Company: Ziggo
Company background: VodafoneZiggo is a Dutch company and is the result of two strong brands joining forces. Ziggo is one of the leading communication and entertainment service providers for consumers and businesses in the Netherlands. Ziggo provides 9.7 million services to its customers with nearly 4 million television, over 3 million internet, and 2.5 million fixed and mobile telephone services subscribers.
Contact: Arakou Khader
Title: Product Owner | Community
Related URLs: https://community.ziggo.nl/
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community?
Sometimes a company helps you so much that you think: "Wow, they understand exactly what I need." That is precisely what Ziggo wants to be for its customers, thanks to its strategic pillar Go Digital. The community channel plays an important role in our strategy as a preferred channel for many use cases, and it's paying off.
Bring self-service to customers. In 2014, we launched the Ziggo Community with the goal to provide a digital channel for peer-to-peer support. This was especially relevant when it came to topics that did not fall into our service level, as some customers began to link non-relevant topics to Ziggo. For example, if the WiFi on your smart home device (i.e., Sonos) is not working, but the WiFi signal is still good, the chances are that the issue is related to the product and not the WiFi connection. Now with more devices connected than ever, our community has become more relevant. We also noticed early on that many of our customers turned to our channel for escalation when more traditional services failed to address their concerns. Because of that, a lot of technical topics were created, and therefore unique content that couldn’t be found elsewhere. As we know, most visitors don’t want to ask the questions - they want to find answers! Therefore, we made it easier for customers to find our community by integrating community self-service content into our other digital channels, such as our website or chatbot. As a result, we realized 5.3 million euro in cost deflection in 2021.
Implement customer feedback to improve our products and services. Starting in 2016, we began to bring active members into our go-to market strategy. Involving these customers has helped us bring market research in-house, whereas we previously outsourced such projects. We soon found that attracting a large number of testers was not that difficult. The challenge was filtering out the relevant feedback so that we could astutely analyze its impact. Fast forward to 2022, the Ziggo Community delivers roughly 90% of the issue tickets that arise from Jira projects. To illustrate the impact, the Mediabox Next, our TV product, has been tested since 2019 by more than 1.200 customers in the community. Since then, it has the highest product NPS in our company. The product team of the community has been growing over the years and our input is seen as crucial for the GO/NO GO decision to launch the product into the market.
Improve customer experience on the platform. Customer demands are ever changing. Users want quick answers to their questions with an easy-to-use platform. We invested in our user experience by redesigning the community to create an better experience. In 2018, we launched an innovation team dedicated to developing the platform’s features, self-service flows, and content. We quickly realized that our previous vendor could not allow us to reach the next-level user experience we desired. The simple customization features or lack of personalization forced us to create complex work-arounds, which were not ideal to deliver quality. Therefore, in 2021, we switched to Khoros, a more development-forward platform that recognized our needs and matched the capabilities to align with our ambition. Now, in 2022, our innovation team works on various projects regarding self-service solutions – all with the aim to add value to the customer journey and experience.
Bundle our employee knowledge to improve customer satisfaction. The Telecom market is constantly changing, especially when it relates to customer needs and expectations. For instance, the growing digital world expects faster or enhanced WiFi. With this in mind, we strive to continually update our knowledge to ensure we deliver the right services and products and that we remain at the forefront as a market-leader. This ambition has led to the creation of the WiFi community, a private community within the Ziggo community, to challenge our current way of thinking, find gaps in our knowledge, and improve internal processes. It’s called a Community of Expert or known as a “guild” in the Agile way of work. Although our WiFi community is still in its infancy, we believe it has already proven to be a successful digital channel to engage and unite employees. After only 4 months, we generated 20+ new knowledge articles and more than 25+ ideas.
2. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen.
The community team has always been looking to add value to our Go Digital strategy. With that mindset we started to explore the idea to build a digital environment for our WiFi Experts. Considering that it was an unknown territory, unfamiliar target group, and a lot of new stakeholders. One might ask: Why did we take this step?
As all companies around the world we learned many things from the pandemic. Not only has the pandemic taken a substantial toll on our creativity and ability to spontaneously craft ideas to make small or big changes, it has also increased the knowledge gaps between teams and departments. At the office, we hear whispers of new projects that other teams are working on. To catch that information remotely is often difficult. As a result, employee engagement was negatively affected. At the same time, our company is determined to deliver high-quality services and WiFi products. To make short-term progress, we adopted an all-hands-on-deck approach that included everyone from agents to the senior management. This resulted in a customer-centric focus. But the knowledge gaps between different teams and departments was still evident. We as a community team were eager to solve this problem. We presented a business case based on conversational engagement, gamification to motivate and distinguish experts, and moderators to connect the right experts. And it’s future-proof. Hybrid working is the standard now. Employees need these kinds of platforms to stay connected. Below, you find an infographic summary of the WiFi community.
Why choose the community channel over current employee channels like Microsoft Teams, Zearch (internal knowledge base), Sharepoint, Yammer, etc.?
The most common reaction we received when introducing the community as an employee channel was “not another channel.” To break the stigma and conjure up some enthusiasm, we had to clearly demonstrate the benefits of the community in comparison with other employee channels. In our analysis, we identified 4 strong benefits, listed below:
- Community is a conversational knowledge base with an intuitive structure and overview of topics.
- Gamification helps to show the different kinds of expertise.
- Out-of-the-box features like group hub, ideation module, Blogs or TKB.
- A unique blend of a public and internal knowledge base.
Khoros offers a group hub with many crucial features that were necessary for this project. Based on the feedback received, we customized a few elements to elevate UX experience and design. Finally, we presented three use cases. Below, you see the WiFi community homepage translated from Dutch to English.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your employee experience or the outcomes you seek as a business.
At the end of 2021, we first launched a pilot to understand employees experience with the channel. We added 70 employees from different teams to glean better insight of their needs and expectations. After a period of 6 weeks, we gathered the results. See the figure below for an overview.
We officially launched the WiFi community last February after receiving approval from senior management to use as an employee channel. Our top priorities for the WiFi community were awareness and engagement. However, there are still many challenges up ahead. For example, how can agents find time to visit the WiFi community to make a topic or article? Or how can we integrate the WiFi community into other channels? For both issues, we have found suitable solutions. The output we have seen so far are related to making the life of an agent easier to help the customer, add new knowledge, or adjust content in our knowledge base. We believe this will positively impact customer satisfaction. The WiFi crew in the WiFi community has 6% higher First-Time-Fix (FTF) than a regular agent. Happy employees lead to happy customers. Below, you can find the KPI dashboard.
What does the future look like?
We are only just getting started! In the future, we aim to create more Community of Experts both big and small. Our long-term plan is to establish the WiFi community as an employee channel and apply the same concept to other products, like TV or Mobile. Bringing employees together on a platform to engage and co-create is an exciting prospect. Our community slogan has always been: “Together, we know more.” The community channel is undoubtedly the right platform to make that happen not only with our customers, but also with our employees.
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