Company: Midco
Company background: Founded in 1931, Midco is the leading provider of internet and networking, cable TV, phone, data center and managed services, home automation and advertising services in the Midwest. More than 410,000 residential and business customers count on Midco services in 342 communities in Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Wisconsin.
Contact: Ken Nelson
Title: Customer Care Manger
Related URLs: www.facebook.com/MidcontinentCommunications/ https://twitter.com/Midcontinent
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Care
1. What were your organization’s digital customer service initiatives? What channels do you support today?
We are ambitious, bold, and enthusiastic about technology and innovation. We're dedicated to empowering and inspiring the people of the Midwest. Our mission is to be the best communications company in the country for our customers, employees, stakeholders, and communities.
We have an aspirational goal to have 75% of our customer interactions handled in either a digital conversation or through self-help options. A substantial, versatile, and ever-adapting platform will be needed to achieve this goal. Someone as bold and enthusiastic as Midco is mandatory for an objective like this, and luckily for us, Khoros has answered that challenge.
Our objective is to meet customers where they are. We provide customer support on Facebook, Twitter, SMS, Apple Business Chat, Google Business Messages, and Modern Chat. We also respond to every Google Review left at any one of our 22 Google Locations. In August, we will start implementing the Khoros Bot. We are incredibly pleased that this can all be accomplished within the Khoros platform.
2. What was the most important issue you were looking to solve via your digital technology (e.g. community and/or social media management platform) — and what makes your approach to that achievement unique?
We wanted to make it as easy as possible for customers to reach us, whichever way was most convenient for them. We consider ourselves Trailblazers, and when offers came to be early adopters of some of the new integrations, we jumped at them. This has allowed us to get out ahead of our competition and provide an unmatched customer experience.
We love to follow-up with customers, so we can't get enough of the Snooze feature. This is a great way for an agent to take ownership of a conversation from start to finish. We follow-up with customers at a later time to ensure their issue has been resolved. For example, if a customer called today and we set a tech visit for tomorrow, we would reach back out the next day to check-in on them. We even had one agent Snooze a conversation for three months so he could let the customer know a free HBO preview weekend was coming up soon.
3. What 1-3 metrics best describe your success? (e.g. CSAT, call deflection, cost reduction, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.)).
We started using Modern Chat in March 2020. Our old chat software required us to often wait minutes at a time for a customer to reply, which resulted in unproductive time for the agent. The ability to move on to help the next customer while the first customer replies in Modern Chat, has significantly improved our agent efficiency. The chat AHT in July 2019 on our old system was 14:00, but with Modern Chat, July 2020 was down to 7:13! We have been so much more productive, we have taken 38,000+ more digital interactions than we did over the same period last year.
We send CSAT surveys from Khoros on Twitter, Facebook, Apple Business Chat, SMS, and Modern Chat. Our overall take rate for surveys YTD is 20%, with an average score of 4.6. However, SMS has a mind-blowing take rate of 40%.
Call deflection is significant to us as we move towards our 75% digital goal. We can easily measure the success of call deflection with our Apple Business Chat interactions. We have had 17,011 incoming Apple Business Chats since implementing it in September 2019. We can see 44% of those interactions were definite call deflections – the customer clicked on our 800 number, we presented them with the iMessage option instead, and they took it.
All the metrics in the world can make us feel that we're successful, but the real proof comes from the mouth (or fingers in this case) of the customer.
We work hard to make each customer interaction unique and memorable. We challenge our agents to look for Surprise and Delight opportunities to make a customer's day. It makes our employees' days just as much.