Company: TELUS
Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager)
Community: TELUS Neighbourhood
Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction
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.
Putting our Customers First
Our top priority since 2010 is putting our customers first. We do this by consistently delivering exceptional client experiences and winning the hearts and minds of Canadians on our journey to become a world leader when it comes to the likelihood that our customers recommend our products, services and people.
We know that listening to our customers is an integral part of our Customers First journey and that taking action based on what they say is just as important. Over the years, we’ve worked harder to identify what our customers are looking for and delivered products, services and experiences that met their expectations.
Every team member, regardless of their role, has a responsibility to put customers first, which is why we have continued to integrate a Customers First culture across the organization.
How We Executed Our Customers First Initiative
In 2015, we reimagined our social strategy, developing a new operations team focused on not just customer service and engagement, but on content development and deep communication skills. Pairing this team investment with existing LSW capability, the launch of the Tribal Knowledge Base inside our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood, and publishing capability, we have developed and implemented a virtuous cycle of customer listening, engagement, and needs fulfillment (see supporting visual).
This meant redefining and redesigning the role of social operations, its job description, and its day to day functions. We diligently tested and recruited for this newly redefined role, and have worked with the successful team members to provide them with increased levels of access to and capabilities within both LSW and our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood.
Our goal was to create a team rooted in both service and content creation excellence who could look at customer questions as unmet demand for support content, then work to meet that demand with social and crowdsourced content. In doing so, we engage and satisfy our users while saving organizational cost. Through our revamped operational team, their access to content creation, adoption of LSW publishing and campaign capability, and their access to management of and response to Ideas, Blog, and Articles (TKB) conversations, we have effectively realized that goal.
A key example of this strategy in action was our development and maintenance of a software update schedule. Upon hearing social conversation and having customer concerns expressed, we were made aware of an opportunity to more transparently share the process for and schedule around delivering software updates to mobile devices. We created a Blog post and Article that addressed these needs, and have leveraged them to great success in fielding inquiries and concerns.
A second example was the StageFright campaign. When Android customers were vulnerable to the StageFright exploit and it started gaining media attention and driving social conversations, we wanted to get in front of the questions. As such, we rapidly developed an Article about the StageFright vulnerability, leveraging content from users already posting. Customers could then be referred to this not only in social, but via our IVR when phoning in and through a mass text campaign where we promoted the Article and community to all Android device users.
Our Q1 2016 Success Results
A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:
- 98% customer satisfaction
- 90% likelihood to recommend TELUS (NPS)
- 89% likelihood to share experience
- > 11,000 Twitter and Facebook conversations and over 30,000 responses sent
- 80% of Twitter conversations responded to in 35 minutes or less
- > 1,600 community posts, 90%+ community-created
- > 330,000 unique community visits
- Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit)
- $3.6M in annualized operational savings
