Company: Sky UK
Contact: Graham Henderson (Community Manager)
Community: Sky Community
Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction
Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company. The group serves 21 million customers across five countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK and Ireland. We offer the best and broadest range of content, deliver market-leading customer service and use innovative new technology to give customers a better TV experience, whenever and wherever they choose.
Our 2015 customer satisfaction initiatives
Community Oracle Programme
At Sky our service message is a simple one; “We want to offer the best service in the country”. The Sky Community was founded in 2010. Since inception we’ve adopted and tested a number of engagement models. At the outset we had a handful of staff and then moved to full service model with over 50 fulltime agents responding to customer posts in the Community. The long-term aim was for the Community to move to a peer to peer model when the user base was high enough. We felt the time was right at the end of 2015 when we had a staggering 1.5 million Community members. We now operate with a peer to peer model with strategic engagement from a team of 5 Community Engagement Specialists and one Community Manager. How can you go from 50 staff to 5 staff overnight while growing a community and out performing business KPI’s like NPS and call deflection? For us, the answer was simple! We had to empower our members by opening our doors and letting them look inside- a real challenge with multiple sites and over 30,000 employees across the UK. We had been running a community Superuser program since 2011 with a relatively small number of members, typically ranging from 8 to 12 members. Despite this small number, these particular members were responsible for creating the best engagement, sharing the best knowledge and generating balanced discussions. We’ve never had a formal Superuser structure in place. No events, no incentives, limited communication and no additional tools. We literally gave them a Superuser badge and said “off you go”. We realized that this had to change!
The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via our Lithium implementation
We wanted to increase NPS, increase the number of accepted solutions and ultimately deflect calls. We wanted the community to become our customers first port of call, regardless of their interests and levels of digital platform usage. We had already identified our Superusers as the solution, but had to find a way to increase their contribution, offer them more support and grow our Superuser numbers. So what did we do? The first thing we did was listen! We asked our Superusers for feedback and spoke Lithium about best practice. Some of the feedback was great, but much of it was tough to hear. Our conclusion was simple; “we’re letting these members down and need to do more. We’ll never increase NPS or call deflection with this current model”. It was then that the “Oracle” programme was born. We launched in January 2016.
Features of the Oracle Program:
- Annual event – We introduced an all expenses paid annual event to show them how much we care. For the first time we brought the whole business together using our community. They viewed our product labs, touched Sky Q for the first time, toured our news and sports studios, sat in a McLaren F1 car and met some of our TV presenters.
Our Sky News HQ presenters left the studio to meet our Oracles. (from left to right: Natalie Sawyer (Presenter), Robbie (Oracle), Adam Leventhal (Presenter)
Our Oracles toured Sky studios and many fulfilled a lifetime dream to see and touch a real McLaren Mercedes F1 car.
- Annual program that recycles every year. This allows us to keep the program fresh and current. It also allows us the ability to take time out to reward our best members.
- Incentives – for the first time our best members are rewarded. The annual program allows us to modify and improve the incentives as we learn through data and qualitative feedback. We also invite Oracles to adhoc events, such as the Sky Q press launch. Two Oracles attended and subsequently answered over 90% of all questions related to the product up until launch.
Andrew Olson (Director of New Products) presents Sky Q to the world during our London launch event. Our Oracles were there along with the press and VIP’s.
- Quarterly hangouts – We jump on a call every quarter and tell our Oracles about our jobs what we’re working on. We also invite guest speakers from across Sky to answer their questions. They love the techie stuff!
- Badging- we implemented Lithium gamification and incorporated an Oracle badge to recognise their community contribution.
- Access to ALL product BETA trials. Our Oracles are the first customers in the UK to use our new products and apps.
- VIP access to priority customer service line.
Our metrics
After months of work, many late nights and a trip to SKY HQ we had to ask our Oracles for feedback. This is what they said about our first ever Oracle event held at Sky Studios, London:
A few quotes from our Oracles after our first ever oracle event:
“Great day”
“Lovely to see you all there Thank you for a lovely day. “
“It was great meeting you all and sure was a busy day. I’d just like to say a big thank you to all the staff involved in making this day possible, and to those of you who were able to come along”.
“Thanks again to all those there today, thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish”.
The Results
Our NPS rose by 71 points following the introduction of our Oracle programme.
Our accepted solutions more than trebled following the launch of the programme. We asked our Lithium Strategy Consultant to run a short session to explain how to write and structure posts. This was delivered to our Oracles in a fun and interactive session- the results speak for themselves!
Post volumes of Oracles that we invited to the Sky Q VIP launch. Following the event, they became advocates for our new product offering. The red line signifies the Sky Q launch and Sky Q comparison shown in relation to existing TV product..
In summary, we increased our net promoter score (NPS) by 1800%. Increasing accepted solutions by 467% was key to our uplift in NPS. We made solutions easier to find by installing the “featured thread” component and highlighting solutions at the start of all discussion threads- both Lithium features. Inviting Community Oracles to take part in our new product launch resulted in them responding to over 90% of all customer questions within that new product area. In addition, we promoted community blogs via our Twitter help handle by utilizing publisher in LSW. We focused on promoting digital services and Sky Q. This increased blog views by 682%.