Company: Telstra
Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Crowd, Help & Support Lead
Community: Telstra CrowdSupport (http://crowdsupport.telstra.com.au/)
Lithy category: Total Community All Star
Telstra is Australia’s largest Telecommunications Company and for over a hundred years we have connected Aussies with each other and the rest of the world.
At Telstra we seek to connect and engage people, our customers and employees. Our digital transformation starts with people, not technology.
Both customers and employees engage digitally with Telstra every day – at scale, seeking to have their questions answered or problems resolved – and share their experiences with our products and the rapidly changing technology landscape. Increasingly, our customers expect and deserve the same level of authenticity from interactions in digital environments as they have traditionally been offered in the offline world.
Telstra has leveraged Lithium Products & Services to build an entire digital eco-system that transcends incumbent boundaries of segment, device, employee and customer.
Building upon our award winning customer community CrowdSupport® - we have extended our digital eco-system unabated to deliver employee collaboration, real-time omni-channel dialogue, complete visibility and measurement in social and a step change in customer help and support.
CrowdSupport®
Through our CrowdSupport community customers can receive quick and reliable responses to questions from community members – both customers and Telstra employees. The contribution from our community members is the difference between ‘good’ and ‘great’ – we recognise community members’ contribution with ‘meet-up’ events and exclusive access to products and services in addition to the established ‘gamification’ model.
Store Locator & Community – Unlocking Omni-Channel
We’ve deployed a single search platform to enable real-time customer feedback and discussion for Telstra’s store network nationally. Team members in store can now directly connect digitally with their customers, helping to create an omni-channel presence.
Telstra Wi-Fi® – a community of Wi-Fi
Telstra is creating Australia’s largest Wi-Fi network. Through the CrowdSupport community customers can locate their nearest hotspot, provide feedback and discuss tips and techniques at an individual access point level. Telstra has over 1,100 hotspots nationwide and over 1 million devices have connected to the network.
CrowdSupport Live – Taking community real-time
We have taken our community connection real-time with an integrated capability between CrowdSupport (Lithium) and CrowdSupport Live (Needle). Our community members are now able to sign up to conduct live chat sessions directly with other customers considering the purchase of new mobile handsets – this has delivered 4000+ chats year to date with great positive feedback.
Klout Integration– A global first
We have successfully integrated Klout into our CrowdSupport community – providing the next wave of gamification and customer value exchange for our community members.
Telstra’s In:sight community, powered by Lithium, is an enterprise community delivering premium access to the latest business thinking, technology, trends and exclusive events. There are now 2000+ registered members and our account executives are connecting in digital communities complementing a traditional face to face or telephone relationship model.
Peer Support
In May 2014, we launched our Peer Support community, which enables our digital and telephone centre teams to connect and share their knowledge and experience. We have thousands of employees actively using the community. PeerSupport has enabled Telstra to connect the knowledge of our digital and telephone centres in a way the company has never previously achieved. Employees are able to find information faster and the collaborative nature is delivering informative and timely updates.
A step change in Customer Help & Support
Telstra re-platformed our entire Customer Help & Support onto Lithium in 2015. Customers are now able to seamlessly connect company authored content (i.e. the ‘official source’) with community generated content. Through the power of the community customer feedback drives the creation of high value content – to date we have received over 12,000 content recommendations from our customers. This provides a great balance for our customers across a wide array of the trust and adoption curve.
Digital Customer Care – Total visibility
On the back of a large-scale rollout of Lithium Social Web in May 2013 Telstra’s 24x7 Digital Customer Care Team have completely embraced the plethora of benefits LSW offers our customers and employees. With rapid onboarding, flexible working, easy access to help and support content, automation, total visibility and measurement– we are operating like a Swiss clock in the rapidly changing social media landscape.
Figure 1: The ‘proof points’ for offering a dedicated internal employee community
Figure 2: Growing our digital eco-system sees growth in the anchor tenants too
Lithium Social Web – the game changer
April 17, 2013 was the day Telstra launched Lithium Social Web (LSW) and transformed our customer’s service experience in social. The seamless workflow, simplistic user experience, social integration, prioritisation and immediacy saw expediential improvement to our customer’s digital service experience.
Pre-Lithium, Telstra manually tracked customer posts and replies via spreadsheets. This was, of course, not sustainable. A solution was needed to handle the immense growth of digital connections in social.
Adoption of the Lithium Social Web was the right solution.
Our digital customer care experienced has improved in six main areas:
Figure 3: The impact of Lithium Social Web on Telstra Digital Customer Care
LSW allows Telstra to provide authentic high quality customer service, create thriving digital communities and foster an internal self service culture.
What’s next?
We have made considerable progress on our digital journey – we must continue at pace as our customers’ expectations increase in a world gone digital.
At Telstra, we believe that in the next five years
- 5G will be standardised
- Networks will be optimised for traffic against specific services and media types
- Consumer devices will be dominant, but small devices for data sensing and processing will make up a significant percentage of mobile and Internet traffic.
- Telecom and other industries will be more platform shaped, with data becoming as important as products.
- The world will be faster, and more connected with a billion more participants in the global economy
For our digital eco-system and our communities we will continue at the pace our customers expect and we will deliver:
LinkedIn integration for business. Considering two new users join LinkedIn every second, it is central to the digital life of businesses, and we are implementing a system where users can login and register with Telstra through their LinkedIn profile.
Achieve a unified social ecosystem, integrating with the core enterprise social platform, to drive a self service culture.
Provide employees with the ability to access a greater repository of knowledge and address issues in real time.
In closing....
Telstra is over 100 years old and is now empowering customers and employees by democratising customer service through rich community peer to peer service.
We are increasing our investment in our digital service for customers through our multiyear Digital First program. This will give our customers even greater control of their accounts and services, technical appointments and support options
We are working to achieve an even more unified digital customer ecosystem through leveraging a wide range of Lithium’s products and services, as we continue our journey to deliver a brilliant connected future for our customers and Telstra.
Appendix: Telstra communities
