Lithys 2018: Comcast - B2C Community Innovator

Lithys 2018: Comcast - B2C Community Innovator

corporate_logo-comcast_.jpgCompany: Comcast

Company background: Comcast brings together the best in media and technology. We drive innovation to create the world's best entertainment and online experiences. We are at the forefront of change and move at an amazing pace, thanks to our remarkable people, who bring cutting-edge products and services to life for millions of customers every day. From our products to our people, we’re committed to delivering the best experience possible so our customers can do more and enjoy more of what they love.

Contact: Cassie Hart

Title: Analyst, Digital Care

Related URLs: Help & Support Forums, Reddit

Lithy category: B2C Community Innovator

The Xfinity Forum Team enlisted the help of Lithium Professional Services to help address one of the unique challenges in operating a large community that has been serving customers for more than 15 years. Technology moves at lightning pace, and Comcast is constantly developing and enhancing products to help our customers get the most out of our service. We identified an opportunity to address the perception of outdated or sometimes irrelevant content that had remained accessible in the Xfinity Forum. This resulted in user confusion; replies on old threads and customers not finding the most relevant content to help answer their questions and avoid the need to contact us through other customer service channels. Our teams went through extensive research into the root cause of the issue and possible solutions that could help us improve. Lithium developed a, first-of-its-kind, archival tool. This allows our team to set parameters like Age of Most Recent Activity and a Threshold for Number of Views to quickly identify and remove outdated and irrelevant topics from public view.

 With the help of this new archival tool, we were able to retire more than 92% of all Xfinity Forum content with no significant decrease in our overall traffic. This tool continues to be an asset in the forum allowing our team to incorporate content archiving as part of our monthly maintenance. This tool reduces customer effort by helping our team keep and update the most relevant information and removing content that may be less relevant. We focused on simplifying the experience and reducing duplicate content. We can measure our success with an 18% increase in searches that locate a result and a 7% increase in solution views year-over-year.

Our goal is to reduce customer effort and deliver a more simplified user experience.  Additionally, we want to improve the visibility of our vetted content from the recently launched Tribal Knowledge Base, which is our collection of approved community-authored content, deemed our most helpful and useful forum content. With focus on significant Search Engine Optimization (SEO), our team updated the canonical URLs of almost 2,000 threads. An additional part of the SEO for Tribal Knowledge Base was the launch of community labels, which help ensure users can quickly locate the information they are most interested in. 

Lithy1.png We have invested efforts to support and expand our Xfinity Knowledge Base (Tribal Knowledge Base). We have continued to add one to two new articles per week, since launch. This has created a valuable resource for our customers with more than 100 articles. It provides a great way to vet and spotlight helpful information that started with forum discussions.

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Further investment in the Xfinity Forum was the launch of our first major redesign in over three years. This project was part of a larger effort to better align the Xfinity Forum with Comcast’s other digital platforms. The redesign included a contemporary layout, new iconography, friendlier guidelines, renewed focus on tone from official employee engagement and a fresh user experience. Along with the numerous internal teams, we designed, coded, staged, tested and launched the new site in six months.

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 One final area of focus was the introduction of our own Comcast Digital Care Specialist Team to support customers in our community channels via Lithium RSS. This small group of customer specialists are dedicated to supporting the Xfinity Forum and the Xfinity sub-Reddit. They have successfully increased the amount of accepted solutions by 17%, decreased minutes to first solution by 57%, and the quality of their responses is attributed in our 18% increase in unique visitors since 2017.

 Once we removed our aged content and began using the new archive tool for weekly maintenance, we see a direct impact to our CHI. The evidence of the success of the new tool is most noticeable in Responsiveness and Interaction increases after launch. Ultimately, we have made the community easier to use for our members and allow our team to manage volume at scale.lithy6.png

 

 External Communities, through Lithium RSS:

Our customer-facing Lithium community is among the touchpoints we support by using Lithium technology. Reddit has become one of our fastest growing channels and we have integrated Reddit into our work queues via Lithium RSS. The Xfinity sub-Reddit started initial support of Reddit’s site-wide redesign efforts in January 2018. The ability for our team to align with the future of what Reddit admins were intending to offer moderators of individual communities allowed us a direct feedback channel with their development teams. To help facilitate our communities redesign, our team worked with internal User Experience partners as well as project managers at Reddit to report bugs and anomalies with features being trialed. Over time, our partnership proved to be a beneficial learning experience for both Comcast and Reddit, as we were able to shed light on how support-at-scale is done at organizations of our size.

We officially launched support for “new” Reddit by April 2018, and in parallel with the existing site. Regardless of which version is used, customers will receive a parallel experience suited to their preference.

 Lithy4.pngFigure 1. Version 3 of r/Comcast_Xfinity

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 Figure 2. r/Comcast_Xfinity on the Reddit redesign

Adding a team of dedicated community specialists has also boosted our community’s stature on Reddit. Since mid-2017, the team has successfully decreased the wait time for a first response to a post by 60%, helped drive unique visitors to our community, up 436.5% since 2017, and increased the number of community subscribers by 92%. New posts grew by 102% from the previous year and page views within the community also increased by 312.7%. In addition, 2018 has been a record-breaking year due to the team: We’ve surpassed peak unique visitors and page views 5 times, and the number of new posts 3 times.

Spearheading this change was the launch of several features providing enhanced value to both our community at large, and our community experts (internally known as “Xperts”) – those customers who have demonstrated a willingness to help others with their knowledge and skills. In April 2018, we offered the X1ErrorHelper, a bot that looks for mentions of X1 error codes within a post and provides a customer with plain English description of the issue and empowering the customer with steps they can take to address it on their own. Specialists can then reach out to the customer to offer additional assistance should basic troubleshooting fail to resolve the problem. We’ve also built and added macros that allow our community Xperts to escalate posts and keep the community clean from unsavory content.

Integration of transactional NPS (tNPS) surveys has been a key return on investment indicator. Since introducing these surveys, we’re better able to gauge how customers feel about our service and support efforts. In 2018, we generated 51% more surveys than the previous year, and 42% of customers with a solved post completed a survey. 69% of customers who completed a survey stated they were promoters of the brand based on the level of service they received through r/Comcast Xfinity, and 18.5% of customers returned to our community to create another post.

In 2018, we also launched our engagement via NextDoor, a free, private social network designed for neighbors and their local communities. We partnered with the Lithium professional services team to help develop an integration into our existing Lithium RSS instance. As we have seen community conversations begin to extend to other channels, such as Reddit and NextDoor, it has become increasingly important that our Digital Care team incorporates those discussions into a tool that allows us to track and prioritize our engagement. By doing so, we are showing value to both customers and the bottom line.