Company: Comcast
Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst)
Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums
Lithy category: Community Design of the Year
Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build a sophisticated network that delivers the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.
Who we are?
Comcast brings together the best in media and technology. We drive innovation to create the world’s best entertainment and online experiences. XFINITY TV offers customers the best viewing experience anytime, anywhere, with the most extensive collection of entertainment available on XFINITY On Demand, online at xfinity.com/tv, through the XFINITY TV App, XFINITY TV Go App, XFINITY My Account App and on XFINITY Streampix. The X1 Entertainment Operating System reflects the powerful innovation of bringing TV and Internet together to deliver a superior entertainment and communications experience for consumers. X1 delivers the simplest, fastest and most complete way for our customers to access all their entertainment from all of their screens. We provide the nation’s fastest most reliable Internet and in-home Wi-Fi speeds to more than 22 million high-speed Internet customers, even during peak use. Our millions of XFINITY Wi-Fi hotspots, allow customers to connect at the fastest Wi-Fi speeds around town. XFINITY Voice is an innovative and reliable IP-enabled home phone service that delivers digital-quality phone service with all of the functions of a traditional phone service, plus enhanced features that are integrated with other Comcast services. XFINITY Home is a growing collection of innovative security and smart home services that give customers added convenience and peace of mind.
Comcast Help & Support Forums:
Our Help & Support Forums are a great place for customers to find answers about their XFINITY products or to get help for service issues. Our forums get over two million unique visitors per month and if you search for a product or service question, links to our Forum pages are right at the top of the results.
Our forums are a place to learn from fellow customers. Nearly 98% of the searches conducted by visitors to the forums turn up related results that were generated by others posing similar questions.
Our forums have been a great resource for years. In 2015 we strove to make the forums as easy as possible for our customers to use, so we rebuilt them from the ground up, with a completely new user interface and easier navigation. But we didn’t stop there, with over 40% of our customers accessing our community from smart phones and tablets, we partnered with Lithium to deliver a fully responsive design that launched in the beginning of 2016.
Improved Search
The most striking change in our new layout was bringing Search front and center for any customer to locate what they’re looking for. Additionally, our new search function now includes real-time suggestions for posts that match customer search terms. There’s also the option to create a new post right from the search bar if none of the results answer the customer’s question.
Improved Content Categorization
We’ve organized all the content to help our users find answers and solve problems faster. We were also able to move our most visited boards above the fold. Our layout helps customers save time and reduce effort to find what they’re looking for.
New Features
We’ve added improved visual cues to highlight trending alerts, recent solutions, and feature our most active users. We launched badging to encourage the right types of user behavior for new community members and recognize the efforts of super users—our Experts— to stand out for the expertise they’ve displayed in helping others.
Links to Related Content
When viewing a discussion thread, the bottom of the page now has links to related content that may help answer questions and green check marks to let you customers quickly see that the question in that thread has an approved solution.
Evolution of the Comcast Community:
Impact
We currently have more than 5.4M registered users. In 2015 we had 21.5M Unique Visitors to our community, nearly 10M from mobile and tablet devices. There were more than 45.5M Page Views in the Help & Support Community. Through our community redesigns and scaling up of a dedicated community-focused internal team, we set our focus on improving our Solution Views. We had our biggest year ever for Solution Views: more than 8.25 million (a 13% increase year over year). Our commitment to our customers is simple: respect their time, simplify their experience and make things right if we fall short. We understand many people will look online first before trying to contact us through our traditional support channels. Our forums are an invaluable tool for accomplishing all three parts of our commitment. We’re able to highlight existing answers to many common questions, promote a vibrant peer-to-peer community and allow customers to engage how they want. This saves time in quickly locating the information they’re looking for, or quickly ask their own question if they haven’t found what they need. With a diverse mix of products and tools our team continues to evangelize the voice of the customer with product teams and encourage expert engagement from our internal experts to share knowledge, tips and tricks, and deliver the best customer experience.