2020 Customer Awards: AMC Theatres - Keep Calm and Carry On

Company: AMC Theatres

Company background: AMC Theatres is the largest movie theatre company in the US and the world.

Contact: Elizabeth Solomon

Title: Manager, Social Media Care

Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On

1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis?
We shifted to prioritize our focus towards the platforms/contact methods which were a) most important to customers, b) posed the largest reputation risk if we didn't meet expectations, and c) where we could drive value most quickly. We ultimately decided to temporarily cut one experimental program in favor of where we were more needed by our customers.

2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?
Especially with the majority of our Social Media Care team on furlough, everything needed to be streamlined in order to keep our customers from feeling negative impact to their support experience. We standardized thorough use of pre-saved Response Templates for efficient, high quality responses to customers while saving precious seconds of handle time during the process, and implemented Welcome Messages with prompts to receive customer information without additional effort from our (limited) team. We found strong success in both of these, and will continue to utilize them moving forward.

3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?
With the 3,000% increase in incoming volume due to just one of the crises we handled this summer, the focus was on getting conversations handled, and thoroughly, without keeping customers waiting too long. We considered sentiment conversion as well as response % and responses/conversation, along with monitoring impacts to response time SLAs.  Ultimately, we wanted to ensure the customer experience would be impacted as little as possible even with the overwhelming level of volume we were receiving day after day (think 40 new incoming posts every minute). Our efforts paid off: Even with almost our entire team furloughed, we still sent out responses at a highly efficient rate, and our handle time remained consistent at 2 minutes. With team members who were highly adaptable and resilient, even when faced with an entirely overwhelming level of incoming volume, everyone simply rolled up their sleeves and jumped in, with the help of Khoros as a platform and a partner.