USPS
Author Details: Name: Mary Beth Levin Title: Manager, Social Media Strategy and Analytics Company: USPS Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I have two teams under my tent: social intelligence and publishing. The publishing team manages content on our 18 accounts on six different platforms. It also manages the ZONE, the first (and so far only) social media ambassador program in the federal government. The social intelligence team takes a 360-degree look at what is being said about us on social and traditional media. Its purpose is brand protection, crisis mitigation, and a better customer experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our goal is to do good and do better. Unlike many other programs which are based in marketing, we are fortunate to be based in communications in a center of excellence model. This means we are a servant with many masters: HQ communications, field communications, operations, HR, government relations, licensing, marketing and even the Postal Inspection Service. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We wanted to map-out feedback coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We also needed to protect customer privacy. When looking at concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites, we noted specific “customer service hotspots”. We also noted that the types of concerns varied by location. At its very heart, USPS is about logistics. We swim in data. At times we drown in data. With social media, this is yet another set of information competing for people’s time and attention. We needed to provide information in a way that was accessible and compelling to people who are already super busy. Our objective was to make things better for everyone: customers and employees. And we needed to recognize that not everyone loves pie charts and bar graphs. Social listening software has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on). This is why social listening software will map-out to cities and states and can do so for a limited percentage of social media mentions (about one-third for those platforms which allow access). Listening software will pull in product reviews, but not location reviews. And there is the issue of integrating data from various sources. USPS uses POS surveys, but these have limitations: they only capture the retail experience, tend to focus on extreme experiences, can’t include photos/videos, and results are rarely shared= outside of a select group. The teams we involved included communications, social intelligence, social customer response, marketing, operations and government relations. 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 think of social media as the world’s largest focus group. In social listening the customer is driving the agenda of the conversation, telling us what is most important. We developed an interactive heatmap to illustrate concerns coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We integrated data from 34 online review sites and our social customer response software (customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media accounts on FB and X). We incorporated our internal tracking software to show not only the destination address, but where it was last scanned (because issues can occur further upstream). In doing so, we provided a one-stop shopping experience for those wanting to know what was going on nationally and in their neighborhood. Users can select one or more postal areas, districts, zip codes, or subjects (tags). The data goes back to January, 2016 and is updated daily. Because what we were doing was so new, we had to go through an 18-month clearance process to ensure data was secure and the information users were viewing had been scrubbed of personally identifying information. We knew we were competing for time and attention. And we are cognizant of the fact that our audience is not comprised of data scientists who love excel spreadsheets. We intentionally used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. People can see a heatmap and recognize that they don’t want the area they work in to show as red! They relate to top ten lists and the personal element of customer quotes, images, and videos the dashboard can show. And seeing how they are doing relative to others and shake them out of complacency with a healthy sense of competition. Working with the unions, we selected local leaders who would give a short presentation featuring the data of that specific location. This was then tied-in to a larger conversation about social media and its role in greater accountability. The feedback received was “I’ve been working here 20 years and no one has ever explained it to me that way. This makes sense.” Employees recognized that unlike other forms of feedback, this information is publicly posted. We promised the unions that the information would never be used punitively. These first conversations discussed customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites. In response to feedback, we included online review sites. This information was emailed on a weekly basis. Information about the heatmap was provided in numerous formal presentations to leadership. Anyone with a USPS email address can access the heatmap. For those using the heatmap, there are weekly office hours, an ops manual, and individual tutorials. Online reviews are shared weekly to those on the ground. Area newsletters share the info monthly. District newsletters highlight results in their localities. There have been close to 100 articles for internal audiences. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Results include the following: Sharing the info in short meetings lead to a 54% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And 18% decrease in ECC (calls to the 800-number) Specifically: 31% decrease in WIMP (Where Is My Package) 51% decrease in certified exception 85% decrease in WMM (Where Is My Mail) These changes were stat sig. Sharing the review info via weekly emails led to a 35% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And a 17% increase in online review scores. Since USPS spends $58 per ECC and $4 per SCR case, the savings can be significant. We have applied for a patent. Completed the one-year preliminary application and filed the final application. The heatmap received external validation: Featured case study by the Social Intelligence Lab Presented at the SocialMedia.Org Board Meeting Presented at the Ragan and PR Daily Social Media Conference 2024 PR News 2024 Digital Awards winner for two categories: Social Listening and Employee Engagement The Postal Regulatory Commission “applauded the Postal Service for using social listening to determine what people are saying about its brand and services on social media. The social media heat map is an effective tool for visualizing customer comments and categorizing them by concern and geographic area.” It is not often that we receive praise from this entity. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We found additional nontraditional use cases: The Office of the Inspector General asked: are there passport concerns worth investigating? (Spoiler: no.) Saved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears since such investigations usually take more than a year. Government Relations – are concerns coming to congressional offices anecdotal or indicative? The heatmap has been used to investigate the location and show that the customer’s concerns were not the norm. We have now divided the heatmap into congressional districts. Proof of concept that employee engagement scores (high and low) correlate with better customer service and savings. Test effectiveness of interventions such as a manga promoting customer service approaches. A/B testing for new tracking software. No increase in tracking complaints observed, leading to expanded rollout. During natural disasters, we use it to identify local concerns (change of address, closure, theft) to inform operations and social media posts. Anticipating PR concerns: e.g. the trend line was going up in Puerto Rico because limited storage led to packages being stored outside. And then it rained. We were able to find additional storage and have a ready answer for the press (who did reach out to us). Located customer service hotspots for Operation Santa for targeted training. This program provides presents to 25K children every year. We don’t want anything to go wrong here. Determined locations for rollout of products and services such as Informed Delivery (now at 64.9M participants). Gemba (site) visits: researching before arriving and giving credit when it’s due. “Hey Erica, I saw that you got a shout-out on social media. Keep up the great work!” Personally, it is extremely gratifying to get an email from someone on the other side of the country saying, “Thank you so much for this email! We only hear from leadership when things go wrong.” It is not exclusively about improving customer service. It is about creating an environment in which good work and good people are honored. 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? There were two things: The flexibility and the sophistication of the tagging system which allows one to code using Boolean or Lucene rules. LLM are still in their infancy and many software lack transparency in their accuracy. I know what I want and the terms my customers are using. When I develop the code myself, I know I’m getting exactly what I am looking for; I don’t have to spend time on learning models. Khoros cut its teeth in customer response. They know how to pull data on the backend to integrate with the new interface we created. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The team understood and appreciated our business case and wholeheartedly supported us in developing something completely new.HubSpot
Author Details: Name: Gabrielle Herrera Title: Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth Company: HubSpot Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Community is an amplifier. Layering human connection on top of any of our customer-facing efforts makes them better. Our mission is to educate, connect and inspire the HubSpot community. In 2023 we showed that through hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, spreading HubSpot advocacy across the web, and by driving access and engagement to some of the hardest audiences to reach. In 2024, we're turning this amplifier up to 11. Our focus is to provide a human touch at scale using Community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. Our teams include Success Community, Communities of Practice, Identity based Communities (The Spot) and ensuring we’re spreading our advocates (Champions community) love throughout the community. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Using experimentation and scalable approaches, the Community Strategy & Operations team helps HubSpot identify hot pockets of community interest and value, and then scale those opportunities into valuable and sustainable communities for our ecosystem members. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers want to be guided and get personalized examples & advice (often preferably from a human). We have no shortage of great resources for our customers, but they don’t always get utilized. We need to spend our highly-talented CSMs’ time on high-leverage moments and stakeholders, not gathering links for front-line reps - but as we continue to succeed, there are even more people vying for CSM time. Through Community, we can scale success so reps can focus on leverage points, without removing the human touch from the experience by transforming into a Community Success Center. Peer responses and public answers save us potentially multimillions per year in support costs (and lift Partners up). Community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation. The Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users and developers on the HubSpot Community to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent and invaluable expertise. The Community Success Center allows HubSpot to become more efficient while keeping a human touch. 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. Evolving from a support community aimed at answering a single, point-in-time question to a recurring, lively success destination has been our major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, Customer Success content lives in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customer apply our tools to their needs efficiently and effectively. 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 HubSpot Community sees 4 million visits per year and 14k posts annually. 96% of solutions are provided by peers and 98% of posts are replied to within 24 hours. In collaboration with the Product Marketing team, we’ve facilitated 30 product Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions YTD, providing customers real life examples and access to the Product team in a cost-efficient manner. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In 2024 we launched a federated search including Knowledge Base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from our Developer Changelog. We also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a one-stop shop to the right solution. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for. We’ve been able to improve relevancy, and in turn adoption of the Community, by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers. Example of our Professional tier Community:https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-HubSpot/ct-p/professional 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 HubSpot Community (community.hubspot.com) launched in 2016 on Khoros (formerly Lithium) as the solution for free user support. Since 2016 the Community has grown in visibility and use cases. We have over 400,000 members (all time), > 1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. We can also associate community usage with healthier customers. Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Since incorporating CARE into our team, we’ve been able to streamline processes and ensure we’re putting the right resources into the right initiatives and biggest value-adds for our customers. Before CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators spent a lot of time in moderation, completing duplicative tasks and trying to clear up confusion around the division of work. This inefficient process negatively impacted how many Accepted Solutions - those peer-to-peer responses that deflect support tickets - they were able to accept each month. With CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, which help the person who raised the question and help the person who responded excel in the gamification of the Community, encouraging them to continue to engage. This efficiency win also allows the Community Managers to spend time on strategic initiatives such as our Workflows Library and build high-impact cross functional relationships with internal stakeholders.Dominion Energy
Author Details: Name: Courtney Koogler Ercolano Title: Communications Consultant Company: Dominion Energy Tell us about you, your company, and your team? My name is Courtney Koogler Ercolano and I’m a Communications Consultant for Dominion Energy. I’ve worked in digital communications for 8+ years. I worked on the previous platform and helped onboard Khoros in 2021. Since then, I’ve become a system administrator to ensure the platform works as the team needs it to. This includes training customer care agents and other admins on how to use the platform as well as strategizing on how to use Care to best serve Dominion Energy’s needs. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? I sit under Customer Communications on the Corporate Communications team. I work alongside Customer Experience and Care teams in our local regions to meet our company goals (with a focus on the customer). The corporate team also sets governance for brand responses and creates processes for how to handle specific situations and escalations. We’ve built out a specific process for our customer care agents so that they can focus on serving our customers. Our goals include reducing call volume as it’s expensive and not ideal for all of our customers. Additionally, we use Khoros to expand our digital care offerings so we can continue to meet our customers where they are (or expect us to be). It’s important for us to be on the channels our customers prefer and to be able to serve our customers on the channel they come to us on. Our goal is to serve them on that channel and hopefully resolve their issue in that channel. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our challenge was to Reduce costs as it’s expensive to have people on the phones, Increase resources - digital positions are much more attractive, and Provide the digital options customers want. Our goal is never to get rid of the phone as there are cases that must be handled over the phone and customers who desire that option. One size does not fit all. Our challenge is finding a way to meet customers where they expect us to be and meet their expectations as a brand in general, not only as a utilities provider. The team uses Khoros Care to handle conversations across traditional social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Review channels, and digital channels including Apple Business Chat. 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 launched Apple Chat about a year and a half ago, and have continued to expand the offering in South Carolina because it has been so successful. Virginia is our next focus for this channel to help call diversion. Normally, it would be difficult to say whether this channel reduces calls, but because of message suggest, we can see that people chose this channel instead. Message Suggest is a prompt that appears to iPhone users when they go to make a phone call encouraging them to message the business instead. We use a tag in Khoros to track message suggest. During a storm, customers need to be able to report their outages to us. During one (very recent!) particular storm in South Carolina, our app was not working, our website outage reporting was down, and our IVR was down. Apple Chat was bombarded - but luckily, we had that option. Customers could report their outage using Apple Chat until our other options were back up. 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 primary business outcomes are that we’re able to directly divert calls through Message Suggest, offer chat options directly on our page using entry points, and test how customers would utilize this digital channel to move them away from phone calls in different regions. It’s important that we have data on how customers choose to use our resources so that we show leadership the need to grow channels, or offer new channels. More customers may choose to use digital after using Apple Chat. For example, we noticed a spike in Facebook use in South Carolina following the storm that pushed that customer base to Apple Chat. In addition, Dominion Energy has a goal of improving customer experience and increasing customer loyalty by delivering timely responses and faster resolution over traditional support channels. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In the first half of 2024, the team delivered on this goal and saw an increase in agent efficiency by decreasing Median Time to Agent response by 70% when compared to the same time period in 2023. This means our agents were able to respond faster to incoming posts from our customers. In addition, the team noticed a decrease in average handle time by 52%. Lastly, our team uses a message suggest tag to see how many conversations came through Apple Chat that were prompted to send a message rather than make a phone call. We saw a 30% increase in these Apple Chat conversations that would have gone to voice. 70% decrease in median TAR YoY (Jan-June 2024) 52% decrease in average handle time YoY (Jan-June 2024) 30% increase YoY in Apple Chat conversations that would have gone to voice (July-September 2024) 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 has helped us move beyond just looking at social media. Having a holistic view of the digital customer experience in one spot has shown us how this can be a more efficient process, divert calls, and improve the customer experience. Khoros has also expanded offerings to create a seamless customer and agent experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Khoros has been a great partner in suggesting ways to utilize the software package we already have and ways to optimize our instance. Often times, I don’t have to go sell anyone on a big investment, because we can test things out in Khoros that are in our current contract, show the value and grow from there. In addition, the ease of using the platform and having the option to work with an optimization specialist and tweak things on our own has been helpful. With our past provider it was hard to feel like an expert.Instructure
Author Details: Name: K Lundstrum Title: Community Manager Company: Instructure Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Instructure is the innovative education technology company behind Canvas, the world’s most popular learning management system and developing Ed-cosystem. As a company, we seek to elevate student success, amplify the power of teaching, and inspire everyone to learn together. Our Community team is at the heart of it all, driving vision and strategy in content, engagement, and innovation within the Instructure Community, a Khoros community. We’re dedicated to ensuring our users and over 2.2 million Community members have access to a wealth of knowledge, self-support resources, and peer collaboration. Through the Community, we empower educators, administrators, and students to discover solutions, share best practices, and access valuable resources—all while fostering a vibrant environment for learning and growth. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our role is at the core of Instructure’s mission—empowering users to be more self-sufficient and providing scalable, effective customer support through our online community. By fostering peer-to-peer problem solving and collaborating with internal teams to share best practices, we’re committed to enhancing teaching and learning. Our efforts drive impact at scale, ensuring that millions of users can quickly find the solutions they need, reducing reliance on traditional support channels, and creating a more efficient, dynamic support experience across the entire Instructure Ed-cosystem! Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Instructure Community, one of the first of its kind and now nearing its 15th year, has grown and evolved across three platforms while staying true to its inception: to capture the energy, excitement, and learning of InstructureCon, our annual conference, and keep it alive year-round online—it's the ultimate perpetual unconference! Built for our diverse user base of educators, administrators, IT professionals, and students, the Community offers quick, easy access to a wealth of resources, tips, and troubleshooting. It's more than just support; it’s a vibrant, multi-faceted self-service hub where users can tap into content created by both Instructure employees and their peers. Today, powered by Khoros, the Community continues to thrive as a scalable solution, enabling our 2.2 million members and millions more visitors to find answers fast. The collaborative spirit of peer-to-peer support and self-service empowers users to solve problems on their own, while also reducing the demand on traditional support channels. In fact, we’ve seen a clear link between increased page views and a decreased need for direct Support assistance. The impact of this self-service success is huge! At scale, it means significant case avoidance for our first-line support agents, saving the company money every quarter while freeing up our teams to tackle more complex, time-consuming cases. It’s a win-win that fuels both efficiency and innovation for everyone involved! 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. This year, the challenge we set out to solve was scaling the Instructure Community to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth through acquisitions and new product development. As Instructure’s Ed-cosystem continues to expand, so does the need for consistent, efficient, and scalable support across our entire product suite. With each new product added to the portfolio, the demand for quick access to resources, self-service tools, and peer collaboration grows—making the role of the Community more critical than ever. To meet this challenge, we focused on applying the proven strategies that have made the Instructure Community so successful to the broader Ed-cosystem. Our goal was simple: extend the Community's power and reach to support every corner of Instructure’s expanding portfolio. By integrating new products and user groups into the existing Community framework, we could provide a unified, scalable self-service platform that empowers users to find solutions across the entire product line, reducing strain on traditional support channels. While we’re beginning to expand the impact of the Community, the journey is just getting started. Customers are gradually discovering the wealth of resources available, and engagement is steadily building. As users explore and start tapping into the peer-to-peer support and self-service options, we expect the benefits to unfold over time. The true scale of savings through case avoidance will become more apparent as more members engage with the platform. By applying the same proven strategies that made Canvas LMS successful, we’re laying the foundation for a future where the Community plays a pivotal role in reducing support demands and creating a scalable experience across all of Instructure’s products. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Thanks to our commitment to fostering an environment of innovation, we’ve experienced an incredible 3% membership growth quarter over quarter! This growth isn’t just numbers on a page; it’s a testament to the needs this Community meets. New members are joining us, excited to be part of a vibrant ecosystem that prioritizes learning, advocacy, and thought leadership. We’re not just a community; we’re a movement! Our strategy to create “connection voracity” has truly paid off. We’re thrilled to report that 69% of our visitors found exactly what they were looking for! This means our resources are hitting the mark, empowering our users to engage deeply and meaningfully with our content. And it doesn’t stop there—an astounding 87% of our users rated our guides as helpful. This is more than just a number; it reflects our dedication to providing valuable insights that empower our users to thrive. When our members feel supported and informed, they become our greatest advocates, spreading the word about the invaluable solutions Instructure provides, and resources available within our community! We’ve become the ultimate source for self-enablement and self-support for every Instructure Ed-cosystem user. The results speak volumes: a staggering 95% accepted solution rate in our Q&A sessions, with a remarkable 72% solution view rate! Users are not just seeking help; they are finding it! This high level of engagement shows that our community is a reliable hub where answers are at their fingertips. Plus, with an impressive 26:1 unique visitors-to-support case ratio, we’re efficiently serving our users while deflecting an average of 1 million support tickets quarterly. This operational efficiency means we can focus even more on enhancing user experiences. When we look at these outcomes, it’s clear that addressing our strategic challenges has driven significant value. We’re not just keeping up; we’re leading the way! The synergy between our innovative offerings, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency creates a powerful narrative of success. We’re building a legacy that will resonate for years to come—a community that champions self-empowerment, fosters meaningful connections, and continually sets the standard for excellence. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Please see the previous question. By fostering self-service through our Khoros Community, we’ve consistently seen significant value in key metrics. Over the past year, our contact deflection rate held steady at26 visits to 1 support case, and we estimate that that deflects an average1 million quarterly support tickets. Additionally, the solution rate within the Community has averaged over 95%, as more users are solving problems through peer-to-peer discussions. These outcomes highlight the success of our strategy in leveraging self-service principles to improve overall customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and increase engagement—scalable community success. 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 Khoros platform is a powerhouse that supercharges our self-support initiatives! With its advanced features—like custom discussion filters, seamless knowledge base integration, and robust analytics tracking—we’re not just making strides; we’re leaping toward success! These incredible tools empower us to cultivate a vibrant community that thrives on member contributions while giving us the data-driven insights we need to continually refine and elevate our approach. But that’s not all! The ability to personalize user experiences, automate content moderation, and segment content for specific audiences has been an absolute game-changer, driving scalable solutions that make our community truly shine! And let’s talk about integration—thanks to Khoros seamlessly connecting with Instructure’s existing tools and resources, we’ve created an effortless user experience that encourages enthusiastic participation and engagement from our members like never before! Together, we’re not just building a community; we’re igniting a movement where every member feels empowered, valued, and excited to contribute. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Please see the previous question. The combination of an intuitive platform, robust analytics, and the ability to easily scale our initiatives has positioned us to continuously evolve the Instructure Community, delivering immediate and long-term value to our users and our business as we optimize content delivery, create more targeted resources, and improve the overall self-service experience.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.USAA
Author Details: Name: Lars Plougmann Title: Product Manager Name: Lori Castillo Title: Product Manager Company: USAA Tell us about you, your company, and your team? We are the product management team for USAA’s Social Chat. We sit within a larger team responsible for USAA’s chat capabilities, which is part of the organization developing all our digital channels. USAA is a 100-year-old member association offering financial services, such as insurance and banking. We don’t have branches, so our app and website are the main channels for self-service. Members can have direct conversations with our member service representatives on the phone or chat. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Social Chat fits with USAA’s philosophy to be available where our members are, and being asynchronous in nature, it offers our members a convenient way to engage with. Social Chat is available 24/7, crewed by a team of 100% human USAA member service representatives. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Social Chat is conducted by teams of member service representatives and specialists in Insurance, Bank, Life Insurance and other USAA companies. USAA maintains Social Chat policies that include standard responses for specific situations. This solves the challenge of having an official response available, but it is not necessarily convenient. The policy resides in a different system, and the integration mechanism falls back to copy/paste. Individual member service reps often compile a handy local list of official responses for quick access, and they include some of their own frequent responses. This can mean, if standard responses in a policy are updated, the change may not make it to those individual lists from where responses are copy/pasted. Response templates seem like such a simple feature in Khoros Care that it is barely worth mentioning. Yet, there is power in simplicity. Some of the situations where response templates really shine: When the appropriate response is long or complex. When using URLs in the response: A template helps our agents point to the relevant URL and avoid issues when copy/pasting URLs. When the response must be vetted by Corp Comms or Legal. The Bank team was the first to make use of response templates. The front-line team had a solid sense of which questions are asked most frequently, so those made up the first set of ten templates to be rolled out. 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. Once enabled, use of response templates for the Bank team quickly took off. Using response templates not only had the immediate benefits of quality and consistency, it also gave rise to new ideas for templates. The “Protect yourself and your accounts” template was developed by one of our member service reps. She got permission to experiment with scammers’ posts and honed our message by iterating and testing. It aligns with USAA’s mission to protect our members from scams, and that extends to social media. "Be cautious! Protect yourself & your accounts. Visit our Security Center (Security tab located at the bottom of USAA.com) for articles & recommendations. Also, visit the Advice & Guidance tab on the Federal Trade Commission website ftc.gov." By making the warning a response template, it is quick and easy for any of our member service reps to call out scams. We’ll hide the scammer’s post if that option is available. Our member service reps also take the extra step of reporting scammers’ accounts to social platforms. The earlier we address fraud, the more valuable the intervention is. While we don’t have specific estimates for the fraud prevented by using this template, there is an indication that it is effective: Some scammers delete their post once we apply the warning template - sometimes within a few minutes. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. (Examples: Decreased spend, Increased revenue, etc.) The benefit of templates is not just reduced time for the member service rep to compose a response. They reach further: Quality: The response templates are the result of teamwork, iteration and multiple perspectives - and vetted by lawyers if required. Consistency: By using approved templates for responses, available directly in the platform, members will receive consistent responses, regardless of which rep is handling the conversation. Through automated tagging, we can track that our team uses response templates close to 5,000 times a year. And we are just getting started. For our anti-scam response template, our analysis shows that 8% of the time that the template is applied, the scammer deletes their post. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Reduced error rate: Response templates are placed fully in the response field, reducing the probability of errors (eg typos, copy/paste irregularities, obsolete responses). Improved governance: When a response template is updated, it takes immediate effect in the system. It may take longer to update SOPs or individually maintained crib sheets of responses. We made sure to include automatic tagging: Each response template invokes a generic tag that the response used a response template and one or more topic-related tags. To be sure, we previously used templates sometimes: copy/pasted directly from policies with standard responses or from our member service reps’ individual lists. With response templates, this formerly invisible process has become visible and trackable. Cost of implementation was negligible. In most cases, we already had standard responses, they just weren’t conveniently stored within Care or shared with the full team. For a subsequent batch of response templates, the Social Chat product manager worked with a stakeholder team to address a set of scenarios that required longer than normal responses. The templates were crafted and went through Legal review and approval before making them available through Khoros Care. The project to implement response templates in Social Chat received our Chief Strategy and Brand Officer’s Excellence Award in Q2 of 2024. 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? Won’t the use of response templates make our team of 100% human member service reps sound like bots? Not necessarily. The beauty of the feature is that the response template populates the response field, allowing the rep to finesse and personalize the response before posting it. This focuses human effort where it matters and allows the rep to post an appropriate and empathetic response. Our member service reps use their best judgment when responding to social conversations. The templates are offered as an aid to swift and consistent responses, always with the encouragement that the individual response is tailored to the specific context. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Khoros Care solution consultant had expressed surprise that USAA was not using response templates. When we decided to go ahead, the reference guide in Atlas had all the information we needed to get going. Implementation was simple. As our library of response templates grows, we are looking at enabling response templates through the Agent Assist feature.Truist
Author Details: Name: Amanda White Title: Social Media Manager Company: Truist Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Truist is a purpose-driven financial services company, formed by the historic merger of equals of BB&T and SunTrust. We serve clients in several high-growth markets in the country, offering a wide range of financial services. Our team is Client Advocacy Social Media Care. We show care by advocating for our clients when they need help. I have been with Truist for 21 years and have led the Social Media team for 7 years. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our team is here to support clients and potential clients with questions, concerns, suggestions, and comments. We want to make sure they feel that they are supported and cared for in every aspect of their financial journey. We believe when our clients win, we all win. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Client Advocacy Social Media care team was looking to improve TAR to be less than 24 hours as well as work on solutions to reduce manual tagging and closing of posts as irrelevant so that true client issues could be addressed. The TAR had increased to over 48 hours, which meant clients were having to wait an extended amount of time to be engaged and get a potential issue handled. 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. Through product coaching and working with Khoros implementation advisors, we were able to uncover some features within Khoros that were not being utilized to allow for improved efficiencies in the daily work. We were able to set up some auto-tagging rules and flush rules to remove posts that no action needed to be taken on. We also were able to implement push next in Q4 of 2023 for most of the team. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Through implementing enhanced flush rules, auto-tagging and switching to a push next work style, we were able to significantly improve the TAR for client engagement which allowed clients to be taken care of faster. The team also benefited with less manual work to do which allowed more focus on accepting and responding to posts faster and removing posts that were unnecessary to take action on. Not only did switching to push next decrease TAR this also led to an improvement on being more efficient. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The outcome of utilizing Push Next verses agents self-assigning posts has lead to KPI improvement to meet and exceed the goal of first response in less than 24 hours. Comparing the last 90 day period in 2024 to the same period in 2024 saw a 71% YoY improvement in TAR from 36 hours 16 minutes to 10 hours 20 minutes. Another positive outcome of implementing Push Next is improved productivity by agents. By moving from claim next to push next, the team saw a 12% increase in productivity between August 2023 and Jan 2024. The teams Average Response Handle Time decreased by 15% YoY when comparing June-August 2024 to the same time period 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 Khoros Service solution of implementing Push Next was able to give teammates the ability to focus on one conversation at a time and take appropriate action on each conversation. Once all actions could be taken then they would be assigned a new conversation to work on. This prevented older posts going unanswered and gave a streamlined approach of ensuring all clients were being assisted in as quick of a manner as possible. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? I would highly suggest ensuring that any product coaching is taken advantage of as well as working with implementation advisors. We didn’t know what solutions we already had that would work for our benefit until we had open discussions. Also, having frequent touch bases to discuss optimization opportunities and getting feedback on metrics allows for greater success.Lucky Mobile
Author Details: Name: Darrell Harrison Title: Community Manager, Specialist Business Strategy - Digital Support Company: Lucky Mobile Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Lucky Mobile is a Canadian prepaid mobile virtual network operator. Lucky Mobile is Canada’s super cheap mobile provider. There’s no credit check, no long-term commitment and no data overage charges. Truth is, you don’t have to be lucky to get great mobile savings – you just have to be with Lucky Mobile. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? When launching the Lucky Mobile Community in Q4 2021 our goal was to alleviate call centre and live chat volume by providing an additional platform of support available 24/7. The Lucky Mobile Community team focuses on driving the best digital peer to peer, self-serve experience for our customers. Whether the customer has questions, curiosities or requires technical, account, product or sales/activation assistance; the Lucky Mobile Community team develops the digital pathways to connect the customer to their desired self serve, peer to peer or customer support channel. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Focusing on contact centre volume reduction, the implementation of a Khoros Community would provide a 24/7 source of both searchable and peer to peer knowledge and support; adding to the social contact channel already available and operating within Khoros Care. Generally speaking, the Lucky Mobile customer base has the same handful of questions or issues; with nearly all being solvable via self-serve. Therefore, the main challenges the Lucky Mobile Community was intended to solve was to encourage, educate and commit the customer to use self-serve moving forward to address their questions or concerns as the first line of contact, before reaching out to an agent. This way we can answer their question or deliver the solution to their problem far quicker. 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. In order to deliver on the main goal of the Lucky Mobile Community; self-serve and peer to peer support, the Lucky Mobile Community had to build its reputation as a knowledgeable and helpful place. We worked hard to grow community content, increase solutions, resolution rate and lower peer to peer response times. We built out TKB content, maintained a respectable SLA to allow Community users’ posts to breathe and develop thoughts, responses and the solutions needed. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We’ll go into additional detail below as progress outcomes directly relate to business and value outcomes, but the main value outcome is always to reduce the cost to serve the customer while increasing the customer’s use of self-serve. Through increased Community content, Blogs, TKBs, Accepted Solutions, Solution Views, Resolution Rate and Contact Rate we’re driving a $327K 2024 YTD contact savings from the Lucky Mobile Community alone. By building the connecting bridges between Khoros Care’s social media, leveraging the After Hours automated response and soon Agent Assist, we are able to provide faster resolution, through less contacts, while educating the customer on where to find the answer themselves in the future. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The Lucky Mobile Community finished 2022 with a Community Resolution Rate of 26%, Avg. Min. to First Response of 2.6K minutes and 133.5K Solution Views. In 2023 we had maintained the Community Resolution Rate of 26% but delivered an exemplary 39% decrease in Min. to First Response at 1.6K minutes (1K minutes faster) and a 65% increase in Solution Views to a total of 220K YoY. On the social media side we targeted an 80% SLA in 20 min. or less and achieved 72% across 4.3K Conversations, 15.6K Posts and a 95% CSAT. 2024 YTD, the Lucky Mobile Community currently holds a 22% Resolution Rate, has further reduced Min. to First Response by another 18.75% down to 1.3K minutes (300 min. faster) and are already 25% above 2023’s Solution Views; currently 275K. We are equating an approximate contact deflection savings of $327K 2024 YTD from the Community alone as only 11% of customers who visited the Lucky Mobile Community first, then called in or reached out to Live Chat. On the social media side, 2024 YTD we have achieved an 85% SLA in 20 min. or less across 1.4K Conversations and 7.5K Posts with an 88% CSAT. 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 number one differentiator the Khoros Community solution has in relation to our business goals, is the connection between Khoros Care and the Khoros Community. Utilizing Khoros Care for our social engagement side allows the Lucky Mobile Community to increase traffic with the use of social-to-community pathing via agents and community moderators. We utilize Community redirection via agents and Khoros Care’s after hours/out of office auto-response. Additionally, other factors adding to our success through 2024 and into 2025 will be the increased use of Khoros Agent Assist. Agent Assist helps social agents connect relevant community topics and solutions to their social media customers. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Community Manager and Social Media Specialist have over a decade of experience with Khoros Communities and Khoros Care each. Our long term partnership and experience has afforded us the time to learn and absorb all of what Khoros platforms have to offer. As we grow, meet new challenges and opportunities, we can match those challenges with the appropriate Khoros solution.
