Company: MoneyGram
Entry submitted by: Lindsay Conant (LCMG) Digital Marketing Manager, Social Care
LSW: www.facebook.com/moneygram and www.twitter.com/moneygramme
Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer
It’s a big world out there. People now move across continents, through time zones, and around the globe with staggering speed, frequency, and efficiency. And when they do move, they need a way to move their money as well. While banks usually facilitate this need, there is a surprising population of individuals and countries that are either underserved by – or unable to fully use – traditional banking services.
For those individuals, MoneyGram, offers worldwide money transfer services through a network of 336,000 agent locations – including retailers, international post offices, and financial institutions – in more than 200 countries and territories. That’s more locations than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart combined!
In the money transfer industry, sales are traditionally driven by word of mouth and methods of doing business and internal corporate structure are slow to evolve. Therefore a decision to become a more consumer-centric, socially-devoted company was a significant challenge for MoneyGram.
As MoneyGram’s Digital Marketing department began to nurture a stronger relationship with our customers via communication on preferred social media channels, and witnessed impressive growth of our online community, customers immediately started engaging with us to resolve service questions and concerns.
The ability to provide reliable money transfer services for our consumers is critically important to our business. Meeting the needs of consumers who use money transfer services is far from a simple Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 endeavor. Customers rely on MoneyGram services to enable them to complete financial transactions, quickly and securely, to send money to family members and loved ones across different time zones – often money that is intended to help with family emergencies and other important events.
And because our business consistently deals with fraud and privacy risk, we deemed it essential that our customers have a fast connection to our top-tier customer care team to address these concerns – 24/7/365. Timeliness and effectiveness are key. We also wanted to significantly decrease response time and streamline a fragmented customer support process by enabling our customer support team to directly engage with customers on their preferred social media channel.
To address these goals, we resolved to change and refocus the way we approached our customer relationships on social media by strategically combining our marketing channel customer support with our global contact center to respond to and resolve issues more efficiently. This would require a significant cross-functional collaboration and a shift in established social media procedures and customer service methodology within the organization.
Previously, Digital Marketing and Customer Care functioned in distinctively separate “silos.” The Customer Care department focused on issues received from the call center. The Digital team was dedicated to addressing communication with the online community to develop relationships and brand loyalty with customers. That’s where Lithium came in.
Lithium enabled our social care program to grow from one person to a team of eight, quickly and effectively, by providing an easy-to-use, single-engagement tool that:
- Met the unique needs of both marketing and customer care
- Ensured one source of metrics and one message internally
- Provided a customer profile and conversation history that protected against duplication of conversations and requests
- Offered scalable workflow management and agent specific metrics which was essential for staffing, training, and performance evaluation purposes
- Enabled us to share the voice of the customer back into the business to drive actionable results
Our business partnership with Lithium commenced in October when social care was still being monitored and responded to solely by the Digital team. Both Digital Marketing and Contact Center leadership then worked together diligently to establish an alliance where both sides trusted the value of social media as a communication channel, and understood the needs of our global customers online.
With limited resources, we did not have the luxury of appointing a team solely dedicated to social care. To solve this issue, we addressed social care as a ‘rotating task’ to be carried out by current customer care representatives.
Digital Marketing collaborated closely with Contact Center decision makers to agree upon an agent profile and identify the skill sets required for successful social media engagement. With this blueprint, Customer Care was able to select an effective Social Care team made up of senior representatives who fully understood our products, compliance, and legal guidelines.
Along with meeting the initial challenges, Lithium gives us the opportunity to expand our social care initiative and continue to address our customers evolving needs.
The impact on the organization was significant, highly successful, and received company-wide recognition and acknowledgement. Now, with the help of Lithium, MoneyGram enjoys the benefits of a cooperative relationship where two previously exclusive business channels can combine their respective expertise to serve the needs of our social media community, quickly & effectively, provide in-channel resolution of issues, and realize the potential to convert dissatisfaction into solid brand advocacy. Customer Care now looks at themselves as more than simply a “call center” and has repositioned the department as a “contact center” that can communicate with customers on a variety of different channels. And most importantly, they are now creating customer service roles that will be primarily focused on social media.
Our compliance, fraud, and security departments also gained more visibility into our customer’s online conversations and were, therefore, able to identify and respond to the most current and relevant customer concerns.
Additionally, our customers benefit in the ability to communicate directly with customer service representatives via our social media channels to resolve service issues and, at the same time, continue interacting with MoneyGram as a social media community member.
Here’s an example of how MoneyGram’s 24/7/365 Social Care program is directly impacting and improving the customer experience.
As well as improved customer experience, the new social care focus has enhanced our ability to protect our customers from fraud activity that involves money transfers. The interaction below shows an actual scenario wherein we were able to alert a customer to a possible scam before they became a victim.
Our Business Results:
Since implementing Lithium in October 2013 MoneyGram has:
- Increased the number of customers assisted per month by 46%
- Increased social care outbound volumes per month by 95%
- Decreased conversations requiring off-line resolution per month by 17%
- Reduced response time by 93% – to just over an hour – in February
“It would be difficult to overstate how game-changing MoneyGram’s efforts to improve our customer experience has been for our organization, both globally and locally,” according to Christina Martin, Vice President of Digital Marketing. “In an industry that is rooted in established business procedures, even minor changes require careful planning and thoughtful internal coordination. Changing the way we looked at social media and its contribution to our customer care efforts was, in essence, a remarkable evolution. It gave birth to new business opportunities, increased service efficiencies, and unprecedented cooperation between departments. And through this shift in thinking, Lithium was instrumental in providing us with the exact tool we needed to make the transition smooth and highly successful.”
