Company: Comcast
Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops
Community: Forums.comcast.com
Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer
Comcast, a fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media communications company in the world by revenue. Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states. Comcast strives to provide superior customer service though all channels-traditional and atypical. In recent years Comcast spent considerable energy and resources developing its digital strategy. Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer. Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and enhancing product knowledge. While social care is still new to most organizations, including Comcast, we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program. This includes ramping up a strong operational and technological infrastructure capable of integrating social into our broad operations model. This allows social to feed into all organizations providing for both rapid customer engagement and collaboration and message synchronization across all channels.
Comcast’s Digital Media Outreach (DMO) team has set and continues to drive an ambitious social media agenda encompassing technology, operations, broad functional alignment and support from all levels of the organization. Comcast has deployed Lithium products to help meet our goals to make significant improvements in our customers experience using social media. Through the use of these tools we have been able to create broad partnerships across the organization. This includes our communications and PR teams, marketing, operations and quality teams. DMO information is being used to augment business processes ranging from customer satisfaction to retention and sales to outage detection and prevention. The winter Olympics provided an opportunity for Comcast to showcase the social media platform in preventing incidents, resolving customer issues quickly and directly, and engage customers in entirely new and innovative ways.
Lithium’s products and services have supplied Comcast with the ability to track measure and engage with our customers in real-time on preferred customer platforms. This includes:
- LSW: In order for Comcast to provide superior social media customer service while maintaining a single message, it was necessary for the company to develop a singular, seamless workflow. The LSW product has been integrated at the corporate and divisional levels for care, marketing, communications and sales to allow customers to have a top-quality in-channel experience. LSW has also helped us understand inbound volumes as we work to develop a true operational social care model which includes forecasting, service level management and staffing requirements. Within five months of launching LSW, we were able to justify a 30% increase in staffing through the use of clear and concise operational reporting. In a most recent case study, Comcast brought on 10 additional agents to support customers during the winter Olympics as social volume was expected to increase as much as 40% in a short three week period. Comcast has a complex organizational structure with Care resources deployed geographically by division. Each division assigned several resources to assist the corporate Digital Media Outreach (DMO) team by handling geographically specific questions and concerns. LSW allowed DMO to seamlessly re-queue work to our additional support teams. As a result we eliminated thousands of out-of-channel escalations by enabling the front line employee’s best equipped to handle these contacts to do so immediately. Our marketing team also used the publisher feature to provide great Olympic content through the duration of the event.
- Community: Comcast has built a 2 million monthly peer-to-peer participation community, using Lithium’s platform. Our community is different from third party social networking sites in that we are finding more brand advocates and loyalty within the community. Comcast utilizes this audience to provide customers the opportunity to become beta testers with certain product releases. This is also the only channel that has over 100 internal employees from throughout the company participating from a product, care, marketing, communications, engineers and user experience standpoint. Through Lithium we control the content and knowledge base within the community’s approved solutions. Community posts and engagement can also be fully integrated into LSW, allowing us to engage with customers on multiple social platforms simultaneously while inviting third party platform customers into the community through sharing of publically available and approved solutions within our help and support site and communities. This helps the agents to both engage properly with the customers and provide an efficient way to enable future self-service.
- Social Operations Center: Comcast and Lithium teamed up to create a monitor wall or better known within Comcast as the Social Operations Center (SOC) to provide real-time volume, operations and social feeds. The SOC was designed specifically to act as an early warning mechanism for Comcast’s National Customer Operations team as we headed into the winter Olympics. The Olympics is a significant event for Comcast and we needed to deploy a sophisticated way to monitor all social volume for any possible network feed issues and proactively alert the right internal fix group. The SOC’s launch demonstrates our continued efforts to push the limits on what social media is capable of providing to the operational infrastructure of a complex organization such as Comcast. The social operations center was active within the Olympic war room and is still currently active in our national workforce management center. The SOC allows us to find groups of customers in real time who are reporting service concerns and the opportunity to escalate to the appropriate fix groups more rapidly than possible via traditional care channels. Through this system proactive customer messaging become possible - potentially preventing significant call, chat and social media volume while providing a better overall customer experience with consistent messaging created and make available in all channels.
Lithium social Web was launched as a cross functional solution for organizations to engage properly with customers. Currently we have four organizations using LSW for proper customer engagement and seamless customer interaction.
The Comcast Community forum gives our internal experts (from all over the company) an opportunity to engage with customers who may have concerns with a specific product. The community allows customers to speak with the appropriate internal expert for proper assistance. The community also allows our internal experts to help many with one response. Superusers also play a large part in the community life cycle, assisting with peer-to-peer engagement.
The Social Operations Center delivers social real-time brand content company wide. As mentioned above this is used for multiple purposes to analyze data, catch real time trends about the brand and show team productivity.
LSW: The DMO team is challenged to provide at least a 25% in-channel resolution rate and no greater then a 10% ticket escalation.
Community: The increase of community page views and participation is a key driver of our community growth.
SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand. Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.
