Our Community has really hit its stride this year with respect to ROI, which has been great to see. Our goals for Community during the 2016-17 financial year was to simply ensure growth and deliver upon several agreed initiatives as part of our customer experience transformation program.
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Company: AGL Energy Ltd
Entry submitted by: Liam Woods (Digital Community Channel Manager)
Community/Social Channels:
https://www.youtube.com/user/aglenergy
https://www.linkedin.com/company/agl
Lithy category: Topline Titan
AGL is one of Australia’s leading integrated energy companies. It is taking action to responsibly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions while providing secure and affordable energy to its customers. Drawing on over 175 years of experience, AGL serves its customers throughout eastern Australia with meeting their energy requirements, including gas, electricity, solar PV and related products and services. AGL has a diverse power generation portfolio including base, peaking and intermediate generation plants, spread across traditional thermal generation as well as renewable sources including hydro, wind, solar, landfill gas and biomass.
Goals
Our Community has really hit its stride this year with respect to ROI, which has been great to see. Our goals for Community during the 2016-17 financial year was to simply ensure growth and deliver upon several agreed initiatives as part of our customer experience transformation program. We had already seen some success through solution views and visitation increases previously, but we knew there was more room for growth.
Our objectives were:
- Deliver an improved user experience for all users
- Develop a iron clad ROI model for support savings and sales. Prove at least $250,000 in support deflections for the business
- Deliver a single-sign on (SSO) capability ready to be linked with other AGL digital assets
- Achieve growth of at least 30%
Focus areas
In order to meet the agreed objectives, we put together a digital channel strategy for the Community, which addressed objectives as follows:
1. Deliver an improved user experience for all users
We engaged Lithium Professional Services to take the design of the Community back to the drawing board. We briefed them on a new responsive website design which would both modernise the experience for customers whilst also delivering a mobile-friendly design.
2. Develop a iron clad ROI model for support savings and sales. Prove at least $250,000 in support deflections for the business
As part of my attendance at LiNC 2016, I attended two master classes. One of these was a Community ROI class spent with Joe Cothrel from Lithium which enabled me to develop a comprehensive ROI model based on support deflections utilising Lithium’s Value Analytics product. In addition, this class enabled me to reach out to our sales team and develop an accurate attributed sales model, which enabled us to tie value to sales that came from users that had used Community during the pre-sales process.
3. Deliver a single-sign on (SSO) capability ready to be linked with other AGL digital assets
This was an internal deliverable requirement from the business. I worked closely with the project team to help shape and define the solution that we ultimately provided, ensuring that our input was fed in to the experience.
4. Achieve growth of at least 30%
We have a community link on our homepage and an integrated content and social media strategy also support the channel. We also promote the community through paid search marketing. We also built intelligent, contextual FAQ integration on our website leveraging Lithium’s REST API so that customers can find answers to commonly asked questions at the right time. Our community has been live for 2 years now so we get a fair bit of traffic organically from search; but the FAQ integration and our domain provides up to 40 percent of traffic.
The results
1.Deliver an improved user experience for all users
We delivered 2 redesigns of our Community forum – once in October 2016 and once in April 2017. Our first redesign included a mobile responsive framework, which has led to a 55% increase in mobile visits. Through this work and other optimization and technical improvements, our bounce rate has decreased 61% year-on-year.
2. Develop a iron clad ROI model for support savings and sales. Prove at least $250,000 in support deflections for the business
We have delivered $1,246,274 in business value to date in the 2016-17 financial year. This is comprised of:
- $634,797 in cost savings through support deflections
- $611,477 in attributed sales or revenue
In addition to this, our executive team have more awareness of the value the platform is delivering which has helped raise the profile of the channel.
3. Deliver a single-sign on (SSO) capability ready to be linked with other AGL digital assets
We delivered this on-time and on-budget in April 2017. This capability has delivered a huge user experience improvement, going from a 7 step sign up process to a 3 step sign up process. Community is also going to link to all other AGL digital assets progressively as the year wears on, so our users will not have to sign in more than once.
4. Achieve growth of at least 30%
Through all the aforementioned work, visits to Community have increased 110% year-on-year
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