Company: Fitbit, Inc.
Company background: Fitbit's mission is to help people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration, and guidance to reach their goals. We design products and experiences that fit seamlessly into everyday life so our customers can achieve health and fitness goals, whatever they may be.
Contact: Matthew Wanlin
Title: Senior Community Manager
Related URLs: http://community.fitbit.com, https://twitter.com/FitbitSupport
Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On
1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis?
The challenge we faced during the onset of COVID-19 in March was the same one faced by every other business reliant on subcontracted vendors: How can we maintain business continuity when BPO sites close their doors? The Fitbit Community Team oversees social media support channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram), an active community forum in seven supported languages (community.fitbit.com), the Fitbit in-app social feed, as well as consumer review spaces (Amazon, other retailers, app stores). Our presence in all these channels at once is critical to achieving Fitbit's customer support goals, as they provide the fastest and lowest-cost support resolutions possible, give us global actionable insights to relay internally, and play a critical role in real-time awareness of emerging issues. Our success during this time of crisis came from quick and decisive action, cooperation with our vendor partners, and especially the versatility of our many different channels.
2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?
First, we identified our most business-critical channel (a support-designated Twitter handle). Knowing that failure to keep up with contacts on social would cascade to impact other stressed lines of business, we diverted all available resources here. Agents who had previously only worked on Community and in-app Feed were given crash-course training on social support, and rapidly onboarded into Khoros Care. Fitbit staff stepped out of their project-oriented roles to work cases alongside these teams, focusing on challenging escalations and refinement opportunities for the fresh agents.
We temporarily suspended responses on lower-priority channels like Amazon, and handed off ownership of marketing-based handles to the Marketing team, who directed support questions accordingly and worked with us for critical contacts.
These moves left a gap in our community forum presence - which we filled by "deputizing" our tireless and passionate superuser group with temporary moderation capabilities, allowing them to maintain that space almost entirely on their own.
By carefully moving these pieces, as well as working with vendors to arrange work-from-home options for some agents, we not only met customer expectations during this challenging time, but in fact exceeded them.
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?During this time, we had to do more with less - taking on increased volume to relieve other channels, while utilizing a minimal workforce. We kept a close eye on:
- SLA: social support demands quick responses, or else customers will move to another contact point with higher impact on the business. We were able to recover from some early challenges in this area through focused application of staff, refinement of Khoros Care tags to triage actionable content, and remote training of personnel.
- Response Speed: Agents who were converted from community and feed moderation had an especially big challenge - to quickly learn an entirely new line of business and achieve demanding performance targets. We kept a close eye on responses from this group, and worked closely with them to provide extra training as needed. Within 4 weeks of the restructure, we were achieving the desired targets.
- Case Deflections: One of the most critical functions of our community forum is the ability to resolve support concerns through peer-to-peer messaging, commonly eliminating the need for a support case. With our superuser group owning the forum space for more than a month, we were pleased that related value analytic metrics did not falter at all during that time. This speaks not only to the commitment and capability of that superuser group, but also to a strength and functionality of a forum that can operate almost autonomously for a time.
This experience in crisis management gave us the confidence to know where we can contribute most meaningfully to business success, as well as valuable insights into how else our team might be structured in the future.
