Company: MEO (Portugal Telecom)

Entry submitted by: Hugo Rebelo, Self Care Manager and Vanessa Simão (Vanessa_Simao)

Community: MEO FÓRUM (https://forum.meo.pt/)

Lithy category: Social ROI Titan

MEO is a fully owned subsidiary of PT Portugal, a leading telecommunications and multimedia operator based in Portugal. The company’s activities extend across all telecommunications segments: fixed line, mobile, multimedia, data and business solutions.

In the Portuguese market, PT is the leader in all segments it operates, with over 6 million mobile subscribers, 2.5 million wireline voice customers, 1.4 million pay-tv customers and 1.4 million broadband customers. PT is the pioneer and the market leader of convergent services, with a comprehensive offer of 3Play and 4Play bundles.

In 2014 domestic business revenues amounted to Eur 2,455 million.

In April 2014 we launched the online community forum.meo.pt (MEO Forum), a user generated knowledge platform aimed at providing first aid care to customers, despite the service, brand or equipment they have, and at the same time promoting brand advocacy.

Integrated in a new digital strategy, where all digital customer touch-points are managed to ensure consistent brand experience and seamless customer journeys, the MEO Forum was launched as a crucial layer of our e-care channels framework.

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Since day one we developed the MEO Forum to be fully aligned with the other MEO digital platforms and sites, ensuring the desired consistency and synergies:

Common digital brand guidelines
Fully integrated within meo.pt site, as the other main digital platforms such as the customer selfcare site, the help and support contents, or the online store
Leverage on the single sign on (Login) used by all the MEO sites ecosystem
Contribute to traffic and lead generation through strong SEO performance
Social media integration with facebook
Mobile first strategy to drive user experience and address increasing usage of smartphones

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Being such a young community, our main objective was to increase MEO brand credibility and to become our customer’s first choice when searching for online support. We established 3 main goals for the project:

Member acquisition and usage growth

During the first 9 monthsof existence, MEO Forum outperformed our estimates across all the relevant metrics:

7.105 members were acquired, generating 20.444 new posts in a total of 662.352 visits
Each new topic resulted in 5 new response posts with 12% of them receiving Kudos
MEO Forum reached market leadership, overtaking the main competitor’s long established online community, with more than four years of activity (source: webspectator)

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A comprehensive marketing campaign was implemented to support the project launch. Several communication techniques were used to promote the forum, such as email marketing, banners in our web sites, social media campaigns, as well as a few non digital communication channels.

Additionally, we leveraged on the existing MEO single sign on (a proprietary sign on service with over 2.5 million users) to simplify registration and removing an important barrier to customer adoption and participation.

2. Resolution rate and call deflection

The main purpose of having an online community was to provide good and credible first aid care to customers, in order to improve customer satisfaction and reduce customer care costs with traditional channels.

Since we launched the forum, we are recording a decrease in the percentage of customers who need to use another customer care channel after visiting the forum, either for posting or just browsing for a solution. We call this “Leakage” – in 2014 less than 5% of the MEO Forum visitors had to contact a traditional customer care channel within the following 7 days.

To ensure that the appropriate content is provided to the community to minimize leakage, we have dedicated staff members and moderators with complementary roles. Staff members are there to help customers with personal queries and are the official voice of MEO. Moderators help to moderate the community, controlling members’ behavior, providing support in most of the community questions, and also generating new content.

Technical tutorials created by our moderators and other loyal and more active members, are appreciated by the community and contribute greatly to this decrease. They have high page views numbers and are also used by our technical staff.

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3. Customer journeys optimisation and customer listening

As customer journeys are becoming increasingly digital, the number of customers that are firstly searching for help in the internet is growing consistently.

With the launch of MEO Forum, we intended to bridge the gap in our digital presence, providing our customers with a branded and credible online community where they can interact with other members to solve their service queries.

As more and more of these customer journeys begin with a Google search, SEO becomes top priority when it comes to implement good customer experiences. The quality of the content created by the online community and the increasing number of visits is generating more SEO traffic to our MEO website, fueling lead generation and engagement with the brand. As of December 2014, 9% of the meo.pt website SEO traffic was generated by MEO Forum.

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MEO Forum strategy has been focusing on community listening to better understand our customer needs and provide valuable and timely information to the organization.

Today our help and support team and customer care teams are regularly updating their contents and processes based on insights from the community, which demonstrates how the MEO Forum helping to transform the way we serve our customers, beyond the digital frontier.

ROI

Despite the early stage of development, MEO Forum recorded fast growing adoption and usage metrics. In the last 12 months we had over 900 thousand visitors, which is close to 20% of the Portuguese population with internet access.

Based on the results achieved by the MEO Forum, and considering the outcomes of an online survey we conducted on the community website, we built a ROI model where we estimate savings in customer contact deflection of approximately € 560.000 during these first 12 months of activity.

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Lithys 2015: MEO (Portugal Telecom) - Social ROI Titan