Company: Three Ireland
Company background: Three is Ireland’s largest mobile telecommunications provider with 42.8% market share and 3.7 million customers (as of December 2022). 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. Our network is built for data; with over 85% 5G coverage and 99% 4G coverage. Three has over 1,300 employees throughout Ireland, with our head office in Dublin, our award-winning Customer Experience Centre in Limerick where our 450-strong team supports over 1.7 million customers every year, and more than 60 retail stores nationwide. Three has to date invested over €2 billion in building our business in Ireland. This includes a €900 million investment in upgrading and expanding our network and IT infrastructure and delivering a cutting-edge experience for both our customers and our employees. Annually, Three continues to invest over €100 million into our network to ensure we continue to deliver the best experience and service for our customers.
Contact: Patrick OBrien
Title: Digital Services Lead
Related URLs: https://community.three.ie/
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service
1. What challenges did your organization face that required a digital strategy? Provide details on the issues you were trying to resolve or the goals you were trying to achieve. (e.g. reducing handle time, improving CSAT, reducing per-interaction costs, revenue growth, cost savings, etc.)
At Three, we always challenge ourselves to do better, and having won the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award in 2022 we wanted to learn from that experience and appreciate the great work being done by all the other community entrants from across Europe. So we decided to apply those learnings to our strategy for 2023 – we sat down and asked ourselves, “What does 3Community stand for? And how can we let our customers know that we are here to help?”
As in 2022, our goals were consistent and clear. And those goals remain unchanged because we believe in making a commitment and sticking with it:
We like to do things differently at Three. We know it’s cliché, but we truly believe that the sky is the limit when it comes to our digital customer experience. That’s why we have been building upon our previous success to deliver a transformative customer journey that begins with our Khoros-hosted 3Community.
In 2023, our 3Community reached over 94,000 members (growth of 57K members since this time last year) and we expect this to exceed 100,000 members very soon. With this growth comes some challenges which require an evolving digital service strategy to maintain and grow active engagement and deliver meaningful peer to peer interactions. To tackle that challenge we wanted to really leverage all out of the box Khoros community features and implement a holistic digital solution.
Some of the key challenges that our customers faced in 2023 were:
79% have changed non-essential spending, 15% halting non-essential purchases altogether.
Empowered by technology, they also both seek and demand seamless in-store and online experiences that better suit their lifestyles and pockets.
2. Which Khoros elements did you implement as part of your digital solutions? Include details on the channels or tools you added and how your solution was unique and innovative.
At Three, driving digital-first customer support is our core mission, as this directs any unnecessary traffic away from our customer care agents and encourages use of our *award-winning digital self-service platforms wherever possible, thereby reducing those assisted queue times and improving the overall experience for the customers who really need an agents help.
*In 2022 Three Ireland won the CCMA ‘best customer experience award’ and the ‘best use of digital channels award’. We then went on to win the ECCSA prestigious ‘Gold’ award for best customer service across all of Europe, and ‘Silver ‘awards for best cross functional teams and best use of technology.
3. What quantifiable results were achieved? Please include key success metrics. (e.g. revenue growth, cost reduction, CSAT, call deflection, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.)
We set a high bar for ourselves with in 2022 by taking home the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award, and we recognised that it would be tremendously difficult to outdo those results. However, this did not deter us, and we achieved success in several areas of Digital Customer Service this year despite the tremendous cost of living challenges being faced by our customers.
Special Thanks: Jon Henshall, Valentina Mengarelli
Case Study Opt-In: Yes
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