Company: KPN
Entry submitted by: Lourens Reijgersberg, Hugo de Vries, and Thomas Pel (ThomasPel) Social Innovations Manager
Community: KPN Community (http://forum.kpn.com)
Lithy category: Support Savings MVP
KPN is a leading Dutch provider of ICT services. With a wide range of products and services, we operate with different brands many different customer groups – both at home and abroad. From prepaid calling in the US, to interactive HD television in the Netherlands.
Meeting business goals and driving success with the KPN Customer Community
In 2010 KPN set out on a journey to realize the ambition to become the best Dutch service provider in 2015, whilst also making a shift left and become an ‘online first’ company. The introduction of the Lithium community in 2011 was one of the key strategies to fast-track both ambitions.
From 2011 through 2013 the community has been experiencing a gradual growth of Dutchies interacting with each other around the KPN brand, products and services. Averaging around 2500 posts, 200K visits and 28000 answers found every month in 2013, the community eventually brought in 1,7M Euros in cost savings through call deflection at the end of 2013.
These results opened up more internal support and 2014 held the promise of becoming the year to professionalize and innovate the community in ways that hadn’t been done before. More manpower was added to the community team and internal development capacity was brought in to ensure maximum growth for the community, all the while adding up to the ultimate goal of becoming the best service provider for our clients.
Driving activity by adding Lithium badges
KPN was the first customer worldwide to release Lithium Badges as part of the betáprogram and did so with great success. The added feature of well-designed badges rewarding various forms of activity (posts, kudos, accepted solutions) resulted in a 10% increase of activity among the lower and medium ranked members on the forums.
Customer driven Community Re-design
In 2014 the entire KPN Community was revamped with a fresh, innovative design that implemented a number of features requested by the community, while still staying true to the broader brand-style. The addition of TKB and the profile gamification widget in particular we’re exceptionally well received by our userbase.
MyKPN Betá
In august of 2014 the release of a dedicated co-creation platform on the community –aptly named ‘OurKPN’- coincided with the release of the new MyKPN portal. All the betáphase testing of the new KPN Client Portal (aka MyKPN) was done with community members, resulting in more actual client feedback than ever before and eventually in a better product!
Connecting employees with the Community
In an effort to open up the immense amount of knowledge available in the minds of our employees for the community, we decided to connect our internal social platform for KPN employees (TeamKPN) to the community. Questions asked on the community can be highlighted in TeamKPN in an effort to involve employees with the relevant –often niche- knowledge in the discussion.
KPN Community driving change and innovation in the organization
The addition of the community as an fully grown customer channel has driven a number of changes in our traditional customer care approach and some nifty innovations in the slipstream of said changes. While a certain amount of hesitation was expected from our side, these changes have actually been welcomed and applauded as a useful addition by the customer care organization.
Improved FAQ’s
Clients connect and communicate with other clients in a manner that is rather different from the way most companies interact with their clients. This in itself isn’t much of an eye-opener, however when it comes to explaining detailed technical features or innovations around a particular product or service, this knowledge can be put to good use.
We noticed that in some cases, community members were in actually better at explaining our products in a user-friendly way than we were. This led to us integrating community content within our existing internal and external FAQ’s and actually asking the community pro-actively to comment and feedback on some of them. A large number of FAQ’s have now been curated through co-creation and their appreciation value has risen significantly since.
Customer Care using community content and TKB
To maximize the use of community content and make the knowledge available to customers who haven’t been on the community yet, we made use of the integration options between Lithium and Salesforce. Through Salesforce knowledge our customer care agent now have the ability to pull relevant answers from the TKB and community content and share this with customers via phone, e-mail or other social channels.
KPN Community facts and figures 2014
The effect of all this added value to the community was overwhelming. The KPN Community experienced a dramatic increase in activity in it’s already active userbase. The number of monthly posts grew to 4000, which in turn led to even more customers finding their answers on the community. A massive number of 1 million answers were found in 2014, resulting in a cost saving of €4,5 million euros by the end of the 2014!
2015 and beyond
The thriving state the community is at right now opens up countless possibilities. For the near future we are planning to enhance and innovate the platform even further, adding things like theme headers, a full blown co-creation platform and a smooth mobile design.
From a community management perspective the focus will be on expanding the pilots and co-creation efforts as those are definitely something our members appreciate and the further professionalization of the superuser program. We’re looking forward to it!
