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: Gabriella Leonardi
Title: Sr. Manager - Performance
Related URLs:
Facebook: Facebook.com/BellCanada
Instagram: Instagram.com/Bell
Twitter: Twitter.com/Bell & Twitter.com/Bell_Support
Community: Bell.ca/forum
Website: Bell.ca
Other: Linkedin.com/company/bell
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Digital
1. What challenges did your organization face that required a digital strategy? Provide details on the issues you were trying to resolve or the goals you were trying to achieve. (e.g. reducing handle time, improving CSAT, reducing per-interaction costs, etc.)
With different groups in our business structure under different platforms, this proved difficult for us to have a unified line of sight and one point of contact. With the help of Khoros, we’ve migrated all of our Bell Media social entries under one platform thus contributing in reducing the costs and allowing more visibility and better metrics.
We have further developed our self-serve account management and self-repair diagnostic apps to reduce calls into our customer care centre. We needed to increase the awareness of these tools, and have leveraged social strategies to increase customer awareness by coupling content on Facebook carousel along with moderators inviting our customers to leverage these tools, allowing our customers to be in the driver’s seat of their account and services.
2. Which elements did you implement as part of your digital solutions? Include details on the channels or tools you added, where you implemented AI or automation, and how your solution was unique.
Currently we provide customer support on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and App Store reviews. In addition. We have also welcomed new teams that happily embraced the Khoros platform, with Crave TV and TSN teams are now using Khoros for their day to day Social Care tasks.
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.
Usage of Tags – We gather customer feedback through Khoros sophisticated tag systems. This feedback is channeled to the executive team, based on which key changes were made. We’ve reorganized our tags into different categories, each category specific to a line of business to better track the trending ones for a much more efficient reporting. The widget tag helps us also with live tracking of what’s trending and take action if necessary in a short stretch of time.
Tagging the conversations provided us with the peace of mind that we could maintain a strong CSAT and SLA while we did not lose sight of the other posts that are equally as important to our customers.
Manage view – In addition to tags, the manage view function allows us a more granular approach in monitoring and tracking each category of tags. We had set up different views to better track sensitive topics and help us catch and prioritize conversations.
The power of smartviews – Smartviews are a great way to isolate conversations/topics and assign them to dedicated teams. It also helps us in pulling targeted reports which helps us in return to determine the gaps in our processes and proceed to fix them.
Our brand team use the smartviews during the Bell let’s talk campaign, the tagging system help directing BLT mentions to the right smartview either for monitoring or for a swift answer.
Negative sentiment tracking – Tracking negative sentiments provides us with an opportunity for continuous improvement in customer service. Our frequent social customer’s 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.
Outage and active disaster management – Khoros is a key element for our success in better handling outages as our Social Media team are in the front line and capture noise about outages before the other regular channels do. Whenever an outage starts trending in Khoros, we connect with different teams to check the gravity of the situation and post notifications to our customers in our Social platforms to alert about the ongoing outage. We provide updates regularly as it is important to be proactive as our customers demand to be always in the know of what’s happening. This approach allows us a uniform outage response from social channels to community.
If the outage is driving high traffic in social, we then activate an “Outage” queue where all of the conversations captured by the tagging system will be routed there. We assign members of our team to monitor and filter the conversations in the queue. Once the outage is resolved and communicated to customers, we then in bulk close the conversations and disable the queue.
Adapting quickly to events that have impact on the lives of Canadians and gauging the sentiment as well as the direction and strength in that sentiment is a difficult thing to do. With Khoros listening and trending tags, it has allowed us to hear and understand the voice of our customers across multiple social entry points. For instance, the war in Ukraine had quickly engaged Canadians to act and be vocal about what we allow to broadcast on our channels. We were able to leverage the power of Khoros to express our company’s actions in light of those sentiments.
Introducing Community – The launch of community has been a game changer in our care strategy. A peer to peer platform solution intended for customers to help and support each other is proving to be a win-win solution for both our customers and our moderators, who also serve as our Care Specialists in Khoros Care. The complexity of some questions in community has pushed us to expand our knowledge base and at the same time seek support from various teams and experts within. With over 60 subject experts available to us in Community, our Care Specialists in regular social channels (Facebook and Twitter) don’t shy away now from promoting our communities and cannot wait for the TKB to be fully integrated in our Care platform. We track trends and solutions in community to share with our non-moderator Care Specialists and have provided four community templates for them to use in social to direct their customer to the community forum for either a current issue/out of scope problem or future self-serve opportunities.
3. What specific results were you able to achieve? Please include key success metrics. (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. Our average agent response is 4 minutes – way below our targeted response times. Our subsequent SLA has slightly improved from 83% to 84% over the same time period.
Our interactions have become more and more complex; resulting in customer posts per conversation increasing from 5 to 6. Similarly, the agent responses haven’t changed from last year and it is still sitting at 4 responses per conversation. Our customer feedback (verbatim) indicates that our team’s success in resolving difficult customer inquiries from end to end had increased our customer’s propensity to direct these complex issues towards our social team. We use the pending expiry function in Khoros care at its full potential as it allows us to touch back and complete follow ups with customers to ensure that their inquiries have been answered and resolved. We are always working to optimize our efficiency in social and Khoros has proved to be the best solution to achieve that.
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. 18% from last year.
CSAT:
We’ve made great strides in providing improved service to our customers, and we continue to enhance the end to end customer experience. We gain our competitive advantage by using Khoros customize CSAT surveys to conduct agent level customer satisfaction assessments and fashion our agent coaching based direct on customer feedback. Our Overall CSAT rate went up by 2 points compared to last year sitting at 76% with a 50% survey completion rate (Facebook and Twitter platforms)
Team Bell Aliant has had an exceptional improvement in their CSAT going up from 81% to 87% this year and boasting an impressive 55% CSAT completion rate.
Community: In our first 9 months since launch we have grown the Bell Community Forums to:
1,100,000 Page Views
516,000 Visits
461,000 Unique Visitors
35,000 User Logins
Average of 9 minutes online per user
1,600 Topics
4,600 Posts
2,700 Likes
190 Solutions, with over 60% authored by the community.
Awarded 5,700 Badges
Published 26 Knowledge Base articles
Achieved a personal best CHI score of 714 and an average of 546 to-date.