Company: Fido (Rogers Communications)
Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager)
Community: Fido Community
Lithy category: Total Community All Star
Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).
Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.
The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the FidoTM wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.
Our Road to Lithium
In 2010, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the Fido Community. We wanted a best in class platform and a means for customers to self-serve, thereby deflecting calls from our contact centres. The support provided at that time was predominantly peer-to-peer technical support.
Around the same time, we launched our Social Support team, offering our customers a new and convenient support option. As such, we began to support and engage our customers on Twitter and Facebook. As our customers grew comfortable with these channels, they began to adopt this new means of social support and the number of followers grew.
In 2013, in order to further increase engagement on our social platforms, the scope of support provided in the Community expanded to include discussions on all consumer products and services.
Recognizing the need for optimizing responses and better reporting capabilities for our social support, we began searching for a social tool that would enable better customer engagement and provide valuable insights through data collection and reporting. After researching a number of social engagement tools, we found Lithium Social Web (LSW) to be the best option to meet our objectives and in 2014, the Social Support team was transitioned to the LSW platform. The transition proved valuable; giving us access to new functionalities and more insightful reporting.
In 2015, the company placed a huge emphasis on the Community and Social Media support, so we went ahead and included multiple enhancements and redesigns, which have proven to have a positive impact on our results. Thanks to the support and insights available through LSW and LSI, our Social Support team was able to consistently offer best-in-class service and deliver a NPS score amongst the highest throughout the company’s customer service channels.
When customers activate their Fido service, they receive this email:
Benefits of Having a Community and LSW
Having a Community is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Consumers have grown accustom to reading reviews and researching products online. “What do you recommend?” is a question anyone who’s worked in the servicing industry has heard. One of the greatest advantages of having a Community is that all this information is centralized, tabulated, searchable and kept up to date. Another great advantage is that some traffic directed to the Community is traffic deflected from our contact centres, resulting in the reduction in operational costs.
In most communities, questions are answered publicly, but our Lithium community allows us to answer our customers in private as well. This is very useful when customers have questions concerning their services or account, requiring us to discuss and exchange sensitive information. Our customers also love that we can treat their requests directly from the Community, as opposed to referring them to our other contact channels.
We also use the Community as a means of communication with our customers. For example, we inform our customers of upcoming software updates, Fido sponsored events, known issues, etc. This transparent approach is truly appreciated by our community members. But why stop there? Our contact centres also send our customers links to useful articles found in the Community, such as ways to pay your bill, ways to activate services, etc. The Community is used to support our customers even when they call in. Talk about versatility.
How do we keep track of all this information and manage all this traffic? That’s where LSW comes in.
LSW proved to be the perfect tool for our Community moderators, as it helped improve our response time by keeping on top of all Community posts, as opposed to sorting through them individually. To do this, we created a Community queue in LSW to receive all incoming Community posts. LSW allows us to “snooze” Community posts to allow time for our members to respond, based on our response strategy. We also created a common “FidoSolutions” Community profile, which we use for all of our Community PMs only, to make the process seamless from a customer perspective. In turn, this helped us be more efficient, improve our CHI score, response time, call deflection rates and resulted in cost savings.
LSW also proved efficient to help our Social Media Specialists to manage our incoming social media posts, improve on our response time and promote the Community thanks to the knowledge base feature. A single click allows us to answer our customers by sharing articles found within the Community and our website. It’s an incredible time saver and our Specialists and customers love it!
Here are some of the LSW features that help us deliver best in class service:
- Community response time: Moderators can “snooze” posts for a certain amount of time, based on our response strategy. The snooze functionality is essential to our Community moderation process. We snooze non-account specific inquiries, to give other Community members a chance to respond. If no one responds, we step in and assist. This incredibly useful functionality ensures no one is ever left unanswered.
- CommunityPMs: Moderators can take over the PM conversations from other moderators once their work shift has ended, greatly increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Information centralization: All customer information is now centralized, including contact info, and even notes for internal purposes.
- Profile merging: LSW allows us to merge customers various social profiles, so we always know who we are speaking with.
- Analytics and tags: This LSW feature helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…. Thanks to Analytics, we can clearly see what our customers are talking about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner.
- Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage with people who aren’t specifically reaching out to us.
- Klout: Allows us to prioritize influencers within our Queues and offer support accordingly.
Let’s not forget that we also utilize shared dashboards for real time reporting to specific people in the company and our launching a pilot for LSW experts in 2016 to hopefully improve our response time.
Our Results
LSW has helped us decrease our Community response time to 120 min in 2016 (93% improvement over 2014 and 34% over last year) while increasing our CHI score by 159 points. Our cost savings and call deflection rates continue to increase. In 2015, our customer survey results indicated over $385K in cost savings by deflecting calls from our contact centre. In the first quarter of 2016 alone, our customer surveys have shown we have already surpassed $625K in cost savings, and that is only for the Community.
For our Social Media Support, the implementation of LSW allowed us to maintain a response time of 15 minutes throughout 2015. The results from our customer surveys state that we recorded $329K in cost savings and ended 2015 with an NPS of over +60. We also ended the year with a Resolution rate of 90%, ascertaining our Social Support channels as a customer favourite.
Additionally, LSW allowed us to keep watch over our volumes and response time when we launched Facebook Messenger as a support channel through our website, and consequently, helped us to earn and keep the “very responsive” badge on Facebook.