Company: Optus
Contact: Karen Le (Community Manager)
Community: My Optus Community
Lithy category: Support Savings MVP
As Australia's second largest Telecommunication provider, Optus is in the business of connecting people. We offer a broad range of communications services including mobile, telephony, internet, business network services, satellite services and subscription television to over ten million customers every day.
While we are a company that is focused on enabling homes and businesses with technology and entertainment, our vision is to lead Australia in outstanding customer experience.
How community meets our customer care business goals
Like many companies, the provision of customer service through traditional channels contributes to a significant proportion of our operational cost base. This year, our overarching Customer Service Strategy has been firmly rooted in digital with the dual purpose of meeting the shift in customer preference and reducing support costs. The under-utilisation of community based customer support was recognised as a key area of opportunity. The resulting business objective was to actively drive My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre during FY16 (March ’15 to April ‘16). What we actually achieved was an incremental 500,000+ calls. There were a number of key initiatives that were implemented in order to achieve these goals;
Integration of Community within our digital assets
This focused on the inclusion of contextually relevant widgets that surface community conversation on the optus.com.au website, including the homepage, help & support, product and sales pages. Strong community CTA’s were on all electronic communications and a further extension of our online integration strategy has been to develop campaign landing pages directly within the community; giving customers the opportunity to directly ask questions, comment and respond directly. These questions are work flowed into to LSW where moderators are able to respond where required. This has worked so well that the Pre- Paid team have made the community landing page part of the customer on-boarding journey, allowing all new Pre-Paid customers ask questions at the time of setup to provide a seamless experience.
Pre-Paid Welcome Hub
Default support channel within our Go to Market Programs
One of the most significant cultural changes was to position to community as THE default support channel for our Go To Market programs. When Optus launched a new mobile App in September, WiFi Talk (gives customers with limited indoor mobile coverage can use the app to make and receive calls over a WiFi connection), My Optus Community was used as the primary support channel and for the very first time all the customer broadcast communications directed customers to a blog post in My Optus Community with all of the key details. Over 67,000 people viewed the post, resulting in 230 comments. This was so effective that only 20 support calls were logged about WiFi Talk issues each week since it launched. This has been successfully replicated a number of times since with equal success and is now considered BAU practice.
WiFi Talk Launch
Australia’s First Responsive Community
We’ve acknowledged the trend of needing support on-the-go by making My Optus Community the first fully responsive community in Australia, ensuring that members have the same experience across all of their devices. This has resulted in a jump from 510K mobile visits last financial year to 1.3 million this year. Today over 50% of our traffic is generated by mobile devices.
Driving traffic and informing customers through the Optus Blog
In June of 2015 we launched the My Optus Community Blog, which has played an important role in our content marketing strategy and has been an excellent vehicle for the discovery of community content. Since launch, we have maintained a steady rhythm of content production with over 125 articles published, which have received over 500,000 page views and contribute a significant proportion of search referrals.
Improving the Resolution Rate
In a world first, we customised the way that the Tribal Knowledgebase (TKB) module is traditionally used to change the way articles are created and published. In doing so, we give community members the control to identify support content they want and think other members might need, allowing us to scale through crowd sourcing. Threads can be nominated as Wiki articles by the community, who can also make updates to the content, giving them power to help other members. Since we launched this module in September, 63 articles have been authored and received over 26,000 views.
My Optus Community Wiki
This combined with prioritised routing of unanswered posts into the social media team through LSW has seen the customer reported resolution rate increase from 9% to 37%.
Retaining & recognising our members
The implementation of a formalised Super User program and the introduction of Premium Gamification has seen the contributions made from our super users increase by almost 300% year on year. This translates to almost 1,500 hours being spent in the community by our top 5 users. The program runs on a 6 month cycle, is built on deep personal relationships (that extends into the ‘real’ world) and actively recruits users from other communities based on a set of attributes.
The execution of our strategy in combination with attentive and responsive community management has seen us exceed the 350,000 incremental call reduction target by more almost 60%, delivering a 230% increase on Opex saving.
Cost reductions from our community
The organisation’s business objective was to actively utilise My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre. These call reduction projections are used to plan for our voice channel workforce. The number of actual calls are recorded and tracked against the projection figures ensure that capacity planning and headcount is accurate and adjustments are made accordingly, and due to these reduced volumes we are able to incrementally increase capacity when unforeseen issues arise.
Also, through the increased participation by members there a reduction in the reliance on Optus moderators to input into the discussion by 40% in comparison to the previous financial year, meaning we were able to handle an 82% increase in engagement volume across social with minimal increase in resource (4 FTE).
Our results
The combination of executive support, solid strategy and a focused team has delivered an outstanding set of outcomes for My Optus Community including an incremental reduction of over 500,000 calls delivering 230% increase on Opex savings. There has been a considerable impact, not only on the number of calls reduced but in the way we organise and plan our headcount and workforce. This has meant we’ve been able to provide more support to customers when they need us as well as a significant reduction in our operational expenditure.
Listen to what the VP of Customer Service has to say about the results and the impact they’ve had on the organisation’s performance.