Company: Videotron
Company background: Videotron is a Canadian telecommunications leader. A wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and wireless telephone services.
Contact: Julien Durand Burgoyne
Title: Sr. Manager Digital Engagement and Social Media
Related URLs:
https://corpo.videotron.com/en/company/our-company
Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On
1. How did your team shift your existing strategy using the Khoros platform to better engage customers during a crisis?
Our shift of strategy came from necessity. Videotron is recognized for its outstanding customer year after year in its market. We take pride in making sure people reaching out to us are treated as best as we can regardless of the channel they chose to contact us in. On social care and in our asynchronous channels that means a lightning-fast time to average response so that we can engage with hem in a live manner or have them dictate the pace.
We normally operate with a team of both customer service and technical support agents in Khoros Care. The asynchronous nature of the conversations allows us to be quite agile even if the influx of conversation suddenly becomes more important than usual allowing us to deliver exceptional customer service quickly regardless of how busy we are. However, on December 31, 2021, in the evening, most of our customers were under COVID lockdown. Not being allowed to have guests, made it so that a lot of people sat down to watch the New Year’s Eve programming on TV. We had a significant outage affecting a portion our TV customers right as the first end of year shows were starting in the evening. To make matters worst, being the evening on new year’s eve, technical support was operating with limited staff. We had one technical support agent handling Khoros Care conversations. We were instantly swarmed by incoming posts both public and private. To give an order of magnitude in one evening we received the equivalent of 33 days worth of incoming messages. The graph below illustrates how significant the number of conversations were compared to our usual volumes.
We had to think outside the box and fast, the phone lines were getting busy too. What was supposed to be a quiet evening changed completely. We had to switch from our normal work processes that allow us to deliver exceptional customer service, to figuring how to maintain that quality of service with a number of conversations we knew we were never going to be able to keep up with. So, we decided to find a way to reach as many people as we can rapidly while still answering conversations that needed a personalized answer to maintain our quality standards.
2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?
In order to achieve that new strategy, we rapidly posted a statement on social media. We also modified our welcome message to advise people of the outage if they chose to message us privately and not check out social channels. We also had similar messages on our phone lines of course.
Our main goal was and always is providing the best customer experience even during a time of crisis. So we could not assume that all the conversations that came in prior to those posts were aware of the outage especially the conversations outside of social media. We needed a way to isolate customers less likely to have seen our social media posts that were getting an enormous reach already.
Using tags, keyword searches and bulk actions from manage view we were able to route those customers that needed personalized support, to a smart view, which the lone agent was dedicated to. Still using manage view and bulk actions, we identified non-time-sensitive conversations that we were able to lower in priority and that could wait until the next day for an answer when more agents would be present. Using that strategy, we were able to maximize the number of people getting informed on the situation and potential workarounds while answering those who needed it. Furthermore, that open transparent approach generated a lot of buzz over social, with people sharing our posts like never before but also sharing fixes and workarounds. The outage and our response on social also made the news. Once comfortable with the new process we were able to start bulk closing conversations that did not need direct agent intervention all while being confident that we would not close any conversations that needed to be engaged.
3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?
Every crisis is different. This one was sudden, intense but short-lived. In order to determine if we were satisfied with the outcome, we looked at a lot of metrics in order to look at the results under three different angles. The reach and reactions on our social posts, the number of conversations received vs. the ones that had to be answered and, of course, the impact on our CSAT. We wanted to know, if we succeeded in massively reaching people quickly, how did that reach help us operationally but above all how did customers respond to it and were they satisfied with our crisis management. In all three the results were striking. Our social posts were by far our top reaching posts, reactions and comments were exceeding what we anticipated compared to past outages and crisis. We managed to isolate and close a lot of conversations without engagement but being confident they did not need to be engaged. We managed to engage all customers that wrote before our actions to let everyone know what was going on and the remaining low priority backlog was handled by lunch the next day. As for CSAT on our private channels, the impact was there but quite minimal and we even saw a rise in CSAT over the following months. Considering it was by far our worst outage in terms of volumes over social, it is clear that the capabilities provided by Khoros Care, our own internal expertise and our desire to keep striving for best-in-class customer service the storm unscathed.