Lithys 2018: Constant Contact - Social Support Champion

Lithys 2018: Constant Contact - Social Support Champion


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Company: Constant Contact

Company background: Constant Contact®, Inc. is a leading provider of on-demand email marketing and interactive communications services for small businesses, associations, and nonprofits. Through customizable, easy-to-use tools, including email marketing and online surveys, Constant Contact helps all types of small organizations build stronger customer relationships, drive sales, and achieve success.

Contact: Kyle Reiners

Title: Community Manager

Related URLs:  community.constantcontact.com

Lithy category: Social Support Champion

1. What were your organization’s social customer service initiatives in 2017-2018?
To better serve our customers, we launched a mobile responsive Community in 2017 and have seen a steady increase in mobile traffic (now at 10%). We added gamification with much appreciated special badges for All Star customers and Partners. Based on data and customer feedback, the Community and Social Care Team began offering support over the weekends in addition to weekday availability.

By surveying Community visitors with Value Analytics, we gained a deeper understanding of Community visitors and their needs. An Optimizely/Tealium integration, launched in 2018, allows us to serve up engaging and personalized content in collaboration with the Acquisition and Marketing teams. Links to Community resources were added to new customers’ email onboarding flow as well as in product.

We have run several popular contests where customers showcase their email designs. Community is part of a company-wide initiative to promote transition to our 3rd Generation Email Editor. The 3rd Generation Editor Headquarters board was launched in 2018 and featured in multi-channel customer communications. The board has extensive resources dedicated to customer success, and as always, our support team is on hand to ensure customer success.

The Constant Contact Help Center was moved to the Lithium platform, with a focus on getting the customer to the right place within one click. The Lithium platform allows faster updates and flexibility in how we message our customer base. We recently launched an International Help Center for customers outside of North America.

Being an email marketing company, we believe in newsletters! In addition to our internal Community newsletter, we recently launched an external newsletter with a digest of the most viewed postings with an opt-in sign up box on our Community.

2. What was the most important customer issue you were looking to solve via your digital technology (e.g. community and/or social media management platform)? What makes your approach to customer satisfaction a gold standard in the industry?
The Constant Contact Community and Social Care Team is a four-person team that is small but mighty, passionately dedicated to ensuring small business owners and nonprofits are successful with email marketing and it shows in every customer interaction. We allow customers a range of choices in how they want to interact with Constant Contact, whether it is through traditional support channels, social care or to peruse our extensive self-help options. This strategy is working. We have seen significant growth in social care and self-help, while positive sentiment and customer engagement is also increasing.

With personalized Community content, we ensure each visitor gets the most benefit for their business, some examples:

 

  • Casual visitors - Highlighting the benefits of email marketing and our product offerings.
  • New customers - Recommend the free, scheduled sessions to help with onboarding, review their business needs and goals as it relates to their email marketing strategy, discuss best practices and answer any questions and promote a community forum where you can post your email for peer review.
  • All customers - Free webinars to provide another level of service to get customers going and stay successful, coaching calls to ensure you are getting the most out of your investment in our email marketing service, assistance with email templates branded for your business.
  • Technically advanced customers - The developer community features a support board specifically for technical questions about APIs.

In 2017, we started experimenting with social tone to find our social voice. We tested into optimal content and frequency of outbound Tweets. It paid off!  We were recognized by two independent analysts for our Twitter Support Handle. We opened the Facebook messenger channel for support, a new popular channel with rapid growth.


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)

 

  • Constant Contact’s customer service team’s customer satisfaction scores are consistently 95% or higher
  • The company’s transactional survey Net Promoter Score for 2017 was 65.2% and it’s customer retention rate is 97.8%
  • Social media support volume tripled in past year
  • Community support volumes and unique visitors increased by 50%
  • Increased number of new Community Members by 140,000 since Jan 2017
  • Increased Solution Views by 335% since Jan 2017
  • Call deflection rate at $92,000 for the month of June 2018
  • Manual case creation eliminated by installing the Lithium Salesforce Connector with savings of 1 min/transaction
  • Reduced turnaround time for Billing inquiries by providing weekend support
  • 50% reduction in negative tweets after introducing social care weekend support
  • Awarded 62,306 badges between Jan – June, 2018

 

Silver Stevie award 2018 for best Customer Service Team – Computer Software

Ranked #1 by independent analyst in “Top 20 SaaS companies and Their Twitter Support Presence”  

Top Rank Marketing blog ranked Constant Contact #4 for brands mastering Twitter for Social Customer ...

Below are examples of direct customer comments:

Twitter:
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Community:

https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Need-help-with-something-else/Why-make-it-so-difficult-to-f...

https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Need-help-with-something-else/A-W-E-S-O-M-E-Customer-Servic...

https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/General-Feedback/Thank-You-Customer-Service/idi-p/296410

https://community.constantcontact.com/t5/Help-Center/Customer-service-help/idi-p/310428

Comments

Hello @kreiners. Great to hear that Tealium has helped you with your Community! I would definitely love to spend some time with you during the this year's CX Live event. Please private message me so we can talk. Thank you!