Company: Virgin Plus
Company background: Virgin Plus first launched prepaid mobile services on March 1, 2005 under the name Virgin Mobile Canada. Over the next 17+ years, Virgin Plus has delivered expanded services including postpaid mobile followed by home internet and TV for Ontario and Quebec. In 2021, to emphasize our expanded service offering, Virgin Mobile rebranded under the name Virgin Plus. Virgin Plus refers to our customers a “Members” and offers a robust benefits program which provides Members with special offers, discounts, and VIP experiences. Virgin Plus continues its growth and innovates in the telecommunications space providing reliable, affordable TV, internet and Mobile options to Canadians coast to coast.
Contact: Gabriella Leonardi
Title: Sr. Manager - Performance
Related URLs:
Facebook: Facebook.com/virginplus
Instagram: Instagram.com/virginplus
Twitter: Twitter.com/virginplus & Twitter.com/VirginPlusCare
Community: VirginPlus.ca/forum
Website: Virginplus.ca & Benefits.virginplus.ca
Other: Linkedin.com/company/virginplus
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.)
Our Virgin Plus experts handle both mobility and household services. At first, we struggled having an accurate handle time per service to know which of the service takes the most time from our agent to complete. With Khoros queuing system, we were able to create two separate queues (mobile and residential) and then conversations were either auto-routed or manually routed to their respective queues. This has allowed to conduct continuous deep dives, understand and pin point where our Experts were lacking knowledge and proceed to close that gap by providing them with necessary training.
We had further developed our self-serve account management and self-repair diagnostic apps to reduce calls into our Member care centre. We needed to increase the awareness of these tools and have leveraged social strategies to increase member awareness by coupling content on Facebook carousel along with moderators inviting our members to leverage these tools, allowing our Members to be in the driver’s seat of their account and services as our top priority is always Members first.
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 Member support on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and App Store reviews. In addition, we track Virgin Plus Google Business reviews for approx. 200 stores through Khoros
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 member 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.
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.
Negative sentiment tracking – Tracking negative sentiments provides us with an opportunity for continuous improvement in member service. Our frequent social member’s complaints (tracked by internal tag system) indicated a missed opportunity for a positive member experience and served as a feedback loop for continual end to end process improvement.
On Khoros platform, we track all member sentiments. However, our priorities focus more on responding to the negative sentiments first, especially as the members 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 confirm the gravity of the situation and post notifications to our members in our Social platforms to alert about the ongoing outage. We provide regular updates, as it is important to be proactive for a demanding member base 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 outage fixed and communicated to members, we then close in bulk 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 members 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. 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 members.
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 member inquiries on the social platforms within 20 minutes, 7 days a week from 8am to midnight. No exception. Our average agent response is 5 minutes – way below our targeted response times. Our subsequent SLA has slightly improved from 82% to 83% over the same time period.
Our interactions have become more and more complex; resulting in member posts per conversation increasing from 6 to 7. Similarly, the agent responses haven’t changed from last year and it is still sitting at 4 responses per conversation. Our member feedback (verbatim) indicates that our team’s success in resolving difficult member inquiries from end to end had increased our member’s propensity to direct these complex issues towards our social team.
CSAT:
We’ve made great strides in providing improved service to our members, and we continue to enhance the end-to-end member experience. We use Khoros customized CSAT surveys to conduct agent level member satisfaction assessments and fashion our agent coaching based direct member feedback. Our CSAT rate sits at 73% with a 48% survey completion rate (Facebook and Twitter platforms). The social care team boasts one of the highest survey completion rate, the rate for other platforms like website & app chat is lower than 30%.
Community:
In 9 short months since launch we have grown to:
460,000 Page Views
186,000 Visits
157,000 Unique Visitors
27,000 User Logins
Average of 4.5 minutes online per user
1,000 Topics
2,200 Posts
480 Likes
86 Solutions, with 24% authored by the community.
Awarded 4,400 Badges
Achieved a personal best CHI score of 639 and an average of 501 to-date.