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: Partners for Life
1. Describe your partnership with Khoros. Tell us about which Khoros teams you partner with (e.g. Strategic Services, Professional Services, Customer Success, etc) and the outcomes you were hoping to drive.
Khoros customer success provides timely and efficient answers allowing us to make split second educated decisions. Thanks to Khoros, we are always ahead of the game and recently Khoros assisted us with their expertise in providing step by step support when we began the process of rebranding Virgin Mobility to Virgin Plus, and allowed us a flawless transition to new handle on Social. Khoros gave us valuable suggestions and provided us with the steps to follow in order to sync the new brand name in Khoros.
2. How have your Khoros partners helped you shape your strategy and align your people and processes?
With the launch of community came the challenge of how to incorporate it into Khoros Care. Our moderators use Khoros Care for their daily community tasks and with Khoros account managers, we were able to get the help needed to better flow community into the care platform. Below are some key elements that Khoros contributed to our success now in community:
- Training and best practices for community
- Step by step support setting up the forums
- Tailoring the Khoros functionalities to each LOB’s unique specifications:
- Moderator manage view set up
- Create unique tagging for community
- Set up a community analytic dashboard in Khoros care
- Best practices to measure community SLA
3. What successes have you experienced because of your partnership with Khoros? How are you better able to deliver your strategic priorities and deliver value back to your business? Please include metrics if possible.
Currently we provide customer 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 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.
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 outage fixed and communicated to customers, 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 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. 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.
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.
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.