Company: Rogers
Entry submitted by: Margaret Tsuji (Community Forums and Social Media Support Manager)
Community: Rogers Community Forums
Lithy Category: Total Community All Star
Rogers Communications is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada's largest provider of wireless communications services and one of Canada's leading providers of cable television, high speed internet and telephony services.
In 2014, we launched a multi-year plan, called Rogers 3.0, to revitalize the company’s legacy of innovation and growth. The plan is centered around delivering a better experience for our customers. We are focused on fixing the basics, creating a more consistent experience and improving customer self-service.
Our road to Lithium
In 2010, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the Rogers Community Forums. 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.
With the successful launch of the Rogers Community Forums, we sought new opportunities to engage with our customers; Twitter and Facebook were the obvious choices.
In 2011, we launched our Social Media Support team, offering our customers a new and convenient support option. As such, we began to support and engage with our customers on Twitter and Facebook. As we earned their trust through the provision of reliable support and information, customers began to adopt this new means of social support and the volume of customer interactions in social media grew exponentially.
Recognizing the need for 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 settled on Lithium Social Web (LSW) and in 2014, the Social Media Support team was transitioned to the LSW platform. The transition gave us access to more insightful reporting and new capabilities.
Our Social Media Support team started off as a small group providing customer support on Facebook, Twitter and moderation of the Rogers Community Forums. We now have a significantly larger team supporting customers in social media and for the first time ever, we have a dedicated moderator team for the Rogers Community Forums.
The benefits of having both a community and LSW
A Lithium community and LSW are important to our social strategy of providing customers with convenience through self-serve. LSW enables seamless engagement with our customers, allowing us to respond to their support requests on Facebook/Twitter via PM/DM or in public, while the Community Forums serve as a lasting source of relevant and helpful content.
In 2015, we optimized the Rogers Community Forums by leveraging insights from Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI). Our focus was set on content optimization, customer support and redesigning the Community Forums. We underwent a significant clean up and optimization exercise where we reviewed each and every post (all the way back from 2010) to ensure accuracy and relevance of information, accepted or provided solutions, and then creation of new content via posts, videos and blogs which aligned to contact centre top call driver results.
In addition to a significant community redesign in partnership with Lithium, we also launched Gamification in 2015. Take a look at some of our badges:
And we were one of the first Lithium communities to undergo a Responsive redesign. Over 30% of our traffic comes in from mobile devices and we expect this number to increase.
We also shifted from a purely peer-to-peer support model and started to provide direct support to customers in the Community Forums when our Super Users or other users are unable to assist. We created a common handle called @CommunityHelps to PM with users in the Community Forums. This helps our interactions look and feel seamless to the user and allows us to house all PM conversations in a single, easily-accessed inbox.
Our super user program is a key pillar of our overall Community Forums strategy. In 2015, we created “Front of the Line” service for our Super Users. In LSW, we have tagged our Super Users as priority customers so they receive even faster service through our social channels if they need it. It’s a small token of appreciation for their help in the Community Forums and it’s made possible by LSW.
Our Total Community results
Today, the Rogers Community Forums is staffed to support customers from 8 am to midnight, 7 days a week. Our response time has dropped dramatically to under 60 minutes. We create content daily using blogs, posts, videos and live Rogers Ask an Expert events. Our marketing teams have created detailed communication plans to promote the Rogers Community Forums as a destination for self-serve. We are also invited to every go-to-market activity across the company; Community Forums are now seen as a channel in which we can communicate new product/service launches AND obtain valuable customer insights/feedback post-launch.
Take a look at some of the promotional material designed to drive traffic to the Rogers Community Forums:
We achieved some amazing results from all of our efforts in 2015 (chart below). We have set some aspirational targets for 2016 and are confident that we are well on our way to our goal of offering a best-in-class customer experience.
|
KPI |
2015 Results |
|
Registered users |
20% YoY ↑ |
|
Page views |
60% YoY ↑ |
|
CHI |
All time high 787 in Sept |
|
Response time |
<60 minutes |
|
Call deflection |
Deflected 160k+ calls |
|
Super users |
11 super users spent 4,713 hours online |