Company: Post Office
Company background: With over 370 years of service, Post Office is the UK's largest retail network and the largest financial services chain in the UK with more branches than all of the UK’s banks and building societies put together. We also have growing direct channels such as contact centers and online - meaning they’re there for more customers, in more ways. Post Office is now more than it ever was - an independent multi-channel business, with a vibrant, fast-growing financial services business and embarking on a new era of growth, modernization and customer excellence in serving the UK population.
Contact: Darren Jones
Title: Senior Social Media Manager
Related URLs: http://www.twitter.com/postoffice
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Care
1. What were your organization’s digital customer service initiatives? What channels do you support today?
This entry relates to the customer support provided during the peak of the COVID pandemic, which saw nearly all of our 16 call centres being closed down and our 16m customers turning to social media for answers to their travel insurance and money, mails, credit card matters during much uncertainty.
2. What was the most important issue you were looking to solve via your digital technology (e.g. community and/or social media management platform) — and what makes your approach to that achievement unique?
At the volume peak, end of March, our daily post volume increased from 850 to overall 2500 posts. and first response time exceeded our 1 hour benchmark, with customers not receiving a response for 1 day and 20 hours. Our social team are uniquely not product experts for the third party products we sell, and which many were talking to us about.
3. What 1-3 metrics best describe your success? (e.g. CSAT, call deflection, cost reduction, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.)).
1) Reduced response time from 1 day and 20 hours to just 11 minutes in a one week period via immediate internal recruitment of 60 'at risk headcount' from other teams who had no work - building on our BAU team of 5 colleagues. Each received training on the same day as they started to service customers. These colleagues are now trained and available to help during future crisis, building future resilience into our team.
2) Sharing daily trend emails across the business, including CEO, gave visibility of positive contributions being made to help on social, while also helping to get resolution to key concerns being shared. These trends also fed into a daily updated FAQ on our website, which gave us an avenue to point customers to - mitigating the problem we had of the social team not being product experts.
3) Problem created future resilience, via more trained volunteers, greater visibility at executive level, and an interest and willingness to further invest in social media more generally - especially at a time when many are increasingly not visiting the high-street for those face to face interactions.
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