Company: SMARTY
Company background: SMARTY is the SIM-only network that is on a mission to put trust back in the mobile industry, by doing things properly. With SMARTY, customers don’t need to worry about a hefty bill or nasty surprises at the end of the month – it’s just simple, honest mobile. Great value, simple plans, transparent pricing and flexible 1-month plans come as standard.
Launched in 2017, SMARTY is powered by Three’s strong and reliable 4G and 5G network to deliver super-fast speeds for browsing, streaming, gaming, downloading, emailing, and more. SMARTY was recently named Which? Recommended Provider for the third year in a row thanks to its commitment to its customers – all 800k (as of April 2023) and counting!
With SMARTY there’s no contract and no tie in; customers can pause or cancel their plan at any time. SMARTY is committed to no price increases, and will not introduce RPI annual prices, and SMARTY will not reintroduce roaming fees in Europe, meaning customers travelling to EU destinations can use their mobile data (up to 12GB), calls and texts on the same deal as they have in the UK, with no hidden charges.
Contact: Yulian Kozachok
Title: Community Manager
Related URLs: https://community.smarty.co.uk/
Kudos Category: Holistic Customer and Digital Engagement
1. Tell us about your integration or unification strategy for connecting multiple CX teams and/or tools with the Khoros solutions.
Community
SMARTY had always considered the prospect of offering a Community as a way for customers to share knowledge and ideas, give peer to peer support and access 24x7 help.
In March 2021 we started an invite only customer Community (The Forum) to gain real time feedback to best aid our app development. The Community worked. Not only helping us deliver the best app in the right way for our customer, but it also gave us a fresh perspective into our customer’s mind and opened a unique opportunity for brand and customer to engage.
In Dec 2021, we decided to partner with the industry leader in online Community’s: Khoros. Our goal was to deliver the ultimate SMARTY Community space with our customer at its heart.
Khoros Care
Besides Community platform, SMARTY'S award-winning customer excellence team, took the decision in June 2021 to integrate with Khoros Care.
Prior to launching Khoros Care, the customer excellence team managed Facebook and Twitter within their native platforms, this didn't allow us to track and monitor customer engagement effectively, Khoros Care allowed us to do that by supplying us with the tools to review analytical insight to further improve our customer journey from start to finish.
2. What specific impact has having a more holistic solution had on your customer and employee experiences? What were the benefits?
Community
We committed to delivering the very best Community experience with Single Sign On and responsive design that would perform well on desktop and mobile devices.
As a result, our new Community is head and shoulders above our previous forums.
With the help of Khoros Professional Services we were able to deliver Single Sign On and enabled our customers to login with their existing SMARTY accounts.
We have launched and signposted the community within the SMARTY app right from the start, this has improved our customers journey and experience.
While our community was built with support in mind, we have grown significantly in a very short time, and were able evolve our proposition further. We are seeing a lot of engagement in our Off Topic area, run regular ‘open discussion’ topics and held a very popular community prize draw.
At the moment we are looking forward to introducing a Superuser program in order to recognise our most active and helpful community members.
Our next step would be an Ideation area that would assist us with product innovation and gathering valuable input from our customers.
Khoros Care
Integrating multiple social channels into a single solution platform has given our customer excellence team the edge in monitoring and managing all communication with our customers.
Being able to review and analyse all the interactions within the same platform was a great practical opportunity to enhance our customers experience further.
3. What specific business outcomes and successes have resulted from the improved customer and employee experiences you have seen using Khoros? Please include quantifiable metrics where possible.
Community
Launched only 6 month ago, our community is doing exceptionally well:
- We have over 24K registered Community members, and we average over 20K monthly Active Users.
- Our Traffic has been growing at a steady pace and we are well above 100k Page views every month now.
- Community Responsiveness (Avg. Time to a first Response) has seen a dramatic improvement since we launched. and is below 6 Hours now (14-17 Hours in Jan).
- Great to see that our Community is helping people to make their decision. Conversion rate to store is at 1.6%
- Working with Khoros PS, we have improved our Community Activity component with several options to feature posts, images and direct users to Accepted Solutions. Our Accepted Solutions Views went up by 70%!
- Khoros helped us to benchmark our performance against European telco’s Communities and we rank first in Acquisition and Engagement across many benchmarking KPI’s.
*red dot is SMARTY Community in comparison with other European telco’s
*red dot is SMARTY Community in comparison with other European telco’s
Khoros Care
The results of introducing Khoros Care were immediate, our SLA response rate went form 24 hours to just 2 hours, maintaining an average of a 95% success rate - recently we have embedded Instagram into Khoros Care and this has also been a huge success as well.
Since switching to Khoros Care our customer excellence team has won Customer Service Team of the Year at the prestigious UK National Contact Centre Awards in 2022.
Special Thanks: Jon Henshall
Case Study Opt-In: Yes
