Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG
Entry submitted by: Claudia Religa (viktoria) Community Manager
Community: A1 Support Community (a1.community.net)
Lithy category: Best Business ROI
________________________________________________
In a rather small country like Austria with a population of 8.4 million people, A1 is the unique leading telecommunication provider with 5.2 million mobile and 2.3 million fixed subscribers.
We claim the top position in terms of technology, so our mission is also to advance service innovation.
More than one year after launching our community it’s time to take a look at the benefits we gained from it. We had an average extraordinary 270% growth rate on requests since the start.
To generate our Real Substitution value we integrated a randomized onsite survey on our website (www.a1.net). It pops up for community users after some time of activity. To get a valid outcome the number of cases is exceeding 300 every month and the respondent gets the survey only once every three months.
The Real Substitution rate shows how many of our users come to visit the community without contacting any other service channel we offer – in other words: how many users perceive the community as primary service channel. Additionally we measure if community visitors find a solution for their problem in the A1 Support Community.
For 2012 we reached an amazing Real Substitution value of 25%! That sums up to 168,000 Saved Interactions in one year whereupon only posts and search requests count as interactions in the A1 Support Community. A remarkable 26% of community users found their solution in the first minutes of their visit.
Especially in the field of crisis communication we were able to prevent a shitstorm by actively informing our customers about tariff changes and keeping the protest wave to a minimum. In four months we attained 60,000 contacts on the board that has been set up especially for this task.
Increasing Customer satisfaction and Growing Loyalty
With our special customer loyalty program we offer low smartphone prices for our community users on a monthly basis. Our logged-in members are able to accept the offers directly in the relevant boards.
To increase customer satisfaction we already involve our Super Users in service and product development processes to guarantee the best outcome for us and our customers. This year we launched the new self service are on our website where we used this co-creation approach.
To generate leads we organize competitions that are cross and deep linked through all of our social media channels. An example is our Sony Xperia go outdoor smartphone test where our users got the chance to design the screenplay with us and win a device. The success of over 1 million views on YouTube proves us right!
To sum it up: Community activities push the Digital Service Shift
- 80% Crowd Ratio (Crowd Ratio = percentage of user-generated content) – thereof 20% is created by our most active users
- Reduction of development and beta testing expenses
- Lead generation due to our customer loyalty program
- Real Substitution value of 25%, call reduction – up to 16,000 reduced Support calls and emails per month
