Company: Virgin Plus
Company background: Virgin Plus is a provider of postpaid and prepaid wireless voice, text and data communications services throughout Canada. They also offer home Internet and TV services in select areas of Ontario and Quebec. 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: Imad Daoud
Title: Sr Manager, Digital Support
Related URLs:
Website: Virginplus.ca & Benefits.virginplus.ca
Facebook: Facebook.com/virginplus
Instagram: Instagram.com/virginplus
Twitter: Twitter.com/virginplus & Twitter.com/VirginPlusCare
Community: VirginPlus.ca/forum
LinkedIn: Linkedin.com/company/virginplus
Kudos Category: Partners for Life
1. Describe your partnership with Khoros. Tell us about which Khoros team(s) you partner with (e.g. Strategic Services, Professional Services, Customer Success, etc) and the outcomes of those partnerships.
Currently the Community and Social have a Customer Success Manager (CSM) through Khoros.
Our CSM helps keep us up-to-date on what's available and coming down the pipe from Khoros. They help us connect with Khoros experts and navigate any issues that we may have. Our CSM has been an integral part of Community success both early on after launch and continually throughout the year as our CSM has helped us with SEO, SSO and Professional Services support and coordination. The Virgin Plus Community has employed the services of a TAM/Technical Account Manager twice during a few projects such as Accessibility and Aurora readiness and other Professional Service projects.
2. How has Khoros’ partnership helped shape your organization’s strategy and aligned your people and processes?
Khoros partnership with Virgin Plus shapes our Social and Community strategy as we employ both a Khoros Care and a Khoros Community instance. These instances are integrated and have become dependents of each other; one not being able to function to its full potential without the other.
These dependent instances align our Customer Ops and Digital Support arms and force a collaborative process in all aspects from staffing, data analytics and support all the way through to content publishing.
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 quantifiable metrics where possible.
Usage of Tags – At Virgin, we utilize Khoros' sophisticated tag systems to collect valuable customer feedback. This feedback is then directed to the executive team, enabling them to make informed decisions and implement key changes. To enhance our tracking capabilities and streamline reporting, we have restructured our tags into distinct categories, each corresponding to a specific line of business. This categorization allows us to closely monitor trending feedback for more efficient reporting.
Moreover, we leverage the widget tag, which facilitates real-time tracking of emerging trends. This feature enables us to promptly identify significant shifts and take swift action if necessary within a short timeframe. By utilizing these tools and strategies, we enhance our ability to effectively analyze customer feedback and respond in a timely manner.
Manage view – In addition to utilizing tags, the manage view function provides us with a more detailed and precise approach to monitor and track each category of tags. We have configured different views to enhance our ability to track sensitive topics effectively. This enables us to identify and prioritize relevant conversations, ensuring that we can address them promptly and appropriately. By leveraging this granular approach, we can stay proactive in managing discussions and providing timely support.
The power of smartviews – Smartviews serve as an excellent method to isolate and categorize conversations or topics, allowing us to assign them to dedicated teams. This streamlined approach enables us to efficiently manage and prioritize different areas of focus. Furthermore, smartviews play a crucial role in generating targeted reports, which prove invaluable in identifying any gaps in our processes. By analyzing these reports, we can gain valuable insights and take necessary steps to address and improve upon any identified areas of improvement.
Negative sentiment tracking – By actively tracking negative sentiments, we seize the opportunity for ongoing enhancements in customer service. Through our internal tag system, we closely monitor the complaints expressed by our frequent social Members. These complaints serve as a valuable feedback loop, revealing instances where we may have missed an opportunity to deliver a positive customer experience. This feedback drives us to continually improve our end-to-end processes.
While we monitor all customer sentiments on the Khoros platform, our priorities are specifically geared towards addressing negative sentiments first. This approach recognizes the significance of promptly responding to Members who heavily rely on our telecom services. By prioritizing these negative sentiments, we aim to resolve issues swiftly and effectively, ensuring that our customers receive the attention and support they need.
Outage and active disaster management – Khoros plays a crucial role in our success when it comes to effectively managing outages. Our Social Media team, being on the front line, captures early indications of outages before they are reported through other conventional channels. Once an outage starts gaining attention on Khoros, we collaborate with various teams to assess the severity of the situation and promptly notify our Members through our Social platforms, ensuring they stay informed about the ongoing outage. We consistently provide updates, recognizing the importance of proactively keeping our Members informed as they expect to be in the loop. This approach allows us to deliver a consistent outage response across our social channels and community.
If the outage generates significant social media traffic, we activate an "Outage" queue specifically designed to gather all the conversations identified by our tagging system. Our team members are assigned to monitor and filter the conversations within the queue. Once the outage is resolved and the relevant information is communicated to our Members, we close the conversations in bulk and deactivate the queue.
Responding quickly to events that affect the lives of our Canadian users and accurately assessing the sentiment, direction, and strength of that sentiment is a challenging task. However, with Khoros's listening capabilities and trending tags, we have been able to listen and comprehend the perspectives of our members across multiple social entry points. For example, we have leveraged the power of Khoros to communicate our company's actions in response to these sentiments. By tagging the conversations, we have the peace of mind that we can uphold a high level of member satisfaction (CSAT) and service level agreements (SLAs) while still prioritizing other equally important posts for our members.
Community - The complexity of some questions in the Virgin Plus Community continues to push the expansion of our How To's (TKB's) and at the same time build out support from various teams and experts. With nearly 100 subject experts available to us, our Care Specialists in regular social channels (Facebook and Twitter) no longer shy away now from promoting our communities and with TKB's integrated into our Care instance we're able to connect Members with the right content and the right solutions. We continue to track trends and solutions in the Virgin Plus community to share with non-moderator Care Specialists all the way up the chain to executive level operations. This data share helps paint the picture of how well we are delivering on our strategic priorities and where we deliver the best value, along with where can we create more value for our Members.
The Virgin Plus Community was able to deliver content value to our customers by nearly doubling Accepted Solutions from 90 to 173 (+92%), increasing the quality of the content, thus changing how Community users interacted with the Virgin Plus Community. Solution Views increased from 14.3K to 82.8K (+479%), Page Views from 453K to 463K (+2%), Visits from 184K to 219K (+19%), Unique Visits from 155K to 180K (+16%), Member Logins from 26.7K to 35.5K (+33%) and lowered Time to Avg. Response from 2,851 min. to 1,966 min. (-31%).
Special Thanks: Luke Wolters, Rob Delbello
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