Company: Bell Canada
Company background: Founded in Montréal in 1880, Bell is Canada’s largest communications company, delivering a wide range of service innovations to consumers, businesses and government customers across Canada including LTE Advanced, Fibe Internet and TV, WHI, cloud and data hosting, IP voice and collaboration, Connected Cars, Smart Cities and Internet of Things.
Contact: Andre Williams
Title: Sr. Manager - Performance
Related URLs:
https://www.facebook.com/BellCanada
https://www.instagram.com/bell/?hl=en
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Care
1. What were your organization’s digital customer service initiatives? What channels do you support today?
From the initial shopping experience to product installation and after sale support, each user experience with our communication services, content platform and self serve tools function as a key building block to enhance our best in class end to end customer journey.
Throughout the COVID crisis, Bell’s networks have been critical to keeping Canadians everywhere connected and informed, at work and at home.
The pandemic, created an overnight shift in our customers ability to use and afford of our products and services. These changes not only produced a spike in volume, but added new complexity and urgency to our customer’s requirements. Using Khoros’ in-depth integrated tag system, our social care team clearly identified the top pain points our customers were experiencing in relation to the pressures brought on by the pandemic. This information was funneled to our executive team and was invaluable in providing the executive team with a clear view of customer priorities and concerns. Key decisions related to our executive pandemic strategy, such as bill relief, free kids and family content on TV programming, were heavily influenced by this data - decisions which generated increased positive customer sentiment during this difficult time. While our collection of customer data influenced internal decisions, these executive announcements were shared regularly across all digital touchpoints and through our significant reach, keeping our customers well informed in regards to the decisions made to help them in their time of need. This strategy resulted in better customer experience and from the operational perspective reducing call & chat volumes.
Currently we provide customer support on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In addition, we track Google Business reviews for approx. 200 stores through Khoros and plan to have a full integration for all of our Bell, Virgin and Lucky mobile stores in future. Going forward into the next year, we plan to incorporate more platforms - Community Forum and email integration.
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?
The pandemic forced temporary shutdown of many of our contact centres. The social media inquiries through our Khoros platform increased in volume by over 42%. To accommodate this spike in volume, we utilised some key features in Khoros to develop a comprehensive contingency plan:
Change in Queuing strategy – A multi queue approach was developed based on the level of complexity of the inquiries. We compartmentalized our queues and funneled our most complex/special cases to our best-in-class experts.
Negative sentiment tracking – Tracking negative sentiments provided us with an opportunity for continuous improvement in customer service. Our frequent social customers complaints (tracked by internal tag system) indicated a missed opportunity for a positive customer experience and served as a feedback loop for continual end-to-end process improvement.
On the Khoros platform, we track all customer sentiments. However, our priorities focus more on responding to the negative sentiments first, especially as the customers rely heavily on the telecom services in these tough times.
Usage of Tags – We gathered customer feedback through Khoros sophisticated tag systems that identified and cataloged tags from the customers. This feedback was channelled to the executive team, based on which key changes were made.
The customers are helping us influence decision-making in these uncertain times. Using the right technology helps us understand our customers and deliver a great experience, based on direct customer feedback.
3. What 1-3 metrics best describe your success? (e.g. CSAT, call deflection, cost reduction, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.)).
Response Time:
Our strategic goal is to respond to all customer inquiries on the social platforms within 20 minutes, 7 days a week from 8am to midnight. No exception. Over the past year, our average agent response time has reduced from 6 minutes to 4 minutes – way below our targeted response times. Our subsequent SLA has improved from 74% to 83% over this same time period.
During this period, our interactions have become more and more complex; resulting in customer posts per conversation increasing from 4 to 5. Similarly, the agent responses have increased from 2.4 to 4 responses per conversation. Our customer feedback (verbatim) indicates that our teams success in resolving difficult customer inquiries from end to end has increase our customers propensity to direct these complex issues towards our social team. Success brings confidence that in turn brings increased volume.
Complaints Resolution:
Tracking complaints provides us with an opportunity for continuous improvement in customer service. When our customers make a complaint on social media, this indicates a missed opportunity for a positive customer experience and serves as a feedback loop for continual end to end process improvement.
We are continuously learning from the complaints, and updating our queue and tag management strategy in response. In crises and outage situations, part of our strategy is to dedicate cross-trained agents from other queues’. Khoros simple and effective agent platform provides us with the flexibility to allow new agents to hit the ground running and permits our support team to shift focus quickly in real-time from queue to queue to best manage our volume. Our overall complaint resolution has increased by approx. 12% from last year.
High priority complaints:
In our Khoros set-up, we have defined priorities for different types of complaints based on their severity and urgency through sentiment tracking. Our best-in-class agents respond to complex customer complaints resulting in effective resolution and providing positive customer experience.
With the Khoros tagging system, we have tracked more than 30% priority complaint mentions effectively. This has helped us in reducing the number of complaints escalated to the industry-regulated organization by over 17%.
CSAT:
We’ve made great strides in providing improved service to our customers, and we continue to enhance the end-to-end customer journey. We use Khoro’s customized CSAT surveys to conduct agent level customer satisfaction assessments and fashion our agent coaching based direct customer feedback. Our CSAT rate is 74% with a 53% survey completion rate (Facebook and Twitter platforms). The social care team boasts of the highest survey completion rate, the rate for other platforms like website & app chat is lower than 30%.