Lithys 2018: Virgin Media - Digital All-Star

Lithys 2018: Virgin Media - Digital All-Star

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Company: Virgin Media

Company background:

We help to create a digital world that makes good things happen: for our customers and the communities in which we operate. Across the UK and Ireland, we offer four multi award-winning services: broadband, TV, mobile and home phone.

Since 2009 we’ve worked with Lithium to produce the Virgin Media Community, and have used Lithium’s SMM as a response tool for Social and Community for over five years.

Virgin Media is part of Liberty Global plc, the world’s largest international TV and broadband company. Liberty Global connects over 22 million customers through operations in 12 countries across Europe subscribing to more than 46 million TV, broadband internet and telephony services. It also serves over 6 million mobile subscribers and offers WiFi service through 10 million access points across its footprint. Together we’re making good things happen.



Contact: James Woods

Title: Community & Forum Lead

Related URLs: virginmedia.com/community

Lithy category: Digital All-Star

1. Tell us about your digital customer experience: 
Simply - to reduce the need to call.

We set out to leverage the power of our online Community to digitally serve our customers on 1 million occasions each year where they would otherwise have called in.
Three key areas of focus:

  • Improve direct customer support
  • Grow Community Engagement
  • Drive contact deflection.



2. What are the benefits of having both a community and a social media management platform for your organization? 

We can quickly and accurately identify trends, act on events and moments, and provide a consistent omnichannel approach to our customers across Social Media and Community. 

Our Digital Assisted Care is carried out by one team, in two locations, and the shared platform means we can prioritise and triage.

3. What are your digital results? Please provide your business outcomes and results because of your digital customer experience approach in quantifiable metrics (e.g. revenue, Net Promoter Score, cost savings).

Our contact centres already handle millions of calls from our customers each year. And while we love – love – talking to our customers, it’s not always the most efficient way to do things for our business or our customers.

Wider adoption of our already thriving Community would lead to an increase in customers served digitally, through peer-to-peer or assisted support.

At the same time our Community was seeing a huge rise in visits and interactions - so how could we manage this growth without expanding the team or diluting customer experience?

Drive Contact Deflection

Next Best Action
If we can’t directly resolve a customer request on Twitter and Facebook, we need to get them to the exact place that can – and anything requiring detailed messaging, faults, or troubleshooting has a Next Best Action of Community.

Search Engine Optimisation
As well as making full use of the Communities built-in SEO settings, our Moderators archive thousands of posts that are no longer relevant, and edit titles of posts to make them more searchable.

Digital Life blog
By pin-pointing specific search terms that customers were looking for, or questions that had a lot of views (but not necessarily relevant answers) we worked with teams across Virgin Media to create the content that our customers needed. We’ve developed a content calendar to ensure we publish the right content at the right time.

Incident Management

We use our News blog to reach out to customers to prevent calls that they may otherwise make. We drive customers to community from other channels so that they can get up-to-date and long-form information. Because Community content can be edited on the fly, our communications team often turn to us in order to share timely information with our customers.

Grow Customer Engagement:

External Promotion
Community growth has been entirely organic – but now we’re ensuring links to the Community are in place on our apps, on literature and new customer information.

Internal Promotion
Roadshows letting the rest of our business know what the Community is and how it can help. Our call-taking teams are now fully on-board with referring customers to the Community where appropriate - reducing repeat calls and improving call handling time.

Improving Direct Customer Support

Working Smarter
It’s easy to get stuck in transactional private messages – but the real value to Community is the universal Helpful Answer (aka. Accepted Solution). We shifted our way of working with and talking to customers, placing the emphasis on responding publicly where possible so everyone can benefit.

Improved Response Times
There’s a balance required in responding on Community – too quick and you stop the other customers jumping in to help out; too slow and you risk customer going elsewhere. Having started 2017 with significant channel growth, and with a post-Holiday season back-log, we’ve tightly managed our work queues with daily reporting, and precisely focussed resources.

Simplification
Our moderators have implemented a number of streamlined processes to intercept and answer quick transactional queries, and escalations. This allows our team of responders to deal with the more technical queries where their specialist expertise is really required.



3. Please share customer satisfaction metrics, both qualitative and quantitative, as well as agent and response time metrics (e.g. CSAT, decreased customer complaints, call deflections, agent SLA, manual processes eliminated)

We've sped up direct support:
Time to first Response reduced by 300%
80% peer-to-peer support

We've grown the Community:
1k new members a week / 560k member entrances /year.

And we've managed the growth.
At the same time, we've more than delivered on our Contact Deflection target.

While we've continued making huge strides in 2018 - here are the figures from 2017 when we first started our journey, and provide a full years worth of stats.

We increased visitors and page views. Significantly.
33m page views -  up 47% 
12m visitors - up 73%

 

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Despite the continued growth,  new Topics only increased 12% because of our our Smart Content strategy, which ensured the right content was in the right place at the right time, depending on the customer's journey.

Blog views were up 195% and  6.3m Accepted Solutions were  viewed  - up 93% 

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In 2017 we hit our 1 million yearly target by August!

In all we had 33 million page views from 12 million visitors, which equates to 1.7million customers served digitally where otherwise they would have called.

Based on an approximate minimum cost per call of £2.35, we can conservatively state that we have realised a £4 million savings on calls – £1.6 million above our targeted contribution.

Comments

This site is very solid;  Looks like another success for Virgin!