2020 Customer Awards: Midco/Midco Sports Network - Better Together: Customer Engagement
Company: Midco/Midco Sports Network
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.
Midco Sports Network provides live coverage of local sporting events and produces award-winning original sports programming. Since 2010, MidcoSN has delivered the sights and sounds of high school, collegiate, outdoors, motorsports and more to homes and businesses across the Midwest. Midco Sports Network is a broadcast partner for North Dakota State Unversity, South Dakota State University, the University of South Dakota, and the University of North Dakota.
Contact: Amanda Potter
Title: Social Media Manager
Related URLs: https://www.facebook.com/MidcoSN; https://www.instagram.com/MidcoSN/; https://twitter.com/MidcoSN
Kudos Category: Better Together: Customer Engagement
1. Tell us about your integration as well as your goal and key strategies.
In 2020, we transitioned from using Care as an all-in-one platform for publishing, listening, and response to using Marketing for publishing just in time for the sports network’s biggest live events of the season – the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference and Summit League basketball tournaments. Held in consecutive weeks in late February, we lovingly call these events “our Super Bowl” due to the effort, attention, and viewership it attracts. It represents months of preparation – as well as two weeks of long hours as we provide live TV coverage on our network.
During the tournaments, our social media posting schedule gets kicked into overdrive. We provide live updates, game clips, and analysis for 28 games over 8 days. Our small marketing team of three managed to put out over 1,200 pieces of content on five platforms during this year’s tournaments. Needless to say, the team is busy and doesn’t have time to respond to incoming messaging from fans watching on TV or following along on social – a responsibility the marketing team would normally have.
We wanted to provide our customers and tournament viewers with the best possible experience on both sides – both in publishing and in customer care. We wanted to be able to put out content that followed the pace of the games, but also respond to viewer concerns and comments in a timely manner.
2. Share your plan with the target audience and how your digital technology helped provide a better customer engagement experience.
Knowing that our social media marketing team would be focused on outgoing posts and tweets and their end goals of driving viewership and brand awareness, we made a shift in workflow. We decided that the digital customer care experts, who work out of the Care platform and normally take incoming posts/messages for Midco (the cable TV provider) only, would take over incoming messages for Midco Sports Network during the tournament, leaving the social media marketing team freed to focus on publishing in the Marketing tool.
An example of the content put out during the tournaments
We also knew that the questions and comments coming in during the tournaments could well be outside the scope of knowledge for our customer care experts. Since there are many facets to putting out a live sporting event, customer questions about the broadcast may need engineering or producers to weigh in. At the same time, we knew that fans needed and wanted quick answers to their questions and concerns during one of the year’s hottest sports events.
We used Care to work as a team on incoming posts on the sports channels. If it was a technical/service-related question (for example, “My picture went out,” it would get assigned to a customer care agent. A cross-functional team joined a WebEx space to talk through any questions coming through. For example, if someone said the online stream was glitchy, the producer and engineers could check on their ends to confirm that it wasn’t on our end and communicate that back to the customer care agent.
Care’s automatic tagging functionality also helped save time and give a full picture of social activity during the tournaments. At the same time, we applied labels manually in Marketing – and the bulk tagging function became a life saver! The labels make for more accurate reporting about incoming and outgoing posts, and will help us sell social sponsorships for next year’s tournament season.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it helped you meet your strategic goals. Please include metrics if possible.
Social media marketing staff were able to get a high number of posts out more quickly, and customer care agents were able to respond to viewer concerns in a timely manner.
- 1,291 outgoing brand posts during the tournament (up 310% from the previous 11-day period)
- 3.1 million impressions on posts (up 3% from the year before)
- 418 incoming conversations and 917 incoming posts – up 4.9% from the previous period
- 96% TAR SLA