Company: Telkom SA Ltd
Entry submitted by: Adam Wesson (Operational Manager)
Community: Telkom Community
Lithy Category: Community Design of the Year
Telkom SA Ltd was founded on 1 October 1991 and today is Africa’s largest provider of fixed telephone services, operating in the Fixed and Mobile voice and data space. It is our vision to lead in the converged ICT market through deep and credible relationships and a distinctive customer experience.
Our community goals
The Telkom Community isn't just a place where customers can help themselves, it's a very real manifestation and important part of our business turnaround strategy from a reactive, closed-off organization to a customer-first, proactive company.
The Telkom Community has been a critical component of our brand strategy, which aims to win hearts and minds and drive customer trial.
Our Community's ultimate goal is to connect with users who have a service challenge, and to provide a place where other Telkom customers can quickly and efficiently resolve their issues. The Community has solved thousands of users' problems, reducing the load on our call centre, improving our digital NPS, making us more operationally efficient, and making us as a company more responsive to our users' service needs. The Telkom Community is making a meaningful, measurable contribution to changing perceptions of Telkom for the better.
The design elements make our community unique and stand out from the rest
The Telkom Community makes use of a fresh, funky design developed from the primary Telkom CI, but specifically adapted for the Community. A gregarious illustrative style, clear, accessible iconography and a full, saturated colour palette make for a Community that's bold, outgoing and friendly. This differentiates the Telkom Community from other communities as having a warm, unreservedly approachable personality, consistent with our aim of winning our customers' trust. The design goal for the Telkom Community was to evoke a strong emotionalresponse through delightful visuals and a helpful experience.
We achieved this in 3 ways:
1. Organising the information
2. Visualising progress & reward
How we showed growth related to Badges and Ranking.
Icons showing gamification progression
Fun designs for Avatars
3. Guiding the user to a solution
How we executed our community design
The design goal for the Telkom Community was to evoke a strong emotional response through delightful visuals and design flourishes. To reposition the brand as being customer-first, the design goal was to create a "Smile in the mind" in the users' minds. In order to achieve this, the Telkom Digital Marketing team worked with the Lithium team to leverage their in-depth knowledge of community management, and tapped the expertise of our digital agency for insights into user behaviour and design thinking.
Below you can see how we have used the Community Hero banner to bring in the marketing themes from our corporate website to create a unified design theme.
Use of ‘Usain Bolt’ add campaign artwork in the Community Hero Banner.
Our results
We launched our Community on 27 November 2015 and in the next 5 months, we have notched up a staggering 624460 Page Views from a total of 186195 visits. In total, 151000 unique visitors have already come to see what our Community is all about.
In 5 months, we have surpassed 4000 member registrations.
SEO for the site has ranked our Community #1 on Google Search when searching for “Telkom Community”.
