Hutchison 3G UK Limited (SMARTY)
Author Details: Name: Yulian Kozachok Title: CX Platform Lead Company: Hutchison 3G UK Limited (SMARTY) Tell us about you, your company, and your team? SMARTY is the SIM-only network on a mission to put the trust back into the mobile industry, by doing things differently. SMARTY believes there’s a better way to do things; great value, simple plans, transparent pricing and flexible monthly SIMs. Customers don’t need to worry about a hefty bill or nasty surprises at the end of the month – it’s simple, honest mobile. With a focus on the customer, SMARTY offers EU roaming up to 12GB and unlimited calls and texts with every plan. Customers can pause, change, or cancel monthly without long contracts tying them down for years. SMARTY is powered by Three Ireland's strong and reliable 4G and 5G network, which delivers super-fast speeds for all your mobile needs. SMARTY was recently named Which? Recommended Provider for the fourth year in a row thanks to its commitment to its customers – all 1 million + (as of October 2024) and counting! How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The CX team specialises in creating a customer experience strategy that provides our audience with an engaging community and peer-to-peer support whenever needed. As a CX Platform Lead, I take care of the community, ensuring that it’s a reliable source of information for customers, allowing users to support one another while fielding engaging discussions. We also run multiple competitions on the platform to boost engagement and provide incentives for being a part of the community. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The SMARTY Community platform is a place where customers can share knowledge and ideas, give peer-to-peer support and access 24/7 help. As our customer base grows, we are looking to gain more of their valuable insights through real-time feedback. The Khoros Community platform is a fantastic asset that enables us to listen to our customers, explore analytics, and understand our customers on a deeper level. We also know that our customers love to self-serve, rather than spend time trying to reach an agent. The community content management enabled us to tag, review and edit content quickly, so users can easily find solutions to any problems they face. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Our goal for this year was to boost our Registrations, Engagement and improve community Resolution Rate. Community platform provides an excellent outlet to present customer-centric content to our base. We kicked 2024 off with a SMARTY Community 1st Anniversary Prize draw. “Let us know about your favourite bargain”. This was an instant success aligning well with SMARTY’s mission to provide great service at bargain prices. In July we have launched “Win Big This Summer” - our most successful activity so far. A segment of our new The Travel One newsletter, this event was a culmination of work and collaboration between Marketing, PR, Comms and CX teams within the business. To boost our community Resolution Rate, we have introduced a Help Video section in our forums and utilised custom content components to feature most wanted content when necessary. For example, Roaming and device settings during the summer months. In addition, we have launched and Ideation area where we invite our customers to share their suggestions and feedback about current features. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. There is a great value of having our community platform as there are many advantages over other social media channels. Besides providing self-service and decreasing the costs, we can use the community to engage with our base, gather insight, run tests and ideation. Great to see that our Community is helping people to make their purchasing decision. Conversion rate to store is between 1.6 - 2%. Retain – despite being no obligation SIM package only deals provider, we are seeing customers who have participated in multiple community events in the past 18 months, and we are looking forward to introducing a Superuser program. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Approaching our 2nd year, we believe our community is doing well, we have doubled almost in every metric and continue to grow: We have over 90K registered Community members already, and we average at 60K Unique Visits monthly. Our Traffic has been growing at a steady pace and we are well above 150k Page views every month now. Community Responsiveness is around 8hr mark. We have seen a 7% improvement in our Resolution Rate year to date. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros community platform provides a necessary toolbox to deliver our vision for Customer Experience. Currently we are sandbox testing Khoros Aurora platform and are excited about this powerful new tool that will help us to better manage our community and create more engaging customer experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have hadseveral customisation requests and Khoros PS were able to provide the solution swiftly. Our Customer Success team in Khoros provides support that we require. Atlas Community forum, and various community meetups and webinars Khoros is organising are particularly helpful to get an additional insight, share and learn from other community players.Videotron
Author Details: Name: Julian Durand Burgoyne Title: Sr. Manager, Digital Engagement and Social Media Company: Videotron Tell us about you, your company, and your team? 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. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? My team handles digital engagement and social media both for customer service and technical support. We handle all things digital in the customer service space for Videotron. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Over the years we deployed a strategy of serving the customer on the channel of their choosing. We deployed capabilities with Khoros to enable us to do just that. Secure forms helped us authenticate customers and allowed us to serve them on a broader range of channels previously inaccessible. We previously had no contact entry point on our support website. The initial reason behind this being we wanted to promote self-service to avoid costs. However, after deploying support on so many channels it didn’t make sense to keep our support site without a way to contact us. We expected that adding messaging capabilities on that section of our website would drive significant volumes that we were maybe not ready to handle. We decided it was time for us to try automation, which we always were skeptical of. This skepticism stemmed from expecting our customer base to hate having to speak to a bot. We were skeptical of traditional bots, since customer service is our DNA and we found bots to be a bit too cold and non-personal. Additionally, accuracy of the GenAI was also a concern, though all of this was dispelled with the POC. Videotron being a leader in customer service satisfaction when we launched automation we wanted to do it right. So, we partnered with Khoros to test in one fell swoop, brand messenger, Flow and the new Helix AI capabilities. In a few months we built and trained a virtual assistant with knowledge of our entire support website that leverages Helix Generative AI capabilities to answer customers in a fluid, in depth and personalized way. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. It allowed us to launch a new major contact point, driving new volumes in Khoros Care, while also deflecting contacts that could be answered without a current support site for the type of customer that didn’t want to search the site and would’ve contacted us. We have doubled our incoming volume within Khoros Care. We achieved for the first time parity with our live chat and conversations incoming within Care. Around a third of the volume coming into our bot doesn’t end up to an agent. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The new entry point brought 50% new conversations from what we had before launching it, which is roughly 12,000 new conversations per month. However, thanks to the automation in that channel, 56% of those conversations never make it to an agent. Some of it we think goes to another channel, based on issue type that cannot be resolved by bot, but still didn't go through to a handover. Real estimated deflection is around 80% of that 56%, so roughly a third of all incoming volume in the bot. 36% of all incoming volume from our support site is deflected. 36% of incoming volume on the entry point in our support site is the bot. The 20% difference is from the customers choosing to not stay for the asynchronous messaging in Brand Messenger and choosing to call us or use our live chat. Conversations that make it to an agent are on average 22% faster than similar private conversations on our other Khoros Care channels. So even when a handoff is necessary the information gathered with the virtual assistant helps the agent handle the situation faster. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We were expecting agents to be apprehensive of AI, but it wasn't the case. They welcomed the help provided by the bot. It helped us find gaps or issues that flew under the radar, having lots of volume being tagged by AI Insights. It also helped us establish a better process where the web teams broadcast changes done to the website since it now can conflict with the bot knowledge. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Flow was easy to learn and allowed us our very small project team of 2, to deploy, modify, and iterate on our AI project. It’s a great too allowing us to quickly find bugs and issues and fix them without needing code knowledge or any internal IT resources that can have an impact somewhere else. Generative AI can be a complex matter, but Khoros’ team was instrumental in allowing us to deliver a working prototype that passed all of our test in order to be client facing. Once the GenAI part was working, building the actual bot in Flow around it was easy to do. Flow is very user friendly the no code – low code approach works wonders in enabling users to build what they envision without the need to involved a big team of developers. We love the fact that the GenAI works as a part of flow and that we can build around it. That allows to be more focused and handhold the end user when needed and leverage the GenAI when it is the time to do so. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Not only is the technology great and easy to use, but Khoros’ accessibility as a partner, ease of communication and collaboration stands out as a defining facilitating factor what we managed to deliver. We always greatly appreciated Khoros for their quick and accessible support and in project like these it makes a world of difference having access to the right people at the right moment. Khoros’ team took the time to guide us and train us at our own pace enabling us to be able to quickly get a grip on Flow thus allowing us to work even better with the team assisting us in building the solution.Ultra Mobile
Author Details: Name: Jon Lamont Title: Director, Care Revenue Company: Ultra Mobile Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Ultra Mobile is a nationwide prepaid mobile carrier committed to providing customers with affordable wireless services and coverage. Our mission is to enhance customers’ lives by connecting them to their world through surfing, streaming, swiping, posting, texting, or calling someone nearby or across the globe. By offering exceptional value on the T-Mobile 5G Network, Ultra Mobile continues to lead the charge in transforming the wireless experience. As the Dir. Care Revenue - I oversee our contact center operations and the software we use to serve our customers. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our focus is ensuring customers get access to their answers in as quick and low friction way as possible, while maximizing efficiency from an operations standpoint. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? At Ultra Mobile, we faced numerous challenges related to growing pains: We were growing fast, but so was our volume of inbound customer support inquiries. Our customer base was expanding into demographics that required a higher degree of account troubleshooting and tech support. Our existing program made it difficult to adapt to spikes in customer support inquiries, including a chatbot that was stuck at a low containment rate, and was too difficult to maintain and optimize over time. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We partnered with Khoros to deploy a new agent desktop and chat experience, new AI platform, and new mobile messaging channels. We onboarded 200+ chat agents, giving them new intent-based tagging and routing capabilities, and the ability to collect customer and payment info in PCI-compliant secure forms. We were able to quickly migrate our existing AI’s intent model and conversation flows — to preserve useful components and prevent starting from scratch. From there, we built a new intent model to better classify conversations, and simplified our bot flows into a structure more suitable for ongoing optimization and tuning. Also, we turned on new Apple and Google business messaging channels, which both deliver highly visible entry points to deflect call volume. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. At Ultra Mobile, we took fast, unified action to transform our customer engagement teams’ workflows, software, and AI capabilities. The results were extraordinary, including one very rare achievement in the customer engagement industry: a revenue positive care operation. 63% chatbot containment rate (2X increase from previous 33%) 4.4M chatbot conversations in 2023 $2M in support cost savings ➔ Enhanced agent efficiency 40% reduction in average handle time (from 25 minutes to 15 minutes) 18% reduction in time to agent response (from 2 minutes, 45 seconds to 2 minutes, 15 seconds) 53% increase in total contact volume, with only 3% increase in staffing ➔ Maintained customer satisfaction leadership 95% NPS across all channels 4.0 CSAT on Apple and Google business messaging channels ➔ Drove revenue from customer care 40% increase in sales volume via web chat $4.0M in incremental revenue via web chat What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. See above and case study here: https://assets.khoros.com/v3/case-studies/Ultra-Mobile-Service-Story.pdf What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The team surrounding us made it very easy to bring across what was successful from our previous vendor, but also helpful in identifying areas for improvement. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The team, the software, the commercials - everything! We felt a real sense of partnership and the simplicity of the software also enabled us to train agents quickly and effectively.Altice USA
Author Details: Name: Carolyn Miller Title: Social Media Care & Insights Manager Company: Altice USA Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I am a Social Care & Insights Manager for the telecommunications company Altice USA. The social care team answers customers’ billing and technical inquiries that come in through various social media platforms. They respond to customers on Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, and numerous online review platforms. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Altice’s goals are to connect, grow, inspire, and delight our customers. The social care team does our part to contribute to that promise. We do that by providing support to our customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We attentively listen to our customers and do our best to solve their problems in the quickest way possible. We pay attention to our customers’ pain points and work with other groups to find solutions for those issues. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We use the Khoros Care solution for our Social Media Customer Care team and our Business Chat Support team. Our primary goal is to always help and support our customers and their needs as expressed through social media platforms. The challenge was to be able access and add more platforms for our team to support. Over the last few years, we have added LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Yelp. This level of support has allowed our team to be more responsive and address more of the concerns that our customers have. Our support has delighted our customers and has improved our brand reputation. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. One of our recent wins for the social care team, and the company, was successfully improving our brand’s reputation, which we have been diligently working on for the last year. This was a cross-departmental initiative. Our goal was to improve consumer sentiment across all platforms including online reviews. The Khoros platforms makes it easy to tag, label and sort any interaction. It also makes it easy to respond quickly and efficiently to the reviews left by our customers, be it positive or negative. That level of personalization and responsiveness does a lot to turn around an unhappy customer. In addition, reaching out to find our customers on various platforms, and then addressing their concerns, improves our brand reputation. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. There were several value-added outcomes from addressing these challenges. First, was improving our brand reputation. We immediately noticed the effects by observing the commentary from our customers. We connected with them by personally and quickly responding to their thoughts and concerns. Through these actions, we were able to improve our brand reputation, which in turn, reduced churn and improved the company’s bottom line. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We were able to reduce the time that it takes for each agent to handle these customer interactions. That allowed us to improve our agent’s efficiency. Even better, we were able to improve our CSAT score to a record high of 90%! Improved Agent Efficiency: 6.2% reduction in average response handle time YoY. RHT of 2 minutes and 13 seconds for social agents. Improved Customer Experience: currently achieving our goal of 90% CSAT score from 87% in 2023. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The ease of use of Khoros’ analytics has improved our awareness and rate of trend recognition determined by our customers' commentary expressed on social media platforms. The tagging system is robust, and we make full use of it. We have widgets on our dashboard that show us what towns and topics are trending. This allows us to quickly determine if there is an outage or service issue in a particular town. We can rapidly get that information to our outage team to declare it, often before they are even aware of it. This allowed us to resolve the outage, calm nerves, and provide a better experience - without impacting call volume in our contact center. One example of that was an when a small segment of our customers experienced issues during the Superbowl. It was specific to one location, and we were able to identify enough examples using the Khoros tags that the issue got quickly fixed. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The support of the Khoros team, including our CSM Jordan, has allowed us to be able to provide specific ad hoc reporting. On occasion, we have been requested by senior leadership to provide reporting on specific topics, including historical data and comparisons. There have been situations where we did not know how to retrieve this data from Khoros. Our analyst was able to set up 1 on 1 training sessions with a knowledgeable Khoros trainer to assist in gathering this data. We were then able to provide accurate, concise and detailed information to the requestor, which improved the reputation of the social care team.Orange Romania
Author Details: Name: Mihaela Andruseac Title: Community Manager Company: Orange Romania Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I am the Community Manager, I was hired in Nov 2018 especially for this project and I helped launch the Orange Romania Community in June 2019 and we grew beautifully in the past 5 years. We started with Ring Central (ex Dimelo) as our initial platform provider and after a while we switched platform providers and we are very happy with Khoros. We are a team of 3 people - 1 Community Manager and 2 Moderators (Daniela & Georgiana) and we are part of the Consumer Operations & Transformation Department at Orange Romania. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Community Team is helping with all Community related activities (managing and moderating, delivering clients insights, user testing on specific topics, Superusers program and so on) and the main goal is to decrease costs with calls and chat / messenger (call & chat / mess deflection). Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Teams Involved: Community Team Marketing Team IT Team Use Cases: Transitioning the Support Community from an old provider to Khoros Launching the Superusers program to enhance community engagement and support Set an annual feedback survey for community members to gather insights and improve the community experience Challenges Addressed: End-of-life platform provider: transition to one of the top community platform providers in the market allowed us to modernize our community infrastructure and the constant support that we received during the transition and after was extremely needed (we didn't have any support in the past in terms of benchmarking, market insights, strategy) Scalable Self-Service: improved access to new features on the new platform, reducing the need for direct support - generating call & chat / messenger deflection Knowledge Management: centralized information sharing to ensure users can find answers quickly Community Engagement: encouraged active participation through the Superusers program, fostering a sense of belonging and loyalty & improving specific KPIs such as "time to 1st answer" Innovation and Growth: leveraged community insights to drive product improvements and enhance customer satisfaction through Superusers program, specific testing sessions & feedback survey. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Challenge: The previous platform provider announced an end-of-life timeline, meaning no updates, developments, or additional support from that moment and the product to be closed in 3 years. This posed a significant risk to our community's functionality and user experience. Opportunity: Switching to Khoros platform allowed us to modernize our community infrastructure and the constant support was extremely needed. During the same period we launched our Superusers program that empowered engaged members to assist others during the transition, ensuring continuity and support. And they were very helpful for the Community Team during the User Testing period. With the help of our annual feedback survey we improved user experience by managing specific features the platform has. Teams Involved: Community Management Team: helped during transition, developed the Superusers program and launched the feedback survey Marketing Team: promoted the benefits of the new platform and the Superusers initiative to our Orange Romania customers. Helped with translations and description texts for the community pages IT Team: helped with the technical part of the transition. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Deflection rate: increase by 11% in 6 months timeframe from a total of 121K to 134.5K call & chat / messenger deflected - generating cost reduction Testing sessions with Superusers: since we launched the Superusers program we received testing scenarios from internal teams. The Superusers' feedback is highly appreciated internally and changes are made based on their feedback and we close the loop by presenting them the high-level roadmap with changes planned internally. CEO was present to our event with Superusers:we organized an event to celebrate 5 years of Orange Community and the Superusers felt appreciated and valued by our internal teams present and by our CEO that gathered insights directly from the source and exchanged ideas. The CEO knows how important the Community is and the generated value. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Decrease in time to 1st answer: Average time to 1st answer decreased by 29% (6 months timeframe) from an average of 76 minutes to 54 minutes Increased Engagement: Community participation increased by 82% in 6 months after the transition; replies / topic ration is above average based on community benchmarking registering 9.69 vs 4.56 average & posts per member entrance ration is also above average with 0.51 vs 0.28 KPI: Active members count rose from an average of 350/month to 637/month (active members - logged in and posted content) Solutions / topics ration above average in community benchmarking with 40.33% vs 24.72% average Private room inside the community platform: Easier for superusers to participate and to develop the program even further (before the transition we had another platform where we discussed with them and it was very difficult for them) Launching superusers program: Generating free time for community team to tackle more important things like strategy and engagement activities What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Robust Analytics: Advanced analytics tools provided insights into user behavior and community trends, enabling data-driven decisions for improvements. Customizable Features: The ability to tailor the platform to our specific needs allowed for the effective implementation of the Superusers program (dedicated private room inside the community) and feedback mechanisms. Scalability: The platform's scalability ensured that it could grow with our community, accommodating increased membership and activity without performance issues. Enabling Factors: Comprehensive training from Khoros for the Community Management and IT teams ensured a smooth transition and effective use of the platform's features. Because of these specific pre-registered training found on Atlas the Community Team and other internal teams involved during and after the transition knew exactly what to do and how. Also the possibility to have a conversation with a Strategist from Khoros was very important in terms of planning and delivering results. Active Superusers: The involvement of Superusers provided peer support and fostered a sense of community, enhancing overall engagement. Community Team: Our dedicated team was hands-on during the transition and after in order to deliver our internal goals. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Comprehensive Onboarding: The onboarding process provided thorough training and resources, ensuring our team was well-equipped to utilize the platform effectively from the start. Dedicated Support: Access to Khoros support teams allowed us to quickly resolve technical issues and receive guidance on best practices, facilitating a smoother transition. Community Best Practices and Benchmarking: Khoros shared insights and case studies from other successful communities, helping us implement proven strategies tailored to our needs. Flexible Customization Options: The ability to customize features and functionalities allowed us to create a community experience that aligned with our specific goals and user preferences. Regular Updates and Enhancements: Continuous improvements and new features from Khoros kept our community platform modern and responsive to user needs, enhancing overall satisfaction.Orange Belgium
Author Details: Name: Rizlaine Baitar Title: Community Manager Company: Orange Belgium Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I've been working for Orange for 6 years. I started as a Webcare agent, I was a moderator for the Tribe forum and now I'm responsible for both forums (Tribe and hey!). I really enjoy my job and my team. Orange is a very pleasant company, you feel good here. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? One of the main objectives of our strategy is to digitalise. The community plays a role because it can help customers to quickly find the answers to their questions directly. Without having to call customer service. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Tribe was a small community that has grown considerably. Today, Tribe has more than 51,000 members. We share all the news with members and continue to promote the community. We have 6 super users who are very active and very helpful. They are constantly looking for answers to members' questions and finding good solutions. We've put Tribe in front of the other departments, so we have very good support. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Seeing this community grow year after year. We've passed the 51,000 members. Many members have got used to the forum and no longer contact customer service. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Orange Forum (Tribe) In 2023, we had around 4,000 new members and 808,521 visits Hey! Forum It's brand new and just starting to make a name for itself. We have almost 2,000 members and had 31,782 visits in 2023. The hey! forum has evolved considerably in the last few months. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. On the Orange (Tribe) forum, in 2023 we had around 4,000 new members, 808,521 visits and 1,885,214 page views. Customer service also highlights tips and tricks from the community. These customers frequently become members and continue to visit the forum. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The tool is easy to use, with a clear view of the categories, members and figures. It's very important for us to be able to monitor progress. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have regular calls with Celestin. We've been working with Khoros for several years now, and the collaboration continues to go very well.
