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%   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%  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. ... View more

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: B2C Community Innovator 1. Describe the innovation(s) and how you settled on the decision to innovate (user request, Lithium suggestion, internal idea, etc.) My Trials A custom-built area of the Community for customers to take part in private and confidential product trials. While board permissions are relatively straightforward, our moderators and trial administrators  and trial managers needed an easier way to collate and display trial information for the right people. We also wanted to be able to highlight new trial opportunities to our trialist sub-community, and encourage non-members and members alike to register. The idea to establish the My Trials experience came from, and was developed in-house by our Community management team. Right Content: Right place Multiple customised or newly implemented features to reduce the number of new posts where content already exists, and to improve readership of targeted information.  Our Community growth was such that we needed to give customers more information with less effort - reducing the number of new repeated topics. These features include: Board / Category pages: A custom-built component to feature blog content by tags, delivering the right content in the right place - relevant to board or category. New Post Page: Implemented search-before-posting. New Post Page: Highlighted board-specific featured posts. New Post Page: Used customer blog component to highlight relevant blogs. Mobile-first layout changes Increased implementation of Custom Content boxes. This programme of enhancements were developed in house by our Community management team.   Lithium Manage View We're constantly asked for "the view from the community" about an issue of the day. The opportunity to beta-test Manage View gave us the ability to provide instant feedback across all forum boards and categories for specific search terms, trending issues and subjects. We worked with the team at Lithium to establish how this product - pitched more at campaigns or marketing, could work in a support environment. YouTube & Product Association Currently under development is our implementation of Lithium's Product Association. After it's announcement we were keen to see what the support implications of this were - while we don't have a specific product catalogue for sales purposes that could be used, the workings of Product Association could cross the traditional linear problems of Community. Our products can't always be easily categorised. Is watching Netflix a TV, Internet or Mobile query? So we looked at Product Association and saw away to create a hub for Netflix - for anything we wanted - without losing the bedrock and usability of a conventional forum. We've worked with our in-house Community team and in consultation with Lithium to make this a reality. Hand-in-hand with this is a new way to use YouTube video content in a smarter way - similar to the blog content. This idea came through discussions with our video content team, as YouTube as a destination is not as configurable as our own site could be. And by tying it into the development of Product Association, we could showcase help videos in a targets and very specified level. 2. Tell us about how you made it happen Did you stage it first, who got an early look, how you drove adoption/use, and any iterations you had to make to get it right. My Trials Built and tested on stage in an Agile manner. Used Community API to create a live environment, showing latest posts and ratifying role-based user access.  Worked throughout with our main trials leads to ensure their requirements were met. Enforced adoption for all trialists, but encouraged new users to visit using customer URL:  virg.in/trials which was shared publicly. Ramped up trails and survey announcements to ensure members returned.  Right Content: Right place Built and tested on stage in an Agile manner. Shared with Operational team during development. When each enhancement ready, deployed to Production. Custom Blog component used Community API calls to filter via label - two different deployments for category / board and for new post page. Search before posting enabled out of the box. Featured posts re-skinned and re-deployed for prominence. Custom Content boxes standardised and consistently deployed across site to allow for messaging on a site / category / board / post level. Lithium Manage View Tested where incidents arose to ensure features worked as expected. Worked with duty managers to explain how to use, and what more they could get from it. YouTube & Product Association Building and testing on stage in an Agile manner. Working initially with Lithium to understand the proposition.  Consulting with relevant stakeholders, product managers, technical leads and insight teams to develop potential. After talking with our video content team, it became clear that this needed to be incorporated to make the whole experience even more helpful and content well-rounded for all customers. Have delayed PA launch while we work with Community API and YouTube API to create a Blog / YouTube repository which will serve the content. 3. What were the results?  My Trials Using Role based access rules, we’ve been able to create an open and welcoming Trials environment, which is both customisable and completely locked-down. Dependent on the type of Community member you are, you’ll see different articles and features, and only trialists on specific trials can see the appropriate trial boards, posts and information. This makes Trial admin a much easier task, and trials more accessible - our Announcements for Trials saw an increase viewership of over 1000% as a result.     Right Content: Right place We have continued to see an rise in visits, member entrances, registrations and page views, but the number of new posts (year-on-year) has declined for the first time in 8 years. More Helpful Answers are being viewed, and more relevant - and in some cases evergreen -  blog content is being viewed.   YouTube & Product Association Very much in-development, but here's a sneak-peek at how our new Product Association pages will look, bringing in supportive content to tagged messages, creating an easily scalable number of product hubs.   ... View more

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: Social Support Champion 1. What were your organization’s social customer service initiatives in 2017-2018? 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 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? 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%         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%    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.   ... View more