Company: Virgin Media
Entry submitted by: Jim Meadows (mrjimmeadows) Content Manager
Community: Virgin Media Help & Support Forum (virginmedia.com/forums)
Lithy category: Total Community All Star
Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impact on the way we live. As a leading communications provider it’s not just the technology that interests us – what matters is how it can improve the lives and prospects of everyone.
Today, Virgin Media is a part of Liberty Global plc, the world’s largest international cable company. Together Virgin Media and Liberty Global serve 24 million customers across 14 countries, helping connect people to the digital world and enabling them to discover and experience its endless possibilities.
Our aim is to provide the best customer care experience in the UK through eService. And, as the UK’s most socially devoted ISP, scaling our social media presence to meet the demand of our customers has been our greatest challenge. In March we became the first ISP to have sent 1Million tweets to customers and we believe the application of Lithium / LSW has been key to achieving this milestone.
Our road to Lithium was born out of three critical requirements.
The first was a desire for our platform to do more. Lithium was responsive and met our demand for performance improvements. We were specifically looking for a platform with both skill-based and priority routing; a single desktop to extend across both social and community; and the product needed to be responsive to Facebook & Twitter developments, adapting swiftly to changes such as page threading.
The second was a need to improve reporting. Here we were looking to identify trends and accurately measure sentiment, with the ultimate hope for real time reporting across the piece.
The third and most important requirement was to maintain and improve customer experience: to align one agent per customer, to reduce customer response times, to use rich media in responses, and to moderate our multi-channel offering through a single console – taking control of conversations to actively encourage peer-to-peer support and improve on social KPI’s.
Lithium’s continued commitment to evolving their platforms, and their ability to adapt effectively to changes in both social networks and social culture is key to our relationship. As Lithium continue to deliver on product, Virgin Media exceeds their operational and transactional goals.
Benefits of a Total Community
The marriage of LSW and Community has enabled Virgin Media to reimagine a niche online space, delivering a dynamic central hub for online help and support.
The transformation of Community places it at the heart of eService. The ability to create optimized content immediately supports customer navigation from social as we drive customers to the right information at the right time, and benefits such as Social Integration within Community and integrating user generated content into online help and support, have driven peer-to-peer support across all touch points.
Through applying rigorous routing principles across LSW we’ve been able to limit risk to our online reputation –high profile accounts are identified using Klout, Conversational Key Words and Verified Status. In addition we’ve been able to harmonize social engagement and combine content streams on Twitter adopting a larger audience for our acquisition & content marketing strategy, whilst developing our care team’s skills to respond to both care and engagement.
Employing a 24-hour snooze rule, we’re now proactively reaching out to customers who have yet to validate our advice and can ensure we close the loop on the majority of conversations – and have increased agent productivity by 24.07% and response times by 25.57% across social and a 59% increase in baseline productivity.
The impact of efficiency has given us scope to activate a new look and feel with more features from our Community supporting our strategy. Using a single console, we brought moderation in-house, developing people and the job role. We were able to implement an archive, improve the effectiveness of Community search and dramatically increase the number of useful solutions viewed. Mobile optimization has enabled customers to navigate content on the go, a huge benefit when home broadband connectivity may be the contact driver.
Appointing a Community Lead has leveraged the effectiveness of our new Superuser advocacy program, increasing their time spent online and overall contribution to support, this coupled with a new ability to our members has given us the opportunity to successfully trial key products through customer outreach – all in a controlled environment.
Our Total Community results
Over the last twelve months we’ve achieved our target of managing a single Twitter feed for marketing and customer care, leading to new brand records in engagement – whilst remaining devoted to customer experience; handling increases in volume, team size and improvements in sentiment across social.
Through Community we’ve seen incremental growth across all KPI’s. As a result of new member entrances up 23% and innovations driving increase in time spent online up 21% we’ve seen impact in kudos and accepted solutions marked up an enormous 76%.
The real benefit of this? The increase in accepted solutions viewed rising by 37%.
We’ve supported 5 major projects with trials including over 2000 triallists, delivering over 22,400 pieces of insight that have developed product ahead of launch and increased customer education – as a result, Superuser activity has hit highs of 37 hours per week (each) with replies from the group contributing to 18% of the overall volume leading overall peer to peer support to reach 80% across the last 12 months.
Whether it’s been the implementation of video content, ranking or board restructuring the technology has been key to giving us the freedom we need to adapt our channels yet the solidarity to manage one of the greatest social media workflows across one of the largest teams in the world, confidently.
“As we pass the milestone of our millionth tweet I am reminded of the amazing journey the Social Media Care team have been on over the last 4 years as we have grown from an ad hoc team of a couple of people to our current 50+ team members.
Always championing our brilliant basics of being there for our customers when they need us, a virtual listening ear, heartfelt service and served up with a dollop of humour, the team continue to push the boundaries and lead from the front in the UK social care space.
The future is bright as we continue to grow and will evolve the social support to be more encompassing across the opportunities for Care, Marketing, Revenue and PR.”
- Cormac Connolly, Director Channel Development, Virgin Media
