Lithys 2012: Sky Social Support - Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community Technical Integration
Company: Sky
Entry Submitted by: Stephen Marshall, Community Operations Manager (StephenMarshall)
Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com)
Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community Technical Integration
Community Launched: 25 Oct 2010
Sky’s Social Customer Support journey started with the launch of the Sky Help Forum (http://helpforum.sky.com/), on 25th October 2010. Here at Sky, service through Social Media means our customers can be confident in finding answers to their issues, from our community and staff, irrespective of the type of question or the complexity of the problem.
Since launch, our forum has grown extremely quickly. With the realisation of the potential we could unlock through Social Media customer service, we decided to extend this support to Facebook and Twitter in March 2011.
Our mission –
At Sky we strive for our customers to ‘Believe in Better’ and as one of the UK’s largest broadcasting, telephone and broadband companies, we aim to lead the way in customer service.
With the help of Lithium, we are building a programme in which goes beyond the service we provide to our customers via traditional contact methods. As well as customers still being able to contact us via telephone and email, with the introduction of our Help Forum, Facebook and Twitter channels we are also now enabling an all-round social customer experience. The customer can simply type their query on to our Help Forum, Facebook and Twitter pages and then await a response. And the power of the social community means that our super-users and other customers often solve many of the questions.
For any issues that cannot be resolved by our community, we have a team of in-house Sky experts ready to assist. Hello to quick and easy resolutions through Social Media!
Our Highlights –
- 30,000 registered users by June 2011
- More than doubled that to 70,000 registered users by March 2012
- Over 150 new registered users each day
- 1 million thread views per week
- 144% increase in Sky service Tweets since July 2011
- 54% growth in Sky Facebook service interactions since July 2011
- Sky social media teams’ deal with 1000-1300 total interactions each day
- Launched in February this year, we are the first company in the UK to offer single-use Live Customer Chat for one-to-one private case resolution
- We have had 90-100% customer satisfaction/resolution for our social media Live Chat service
- Consistently over achieving our customer satisfaction and customer resolution goals across all channels
Broadening our reach –
In October 2011, we started listening to our social customers out with our branded channels. This meant that we can look to provide advice and assistance to people that mention Sky services or products within their Tweets, Facebook updates and other forum posts.
We are currently able to respond within forums that aren’t official Sky channels. We also have the tools to monitor tweets and Facebook posts about Sky from customers, and are able to help and respond when needed.
Seeing the query through to the end – When our customers ask questions in our Help Forum or social media channels, we don’t want anything to get in the way of providing a complete end-to-end resolution.
If a customer’s query requires account sensitive information to be exchanged, our staff are happy to privately interact with that customer. But this requires a one-to-one interaction with one of our Sky staff members and isn’t something for a public area.
To solve this, we have introduced an innovative solution to deal with more sensitive social support issues.
Sky is the first company in the UK to use one time chat links which direct the customer back to the original advisor they were speaking to on the help forum, Facebook or Twitter. Once the customer has clicked the one-time link they immediately enter a private chat session so they can have a real-time confidential discussion. This ensures that the Sky team member can have access to the customer’s Sky account and share sensitive information, which wouldn’t be possible in the forum.
Since we launched this private chat, customers have reported 90-100% satisfaction and resolution.
Our belief –
We believe we are excellent contenders in providing the best social customer experience along with the best technical implementation.
We have a programme in place which means each individual customer will have their question answered or problem resolved. There are some customer questions and issues that require our Sky experts due to the knowledge they have and the requirement to access Sky customer accounts.
Our aim is to own the customer’s social interaction until they are satisfied with an answer or resolution.
