Company: TELUS
Entry submitted by:Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager)
Community: TELUS Neighbourhood
Lithy category: Community Design of the Year
TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, with $12.5 billion of annual revenue and 12.5 million customer connections, including 8.5 million wireless subscribers, 1.5 million residential network access lines, 1.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers and 1.0 million TELUS TV customers. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video, and is Canada's largest healthcare IT provider.
Our Community Goals
Since its launch in 2013, the TELUS Neighbourhood has been focused on providing support content and conversations to users with the goal of offsetting live contact, expanding scope of support through crowdsourced content, and connecting customers more deeply with each other and with TELUS.
A Standout Responsive Design
The TELUS Neighbourhood employs a very deep digital standards guide developed by TELUS to guide all of our online experiences. In this way, our brand becomes a platform from which all experiences emerge, making our community immediately visually familiar to users.
We have employed the use of Lithium responsive (and our own customized approach to responsive before that) to extend that familiar experience across all devices, making an optimized mobile experience and bringing consistency of experience across screen sizes.
We leverage digital assets and design to make for a delightful and outcome-oriented community. Our standards make for a very clean presentation with no clutter, the focus being to provide users with what would satisfy their real needs. Some examples are the different navigational elements in place, designed to let our users get to the information they want as quickly as possible, with current and relevant content easily surfaced for the user.
How We Built our Custom Redesign
In late 2014, to employ brand standards and to match with a newly redesigned telus.com, we built a custom redesign of the Neighbourhood, using the Lithium API to push and pull content with a responsive frontend. While this achieved the use of our digital standards, it came at the cost of a wide number of features and performance. To address this, we became active in the Lithium responsive beta program in mid-2015.
In concert with the Lithium team, we undertook a deep inventory of components both operationally in place or desired. Comparing that inventory to the Lithium component set, we developed a plan to marry initial intent to existing components, striking a strong balance between standards, customization, and best practices.
We then embarked on a wireframing exercise to lock down the relative position of elements, leveraging the digital standards guide to direct look and feel. Through this, we further identified opportunities to optimize for experience and sustainability while still keeping the spirit of our digital standards adhered to.
We released for the first time in January 2016, and have since done a number of subsequent publishes to continue to refine the experience to significantly positive response and engagement from our users.
Our Q1 2016 Design Excellence Results
A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:
- 28% YoY growth in traffic (comparing Q1 2016 to Q1 2015)
- > 330,000 unique community visits
- Over 47% of traffic from mobile/tablet (vs. ~34% mobile traffic in late 2014)
- 286% growth in kudos given (comparing Q1 2016 to Q1 2015)
- Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit)
- $3.6M in annual operational savings