Company: TELUS
Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager)
Community: TELUS Neighbourhood
Lithy category: Total Community All Star
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 Road to Lithium
In 2010, we began engaging and supporting customers through Twitter, leveraging the opportunity of conversations that customers were already having. We followed their lead going to where they were, wanting to join in the conversation. As this sustained and grew, our organization’s listening/marketing tools no longer sufficed; we needed a toolset focused on conversation and case management. Through 2012 we explored tools across the market, and at the end of 2012, after a very successful pilot, we signed with Lithium for LSW.
In 2013, we opened our Facebook wall and established it as an additional customer engagement channel beyond its previous focus of marketing and brand conversation. Additionally, seeing the opportunity to crowdsource knowledge and bring social conversation closer to our own domain, we embarked on a journey to build an on-domain community. After the comparison of several solutions, we selected Lithium, and were able to launch our community forum platform, the TELUS Neighbourhood, eight weeks later. It was augmented with Ideas in 2014 to capture and create conversation around customer concepts and suggestions, as well as with a Blog and Articles (Tribal Knowledge Base) in 2015 to broaden our customer engagement.
Everyone Wins with a Total Community
Our team strives to create a meaningful social experience for every customer and each interaction. 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 LSW campaign and publishing capability, we have developed and implemented a virtuous cycle of customer listening, engagement, and needs fulfillment (see supporting visual).
Identifying and listening to customers needs, both through active participation (LSW analytics of Twitter, Facebook, and the TELUS Neighbourhood posting across interaction styles) and passive participation (LSI analytics of most popular on-domain forum content), we gain a deep insight into customer experience needs. With this insight, and leveraging the robust skillset of our social media operations team, we can polish and curate the most desired content in to Articles (our community Tribal Knowledge Base implementation). Then, leveraging the LSW Publishing Beta and other tools, we market and promote that community-inspired/authored content through our established social channels as well as contextually in the course of related support conversations.
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.
This all happens while engaging and supporting customers in near real-time response on Twitter and Facebook. In 2016, we have already supported over 11,000 off-domain social conversations, with over 80% of Twitter responses done in under 35 minutes. This is springboarding off of the over 48,000 conversations we supported in the whole of 2015, and a sign of ongoing engagement.
Using Total Community practices internally, we developed a wholly cross-functional working team, combining the strengths and perspectives of the new operations team, our Marketing Communications Team, and Media Relations teams to deliver an entirely aligned experience for key brand initiatives, namely our #ExpectMore campaign, where we drove and contributed to conversation about customer experience. This enabled rapid development of content and responses, both written and in video.
To support and grow the on-domain portion of our Total Community, we completed the work on migrating our on-domain custom community in to Lithium responsive, launching it in January 2016. This more reliable, better performing, and more feature-rich implementation of the community has spurred on over 1,600 community posts YTD, a sign of strong growth compared to the 5,889 posts seen in 2015. It should be noted that over 90% of that content is customer-generated (i.e. not moderator or community admin). More exciting than that is that we have already welcomed over 330,000 unique visits so far this year, a more than 28% growth over this same period last year and a strong start as we plan to improve over the 1.33 million total unique visits we enjoyed in 2015.
Lastly, we quietly launched our Community Power User (CPU) Program, which more formally enlists and engages our most influential and active community users. Each was presented with a formal welcome package, and has regular live conversations with our community management team, as well as participation with one another in a private CPU community board. While we work to expand and develop a public plan for the program, this launch helps sustain the contributions of three key individuals who contributed 26% of community content in Q1 2016.
This integrative total community strategy resonates well with our users. When surveyed in Q1 of 2016, they shared a 98%+ satisfaction rate with their social experience with TELUS and, based on that experience, 90% are likely to to recommend TELUS to friends and family, and 89% are likely to share their social experience. These results are all improved substantially over historical, reflective of the value of our new operational model and integrative total community approach.
Quantitatively, this total community approach also serves the business. By serving in social and cultivating content of need to our customers, we are targeting, and are well on track to meet, $3.6M in operational support cost savings through 2016, which continues to grow the value we have realized each year.
Our Q1 2016 Total Community Results
Harnessing the power of social and our total community strategy, we meet the needs of our customers, we delight them, and we save organizational cost. Win, win, win. A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:
- > 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
- 98% customer satisfaction
- 90% likelihood to recommend TELUS (NPS)
- 89% likelihood to share experience
- Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit)
- $3.6M in annualized operational savings
