Company: TELUS
Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (deturbulence) Sr Strategy Manager
Community: TELUS Neighbourhood (forum.telus.com)
Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer
In 2010, we started listening and responding to customer mentions of “telus” on Twitter. This was done using our enterprise platform (formerly Radian6) with a very small team of contact centre agents, looking at only our Mobility line of business. As we gained more and more experience, the channel became more active, and we found we could not only serve customers, but also exceed their expectations by listening to discussions and engaging.
We learned that we could have a legitimate service channel that not only displaced contacts from our live contact centre, but also deliver risk management by ensuring that negative comments from influencers or media did not go unanswered. To this end, in 2012, we added additional agents to support Home Services, and started creating more robust processes to enable communication and hand-offs between operations, public relations/corporate communications, and marketing. These processes have evolved into meaningful partnerships, with the business aligning behind common goals of putting out customers first, and having teams that historically did not inter-operate collaborate on a daily basis.
As we were getting more and more involved from a social service standpoint in delivering customer experience and support through engagement, we found that we needed tools and technologies focused on engagement to suit the needs of this growing channel. To that end, in the back half of 2012, we undertook an evaluation of a multitude of social tools to not only underpin our engagement and customer experience needs, but also to grow our social capabilities. We selected Lithium Social Web as the best tool for our needs based on routing, case management, tagging, and reporting. These capabilities not only empowered the operational teams to really own social engagement, but also gave them credibility internally.
In early 2013, LSW was implemented, enabling our operational team with clear lines of accountability and responsibility on a case by case basis, also giving us insight to volumes, times, and topics of conversation. Supported by this capability, we opened our historically closed Facebook wall to customer posts, allowing customers another communication channel with TELUS, and in to a sustainable workflow process.
To further our strategy of putting customers first and our goals of delivering strong social experiences, we began work on the TELUS Neighbourhood, a Lithium community, in March of 2013. Launching in June, our community serves as an opportunity to ensure support content does not expire/evaporate as it does on Twitter (due to Twitter’s velocity), as well as to enable the growth of superusers and brand advocates. Further, we can leverage it as a draw to bring social experiences on-domain, closer to self serve capabilities and to shopping.
What's next for us
Our efforts in the social space have taught us the need to develop people and skillsets directly related to social service. To that end, we are developing a formalized team (outside of the typical contact centre agent pool) with a distinct mandate, learning and development track, and set of success metrics to properly grow and sustain our social service efforts. This team will own all operational activity, and will continue the active collaboration with PR and marketing teams.
As we move in to 2014, we are finding new ways to leverage social insights internally. We are partnered with web teams, as our community activities demonstrate content customers are most hungry for, based on authorship and views, which inform web development and content authoring/promotion. Operational enablement teams are also receiving our feedback and insights to better tune our processes.
Additionally, we are able to springboard off of our community design and internal partnerships to launch TELUS Ideas, providing us yet another stream of insights in to the customer experience, directly from customers. This, coupled with our work to introduce a gamification strategy, continues to unite the organization internally to better hear and serve our customers.
Our business results in 2013
- 56k+ engagements
- Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 25 minutes in Q4
- Quality survey results say:
- If a colleague, friend or family member were looking for services such as home phone, Internet, TV or Wireless, what is the likelihood that you would recommend TELUS to them? 77% Top 2 Box
- How would you rate the performance of the TELUS social media support agent for the level of service you received? 88% Top 2 Box
- After your experience with TELUS’ social media support team, how likely are you to share your experience with others? 86% Top 2 Box
- 6.3k+ engagements
- Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 118 minutes in Q4
- TELUS Neighbourhood (Lithium Community)
- June launch
- 5.6k+ forum posts
- 1.3k+ Accepted Solutions
- Estimated 28.7k+ live contacts displaced
- 11k+ completed registrations, 254k+ logins
