2023 Customer Awards: NSW Department of Customer Service - Best-in-Class: Social
Company: NSW Department of Customer Service
Company background: We are the NSW Government Social Media Team within the NSW Department of Customer Service.
Contact: Lauren Jordan
Title: Senior Social Media Advisor
Related URLs: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=398123235780650&set=pb.100067489304668.-2207520000.&type=3 https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=410365937889713&set=pb.100067489304668.-2207520000.&type=3
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Social
1. Tell us how you are using Khoros’ Social Media Management capabilities (moderation, publishing, listening, etc.). Please include a full list and be as specific as possible.
During the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020-2022, citizens turned to the NSW Government’s digital channels to gain clarity on stay-at-home orders, vaccine rollout and how to stay safe. One of these channels included the NSW Government Facebook page. At the start of the pandemic, our social content strategy was informed by platform statistics, such as likes, reach and engagement, but rarely used deeper insights, like audience response and sentiment. Our page reach increased exponentially during this time – up from 1.02M average yearly reach in 2019 to 5.62M in 2020 – and with no tool to help us, responding to comments in a timely manner became a challenge, scrolling through our page manually and relying on the notifications tab for incoming comments. It meant that many customers were unintentionally ignored, or comments breaching community guidelines stayed visible on our page. We were also making assumptions when planning new content, using only the engagement figures from previous posts to guide us.
Since adopting Khoros Care, the Social Media Team has been able to use the platform’s unique features to better engage customers. Some of these include:
- using the comment queue to ensure every comment left on our page was reviewed and where required, responded to. This ensured all comments were assessed on whether they needed a response immediately or if we needed to share it with another team to get the information required.
- tagging conversations with specific topics, enabling us to understand which subjects were generating the most commentary. This allowed us to create content that our audience wanted, instead of our previous approach of making assumptions.
- monitoring response times to ensure information was reaching citizens in a timely manner. This ensured we measured and upheld our promised response times.
- assigning tickets to other team members, enabling us to quickly seek information from other expert teams to get the right information for the customer. Previously this would be a slower approach with many emails.
- sentiment tagging to understand how customers were reacting to specific messages or content. This helped us to pivot our strategy as customer sentiment changed.
- leveraging the analytics to better understand our audience, common themes and the content/information they wanted from us. We could then use these insights to create content that answered common queries.
2. Share your goals and key strategies with these capabilities and how Khoros Social Media Management helps drive success for you.
During the pandemic we used Khoros to introduce new processes to improve the audience experience.
Monitoring themes through tags
We created over 100 subject tags covering topics from face masks to proof of vaccination. This structured, detailed reporting meant we were better able to track sentiment and engagement around a particular theme. As rules changed, we would consistently review our tags and create new ones or archive old. We used tag volumes to then inform our content strategy and update our community management responses.
Additionally, overlaying this data with search and traffic data from the nsw.gov.au website enabled us to build a picture of what people were most concerned about or which topics needed to be highly visible, for example how to book a vaccine. In March 2022, we saw an increase in close contact tags, as well as ‘close contact’ being the top search term on the nsw.gov.au website. By sharing this data across teams, we then created a homepage tile linking to close contact rules as well as bespoke social media content on what to do as a close contact.
As COVID-19 wore on, we were able to innovate by creating community feedback tags. By tagging audience commentary with ‘community trust’, we could identify how often audiences felt that the government was a trusted source of information, a critical measure of success. ‘Content feedback’ was used for verbatim comments that we would consider when content planning, for example, more inclusive language or simplified health terms.
Using dashboards and work queues
Creating different work queues when running two different COVID-19 campaigns – the above the line citizen campaign and the organic activity – allowed us to easily see which media formats were generating the most commentary. Changes to ad spend could then be recommended or community management resource scaled up accordingly. It also allowed for segmenting via topic – for example, when the vaccine rollout was in its infancy, we could create a separate work queue and assign agents with this specific knowledge to this queue only.
We also had separate dashboards for our COVID content and BAU activity, meaning we could see the difference in our content strategies and make decisions around the overall content mix for our channel, particularly during the later stages of the pandemic when there weren’t as many time-critical updates.
Simplified visual results
Khoros Care also gave us dashboards which we could share with wider government teams to inform the government’s response to COVID-19.
3. What specific results did you achieve by optimizing your social strategies with Khoros? Did you seize new revenue stream opportunities, serve customers better, protect your brand and/or grow your business (increased subscribers, engagement, awareness, etc.), grow revenue, reduce costs, or a combination of these things?. Please include quantifiable metrics where possible.
Throughout the pandemic we consistently used Khoros Care insights and analytics to shape and guide our decisions and determine if those actions resulted in success.
Responding to our community in a timely way
Monitoring response times to ensure information was reaching citizens in a timely manner was critical. During the month of September 2022, average Time to Agent Response (TAR) was just over 3 hours during business hours – well inside our objective of 24 hours - helping to increase trust in government and provide reassurance by giving our community managers a tool to engage with empathy and facts.
We also used TAR data to make decisions around scaling up or down our community management resource, particularly over typically quieter periods such as weekends.
No comment left unanswered
Ensuring every comment left on our page was manually reviewed and actioned was integral to reassuring our audience in a time of uncertainty. Between October and December 2022, 95% of comments were responded to within our service level agreement (SLA) of 24 hours, and 99% of comments were responded to within 5 days.
Sentiment and subject tagging to inform content and measure success
Peaks in tagged conversations allowed us to create content that our audience wanted, filling a knowledge gap. We would continue to measure tag volume after this content was published. For example, January 2022 had over 3,400 uses of the ‘Booster’ tag, a 459% MoM increase. After the team created four proactive content pieces around booster vaccination, there were only 1,000 booster tag uses by March 2022. This shows that through using Khoros analytics we could successfully leverage audience insights to provide valuable content.
Tags also monitored specifically how our audience were engaging and became a quantifiable measure of success for us. Knowing how frequently we had indicators of trust from our audience helped with the content creation cycle and our planning processes. For example, the ‘content feedback’ tag allowed us to track specific responses to content to inform future creative direction. We were also able to share these insights with our colleagues across government, including with senior leadership to inform decisions made around rules and restrictions. An example can be seen when content was tagged with feedback of ‘propaganda’ or ‘scare mongering’ we were able to assess and shift messaging as necessary to ensure the important health messages were reaching our audiences.
Leveraging Analytics
The analytics available through Khoros Care allowed us to track insights into content, engagement, clicks and recurring themes, helping us understand our audience and what they wanted from us during the crisis. During 2022, the success of the shift in approach resulted in 50,000 visits to the nsw.gov.au COVID-19 website and reached over 1.7M people. We responded to 10,000 direct queries from customers seeking reassurance, advice or more information.
Special Thanks: NA
Case Study Opt-In: Yes
