Company: Rogers Communications
Entry Submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Community Manager
Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com)
Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience
Our Rogers Community Forums are still relatively new, having launched late in 2010, so much of our effort in 2011 was focused on building the community and promoting it internally.
To accelerate growth we used many cross-functional platforms. We put a note on our customers’ bills (which increased page views by more than 200%), ran banner ads on our Barker Channel (a promotional television channel for Rogers Cable customers).
We also added it to our Quick Start Menu (an interactive program guide for Rogers Cable customers), and pushed targeted SMS messages to customers’ mobile phones promoting the mobile enhancement we made to our community (which resulted in a click-through conversion rate of 2.6%).
We also incorporated badges driving to the community on our corporate blog and support pages. These combined efforts helped us to effectively double our user base over the third quarter of 2011.
With the community firmly established, we began to focus on the customer experience.
The community helped support our most successful device launch to date. With over 1,400 posts about the launch, we had many insights to share with the rest of the business to improve for next time. And it meant that, for the first time, customers could find answers they were looking for without calling in and possibly waiting on hold. Many customers were also able to answer each other’s questions.
To support the launch, we moved to a dedicated support model for the community, meaning in-house customer service representatives could address Rogers customers’ account-related questions via private message.
Our community is peer-to-peer so, as a way to engage more deeply with our customers, we launched a program called Rogers RevUp. This is a series of expert events held exclusively in the community where a product manager answers questions for a few hours or a full day. It gives customers unprecedented access to decision makers.
During our first RevUp, which was related to our Android product line-up, we saw registrations go up 42% over the daily average. The event was also well-attended by our key Android influencers, many of whom we’d been gathering feedback from over the last few years.
This was a nice way to give them real-time direct access to our product manager for Android-powered devices). Through events like RevUp and the community forums we are able to capture insights, share them internally and ultimately use this feedback to improve customer experience for Rogers customers.
On a weekly basis we create a “top five” report that is shared internally and we have created specific reporting for product teams at launch time. Employees are also invited to visit the community anytime to find out what’s being said about their own products or services. The result of this work is a more vibrant community that consistently generates answers to customer questions but more importantly, it’s a community the helps us improve our business.
---------- Rogers is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada's largest provider of wireless voice and data communications services and one of Canada's leading providers of cable television, high speed internet and telephony services. Through Rogers Media we are engaged in radio and television broadcasting, televised shopping, sports entertainment, magazines and trade publications, and digital media. We are publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RCI.A and RCI.B) and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RCI).
For further information about the Rogers group of companies, please visit www.rogers.com.