Company: Sky UK
Company background: Europe's leading direct-to-consumer media and entertainment company.
Contact: Sam Ross
Title: Community Manager
Related URLs: https://helpforum.sky.com/
Kudos Category: Better Together: Customer Engagement
We have an almost exclusively peer-to-peer community model. 99.5%+ of posts aren’t made by us. That’s hundreds of thousands of posts by our users to a couple of thousand by us. Just the way we like it. Things are so much more scalable if members help each other and don’t rely on a Sky response.
Thing is…
Sometimes a member asks a question that the community couldn’t possibly help with beyond advising to call us. They may be experiencing product safety issues, in distress, or very vocal in their dissatisfaction.
We know it's the right thing to do but have concerns.
There had to be a more elegant way of dealing with questions that need Sky staff knowledge and systems access within the community without disrupting that near-100% peer-to-peer environment we’ve worked so hard to create for over 6 years.
We knew that the best way to do this was to “escalate” these types of questions somewhere out of a p2p environment. But where? And who escalates it?
The where was into Khoros Care
The who are the Superusers and Oracles.
We knew that the people best placed to escalate into our staff are those having the conversations with the users. And in our community, that’s usually another user.
So, we created an escalate functionality for our Superusers. If they reach the end of the road in a conversation or know that the query at hand is best handled by staff, they can then escalate to our team of customer advisors.
We empower our Oracles and Superusers to help customers by allowing them to be "introducers" to our agents.
How it works:
Our Oracles and Superusers identify a post thaty needs specialist Sky help.The customer is now in the hands of an agent via messaging.
We had some worries at the start, it turns out it's all good though. Read on.
If you're very careful, there is a balance to be struck between end-to-end service and peer-to-peer support.
Our customers probably say it best (feedback via messaging directly to our advisors or shared on community).