Company: Three Ireland
Company background:
Three is Ireland’s largest mobile telecommunications provider with 39% market share and 2.9 million customers (as of September 2021). Our network is built for data; with 99% 4G coverage, and 79% 5G population coverage. This means our amazing 5G network is available to customers in every county right across Ireland. Three has over 1400 employees throughout Ireland, with our head office in Dublin, our award-winning contact centre in Limerick where our 450-strong team manages 1.4 million calls every year, and our 60 retail stores nationwide. To date - Three has invested almost €2 billion in building our business in Ireland. This includes a €700 million investment in upgrading and expanding our network and in Three’s digital transformation, which will deliver a cutting-edge experience for both our customers and our employees. Annually, Three continues to invest over €100 million into our business to ensure we continue to deliver the best network, experience, and service for our customers. At Three we strive to provide our customers with a better-connected life through meaningful products, best in class service and a connected network experience.
Contact: Patrick OBrien
Title: Digital Services Lead for Communities, Bots, and Proactive Engagements.
Related URLs: https://community.three.ie
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community? Do you use your community for support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.? Has the community charter evolved in any way since launch?
Our objectives:
In mid-2020, we completed our Digital Transformation Strategy, 3 Vision. Prior to this our Community was active for almost 10 years. 3Vision unlocked capabilities for us - enabling us to evolve beyond a support community to a full Engagement Model. Our goals are clear:
- Drive Digital 1st support
- Provide a best-in-class engagement experience
- Achieve business growth and drive sales
- Product innovation and insights
Our purpose for Community:
We started by working on getting the basics right, focussing on building our forums and knowledgebases - learning how to do as much design and development in-house as we could. We then integrated Khoros Care with our Community and Social Media channels and have gone on to integrate feedback from Apple & Google App stores. We now support over 37,000 members, 40 knowledgebases & forums, and we recently launched our 3Plus Group Hub, the Community Event calendar, and our much-loved Ideas board. We design and develop a large library of custom components and our community is 100% mobile responsive.
What we use Community for:
We’ve vastly improved SSO across our digital landscape and now operate a 1-click community registration process. Our members generated a 7% ‘community to shop conversion’ rate in 2021 (double our sales conversion target). We achieved this by leveraging @Mentions and Product Association, and we are now developing Product Syndication with Catalogue Sync to reap even greater rewards. This year we’ve really gone beyond the expected by also creating brand new use cases for out of the box Khoros products; we use the Ideas Board as a fully functioning Change Management hub and the Events Calendar as a Release manager tool saving both money and time.
We are on the path to deliver true Omni-Channel experiences, and plan to develop a Super-User programme to engage, reward and inspire our members to be a bigger part of even more amazing conversations. With the help of Khoros audit teams we have dived deeper into the world of digital excellence exploring ways to further enhance accessibility, brand awareness, custom component design and customer journey improvements.
How our Community charter has evolved:
We’ve invested in our Community team and as Digital Services Lead; I now manage a wonderful team including 2 moderators and a Grad who are all part of the overall Digital Services team at Three. In 2021 our team won Best use of Digital channels at the Irish Contact Centre Management Association Awards, where the judges particularly highlighted our work on Community. Our charter has evolved to do more than just support customers – but to fully engage our members and invite them to bring us on their journey, facilitating contribution and rewarding participation.
2. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen. Did you get executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was your process to gain this buy-in? How have you achieved cross functional support, added stake-holders and increased organizational adoption?
Here at Three, we take the script, and we rip it up. We’re just a *big-hearted energetic bunch, striving to create a better-connected life for all. So, when we sought buy-in for the Community for future investment our Senior leadership team fully understood the benefits derived from our Community. We live our core values daily and when everyone in the company works as one team phenomenal things can happen. This is our ambition for our Community; “Make phenomenal things happen!”
*Our recent TV advert “Jeffs World” where we encourage our customers to enjoy the freedom of a Better Connected Life with Three.
As a Digital Services Lead within our Commercial directorate, I manage a Community that influences a **wide array of company objectives and I promote the benefits that our Community brings to our business - improving self-serve containment, collecting vital marketing insights, reducing customer effort across all digital channels, and increasing our sales conversion rate generating more revenue and reducing expenditure.
Along with my team, when I talk to my colleagues about the Community I speak about the rapid growth in membership, the wide array of functionality available – all fully customisable in-house and mobile responsive out of the box.
** A small sample of the variety of content we cover on Community.
It’s now understood across Three the value of growing our membership base. Our members want to get involved and we’ve experienced this with several members who have been with us for some time.
Some of the positive feedback received when we reached 10,000 members in Q4 2021.
It was important for us to give back to those loyal members, so over the past year we partnered with our loyalty team 3Plus to provide amazing prizes to our most valued and engaged members. This has been a real hit with our base who now regularly win tickets to some amazing concert at the 3Arena and 3Olympia, two of Dublin’s best entertainment venues.
We are also leveraging 3Community Events to promote our fantastic 3Live channel which broadcasts a live stream twice weekly, and here’s our very own Jen Ryan who is one of our broadcasters, talking to viewers about new products and services available.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.
We believe Community offers us a competitive advantage and can influence existing and new customers at every stage of the customer’s journey, here is a selection of some of our key results.
- We built a bespoke custom auto-login process for our staff knowledgebases – ensuring a secure and internationally accessible portal for all conversation support content. As a result, we saw ‘Right-First-Time’ scores across all assisted channels increase by 9% in Consumer teams and by 13% for our business teams over 2021.
- Customer survey results in 2021 also showed Net Promoter Scores (NPS) up by 10% in consumer and 12.2% in business.
- YoY we saw a 26.7% reduction in assisted contacts in consumer and 22.3% in business, all because of increased containment in all our digital channels – of which Community traffic accounts for over 10% of channel share.
- Following Single Sign On deployment in November ‘21 our registered membership increased by 270%, over 220K page views / month from approx. 70K unique user visits / month.
- Sales conversion is tracking at over 5% due in part to the new SSO deployment, use of Community Product Association, 3Live video content promoted in our Events calendar and a host of custom components we designed in-house.
- Navigation is a measure of success and 11% more Community users stated they could now find what they were looking for year to date compared to 2021.
Why we believe we are a best-in-class Community:
We are early adopters – and we quickly recognised the true value of an online Community. We have stuck by our members when other companies were opting to abandon theirs. We have a clear vision of the future, and we’ve set out to leverage Community features to generate growth and accomplish our company mission. We’re all about creating a better connected life, and the growth in our Community membership has been a resounding confirmation from our base that we’re going in the right direction.
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