Company: Bell Canada
Company background: Bell is Canada’s largest communications provider, connecting millions of customers throughout the country on our powerful wireless and fibre networks, and delivering compelling content to national and local audiences on our leading TV, radio and digital platforms. Our team of more than 50,000 reflects the diversity of the Canadian population and includes employees living and working in communities of all sizes across every province and territory.
Contact: Imad Daoud
Title: Sr Manager, Digital Support
Related URLs: Bell.ca/forum, Bell.ca
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how?
Bell Canada launched a Community Forum in September 2021 to expand Bell Canada’s digital support offering, enabling peer-to-peer support through a platform that allows us to capture, quantify, categorize and communicate. The Khoros community platform provides Bell Canada customers an enhanced and communicative digital support experience while reducing frontline operational costs through increased contact deflection and lower CHURN rates.
Bell’s Objectives:
- Increase Self-Serve interactions - Digital First program
- Improve user digital experience - additional support channel options & reduced resolution turnaround
- Reduce agent contact rate – One-to-Many support model
- Build stronger brand loyalty – Customer Retention
Just over a year in, with senior executive support; the Community has grown to include TKBs (How To's), access to digital self-serve tools, over 100 blogs, video content, events and sales/marketing opportunities relevant to the Community user and most importantly outage and alerts notifications. The Community was integrated with all our digital entities; social, echat, web and app support to increase our digital support reach and target niche topics and advanced issues."
Use Case:
In mid-2022 a competitor’s nationwide internet and cellular outage affected over 12 million Canadian (25% of Canada). This included emergency services, electronic sales transactions, public transportation, government services and many other day-to-day operations.
The inability to communicate left many users unaware of the situation and without regular updates. As a result, Bell has incorporated an outage plan, which includes transparent communication and updates for major service interruption that in part utilizes the Community Forum as a main source of information to impacted users.
Since the Forums are hosted on the Khoros platform and would not be impacted by a company outage, it serves as a perfect contingency plan to keep the customers up to date. Working with Khoros, Bell is currently looking to build on and improve the current outage process to deliver enhanced features and functionalities that will better automate the outage communication.
2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved?
The Bell Community was brought to life by a need to connect customer’s questions & issues with answers & solutions. COVID public health measures were disruptive to Bell’s contact centres ability to handle an influx of calls while managing the implementation of a massive work from home process. This left Bell searching for customer support alternatives and the peer-to-peer model secured our ability to provide users with a digital self-serve option that is not agent dependent. The Community Forum is lockdown resistant!
Cross-functional and adoption within our direct organization was easy to achieve as both Customer Ops and Digital Support were both in league together in working to obtain exec and business buy-in. Additionally, to achieve buy-in at a multi exec, business and stakeholder level Khoros' led respective teams through the tools used to mitigate potential risks like negative brand sentiment or unwanted “virality” that had been highlighted by the executive team. These tools and solutions provided by Khoros allowed us to put together a viable business case to proceed with our successful Community launch.
After successfully piloting and achieving business objectives, obtaining a positive return on investments, and receiving favorable feedback from our user base, senior executives readily invested in the Community without any opposition. One notable instance of executive buy-in is the integration of Community Forums with the Bell MBM app, which encompasses:
- Single Sign On capabilities from the app for easy access and instant interaction capabilities (removing barrier to entry)
- Community RSS feed incorporation into digital assets serving as targeted and relevant entry points
- Contact-Us pathing focusing on Community support for agent contact alternative
- Personalized tiles linking to topic specific community content
- Community content integration with social communication and eChat (agent & bot)
- In-App Community Forum Federated search
- Content syndication in various digital assets
3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible.
With the help of Khoros, Bell was able to increase not only the traffic to the Community Forum but other internal digital assets. YoY user login and total posts increased over 800% with many of Bell customers relying on the Community for help and choosing the Forums as one of their primary source for self-servable support.
The one-to-many support model has proven to be invaluable to our customers and delivered a 23% improvement in same day contact rate compared to traditional digital support channels. The Community was able to deflect over 300,000 agent contacts annually and continues to deliver cost reduction and CHURN benefits due to a 40% resolution rate in 2023 (46% YOY improvement) resulting in a 3.5X ROI.
The MyBell app has recently revamped the support section to incorporate Community Forums along with other features and functionalities. This helped Bell to receive the Peoples Voice Webby award in 2023. Being recognized by users as the “People’s Voice” Winner reaffirms the benefits of our commitment to provide our customers with the best Digital experience, which includes a vibrant community.
The Community also serves as an effective communication tool for tech savvy customers identifying unique technical issues that Bell had no line of sight on. Community moderators now capture and communicate to various business primes and product owners issues such as firmware problems, system bugs, defects and errors. As a result, the various teams now take part in a weekly “hyper focused symposium” to review the topics provided by the community with the intent to resolve the issues and provide a measured communication to users. In addition, three internal testing teams consisting of 160 internal testers are now using private Group Hubs as a feedback and communication channel.
Special Thanks: Luke Wolters, Rob Delbello
Case Study Opt-In: Yes