Company: Swisscom
Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer)
Community: Swisscom Community
Lithy category: Total Community All Star
As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digital world. Our aim is to inspire our customers with the best network, superb offers and outstanding service. Swisscom is one of the most famous and popular brands in Switzerland.
Our service leadership is not only distinguished by the fact that we offer an outstanding level of service in our own service touchpoints, such as the hotline and shops, but also that we reach our customers where they are most active from day-to-day: online and especially on the social web.
Swisscom’s road to Lithium Total Community
The decision to use Lithium was made in 2009. As an early adopter, we were among the first ten European clients to launch a Lithium Community. Two years later, we were the second client in Europe to put LSW into operation. As soon as the partnership began, it became clear that Lithium would be able to help us assert our service leadership in the social web as well.
Fig. 1: Social Media Universe of Swisscom
LSW for service dialogue in four languages
For the digital avant-garde, we offer full-blown customer care on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Messenger. Simple service requests and complex issues alike are resolved on these channels. Our goal is to offer an end-to-end resolution of the customer’s request on the channel of his choice.
LSW allows not only for effective dialogue management, but also, and in particular, a smooth internal organisation. Service inquiries we receive in German, French, Italian, and English can be distributed easily among two teams in different locations. Since PR, Marketing, and Incident Management specialists also work with LSW, it is possible to provide qualified responses to such inquires as well.
Fig. 2: LSW Setup at Swisscom
Community forum for the “long tail” of service requests
With our quadrilingual customers-help-customers forum, we aim to bring together experts from the “crowd” with the niche requests of our customers. It is not our goal to treat every issue raised in the forum, but mainly those service inquiries:
- whose problem must first be identified by way of dialogue/discussion,
- which largely depend on the customer context (e.g. technical setup) and for which no standard solutions exist, or
- which are not primarily related to our core products (fixed network, TV, web, mobile).
The majority of the service requests can be resolved by the customers themselves via our extensive online help pages. The community therefore plays a vital role in dealing with the “long tail” of customer requests.
Fig. 3: Positioning and Role of the Community within the Solution Space
The benefits of Total Community
With LSW and the community, we lay the foundation to fulfill the promises of our brand – being a trustworthy companion in the digital world and providing outstanding service – also on the social web. Furthermore, with the Total Community approach, we are able to address the fundamental points of our guiding principles in our social media strategy. As Swisscom, we particularly wish to stand by our customers, to make the first move toward meeting their needs by taking their requests seriously. Similarly, we are open to new ideas, which means we listen to and strive to understand our customers. We put these promises into action as follows:
LSW within our social media strategy
Thanks to LSW, we have a scalable solution to handle our ever-growing service requests in a quick and efficient manner and with high technical expertise by using also the extensive knowledge of our community. Our customers appreciate the simplicity of the interaction and the high level of problem-solving expertise in these channels. As a result, social media care has an excellent reputation.
Community within our social media strategy
In addition to customer insights which we gain by listening and engaging through LSW, the community also provides us with greater understanding of the thought processes of our customers. We are therefore better able to grasp what it is that motivates our customers, as well as recognize their needs and discover the issues they discuss with one another. Along with passive listening, we actively invite our customers to participate in product development. As an example, pilot users submitted over 900 posts with suggestions for improving our recently launched UHD TV receiver.
In order that the entire company may benefit from the knowledge derived from these activities, agents and community managers carry these insights on a regular basis to the relevant stakeholders within our company.
Fig. 4: Community and Forum Homepages
The results of Total Community
Since the community and LSW are mainly used in the area of customer care, the focus lies on reducing service costs while maintaining a high customer satisfaction.
Directly measurable savings
From an efficiency point of view, the community helps us deflecting a very substantial amount of calls (savings of about 6k hours/month). Customers who were able to resolve their issues with the help of the community would otherwise have phoned in 75% of the time. The workload savings excel the investments made to license and manage the community tenfold. Furthermore, interacting with customers through LSW has a strong effect on efficiency indicators as well. These overall positive effects are also a result of a community with a current Community Health Index of just over 700.
Fig. 5: Evolution of the Community Forum
Service recovery through social media dialogues
Along with the likewise high resolution rate of the LSW-administered dialogues, this service touchpoint is particularly impressive thanks to its high customer satisfaction index of 8.5 (on a scale of 10) and an above-average NPS compared to other service channels.
Indirectly measurable results within the company
In addition to directly measurable advantages, we clearly see also indirect business outcomes:
- Voice of the customer: Customer attitudes regarding our products and services are easily recognizable by all employees, which is especially advantageous for product managers. The monitoring of these online discussions helps us identify major problems promptly.
- Quick feedback loops: It is easy for community users to become involved in product development. This speeds up the development process and ensures customer needs get addressed.
- Easier troubleshooting: In the case of breakdown, forum discussions help to better understand the cause and thus repair the trouble faster. Thanks to the community’s link to our CRM, affected customers can be identified easily.
- The sharing of knowledge within the customer care department: Complex customer issues via traditional service touchpoints are often cleared up more quickly with the collective knowledge of the community