Company: Telefonica O2 UK
Entry submitted by: Marjo Hallapera (marion101) Head of Community
Community: O2 UK Community (http://community.o2.co.uk/)
Lithy category: Support Savings MVP
The O2 UK is a Telefónica-owned company, managing communities on an international scale in order to optimize and enhance the way in which brands interact and engage with their valued customers. One such community is O2 UK. With more than 20 million customers, O2 is one of the largest mobile telecommunications providers in the United Kingdom. It is supported by Telefónica whose strategy is to become the leading global communications company in the digital world with a goal of opening new pathways, which continue to transform possibilities into reality for their customers.
The O2 Community has gone from strength to strength in 2014, utilizing user-generated content (UGC) and site navigation in a number of ways to ensure our community content is as useful and cost-effective as possible.
Guides created by members on the O2 Community are consistently detailed, accurate and attract the trust of other members due to the supportive atmosphere encouraged and maintained by our Community Team. UGC is consistently useful for customer awareness and deflection to the 500,000+ unique users coming to our community every month.
Due to the high quality of the content created, we have begun to integrate it into our business on a wider scale. One guide for example is used for network self-diagnosis, a commonly queried issue in any telecoms company. This single community post, when used on Twitter, turns a normal 3-tweet customer interaction into a single tweet, attributing to a major cost savings per year. It frees the time up of many advisors, making them considerably more efficient. In 2015 we will repeat this process with a number of products and services, ensuring that our community content forms an even stronger base of knowledge. Below is a snippet of one of our great UGC pieces, with 280,500 views and constantly counting:
We welcome UGC in a number of forms. In 2014 alone, the community welcomed 47 video guides to be used by other customers. These video guides (including iPhone self-help, Operating System tutorials, etc.) have been created at absolutely no cost to O2, but can be used to help other customers as any professional video could – producing a single video elsewhere could otherwise cost the company $7k. This process also enables our customers to contribute to the business they use, and ultimately, to feel as valued as they truly are.
Due to the high volume of visits to certain pages on the community, such as details on services and products, they have attracted a high SEO value to the business. We have utilized this high volume by adding banners for other products within these community pages. This creates a huge amount of awareness for these products, as well as ensuring the community and its potential is tapped into as much as possible. This approach also mirrors in our OS and device announcements, where we often attract over 20,000 views to single update posts that are also shared across the web.
Finally, we have created a campaign within the community to help members to decide on which devices to purchase as a result of peer reviews. Try the Tech allows members to ‘borrow’ devices from us for a few weeks to test out. Every tester writes a thorough review and each content piece creates vibrant discussions about which devices to purchase. The quality of these reviews is so high that device manufacturers have reached out to us in order to gain high quality reviews on brand new devices that will increase sales. Testing and reviewing a device also gives the members more knowledge about the device itself and thus helps them out when offering advice to others on the community. Check out the link below for an example of the quality of content we attract.
Samsung Galaxy Note 4 review (TryThe Tech)
On top of all of these aspects of benefit the community provides for O2, the peer-to-peer advice concept methodology is ever-present, with members offering advice every day. The average response time on the community (when analyzing a full 24 hour cycle) is consistently under 300 minutes and often under 200 minutes, ensuring that any members who enter will have an answer quickly and efficiently. Our regular members are here each and every day, offering insights as well as advice. They have an online home in the community, which is easy to see when we consider that one of our more regular members posted more than 16,000 times in 2014.
