Company: Three Ireland
Company background: Three is Ireland’s largest mobile telecommunications provider with 42.8% market share and 3.7 million customers (as of December 2022). At Three we strive to provide our customers with a better-connected life through meaningful products, best in class service and a connected network experience. Our network is built for data; with over 85% 5G coverage and 99% 4G coverage. Three has over 1,300 employees throughout Ireland, with our head office in Dublin, our award-winning Customer Experience Centre in Limerick where our 450-strong team supports over 1.7 million customers every year, and more than 60 retail stores nationwide. Three has to date invested over €2 billion in building our business in Ireland. This includes a €900 million investment in upgrading and expanding our network and IT infrastructure and delivering a cutting-edge experience for both our customers and our employees. Annually, Three continues to invest over €100 million into our network to ensure we continue to deliver the best experience and service for our customers.
Contact: Patrick OBrien
Title: Digital Services Lead
Related URLs: https://community.three.ie/
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service
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, revenue growth, cost savings, etc.)
At Three, we always challenge ourselves to do better, and having won the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award in 2022 we wanted to learn from that experience and appreciate the great work being done by all the other community entrants from across Europe. So we decided to apply those learnings to our strategy for 2023 – we sat down and asked ourselves, “What does 3Community stand for? And how can we let our customers know that we are here to help?”
As in 2022, our goals were consistent and clear. And those goals remain unchanged because we believe in making a commitment and sticking with it:
- Drive digital-first support
- Provide a best-in-class engagement experience
- Achieve business growth and drive sales
- Provide product innovation and insights
We like to do things differently at Three. We know it’s cliché, but we truly believe that the sky is the limit when it comes to our digital customer experience. That’s why we have been building upon our previous success to deliver a transformative customer journey that begins with our Khoros-hosted 3Community.
In 2023, our 3Community reached over 94,000 members (growth of 57K members since this time last year) and we expect this to exceed 100,000 members very soon. With this growth comes some challenges which require an evolving digital service strategy to maintain and grow active engagement and deliver meaningful peer to peer interactions. To tackle that challenge we wanted to really leverage all out of the box Khoros community features and implement a holistic digital solution.
Some of the key challenges that our customers faced in 2023 were:
- Customers have been going through a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation costs on fuel, food and other goods and services has been much higher this year than last.
- Customer behaviour post covid has changed too with more remote working and a greater sense of value placed on data connections, speed and reliability of service.
- Customers wanted a return to the fundamentals of excellent service that Three has always been number one in providing, they wanted us to get the basics right – and be there when they needed us.
79% have changed non-essential spending, 15% halting non-essential purchases altogether.
Empowered by technology, they also both seek and demand seamless in-store and online experiences that better suit their lifestyles and pockets.
- 50% rate knowledgeable and helpful sales associates as important.
- 23% plan to increase their level of in-store shopping.
2. Which Khoros elements did you implement as part of your digital solutions? Include details on the channels or tools you added and how your solution was unique and innovative.
At Three, driving digital-first customer support is our core mission, as this directs any unnecessary traffic away from our customer care agents and encourages use of our *award-winning digital self-service platforms wherever possible, thereby reducing those assisted queue times and improving the overall experience for the customers who really need an agents help.
*In 2022 Three Ireland won the CCMA ‘best customer experience award’ and the ‘best use of digital channels award’. We then went on to win the ECCSA prestigious ‘Gold’ award for best customer service across all of Europe, and ‘Silver ‘awards for best cross functional teams and best use of technology.
- In early 2023, we developed C.O.D.Y., a self-service chat bot with a fun personality designed to route Conversations Online Digitally, CODY is aimed at improving our customers’ ability to follow the customer service flow that is best for them - through to a successful resolution of their query. In preparing for this deployment (GoLive in Q3), we found that customers wanted to interact with humans – more than bots, so we plan to take advantage of our 3Community user profiles to establish a relatable persona for our non-Khoros CODY bot. This we hope will allow customers learn more about what our bot can deliver and grow to benefit from it – as well as boost our ability to understand our customer’s needs and further improve their experience. We don’t want a bot that pretends to be human, we want to introduce our members to a bot that is just a useful machine – CODY should be helpful and fun and just does what they need it to do and is available 24/7.
- Additionally, this year, we expanded the scope of our secure internal knowledgebase for service agents to also include all our retail agents across the country (some 60 Three Branded stores and a growing base of preferred partner stores). This project was aligned to a massive modernisation of technology in our Retail stores delivering a total refurbishment of store look and feel, display functionality, signage, branding and overall product range. Combined with a major suite of content updates, video e-learning material, and improved accessibility via mobile tablets and interactive touch screen tables in store, we have delivered a rich and valuable digital data hub that customers can benefit from while having conversations with ‘real human beings’ which is what they want. This rigorous process was designed to generate improved digital resources for our retail team, thereby creating an improved in-store customer experience that is fully consistent with the high-quality service already delivered by our customer experience centres and digital self-service channels.
- Recently, we have also focused on the promotion of our business customer support services by building more digital integrations between 3Community and our Salesforce platform. We have delivered online webforms on our brand new 3IOT Group Hub where business customers can access service query forms internationally on desktop / mobile devices 24/7. We have cut the manual interaction time required to collect, validate and process these types of queries (previously done via calls to agents within office hours) by over 50% saving huge amounts of agent time and improving the turn-around time and accuracy of our customer service queries for those customers.
3. What quantifiable results were achieved? Please include key success metrics. (e.g. revenue growth, cost reduction, CSAT, call deflection, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.)
We set a high bar for ourselves with in 2022 by taking home the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award, and we recognised that it would be tremendously difficult to outdo those results. However, this did not deter us, and we achieved success in several areas of Digital Customer Service this year despite the tremendous cost of living challenges being faced by our customers.
- 61% growth in 3Community members since this time last year. (94K members and growing)
- 2 new Group Hubs: The 3IOT Group servicing Business customers and 3UX Group that collects user experience feedback on specific applications and services.
- Our ideas board has gained considerable momentum seeing an extra 13K unique visitors YTD compared to the same period last year.
- While our community to shop conversion ratio is lower this year than targeted (currently 2.4% YTD) we are already matching the sales value from all activity delivered in 2022.
- ‘Right First Time’ scores in consumer are up 9% for the same period last year.
- NPS is up 7.3% over that same period.
- Our 3Community Unique Visitor numbers have increased from 70k / Month to over 100K / Month and because we improved the way we collect customer experience survey data we now know that 55% of 3Community users said it was Easy / Very Easy to use 3Community.
Special Thanks: Jon Henshall, Valentina Mengarelli
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