Author Details:
- Name: Lars Plougmann
- Title: Product Manager
- Name: Lori Castillo
- Title: Product Manager
- Company: USAA
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
We are the product management team for USAA’s Social Chat. We sit within a larger team responsible for USAA’s chat capabilities, which is part of the organization developing all our digital channels.
USAA is a 100-year-old member association offering financial services, such as insurance and banking. We don’t have branches, so our app and website are the main channels for self-service. Members can have direct conversations with our member service representatives on the phone or chat.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
Social Chat fits with USAA’s philosophy to be available where our members are, and being asynchronous in nature, it offers our members a convenient way to engage with.
Social Chat is available 24/7, crewed by a team of 100% human USAA member service representatives.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Social Chat is conducted by teams of member service representatives and specialists in Insurance, Bank, Life Insurance and other USAA companies.
USAA maintains Social Chat policies that include standard responses for specific situations. This solves the challenge of having an official response available, but it is not necessarily convenient. The policy resides in a different system, and the integration mechanism falls back to copy/paste. Individual member service reps often compile a handy local list of official responses for quick access, and they include some of their own frequent responses.
This can mean, if standard responses in a policy are updated, the change may not make it to those individual lists from where responses are copy/pasted.
Response templates seem like such a simple feature in Khoros Care that it is barely worth mentioning. Yet, there is power in simplicity.
Some of the situations where response templates really shine:
- When the appropriate response is long or complex.
- When using URLs in the response: A template helps our agents point to the relevant URL and avoid issues when copy/pasting URLs.
- When the response must be vetted by Corp Comms or Legal.
The Bank team was the first to make use of response templates. The front-line team had a solid sense of which questions are asked most frequently, so those made up the first set of ten templates to be rolled out.
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.
Once enabled, use of response templates for the Bank team quickly took off. Using response templates not only had the immediate benefits of quality and consistency, it also gave rise to new ideas for templates.
The “Protect yourself and your accounts” template was developed by one of our member service reps. She got permission to experiment with scammers’ posts and honed our message by iterating and testing. It aligns with USAA’s mission to protect our members from scams, and that extends to social media.
"Be cautious! Protect yourself & your accounts. Visit our Security Center (Security tab located at the bottom of USAA.com) for articles & recommendations. Also, visit the Advice & Guidance tab on the Federal Trade Commission website ftc.gov."
By making the warning a response template, it is quick and easy for any of our member service reps to call out scams. We’ll hide the scammer’s post if that option is available. Our member service reps also take the extra step of reporting scammers’ accounts to social platforms.
The earlier we address fraud, the more valuable the intervention is. While we don’t have specific estimates for the fraud prevented by using this template, there is an indication that it is effective: Some scammers delete their post once we apply the warning template - sometimes within a few minutes.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. (Examples: Decreased spend, Increased revenue, etc.)
The benefit of templates is not just reduced time for the member service rep to compose a response. They reach further:
- Quality: The response templates are the result of teamwork, iteration and multiple perspectives - and vetted by lawyers if required.
- Consistency: By using approved templates for responses, available directly in the platform, members will receive consistent responses, regardless of which rep is handling the conversation.
Through automated tagging, we can track that our team uses response templates close to 5,000 times a year. And we are just getting started.
For our anti-scam response template, our analysis shows that 8% of the time that the template is applied, the scammer deletes their post.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
- Reduced error rate: Response templates are placed fully in the response field, reducing the probability of errors (eg typos, copy/paste irregularities, obsolete responses).
- Improved governance: When a response template is updated, it takes immediate effect in the system. It may take longer to update SOPs or individually maintained crib sheets of responses.
We made sure to include automatic tagging: Each response template invokes a generic tag that the response used a response template and one or more topic-related tags.
To be sure, we previously used templates sometimes: copy/pasted directly from policies with standard responses or from our member service reps’ individual lists. With response templates, this formerly invisible process has become visible and trackable.
Cost of implementation was negligible. In most cases, we already had standard responses, they just weren’t conveniently stored within Care or shared with the full team.
For a subsequent batch of response templates, the Social Chat product manager worked with a stakeholder team to address a set of scenarios that required longer than normal responses. The templates were crafted and went through Legal review and approval before making them available through Khoros Care.
The project to implement response templates in Social Chat received our Chief Strategy and Brand Officer’s Excellence Award in Q2 of 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?
Won’t the use of response templates make our team of 100% human member service reps sound like bots? Not necessarily. The beauty of the feature is that the response template populates the response field, allowing the rep to finesse and personalize the response before posting it. This focuses human effort where it matters and allows the rep to post an appropriate and empathetic response.
Our member service reps use their best judgment when responding to social conversations. The templates are offered as an aid to swift and consistent responses, always with the encouragement that the individual response is tailored to the specific context.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Our Khoros Care solution consultant had expressed surprise that USAA was not using response templates. When we decided to go ahead, the reference guide in Atlas had all the information we needed to get going. Implementation was simple.
As our library of response templates grows, we are looking at enabling response templates through the Agent Assist feature.