)
- 30% increase YoY in Apple Chat conversations that would have gone to voice (July-September 2024)
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?
Khoros has helped us move beyond just looking at social media. Having a holistic view of the digital customer experience in one spot has shown us how this can be a more efficient process, divert calls, and improve the customer experience. Khoros has also expanded offerings to create a seamless customer and agent experience.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Khoros has been a great partner in suggesting ways to utilize the software package we already have and ways to optimize our instance. Often times, I don’t have to go sell anyone on a big investment, because we can test things out in Khoros that are in our current contract, show the value and grow from there. In addition, the ease of using the platform and having the option to work with an optimization specialist and tweak things on our own has been helpful. With our past provider it was hard to feel like an expert.