Lithys 2017: TalkTalk - Support Savings Titan

Lithys 2017: TalkTalk - Support Savings Titan

To deliver our new community vision and our strategic goals we knew our community had to be more accessible, we solved this challenge with a complete re-design of the community experience.


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Company:  TalkTalk

Entry submitted by:  Stephen Fell (Senior Content & Engagement Manager)

Community: TalkTalk Community

Lithy category: Support Savings Titan 

 

How we’re using digital technology to exceed customer care expectations

We know our customers prefer to contact us via digital channels and locate their answer quickly. This is why we’re making significant strides towards providing effortless self-serve and digital interactions with our customers and our community is at the centre of this activity.

 

Truth be told, this year will mark the 10th year of us providing a community for our customers who've been using it to share their experience, find answers or just hang out. During the past 12 months, we've made a number of significant enhancements to our community to help us accelerate both our digital adoption which is a part of our strategic plans to shift telephony based contacts into digital channels but also to maximize the contact deflection and scalability of our community whilst providing the best possible experience.

 

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Caption: Our new fully responsive community

 

Some of the changes we’ve made…

To deliver our new community vision and our strategic goals we knew our community had to be more accessible, we solved this challenge with a complete re-design of the community experience. We took a truly mobile first approach, challenging every element and component to deliver a rich and fully responsive site. With this solid base we set about creating the following tools to leverage further deflection and which we believe are truly unique to the TalkTalk community experience:

 

Service Status Dashboard

More and more of us are connected 24/7 with multiple devices and whilst a loss of service at home can be frustrating. It’s typically not the only connection our customers have, with many of them taking to their mobile devices to access support.

 

We then had a real challenge, how to maintain consistency of message and centralise these service updates. Using our community platform, we built a Service Status Dashboard, which provides an instant visual indication of the status of our core products, something not available anywhere else within our .COM

With a cross functional team of people from our consumer and technology business we're able to provide customers with outage messaging and updates 24/7, 365 days a years.

 

Since its launch, we've seen 150% growth in its use, this is primarily down to its adoption as the strategic "go to" location for all customer outage messaging. Our social, support and automated IVR channels always direct customers to talktalk.co.uk/servicestatus for the latest's updates, trying to keep the contact within a digital channel and mitigating the need to contact us.

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Caption: Our Service Status Dashboard

 

Fancy a chat?

We've seen significant growth in our chat channel, delivering better levels of satisfaction for our customer’s vs telephony channels. Whilst peer support is an excellent tool in deflecting, there's always a percentage of contacts that need intervention from us to bring final resolution. Following a period of data analysis and reviewing customer experience we've been able to pin point specific contact drivers which are resolved quicker and to a higher customer satisfaction via chat vs other channels.

 

We set about finding a way to complement our community and peer support with proactive chat but without acting as a cannibalizing force to discussions & engagement. Armed with the insights gained from our analysis and a bespoke integration between our chat provider and Lithium, we're able to identify and target members with specific queries inviting them to instantly chat with us. Unlike a normal chat invite, this is only visible to that member and only delivered when we know our chat agents are available and able to provide a better or more conclusive answer. For example, account specific queries where peer support can be limited, the member is invited to chat with us until their question is marked as solved. 

 

Scaling community support with super users

You may decide to flood a community with support agents or provide no official support at all, either way isn't scalable and will leave your most active members and customers feeling abandoned. We wanted to find a model that fostered true peer support whilst also providing official support when and where it’s needed in the most effective way.

 

Using a combination of our super users and a customisation to Lithium SMM for Support, meant that topics would only be pushed into Lithium SMM if they met one of two criteria, we were able to scale support. With our super users being the most trusted and respected users we built a bespoke search tool: Who needs help?” which allows them to locate members with questions about topics they are most proficient in which are yet to be answered or solved. This group of users also have exclusive access to escalate topics into Lithium SMM, this along with an automated escalation rule where topics would auto-escalate if they had no reply within an hour lead to reducing the overall volume of cases hitting the support team whilst also empowering our super users to help more members with their increased reach.

 

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Caption: Super users bespoke search tool

 

What about the bottom line?

Through a combination of these enhancements, driving growth and placing a more strategic focus on our community we we're able to achieve greater SEO reach and improve engagement.

 

We've seen a 70% reduction in the case load on our community support team, combining our incremental SEO traffic and contact deflection we've delivered an annual total community benefit of £3.1 Million.

 

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Comments

Broken community link.

Fixed- thanks for letting us know, @tealiumjustin!