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 Manager
Related URLs: www.facebook.com/MidcontinentCommunications/ https://twitter.com/Midcontinent
Kudos Category: The Accelerator
1. Please describe your company and your initiative.
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. Getting to that level will require us to offer Support where our customers want to be. 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.
2. What was the “before” state? What challenges did you have to overcome?
We began our journey with Khoros Care (Lithium) in 2018 as our social media engagement tool. Our Customer Care team used Response as a support option on our Midco Facebook and Twitter accounts, and our Marketing/Communications used Response to interact with fans on our Midco Sports Network Facebook and Twitter pages.
Our traditional Customer Care chats came in on a different software platform. We also make it a point to reply to all Google Reviews left at any one of our 22 Google Locations. We had to log in to each of these locations as a review was received and answer it there.
Having so many processes across different platforms left us with a lot of inefficiencies and wasted time transitioning back and forth. We also lost productivity in our old chat system, because we often had to wait minutes for a customer to reply instead of just moving on to help the next customer. Something had to change, and oh boy has it. You might want to strap in for this next part. 😊
3. What were the results? Please cite qualitative and quantitative results.
Starting in July 2019, we stepped on the accelerator and have been adding integrations, capabilities, and improved customer experience to Care ever since.
- August 2019 – SMS was added as a Support option, and we have handled over 36,000 customer interactions in this channel.
- August 2019 - In the true Midco Trailblazer spirit, our Dispatch team was thinking about how to use Khoros to fit their needs. They wanted a way to interact more efficiently with the technicians in the field, and SMS was that answer. Dispatch obtained a unique short-code and provided it to the technicians. Now the techs can text our Dispatch team, and the team can assist many techs simultaneously. Dispatch is using Khoros as an internal to more effectively talk to the techs, and it shows some great ingenuity on their part. Profiles were created for each technician. Now when they text in, their profile identifies who they are and to which region they belong. Dispatch has used Khoros to handle 16,876 tech interactions successfully.
- September 2019 – Apple Business Chat was initiated. 17,000+ chats have been handled through iMessage, with 44% of those being call deflections – someone clicked on our 800 number to call, and we popped the option to message instead.
- November 2019 – Google Business Messages was first offered to customers. While this channel hasn’t been as active as the others, 1853 customers have opted to contact us this way. Each month has shown steady growth over the previous month.
- March 2020 – Modern Chat replaced our traditional chat platform. Making this change improved our effectiveness significantly. In July 2019, on our old software, our AHT for a chat conversation was 14:00. Using Modern Chat in July 2020, our AHT is down to 7:13! We have talked to 36,286 customers in Modern Chat
- March 2020 – Google Reviews were moved into the Care platform. This has resulted in less agent time toggling between applications, and we now have some additional productivity metrics to measure with the rest to gauge overall performance.
- August 2020 – We are implementing the Khoros Bot and will begin testing in August.
We would not have been able to achieve the success we have without a great partnership with Khoros. Overall, excluding Google Reviews, Customer Care has handled nearly 39,000 more digital interaction from February 1, 2020, to July 30, 2020, than we did for the same timeframe in 2019. That equates to an increase of 77%. We are well on our way to reaching our goal, and our customers love the options. Let’s hear from a few of them.