Author Details:
- Name: Yulian Kozachok
- Title: CX Platform Lead
- Company: Hutchison 3G UK Limited (SMARTY)
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
SMARTY is the SIM-only network on a mission to put the trust back into the mobile industry, by doing things differently. SMARTY believes there’s a better way to do things; great value, simple plans, transparent pricing and flexible monthly SIMs. Customers don’t need to worry about a hefty bill or nasty surprises at the end of the month – it’s simple, honest mobile.
With a focus on the customer, SMARTY offers EU roaming up to 12GB and unlimited calls and texts with every plan. Customers can pause, change, or cancel monthly without long contracts tying them down for years.
SMARTY is powered by Three Ireland's strong and reliable 4G and 5G network, which delivers super-fast speeds for all your mobile needs.
SMARTY was recently named Which? Recommended Provider for the fourth year in a row thanks to its commitment to its customers – all 1 million + (as of October 2024) and counting!
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
The CX team specialises in creating a customer experience strategy that provides our audience with an engaging community and peer-to-peer support whenever needed.
As a CX Platform Lead, I take care of the community, ensuring that it’s a reliable source of information for customers, allowing users to support one another while fielding engaging discussions.
We also run multiple competitions on the platform to boost engagement and provide incentives for being a part of the community.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
The SMARTY Community platform is a place where customers can share knowledge and ideas, give peer-to-peer support and access 24/7 help. As our customer base grows, we are looking to gain more of their valuable insights through real-time feedback.
The Khoros Community platform is a fantastic asset that enables us to listen to our customers, explore analytics, and understand our customers on a deeper level.
We also know that our customers love to self-serve, rather than spend time trying to reach an agent. The community content management enabled us to tag, review and edit content quickly, so users can easily find solutions to any problems they face.
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.
Our goal for this year was to boost our Registrations, Engagement and improve community Resolution Rate.
Community platform provides an excellent outlet to present customer-centric content to our base.
We kicked 2024 off with a SMARTY Community 1st Anniversary Prize draw. “Let us know about your favourite bargain”. This was an instant success aligning well with SMARTY’s mission to provide great service at bargain prices.
In July we have launched “Win Big This Summer” - our most successful activity so far. A segment of our new The Travel One newsletter, this event was a culmination of work and collaboration between Marketing, PR, Comms and CX teams within the business.
To boost our community Resolution Rate, we have introduced a Help Video section in our forums and utilised custom content components to feature most wanted content when necessary. For example, Roaming and device settings during the summer months.
In addition, we have launched and Ideation area where we invite our customers to share their suggestions and feedback about current features.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
There is a great value of having our community platform as there are many advantages over other social media channels. Besides providing self-service and decreasing the costs, we can use the community to engage with our base, gather insight, run tests and ideation.
Great to see that our Community is helping people to make their purchasing decision. Conversion rate to store is between 1.6 - 2%.
Retain – despite being no obligation SIM package only deals provider, we are seeing customers who have participated in multiple community events in the past 18 months, and we are looking forward to introducing a Superuser program.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Approaching our 2nd year, we believe our community is doing well, we have doubled almost in every metric and continue to grow:
- We have over 90K registered Community members already, and we average at 60K Unique Visits monthly.
- Our Traffic has been growing at a steady pace and we are well above 150k Page views every month now.
- Community Responsiveness is around 8hr mark.
- We have seen a 7% improvement in our Resolution Rate year to date.
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 community platform provides a necessary toolbox to deliver our vision for Customer Experience.
Currently we are sandbox testing Khoros Aurora platform and are excited about this powerful new tool that will help us to better manage our community and create more engaging customer experience.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
We have had several customisation requests and Khoros PS were able to provide the solution swiftly.
Our Customer Success team in Khoros provides support that we require.
Atlas Community forum, and various community meetups and webinars Khoros is organising are particularly helpful to get an additional insight, share and learn from other community players.