Company: AT&T
Entry submitted by: Bridgette Butler (Lingoes) Sr. Community Manager
Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://forums.att.com)
Lithy category: Support Savings MVP
AT&T is bringing it all together - helping people mobilize their worlds - with advanced mobile services, next-generation TV and high-speed Internet services, and smart solutions for businesses.
For more than a century, we have consistently provided innovative, reliable, high-quality products and services. Our mission is to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else. We're creating new solutions for consumers and businesses to help them mobilize their communications and entertainment.
How our Community meets our customer care business goals
AT&T Community Forums provide 24 x 7 peer-to-peer assistance as well as AT&T direct support during normal business hours to tens of thousands of users daily, supporting customers across AT&T’s diverse spectrum of products and services. Recognizing areas underserved by more traditional support, in 2014 we launched a Third-Party Devices board and a Wearables board, together averaging approximately 75k page views by 45k unique visitors monthly. Additionally, we launched a public-facing board for Samsung representatives to interact publicly with our general community, and a Samsung Ambassadors board for those skilled professionals to interact privately with our 34 recipients of the Award for Community Excellence (ACE) . This innovation directly connected Samsung experts with AT&T experts, resulting in a superior customer experience that contributed to the rise in Customer Satisfaction we saw in 2014. We’ve begun tweeting out our most valuable Accepted Solutions, and linking to them from Facebook.
Example of AT&T Community Forums content in the Social Support Center of AT&T Facebook
To better assist the wider base of customers searching for help on att.com, we increased the number of Accepted Solutions appearing with knowledge base articles by 40%.
Example of “Help from Community Discussions” modal on an att.com knowledge base article
Additionally, the AT&T Community Forums redesign, launched during July 2014, provides in-context features, game mechanics and an unprecedented level of personalization that enables users to tailor their forums experience in new ways. Archiving activities prior to redesign also improved the relevancy of internal and external search results, fostering repeat traffic and increased viewership.
July, 2014 – from “Yawnnnnn”
…..to “Yowzers!”
How Community has changed our customer care organization
Sparked by the community’s success in producing call deflection, AT&T recently launched a team of crack Wireless specialists to assist customers with account and technical issues on the forums, much like the U-verse experts on-boarded in 2013. In addition, AT&T Community Forums was added to the att.com “Contact Us” flow. U-verse customer care agents now routinely refer customers to our Third-Party Devices board for support outside their traditional scope. AT&T’s 200k+ employees – including care agents – learned about the value of our community and especially its star ACEs via recognition in the AT&T Employee Insider newsletter and the AT&T Consumer Blog.
Our customer care business results
Call Shed
In 2014, AT&T Community Forums worked to implement a standardized call shed model through the extraction of Community key performance indicators and pairing visitor calling rates with quantitative sentiment survey data. This model enables us to identify opportunities within each LOB to serve up content that addresses top call drivers, effectively shifting contact volume from our Call Centers to the Community Forums while also growing online adoption. During 2014, AT&T Community Forums shed over 4 Million calls.
Cost Avoidance
Cost avoidance in the AT&T Community Forums determines digital ROI and frequently spurs Officer-level conversation around Community impact to the overall business. During 2014, the AT&T Community Forums generated over $30 Million in savings for the Organization, driving further ideation for additional points of invocation and awareness-building campaigns.
New Threads - Accepted Solutions
On a larger scale, our groundbreaking Community redesign with a faster, simplified user experience launched in July, 2014, yielded a 19% increase in call shed. Key drivers impacting Call Shed include a 54% lift in new thread creation and a 63% improvement in accepted solution development.
