Kudos Awards 2023

Company: Bell

Company background: Bell is Canada’s largest communications provider, connecting millions of customers throughout the country on our powerful wireless and fibre networks, and delivering compelling content to national and local audiences on our leading TV, radio and digital platforms. Our team of more than 50,000 reflects the diversity of the Canadian population and includes employees living and working in communities of all sizes across every province and territory.

Contact: Imad Daoud

Title: Sr Manager, Digital Support

Related URLs: Bell.ca, forum.Bell.ca, facebook.com/BellCanada, twitter.com/bell_support

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.)

COVID public health measures were disruptive to Bell’s contact centres ability to handle an influx of calls while managing the implementation of a massive work from home process.  This left Bell searching for customer support alternatives and the peer-to-peer model secured our ability to provide users with a digital customer support option that is not agent dependent.

It was clear that Bell needed a Digital First strategy with the following objectives;

1. Reduce agent contact dependency
2. Increase digital adoption & engagement
3. Provide additional channels of Digital Support
4. Improve customer satisfaction rating
5. Maintain a simple digital management process

By utilizing the Khoros Care platform, Bell was able to manage and moderate various social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the Community Forums.  The ability for agents to manage multi-channel communications with customers in a one-stop-shop has allowed Bell to minimize operational costs while maintaining a high-quality level of digital customer support.

Khoros Care is currently being used by more than 30 agents who handle customer inquiries and comments, as well as moderate different social media platforms at a reduced cost per contact.

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.

1. Khoros Care
2. Khoros Social Media
3. Khoros Community Forums
4. Unified Analytics (Khoros & Internal database)
5. Federated Search
6. RSS Feeds
7. App integration in the MyBell app
8. Service interruption alerts

Bell & Khoros digital assets together to better serve customers

Bell connected its Community's TKB/How-To’s and Solutions to Khoros Care that enables the agents to search and select related or helpful topics and articles to Social Media customers.

In July of 2023 we added Blogs to the Bell Community.  The content focused on helpful and related information about new tools, events and marketing opportunities relevant to the Community user.  Collaborating with Brand and Marketing they were able to leverage the Blog for social campaigns.

Building upon the success of those small campaigns, the Bell Community connected with the Fraud & Security team to author and publish 6 fraud prevention blogs that were featured in a Connected Newsletter to our customer base. Linking multiple digital assets has proven to be a success with the first week as 14% of all Community Page View were attributed to those articles.

Community & Social keeping Bell customers informed

Bell has also started utilizing its Community platform to send out notifications regarding service interruptions.  The simple and quick process to publish and update content using the Khoros platform solves the problem of timely, complicated and expensive procedure needed its main site. This helps effectively communicate with and provide a platform for those who are or may be affected. Our process involves providing frequent updates and utilizing solutions that highlight ETAs and restoration progress. The positive outcome of this initiative has allowed us to further innovate by using the Community platform to host two hidden microsites. These microsites specifically support Outage/Service Interruption Alerts specifically for Bell Aliant and MTS customers. 

In mid-2022 a competitor’s nationwide internet and cellular outage affected over 12 million Canadian (25% of Canada).  This included emergency services, electronic sales transactions, public transportation, government services and many other day-to-day operations.

The inability to communicate left many users unaware of the situation and without regular updates.  As a result, Bell has incorporated an outage plan, which includes transparent communication and updates for major service interruption that in part utilizes the Community Forum as a main source of information to impacted users.

Since the Forums are hosted on the Khoros platform and would not be impacted by a company outage, it serves as a perfect contingency plan to keep the customers up to date.  Working with Khoros, Bell is currently looking to build on and improve the current outage process to deliver enhanced features and functionalities that will better automate the outage communication.

Bells One-Stop-Shop with Khoros Care

Bells business structure was previously divided among various platforms, making it challenging to have a unified perspective and a single point of contact. However, thanks to the implementation of Khoros Care, we successfully migrated all of our Bell Media social entries onto one platform. This move not only reduced costs but also provided greater visibility and improved metrics. The transition to Khoros Care enabled us to identify gaps in our engagement rate within Bell Media, prompting us to develop a strategy to handle complex conversations more effectively. As a result, our engagement rate skyrocketed from 5% to an impressive 37% within a couple of months.

Khoros in the MyBell App

Bell has made significant advancements in its self-serve account management and self-repair diagnostic tools in the MyBell app, aiming to minimize the number of calls received by our customer care center while providing the best digital customer service. To ensure that our customers are aware of these useful tools, we employed social strategies such as coupling content on Facebook carousel and having moderators invite our customers to take advantage of these resources. By empowering our customers to take control of their accounts and services, we put them in the driver's seat. This approach has proven successful in increasing customer awareness and promoting self-serve, ultimately benefiting both our customers and our company.

Community Forums with the Bell MBM app, encompasses:

1. Single Sign On capabilities from the app for easy access and instant interaction capabilities (removing barrier to entry)
2. Community RSS feed incorporation into digital assets serving as targeted and relevant entry points
3. Contact-Us pathing focusing on Community support for agent contact alternative
4. Personalized tiles linking to topic specific community content
5. Community content integration with social communication and eChat (agent & bot)
6. In-App Community Forum Federated search
7. Content syndication in various digital assets

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.)

With the help of Khoros, Bell was able to increase not only the traffic to its social media platforms (over 580K posts annually) but also other internal digital assets.  YoY community user login and total posts increased over 800% with many of Bell customers relying on the Social/Forums for help and choosing the platforms as one of their primary sources for self-servable support with a satisfaction score of 83%.

The one-to-many support model has proven to be invaluable to our customers and delivered a 23% improvement in same day contact rate compared to traditional digital support channels.  The Community was able to deflect over 300,000 agent contacts annually and continues to deliver cost reduction and lower CHURN benefits due to a 40% resolution rate in 2023 (46% YOY improvement) resulting in a 3.5X ROI.

The MyBell app has recently revamped the support section to incorporate Community Forums along with other features and functionalities.  This helped Bell to receive the Peoples Voice Webby award in 2023.  Being recognized by users as the “People’s Voice” Winner reaffirms the benefits of our commitment to provide our customers with the best Digital experience, which includes a vibrant community and strong social presence.