Company: Telekom Deutschland GmbH
Contact: Eva Heinrichs (Platform Owner Telekom hilft Community)
Community: Telekom hilft Community
Lithy category: Support Savings MVP
Following our slogan “life is for sharing” Telekom Deutschland GmbH offers innovative products and services connecting people all over the word. Customers should be given easy access to the world of telephone, Internet, Internet TV and cloud services. As a telecommunications provider, it is Telekom's goal to enable this by providing the best possible communications and IT services. Meaning Telekom customers can enjoy the "life is for sharing" experience anytime, any place.
Telekom hilft Community, Europe’s largest telco community, is a pillar of Deutsche Telekom’s customer care -for both consumer and business customers. The focus is on support, but also leveraging product feedback and co-creation.
Our three pillars to leverage the community for support excellence
Established in 2014 we bundled three legacy forums to Telekom hilft Community to foster the peer-to-peer “customers help customers” concept. Steadily growing, the community has >550.000 registered users (growth of 50% since 2014). To enhance the involvement of our most active super users producing >50% of all content, we are using gamification elements. Furthermore the closed user group “Community Guides” with advanced editing rights enables us to gain customer insights for the platform development. Additionally, we also launched the closed user group “Telekom hilft Lab” connecting product managers with customers to develop and evaluate current as well as future products and services.
Title: Participants of the Community Manager Guides event with the superusers of Telekom hilft Community
Title: Example of promotion on Facebook for our CUG “Telekom hilft Lab”
Telekom hilft Community enables us to increase our permeability and customer proximity by facilitating involvement in closed user groups. Participation of super users and active listeners helps Deutsche Telekom to gain valuable customer insights. The project PM@ThC (product manager at Telekom hilft Community) helps for example product managers to receive precious feedback and also users to get profound answers from experts. The close relationship between customers and Deutsche Telekom’s employees has even effect on 3rd party support, such as shorter on-site technical support time. These insights are communicated to the management board and are part of our early-warning system.
Recognizing the changing user behavior, a relaunch in 2015 included a responsive design to increase traffic of mobile phones and tablets, which now accounts for up to 30% of our overall traffic. Additionally, we integrated Telekom hilft Community in other DT websites such as Telekom eShop and help portal. They include a search widget, a service tab and customized landing pages informing about the Telekom hilft Community. Auto suggestions help customers to find relevant content and enrich the problem solving or buying process at all stages. Relevant discussion feeds were posted on Deutsche Telekom’s social media channels, enabling the community team to enrich their content and link to Telekom hilft Community by using synergies between the different platforms.
Title: Example of integration within geschaeftskunden.telekom.de via service tab
Title: Example of seamless integration of community posts within search results of other portals
Title: Example of a posting at Deutsche Telekom’s social media channels from the Telekom hilft Community: Why do my incoming calls always end directly on my mailbox?
The community’s impact on our customer care organization
Community Management is the new Service: By linking Community solutions on other social media channels, we are constantly promoting Telekom hilft Community. By doing so, we are increasing the relevance of our “user to user” centric platform. Adapting to the new business environment, customer service focuses now more on community management instead of just answering questions. Due to the community focused activities, we improved the solution rate within the community from 25% to 35% year to date.
Facilitating the permeability and customer proximity, the success of Telekom hilft Community is influencing the online strategy of Deutsche Telekom i.e. user generated content cements the reputation of Deutsche Telekom as a customer-centric company. Furthermore, providing a strong external reputation affects the employees who have learnt about the value of Telekom hilft Community and strengthen it through blog entries on blog.telekom.de.
Introducing new use cases steadily, we start social commerce with ratings and reviews at the business customers’ eShop to foster product recommendations and to assist in the buying process by giving additional information. By doing so, gamification elements motivate users to rate products while other users award those ratings with kudos. This encourages the overall community building of Telekom hilft Community.
Title: Example of integration of ratings & reviews in business customers shop on geschaeftskunden.telekom.de
How we became leader in service through customer satisfaction and operational efficiency
Deutsche Telekom pursues a quality leadership strategy in the German market. Therefore customer satisfaction is an important part of the overall strategy. We believe that happy customers share their experiences just as troubled customers ask for help. 80% of the questions in the community are answered by other community members, mostly happy customers. Telekom support colleagues answer only 20% of the questions.
A recent survey by a big German business magazine, Focus Money, confirmed the leading role of Deutsche Telekom: The best online service across industries in Germany is provided by Deutsche Telekom. As Focus Money also says, “Telekom hilft” is rated as a most likeable service brand in Germany.
Title: Gero Niemayer, managing director customer service Telekom Deutschland, proudly presents Focus Money survey results on Twitter
Telekom hilft Community attracts on average approximately 1.6m unique visitors each month – trending up 22% on year to year comparison. Based on a 35% solution rate, we assume that >350,000 calls can be avoided per month. In addition to the value of deflected calls, we take advantage of priceless value from customer insights and increased reputation for Deutsche Telekom.
Before Telekom hilft Community started, Deutsche Telekom offered three different online platforms. Migrated and consolidated to one platform, Lithium helps us to streamline customer service and the IT landscape as well as to enhance usability and the user journey for our customers.
