Company: Comcast
Entry submitted by: Jared Schultheis (jschultheis) Executive Director, Digital Care
Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums (Forums.comcast.com)
LSW: @comcastcares, facebook.com/xfinity
Lithy category: Social ROI Titan
Comcast Corporation is a global media and technology company with two primary businesses, Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal. Comcast Cable is the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.
Our 2014 objectives
Comcast strategic enhancements in 2014 included expanding the use of Lithium Social Web and completely redesigning and enhancing our Comcast community. We significantly expanded our use of all features of the engagement console to measure the investment, success and the increasing need to support the social channel better. Similar work was done in the community, such as building:
- Gamification
- Author profiles
- Mobile
- Expert user program
- Content management
- Search Dedicated moderation
- Cross-channel integration
Key achievements include:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration
The integration of CRM is a significant first step in allowing us to analyze customer behaviors, close the communication gap from social to other front line channels and identify account health opportunities. Below is a timeline reflecting the integration of social with other touch points a customer had with the company.
- Escalation Workflow
We now have a more stable workflow to escalate conversations to our divisional teams and senior specialists within the Digital Care team. The new enhanced workflow increased our in-channel resolution rates significantly (nearly 20 pp).
- Routing Enhancements
The routing system was built with multiple triaging capabilities. Specialists can now work on specific issues based on their background and strengths. This provides not just a better customer experience but a more in-depth measurement on trending tags. Below shows an example of the tagging system Comcast uses to triage social volume.
- Early Warning System
The dashboard helps the Digital Care team alert multiple organizations within the company on trending events on social. In many cases, outages or viral events were recognized 30 minutes in advance of a normal call center trend or spike in volume. In the first three months of using the console, the cost savings have exceeded expectations.
While the Digital Care team is saving Comcast significant costs through call deflection, call avoidance, customer health and customer engagement, the most passionate win for the team the improvement in the overall customer experience. Our biggest ROI measurement is our increased ability to provide best-in-class service to our customers.
Comcast’s number one goal is to transform our customer experience. We strive to provide outstanding service to our customers, offer them the best products in the market and be proactive with our communication. Social media has become a strong and effective service channel for our customers to seek solutions to issues or answers to their questions. The ROI for Comcast is the improved capability of our Digital Care team to provide excellent service. Our customers deserve the best experience every time they interact with us and to find care and support through whatever channel they want to use. With the help of Lithium communities and LSW, we are able to measure success and track volume and engagement from each social platform. With these simple measurements, we have been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of social care leading to a tripling in size of the Digital Care team (http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/now-hiring-comcastcares ). With these additional team members we will be able support customers across more platforms and get to them faster. The growth of digital care has been explosive the past two years. The following chart shows the growth and development of our social care strategy and capabilities over time.
In addition, our Community roadmap continues to be geared towards: optimizing and growing the community, organizing and improving content, and scaling and integrating cross-channel. Through these initiatives, we expect the ROI on our community to increase by 500% by the end of 2015.
Additional business results achieved
The Digital Care team has a unique opportunity to improve the overall customer experience. As we have built out our social care capabilities our data has shown us that although the social care team is providing timely and effective resolutions to issues, the sentiment of the social conversation remains neutral (see diagram below).
When customers reach out to the Digital Care team for support, they expect us to resolve their issue. Although the care specialist resolves the issue, the customer can still have a negative or neutral sentiment because the issue happened in the first place. To increase customer satisfaction and brand perception, the Digital Care team now conducts a wellness exam to proactively look for potential problems or red flags on accounts. For example, the specialist researches a customer’s bill to discover when his or her promotion is up, makes the customer aware, and in some cases repackages them on the spot to a more affordable package. This is a great way to inform and educate customers about their services and provide opportunities to surprise and delight them.
We measure customer contact rates from multiple channels and are finding that social can be very effective at providing a better customer experience. Since 2010, we have seen nearly a 25% reduction in calls coming in and a 35% reduction in the need for service visits to customers’ homes in part by providing solutions through social and community channels. Through detailed analysis and application of data garnered through our LSW Analytics and LSI for our communities, we have seen that the amplification benefit or providing solutions that other customers can use has helped the Digital Care team handle nearly double the volume of more traditional channels.
Assuring customers that the person on the other side of the social conversation is doing everything he or she can to be responsive and helpful will help increase customer loyalty. Our mission is to provide care and support to anyone who needs help, wherever they want it through accurate measurement and timely responses on all channels while continuously improving the customer experience.
