Company: Videotron Company background: Videotron is a Canadian telecommunications leader. A wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and wireless telephone services. Contact: Julien Durand Burgoyne Title: Sr. Manager Digital Engagement and Social Media Related URLs: https://corpo.videotron.com/en/company/our-company www.videotron.com Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On 1. How did your team shift your existing strategy using the Khoros platform to better engage customers during a crisis? Our shift of strategy came from necessity. Videotron is recognized for its outstanding customer year after year in its market. We take pride in making sure people reaching out to us are treated as best as we can regardless of the channel they chose to contact us in. On social care and in our asynchronous channels that means a lightning-fast time to average response so that we can engage with hem in a live manner or have them dictate the pace. We normally operate with a team of both customer service and technical support agents in Khoros Care. The asynchronous nature of the conversations allows us to be quite agile even if the influx of conversation suddenly becomes more important than usual allowing us to deliver exceptional customer service quickly regardless of how busy we are. However, on December 31, 2021, in the evening, most of our customers were under COVID lockdown. Not being allowed to have guests, made it so that a lot of people sat down to watch the New Year’s Eve programming on TV. We had a significant outage affecting a portion our TV customers right as the first end of year shows were starting in the evening. To make matters worst, being the evening on new year’s eve, technical support was operating with limited staff. We had one technical support agent handling Khoros Care conversations. We were instantly swarmed by incoming posts both public and private. To give an order of magnitude in one evening we received the equivalent of 33 days worth of incoming messages. The graph below illustrates how significant the number of conversations were compared to our usual volumes.  We had to think outside the box and fast, the phone lines were getting busy too. What was supposed to be a quiet evening changed completely. We had to switch from our normal work processes that allow us to deliver exceptional customer service, to figuring how to maintain that quality of service with a number of conversations we knew we were never going to be able to keep up with. So, we decided to find a way to reach as many people as we can rapidly while still answering conversations that needed a personalized answer to maintain our quality standards. 2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis? In order to achieve that new strategy, we rapidly posted a statement on social media. We also modified our welcome message to advise people of the outage if they chose to message us privately and not check out social channels. We also had similar messages on our phone lines of course. Our main goal was and always is providing the best customer experience even during a time of crisis. So we could not assume that all the conversations that came in prior to those posts were aware of the outage especially the conversations outside of social media. We needed a way to isolate customers less likely to have seen our social media posts that were getting an enormous reach already. Using tags, keyword searches and bulk actions from manage view we were able to route those customers that needed personalized support, to a smart view, which the lone agent was dedicated to. Still using manage view and bulk actions, we identified non-time-sensitive conversations that we were able to lower in priority and that could wait until the next day for an answer when more agents would be present. Using that strategy, we were able to maximize the number of people getting informed on the situation and potential workarounds while answering those who needed it. Furthermore, that open transparent approach generated a lot of buzz over social, with people sharing our posts like never before but also sharing fixes and workarounds. The outage and our response on social also made the news. Once comfortable with the new process we were able to start bulk closing conversations that did not need direct agent intervention all while being confident that we would not close any conversations that needed to be engaged. 3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes? Every crisis is different. This one was sudden, intense but short-lived. In order to determine if we were satisfied with the outcome, we looked at a lot of metrics in order to look at the results under three different angles. The reach and reactions on our social posts, the number of conversations received vs. the ones that had to be answered and, of course, the impact on our CSAT. We wanted to know, if we succeeded in massively reaching people quickly, how did that reach help us operationally but above all how did customers respond to it and were they satisfied with our crisis management. In all three the results were striking. Our social posts were by far our top reaching posts, reactions and comments were exceeding what we anticipated compared to past outages and crisis. We managed to isolate and close a lot of conversations without engagement but being confident they did not need to be engaged. We managed to engage all customers that wrote before our actions to let everyone know what was going on and the remaining low priority backlog was handled by lunch the next day. As for CSAT on our private channels, the impact was there but quite minimal and we even saw a rise in CSAT over the following months. Considering it was by far our worst outage in terms of volumes over social, it is clear that the capabilities provided by Khoros Care, our own internal expertise and our desire to keep striving for best-in-class customer service the storm unscathed. ... View more

Company: Videotron Company background: Videotron is a Canadian telecommunications leader. A wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and wireless telephone services. Contact: Julien Durand Burgoyne Title: Sr. Manager Digital Engagement and Social Media Related URLs: https://corpo.videotron.com/en/company/our-company https://videotron.com/ Kudos Category: Partners for Life 1. Describe your partnership with Khoros. Tell us about which Khoros teams you partner with (e.g. Strategic Services, Professional Services, Customer Success, etc) and the outcomes you were hoping to drive. Videotron’s primary focus has always been delivering best of class customer service, and to engage with our customers wherever they are, whatever they need. This desire to provide the best customer service made us early adopters of non-traditional channels such as social media and asynchronous messaging. We rapidly understood the need to have a powerful digital engagement tool and this is why Videotron and Khoros have been partners since 2015. We first launched Lithium Response (now Khoros Care) and a year later we launched our community. Throughout the years we interacted with many different teams at Khoros, professional services, customer success, The service and partnership with Khoros and its teams have always been impeccable.  Everything we did with Khoros over the years allowed us, to drive digital engagement, to innovate and push the envelope in an industry where traditional call centres are deeply rooted all while maintaining our excellent customer service for which we are known for.    2. How have your Khoros partners helped you shape your strategy and align your people and processes? At first Khoros helped us elevate our service levels and deliver our best-in-class customer service over social channels with the same degree of excellence to which our customers are accustomed to on our traditional channels. With the community Khoros helped us build an evolving support community for our customers, further driving digital engagement and customer satisfaction. In the last few years, the partnership with Khoros, especially interactions with our CSMs and account executive, the events, webinars, training and coaching offered by Khoros, helped us put in place a new global digital engagement strategy that uses social channels and asynchronous messaging to deliver better customer service outside of traditional phone or live chat service. This was possible through three major milestones. First, we launched Secure Verification in March 2020 right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing us to be among the first Canadian telecommunications company to authenticate customers and deliver end to end service over Facebook Messenger and Twitter DMs. It was an immediate success, and since then our digital channels kept growing. The second milestone was the participation in the Google Business Messages early access program, made possible again through our partnership with Khoros. We launched in November 2020 being the first Canadian Telco to use GBM, and in only a few months GBM became one of our most popular digital channels. The third milestone was in October 2021 were we able, thanks to Khoros, to participate in the Secure Forms early access program, allowing us to authenticate our customers fully and securely on every private channel including GBM. Adding to that, we just launched Push Next, and thanks to our management and our Khoros CSM the change management was a breeze and agents are unanimously loving it. 3. What successes have you experienced because of your partnership with Khoros? How are you better able to deliver your strategic priorities and deliver value back to your business? Please include metrics if possible. Since March 2020 we have roughly tripled our overall customer interactions, while being able to do more for our customers and thus significantly raising our number of incoming messages and responses per conversations, rivalling what we can do on our traditional channels without the need to wait on the phone or in a live chat queue.  While our interactions tripled, became longer and more meaningful, our staffing needs only grew by 60%. While this growth was happening our CSAT grew alongside it. Reaching over 80% CSAT on Facebook and Twitter. Our partnership with Khoros and the tool itself, allowed us to scale up our digital engagement significantly. While allowing the impact of that growth to be managed easily but also our costs grew at a significantly lower rate than if we would’ve faced that growth in traditional channels and tools. ... View more

    Company: Videotron Company background: Videotron is a leading player in the telecommunications market in Canada. A wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and wireless telephone services. Contact: Julien Durand Burgoyne Title: Senior manager social media and electronic communications Related URLs: videotron.com forum.videotron.com facebook.com/videotron Kudos Category: Bottom Line Savings Rock Star 1. Tell us how you are implementing Khoros’ digital engagement technologies (e.g. community and/or social media management) to meet your customer care business goals. Please highlight unique programs, technical upgrades and/or API usage to help reach these goals. This year we implemented social verification in order for our social care agent to be able to handle conversations on the same level they would a live chat. We are now able to handle complex customer request over social keeping them in channel and in an asynchronous conversation. 2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change? Social verification allowed me to show the power of asynchronous customer care, and allowed me to properly build a business care to further transform our digital care approach. It resulted in a new portfolio of projects to completly transform our digital care. 3. What are your customer care and business results in quantifiable metrics? Include support savings metrics (e.g. cost savings, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, increased agent productivity, optimizing campaigns, and efficiency with publishing and reporting). The launch of social verification coincided with the start of the covid crisis. In 3 months we tripled our conversations handeled and responses made, while maitaining our SLA and being short staff due to covid-19. On top of that those conversations are now more complexe since we can ID our customer. ... View more