Company: BSkyB
Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager
Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com)
Lithy category: Best Social Support Program
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Best Social Support Program
BSkyB
2013
BskyB has become an integral part of our modern entertainment society with in excess of 10 million subscribers across the UK and Ireland.
As part of our core vision of “Believe in Better” we have implemented a multi-platform Customer interaction and engagement model to create a culture of entertaining, exciting and inspiring our Customers. As a pioneer of modern entertainment and Customer service we developed a fully integrated Social support Customer program encapsulating Sky Help Forums, Facebook and Twitter delivering service excellence whenever and wherever our Customers need us.
Our Vision
“To ensure our existing Community and Social Media channels are kept relevant, informative and engaging. To develop emergent channels to engage our current subscribers, enhance our brand/recognition with our Online Customer base.”
Our core goal in implementing a cohesive Customer Service structure is centered upon the integration of our Social Channels and Customer support services, whilst promoting a culture of peer to peer support and online self-help.
Empowering our Customers to utilise the wealth of self-service options online supports the fast paced lifestyles of our Customer base allowing them to access the information they need at the click of a button at a time that suits them. In increasing community traffic and engagement, we have identified a core improvement in Customer first time resolution, Customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.
Our Strategy
Our core methodology within Sky is “Believe in Better” from investing in our Customers, our product and our people we have created a culture of continuous improvement and development. Our social support streams are unique in their integration as a cohesive Social Customer Support program combining an end to end Customer experience.
We have seen our engagement on the community increase in the last year and we now have 9,708 marked accepted solutions. Over the last six months our thread views have reached in excess of 1.5 million each week.
We have also introduced Ask a Question and a Knowledge Base to help support our Customers in getting an answer to their query or issue quickly.
Our Knowledge Base is proving a great success to both our Community and Sky as a whole. We currently have 65 articles within the Knowledge Base with in excess of 127,813 article views in one month alone (February – March 2013) Our Knowledge Base is fast becoming a “One Stop Shop” for troubleshooting guides, hints & tips and ‘How To’ guides for our Community members and visitors.
To enrich support for our Customers we have expanded our Communities & Social Media team at Sky to incorporate a Community & Engagement team and a Designated Case Handling team. In optimising our Customer Service strategy in terms of social support we have utilised both the traditional Customer insight frameworks based upon KPIs of Customer sentiment, traffic and SEO analysis but also we have implemented a core Customer insight strategy to ensure that we continue to improve the service we offer our audience.
Our Customer insight strategy includes the implementation of Customer direct feedback sessions based both in an online WebEx environment and Customer closeness events to understand the experiences of our Customers. This insight has proved invaluable in the continued improvement of Customer support with the future implementation of gamification and supportive resources. The insight provided in terms of the continued optimisation of our social platforms, use of KPI metrics in terms of sentiment, SEO analytics and Customer satisfaction also support continued improvement across our Contact Centre operations providing key insight into service provision, product insight and Customer engagement thus influencing improvement programs across the organisation.
The core ethos of One Service is to provide our Customers with continued Service Excellence in their end to end Customer journey from joining Sky to help and support. The initial One Service programme has launched to a pilot group customer base of 400,000 Customers in a key geographical location.
The measures of success in terms of individualised support have been resoundingly successful in terms of core operational metrics of Customer First Time resolution, Customer satisfaction and NPS. We have introduced brand new online features exclusively for One Service Customers including “My Help Request” that allows our Customers to manage their account and get in touch with us should they have any questions or experience any issues.
The My Help Request Portal is a central hub to raise help requests and manage any existing enquiries related to Sky products and services. All My Help Requests are case managed by our team of specialist trained Sky staff who resolve queries and answer any questions within 24 hours providing updates via text alerts or email.
In offering our Customers multi-platform help it was key that our internal structure in terms of processes and insight was robust and inclusive in terms of shared knowledge and best practice. Developing a core network of Specialists across our varying products and services assures that our audience demographic receives simply great service regardless of their chosen channel. Historically, our internal operational structure and process was designed to support Customer interaction in a standardised contact centre format however, with the inception of help and support across social channels outlining Customer journeys based upon each individual social channel was imperative in offering tailored solutions based on the method of contact.
Our core Customer Response Management system is now reflective of each individual Customer’s journey across all products and contact channels. Individual case management of each Customer’s enquiries across both our Lithium Social Monitoring/Social interaction platform and our internal Customer Response Management system provides a holistic view of each Customer’s activity and interactions allowing our people to provide an individualised service in understanding our Customers.
“Just knowing this has been achieved with the customer only needing their use of their smartphone/tablet/laptop opens up a world of possibilities. No more waiting on hold, no more call flows or robotic responses, just 100% satisfaction! And the best part of it all? The system is still in its infancy and will get even better with future updates!” - Dave Charleston, Community Co-Ordinator
Outcome/Results
As a pioneer of multi-platform entertainment and Customer interaction we continue to develop new and innovative ways to engage and offer support to our Customers. From Social Media to Interactive help via their Remote Control we have assured that our Customers are at the heart of our business.
The introduction of social interaction across multiple platforms has shown not only seen an increase in interactivity– over 82,000 interactions per month - but an increase in Customer satisfaction to 87%. Similarly, NPS for both Twitter and Chat Services has also increased substantially to 61% and 64% respectively.
In addition to increased usage and satisfaction, BSkyB has seen significant savings through call deflection with circa 11% Customers saying their visit to the forum partially resolved their query; and a further 29% of customers surveyed within the forum stating their query had been fully resolved to their satisfaction negating the requirement to contact us via telephone.
“I think that our use of social media along with our own in-house help forum is second to none due to the interaction we are enabled to have with our customers. Actually dealing with their inquiries through this form of communication allows us to deal with a customer at a time which is convenient for them, but it also allows us to deal with a customer from their initial query all the way through to a resolution for the most part.” - Fraser Hughes, Community Co-Ordinator
