Lithys 2017: Sky - Digital CX All-Star

Lithys 2017: Sky - Digital CX All-Star

 Sales through the community now exceed the combined sales seen on other digital service channels; Facebook, Twitter, and Live Chat Complaints.

 

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Company:  Sky UK

Entry submitted by: Graham Henderson

Community:  Sky Community

Lithy category: Digital CX All-Star

 

Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company. The group serves 22 million customers across five countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK and Ireland. We offer the best and broadest range of content, deliver market-leading customer service and use innovative new technology to give customers a better TV experience, whenever and wherever they choose.

 

Goal & Strategy  

Since its launch in 2010, the Sky Community has primarily served a help and support function. Customers are more likely to visit if they’re unhappy with our service or have a problem with one of our products. This behavior results in one of two things happening:

  • Customers search and find the answer to their problem and leave. Only returning if they encounter another issue in the future. This may seem like good news from a customer service perspective, but how does this contribute to community growth longer term?
  • Customers register, make their first post, get their answer and leave, never to be seen until the next issue arises. I’m sure this sound familiar to those running service based communities?

We wanted to change this and focused on three main areas:

  1. Engagement and thread depth out with help & support areas.
  2. Gain better member retention.
  3. Generate sales- notoriously difficult within the help arena.

We noticed a small group of customers who didn’t have an immediate issue with one of our products, but rather, wanted to discuss their favourite shows or their soccer team’s latest performance. Our strategy was to create a dedicated space for this audience.

 

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The popularity of Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead made them a natural choice when we were considering the initial focus.

 

The strategy to achieve our three goals centered around engaging longer form blog content from in-house writers as well as freelance bloggers alongside shorter, more controversial pieces designed to stimulate debate and discussion. The content was our hook to help retain members as well as turn passive browsers into active contributors. Our bait was in the form of lots of money can’t buy prizes.

 

Both the content and the prizes were promoted via Twitter and content discovery platforms like Taboola and Outbrain. We also utilized pay per click advertising. We partnered with FOX, Sky Atlantic, Sky Sports, Forbidden Planet, Grindstore and others to amplify our own social promotion content.

 

The Plan

Our target audience consisted of three different user groups. Those who have made one post related to their own specific issue a long time ago and not continued to be engaged with the community, those who only search for answers on the community and don’t actively participate and those Sky customers who are unaware of the community and may want to get involved to discuss content and not get help with service issues. 

 

Lithium Social Media Management (SMM) for Marketing was instrumental in allowing us to manage the ongoing content load from various contributors. We’ve published well over 300 blogs since the campaign began. Lithium SMM for Marketing also provided a way to manage the publishing of blogs outside of our office hours while providing a robust approval flow to ensure a high quality standard and alignment with our brand.  

 

Competitions recognized the contribution of active community members and enticed new signups and participation. We had our members searching high and low for our hidden community zombie- what better way to explore the Sky Community and learn more about what it has to offer?

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Featuring blogs and discussions targeted passive users and incorporated a more inclusive community area. We used featured blog components to divert help and support traffic to non-help and support areas of the community.

 

Lithium Social Intelligence allowed us to effectively monitor our successes, analyze trends and customer behavior within the community.

 

The Results

 Forum: 

  • Unique visitors - weekly average increased +19%
  •  Kudos ratio +15%
  • +12% increase in contribution

Blogs: 

  • +355% blog visits
  • +120% kudos
  • +60% comments

Sales through the community now exceed the combined sales seen on other digital service channels; Facebook, Twitter, and Live Chat Complaints.

Comments

Astounding work chaps. Great fun to work on.  \o/

Fantastic work team!

Well done guys!