Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG
Entry submitted by: Esther Groth (esther27) Market Development and Digital Business
Community: A1 Support Community (www.a1community.net)
Lithy category: Total Community All Star
A1 Telekom Austria AG is Austria’s leading communications provider, encompassing more than 5.4 million mobile communications customers and almost 2.3 million fixed access lines. The offers by A1 include voice telephony, internet access, digital cable division, data and IT solutions, value added services, wholesale services and mobile business and payment solutions. With four strong and established brands (A1, bob, Red Bull Mobile and yesss!) A1 successfully targets various different markets, ranging from premium quality to low budget.
A1 is part of the Telekom Austria Group which holds eight international operations in eight CEE countries. Headquartered in Vienna, A1 employs approximately 8,600 employees.
In 2014, A1 started its largest infrastructure investment with the fiber optic broadband roll-out in cooperation with the Austrian government and the national broadband plan.
Placing the customer at the heart of A1’s business has been key for the company’s ambitions to continue leading the Austrian telecommunications industry. This has been emphasized in the core values “Close to the customers”, “Simple” and “Trendsetting”. Hence, the A1 support community aims to provide the best service for our customers, to efficiently distribute the A1 brand and to use the potential of our crowd to develop new products, services and authentic user-generated content.
Through the Lithium community platform and LSW we could successfully tackle our main challenge to understand our social customers in more depth (360° social customer profiles).
By modeling the social history of all interactions in LSW and using the behavioral tools of the Lithium community we can generate quantifiable ROI in terms of increased sales and reduced service costs.
We could also improve the following points of our social customer care processes:
Technical feasibility – Adequate infrastructure for growing visitor flows looking for digital service
Workforce optimization. – Considerable volumes of community requests can be efficiently managed by social media agents via efficient routing and prioritizing measures
Linkage between public network and owned social properties via Facbook tab application –Facebook users can be directed to our own knowledge site and get a deeper level of engagement and experience among an articulated and curated crowd
Peer-to-peer engagement – In the A1 Support Community users help users and with LSW social media agents can effectively assess and steer the need of providing additional answers to the user-generated content
Trend intelligence – By engaging community members in idea exchange boards and through intelligent tagging we can identify trending topics and connect them with observations from our other social media channels
Premature crisis management – LSW enables qualitative sentiment analysis of community content and helps to raise awareness for customer dissatisfaction with our service
Benefits of having a Lithium Community and LSW for our digital strategy
With our Lithium-powered Community and LSW we are able to exercise full control over the digital service topics incurring within the service tools of the A1.net online portal or on the other A1 social media channels. A specific process has been established for fast improvement measures where service issues were reported by community users.
This process entails the identification of service issues, e.g. with the disrupted transmission of A1 TV on customers’ TV screens, by the A1 social media team. With LSW the social media team was able to assign new tags to this kind of issue and to observe the sentiments resulting from this topic. The service disruption as well as the magnitude of concerned customers was reported to the A1 customer and field service to prepare and sensitize all customer touch points. In a second step the A1 TV product management was informed and presented with the LSW analysis. Consequently, reasons for the service disruptions were analyzed and the product management could take up the depth of the issue by receiving daily updates from the community. The A1 TV product management team was also able to actively listen to the community discussions of the TV issues and the proposed solutions by members. As the share of negative sentiments towards A1 TV began to rise the corporate communications department was integrated in order to create unified statements regarding criticism in other media. Subsequently, a broader project team responsible for fast corrections of the detected issues with A1 TV was built. By involving the A1 social media team into the project, informal feedback and solutions posted by the community crowd were taken into account and directly integrated into the product improvements. Within 12 days A1 managed to provide A1 TV customers with a new interface, improved connectivity and a reduction in switching time.
The A1 Support Community currently counts 25,000 logins per month and has acquired 175,000 registered members so far.
With an average real service substitution rate of 25%, A1 was able to save about 50.000 service interaction in January 2015 (calls and e-mails per month) and could therefore strongly increase its agent efficiency gains. What is more, although the amount of total community visits dropped in summer 2014 because community posts were then also integrated into the A1.net portal search the traffic began to soar up again in the following months. In addition, the weighted average for the real service substitution rate also increased and refers to an even more purposeful visitor stream.
With 80% of user-generated content A1 is also able to draw detailed insights from the community posts and create more innovative and competitive services for its subscribers.
