Company: Three Ireland Company background: Three is Ireland’s largest mobile telecommunications provider with 42.8% market share and 3.7 million customers (as of December 2022). At Three we strive to provide our customers with a better-connected life through meaningful products, best in class service and a connected network experience. Our network is built for data; with over 85% 5G coverage and 99% 4G coverage. Three has over 1,300 employees throughout Ireland, with our head office in Dublin, our award-winning Customer Experience Centre in Limerick where our 450-strong team supports over 1.7 million customers every year, and more than 60 retail stores nationwide. Three has to date invested over €2 billion in building our business in Ireland. This includes a €900 million investment in upgrading and expanding our network and IT infrastructure and delivering a cutting-edge experience for both our customers and our employees. Annually, Three continues to invest over €100 million into our network to ensure we continue to deliver the best experience and service for our customers.    Contact: Patrick OBrien Title: Digital Services Lead Related URLs: https://community.three.ie/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service 1. What challenges did your organization face that required a digital strategy? Provide details on the issues you were trying to resolve or the goals you were trying to achieve. (e.g. reducing handle time, improving CSAT, reducing per-interaction costs, revenue growth, cost savings, etc.)   At Three, we always challenge ourselves to do better, and having won the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award in 2022 we wanted to learn from that experience and appreciate the great work being done by all the other community entrants from across Europe. So we decided to apply those learnings to our strategy for 2023 – we sat down and asked ourselves, “What does 3Community stand for? And how can we let our customers know that we are here to help?”  As in 2022, our goals were consistent and clear. And those goals remain unchanged because we believe in making a commitment and sticking with it:   Drive digital-first support   Provide a best-in-class engagement experience   Achieve business growth and drive sales   Provide product innovation and insights   We like to do things differently at Three. We know it’s cliché, but we truly believe that the sky is the limit when it comes to our digital customer experience. That’s why we have been building upon our previous success to deliver a transformative customer journey that begins with our Khoros-hosted 3Community.    In 2023, our 3Community reached over 94,000 members (growth of 57K members since this time last year) and we expect this to exceed 100,000 members very soon. With this growth comes some challenges which require an evolving digital service strategy to maintain and grow active engagement and deliver meaningful peer to peer interactions.  To tackle that challenge we wanted to really leverage all out of the box Khoros community features and implement a holistic digital solution.    Some of the key challenges that our customers faced in 2023 were:   Customers have been going through a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation costs on fuel, food and other goods and services has been much higher this year than last.  Customer behaviour post covid has changed too with more remote working and a greater sense of value placed on data connections, speed and reliability of service.   Customers wanted a return to the fundamentals of excellent service that Three has always been number one in providing, they wanted us to get the basics right – and be there when they needed us.     79% have changed non-essential spending, 15% halting non-essential purchases altogether.    Empowered by technology, they also both seek and demand seamless in-store and online experiences that better suit their lifestyles and pockets.   50% rate knowledgeable and helpful sales associates as important.   23% plan to increase their level of in-store shopping.    2. Which Khoros elements did you implement as part of your digital solutions? Include details on the channels or tools you added and how your solution was unique and innovative.   At Three, driving digital-first customer support is our core mission, as this directs any unnecessary traffic away from our customer care agents and encourages use of our *award-winning digital self-service platforms wherever possible, thereby reducing those assisted queue times and improving the overall experience for the customers who really need an agents help.  *In 2022 Three Ireland won the CCMA ‘best customer experience award’ and the ‘best use of digital channels award’. We then went on to win the ECCSA prestigious ‘Gold’ award for best customer service across all of Europe, and ‘Silver ‘awards for best cross functional teams and best use of technology.  In early 2023, we developed C.O.D.Y., a self-service chat bot with a fun personality designed to route Conversations Online Digitally, CODY is aimed at improving our customers’ ability to follow the customer service flow that is best for them - through to a successful resolution of their query. In preparing for this deployment (GoLive in Q3), we found that customers wanted to interact with humans – more than bots, so we plan to take advantage of our 3Community user profiles to establish a relatable persona for our non-Khoros CODY bot. This we hope will allow customers learn more about what our bot can deliver and grow to benefit from it – as well as boost our ability to understand our customer’s needs and further improve their experience.  We don’t want a bot that pretends to be human, we want to introduce our members to a bot that is just a useful machine – CODY should be helpful and fun and just does what they need it to do and is available 24/7.  Additionally, this year, we expanded the scope of our secure internal knowledgebase for service agents to also include all our retail agents across the country (some 60 Three Branded stores and a growing base of preferred partner stores). This project was aligned to a massive modernisation of technology in our Retail stores delivering a total refurbishment of store look and feel, display functionality, signage, branding and overall product range. Combined with a major suite of content updates, video e-learning material, and improved accessibility via mobile tablets and interactive touch screen tables in store, we have delivered a rich and valuable digital data hub that customers can benefit from while having conversations with ‘real human beings’ which is what they want. This rigorous process was designed to generate improved digital resources for our retail team, thereby creating an improved in-store customer experience that is fully consistent with the high-quality service already delivered by our customer experience centres and digital self-service channels.    Recently, we have also focused on the promotion of our business customer support services by building more digital integrations between 3Community and our Salesforce platform. We have delivered online webforms on our brand new 3IOT Group Hub where business customers can access service query forms internationally on desktop / mobile devices 24/7. We have cut the manual interaction time required to collect, validate and process these types of queries (previously done via calls to agents within office hours) by over 50% saving huge amounts of agent time and improving the turn-around time and accuracy of our customer service queries for those customers.    3. What quantifiable results were achieved? Please include key success metrics. (e.g. revenue growth, cost reduction, CSAT, call deflection, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.)   We set a high bar for ourselves with in 2022 by taking home the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award, and we recognised that it would be tremendously difficult to outdo those results. However, this did not deter us, and we achieved success in several areas of Digital Customer Service this year despite the tremendous cost of living challenges being faced by our customers.    61% growth in 3Community members since this time last year. (94K members and growing)    2 new Group Hubs: The 3IOT Group servicing Business customers and 3UX Group that collects user experience feedback on specific applications and services.    Our ideas board has gained considerable momentum seeing an extra 13K unique visitors YTD compared to the same period last year.    While our community to shop conversion ratio is lower this year than targeted (currently 2.4% YTD) we are already matching the sales value from all activity delivered in 2022.    ‘Right First Time’ scores in consumer are up 9% for the same period last year.    NPS is up 7.3% over that same period.    Our 3Community Unique Visitor numbers have increased from 70k / Month to over 100K / Month and because we improved the way we collect customer experience survey data we now know that 55% of 3Community users said it was Easy / Very Easy to use 3Community.    Special Thanks: Jon Henshall, Valentina Mengarelli Case Study Opt-In: Yes ... View more

  Company: Three Ireland Company background: Three is Ireland’s largest mobile telecommunications provider with 42.8% market share and 3.7 million customers (as of December 2022). At Three we strive to provide our customers with a better-connected life through meaningful products, best in class service and a connected network experience. Our network is built for data; with over 85% 5G coverage and 99% 4G coverage. Three has over 1,300 employees throughout Ireland, with our head office in Dublin, our award-winning Customer Experience Centre in Limerick where our 450-strong team supports over 1.7 million customers every year, and more than 60 retail stores nationwide. Three has to date invested over €2 billion in building our business in Ireland. This includes a €900 million investment in upgrading and expanding our network and IT infrastructure and delivering a cutting-edge experience for both our customers and our employees. Annually, Three continues to invest over €100 million into our network to ensure we continue to deliver the best experience and service for our customers.    Contact: Patrick OBrien Title: Digital Services Lead Related URLs: https://community.three.ie/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? At Three, we like to challenge ourselves to do better, and we recognise that this is easier said than done, having been awarded the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award in 2022 we had set quite a high bar.   Not only did this award mark a tremendous milestone for our 3Community and for our team, but it inspired us to work harder and dream bigger, towards even more phenomenal results in 2023. We took our learnings from this win and decided to apply it to our strategy for 2023 – we sat down and asked ourselves, “what did we do well in 2022, and how can we maintain or improve on that in 2023?”   As in 2022, our company goals are still clear and consistent because we believe in making a commitment and sticking with it:   Drive digital-first support   Provide a best-in-class engagement experience   Achieve business growth and drive sales   Provide product innovation and insights     Our Purpose for 3Community:     We set out to build upon the incredible achievements of our Community in 2022, the most prestigious of which was taking home the Khoros Best-in-Class Community award.   In 2023 we recognise that our customers are facing a whole new raft of challenges and we want to be sure we are there to help them face and overcome as many of those as possible.    Some of the key challenges that our customers face in 2023 are:   Customers have been going through a cost-of-living crisis. Inflation costs on fuel, food and other goods and services has been much higher this year than last.  Customer behaviour post-covid has changed too with more remote working and a greater sense of value placed on data connections, speed and reliability of service.   Customers wanted a return to the fundamentals of excellent service that Three has always been number one in providing, they want us to get the basics right – and be there when they need us.     79% have changed non-essential spending, 15% halting non-essential purchases altogether.   Empowered by technology, they also both seek and demand seamless in-store and online experiences that better suit their lifestyles and pockets.   50% rate knowledgeable and helpful sales associates as important.   23% plan to increase their level of in-store shopping.    What we use 3Community for:    Since we invested so much effort into getting the basics of our 3Community right in 2022, we knew that we had to do better for 2023, while always remaining focused on maintaining our award-winning service across our Digital, Retail and Experience Centre channels.    We now support over 94,000 Community members, which is almost three times the number of members that we had at the time of our Best-in-Class Khoros awards submission in 2022.   Since last year we have developed and extensively tested a new Super User programme internally, with plans to roll this out to our external 3Community members in Q3 this year. We extended the scope of this program to not only include a total overhaul of the Role and Rank hierarchy for members, along with the deployment of a brand new Badge reward structure – but we are also including the introduction of a new employee program called K.E.S. (Knowledge, Experience, Skill) which will see employees with tacit knowledge volunteer to support the creation and validation of content on our internal KB, in turn receiving valuable real world work experience and a measurable data driven engagement score that can be considered by our L&D / HR teams if those employees want to seek promotion or upskill so as to join new teams etc.     We launched a new *UX Hub, which is free for all 3Community members to join and in doing so we hope to gather insights and collect feedback that will help us shape the way we deploy change on our digital channels. This new Hub will deploy a new integration between the O365 Forms application and the Khoros Community. In building better support for this we are also developing tailored reporting dashboards on our MS Teams application to easily view UX survey responses.   And while participating in this Hub members will be rewarded with a chance to win great prizes like sold out tickets to unmissable events in our amazing 3Arena.    How our 3Community charter has evolved:     In 2023, we invested in growing and strengthening our Digital Services team. We felt that if we were to continue providing best-in-class customer service to our 3Community members, then we needed to build a broad and skilled team who would help us to reach our ever-expanding goals.     We brought onboard a new Digital Content Editor to oversee consistency and quality of all content right cross the Digital Services team. Alex comes to us with a masters in journalism and will have a huge influence on how we shape and present our digital content including oversight of both copy and creative direction. We also hired a new Bot Specialist to ensure that the conversation style and self-service options offered within the Bot flows are properly aligned to and supported by our 3Community.   So, in brief: driving digital-first customer support is still very much our core mission, as this directs any unnecessary traffic away from our customer care agents and encourages use of our *award-winning digital self-service platforms wherever possible, thereby reducing those assisted queue times and improving the overall experience for the customers who really need an agents help.  *In 2022 three won the CCMA ‘best customer experience award’ and the ‘best use of digital channels award’. We then went on to win the ECCSA prestigious ‘Gold’ award for best customer service across all of Europe, and ‘Silver ‘awards for best cross functional teams and best use of technology.    2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved? We do things differently at Three. We take the tried and tested methods and re-purpose them bigger and better than ever before. We pride ourselves on our creativity, and on our dedication to our customers.  The continued expansion of our 3Community into 2023 has enabled our team to achieve a range of company objectives. We believe that the 3Community is not an isolated environment and that by living the connected life values we can bring larger customer and business objectives into clearer focus.      For example, to share the award-winning customer service that Three is famous for across more channels, we worked closely with our Project Management Office and with our Retail Department managers to expand the scope of our secure internal knowledgebase for service agents to also include all our retail agents across the country (some 60 Three Branded stores and a growing base of preferred partner stores). This project was aligned to a massive modernisation of technology in our Retail stores delivering a total refurbishment of store look & feel, display functionality, signage, branding and overall product range. Combined with a major suite of content updates, video e-learning material, and improved accessibility via mobile tablets and interactive touch screen tables in store, we have delivered a rich and valuable digital data hub that customers can benefit form while having conversations with ‘real human beings’ which is what they want. This rigorous process was designed to generate improved digital resources for our retail team, thereby creating an improved in-store customer experience that is fully consistent with the high-quality service already delivered by our customer experience centres and digital self-service channels.      Recently, we have also focused on the promotion of our business customer support services by working with the various business service + sales teams as well as account managers - building more digital integrations between 3Community and our Salesforce platform. We have delivered online webforms on our brand new 3IOT Group Hub, where business customers can access service query forms internationally on desktop / mobile devices 24/7. The 3IOT Hub will also become the home of our new IOT device support content and will work to complement existing consumer device support applications. We have cut the manual interaction time required to collect, validate and process Business service queries (previously done via calls to agents within office hours) by over 50% saving huge amounts of agent time and improving the turn-around time and accuracy of our customer service queries for those customers.    In early 2023, we also developed C.O.D.Y., a self-service chat bot with a fun personality designed to route Conversations Online Digitally, CODY is aimed at improving our customers’ ability to follow the customer service flow that is best for them - through to a successful resolution of their query. In preparing for this deployment (GoLive in Q3), we found that customers wanted to interact with humans – more than bots, so we plan to take advantage of our 3Community user profiles to establish a relatable persona for our non-Khoros CODY bot. This we hope will allow customers learn more about what our bot can deliver and grow to benefit from it – as well as boost our ability to understand our customer’s needs and further improve their experience.  We don’t want a bot that pretends to be human, we want to introduce our members to a bot that is just a useful machine – CODY should be helpful and fun and just does what they need it to do and is available 24/7.    **A small sample of this new bot feature and how it appears to our customers.       3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. Across Three, the value of expanding our 3Community membership base is now clearly understood, from our retail stores to our head office. With our 3Community registrations expected to exceed 100,000 soon, we have never been more excited about the challenge of how to sustain this trajectory into the coming years. We feel it is vitally important to reward our loyal members who, through their engagement and enthusiasm, have made the success of our 3Community possible.     We believe the 3Community offers us a competitive advantage and can influence existing and new customers at every stage of the customer’s journey. Some of our key results from 2023 to date are:    We currently have 94K members on 3Commuunity (61% growth since this time last year)  2 new Group Hubs: The 3IOT Group; servicing Business customers, and a 3UX Group; that collects user experience feedback on specific applications and services.  Our ideas board has gained considerable momentum seeing an extra 13K unique visitors YTD compared to the same period last year.  While our community to shop conversion ratio is currently below target,  it is still very much on track as our year to date average is 2.4% V. our year end target which is 4%.   And we are already matching the sales value from all activity delivered in 2022. Our current year to date sales value derived from community to shop conversion activity is €130K.  The 2022 sales value was €133K for the whole year.   ‘Right First Time’ scores in consumer assisted channels are up 9% on the same period last year. This reflects the work being done on our internal knowledgebase as well as our bots.  NPS is also up 7.3% compared to that same period. No doubt influenced by the upgraded retail stores but also by recent work within the company to re-brand our 3Plus customer rewards program into the Three+ program – which now includes upgraded customer reward mechanics allowing for even greater loyalty and engagement offers.   Our 3Community Unique Visitor numbers have increased from an average of 70k / month to over 100K / month and because we improved the way we collect customer experience survey data we now know that 55% of 3Community users said it was Easy / Very Easy to use 3Community.    Why we believe we are a best-in-class Community:    At Three, we aren’t afraid to adopt new ideas, and we certainly don’t take the value of the 3Community and its members for granted. So, we have an ambitious future in mind for our 3Community.      We believe we are a best-in-class Community for the second year running because of our consistently high Customer Service we deliver to our ever-growing membership base – we like to take this growth in registrations as well as unique visitor volumes as the clearest sign that our 3Community mission aligns with the wants and needs of our customers.        Further, we plan to utilise our new in-house design and development capabilities to the best of our abilities, expanding into more modern form integrations so that we can receive direct and honest feedback from our 3Community members. We feel that this is the most secure method of sustaining a long-term future for our 3Community and ensuring that we continue to move in the right direction – by catering to the explicit wants, needs, and creative suggestions of our engaged membership base.      At 3Community we live the core values of Three Ireland and everything we do is designed to deliver a better-connected life for our customers. And as our latest TV ad suggests we always try to do this with a little bit of fun too 😁    Special Thanks: Jon Henshall, Valentina Mengarelli Case Study Opt-In: Yes ... View more

  Company: Three Ireland Company background: Three is Ireland’s largest mobile telecommunications provider with 39% market share and 2.9 million customers (as of September 2021). Our network is built for data; with 99% 4G coverage, and 79% 5G population coverage. This means our amazing 5G network is available to customers in every county right across Ireland. Three has over 1400 employees throughout Ireland, with our head office in Dublin, our award-winning contact centre in Limerick where our 450-strong team manages 1.4 million calls every year, and our 60 retail stores nationwide. To date - Three has invested almost €2 billion in building our business in Ireland. This includes a €700 million investment in upgrading and expanding our network and in Three’s digital transformation, which will deliver a cutting-edge experience for both our customers and our employees. Annually, Three continues to invest over €100 million into our business to ensure we continue to deliver the best network, experience, and service for our customers. At Three we strive to provide our customers with a better-connected life through meaningful products, best in class service and a connected network experience. Contact: Patrick OBrien Title: Digital Services Lead for Communities, Bots, and Proactive Engagements. Related URLs: https://community.three.ie   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? Do you use your community for support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.? Has the community charter evolved in any way since launch? Our objectives: In mid-2020, we completed our Digital Transformation Strategy, 3 Vision. Prior to this our Community was active for almost 10 years. 3Vision unlocked capabilities for us - enabling us to evolve beyond a support community to a full Engagement Model. Our goals are clear: Drive Digital 1st support Provide a best-in-class engagement experience Achieve business growth and drive sales Product innovation and insights Our purpose for Community: We started by working on getting the basics right, focussing on building our forums and knowledgebases - learning how to do as much design and development in-house as we could. We then integrated Khoros Care with our Community and Social Media channels and have gone on to integrate feedback from Apple & Google App stores. We now support over 37,000 members, 40 knowledgebases & forums, and we recently launched our 3Plus Group Hub, the Community Event calendar, and our much-loved Ideas board. We design and develop a large library of custom components and our community is 100% mobile responsive. What we use Community for: We’ve vastly improved SSO across our digital landscape and now operate a 1-click community registration process. Our members generated a 7% ‘community to shop conversion’ rate in 2021 (double our sales conversion target). We achieved this by leveraging @Mentions and Product Association, and we are now developing Product Syndication with Catalogue Sync to reap even greater rewards. This year we’ve really gone beyond the expected by also creating brand new use cases for out of the box Khoros products; we use the Ideas Board as a fully functioning Change Management hub and the Events Calendar as a Release manager tool saving both money and time. We are on the path to deliver true Omni-Channel experiences, and plan to develop a Super-User programme to engage, reward and inspire our members to be a bigger part of even more amazing conversations. With the help of Khoros audit teams we have dived deeper into the world of digital excellence exploring ways to further enhance accessibility, brand awareness, custom component design and customer journey improvements. How our Community charter has evolved: We’ve invested in our Community team and as Digital Services Lead; I now manage a wonderful team including 2 moderators and a Grad who are all part of the overall Digital Services team at Three. In 2021 our team won Best use of Digital channels at the Irish Contact Centre Management Association Awards, where the judges particularly highlighted our work on Community. Our charter has evolved to do more than just support customers – but to fully engage our members and invite them to bring us on their journey, facilitating contribution and rewarding participation.   2. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen. Did you get executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was your process to gain this buy-in? How have you achieved cross functional support, added stake-holders and increased organizational adoption? Here at Three, we take the script, and we rip it up. We’re just a *big-hearted energetic bunch, striving to create a better-connected life for all. So, when we sought buy-in for the Community for future investment our Senior leadership team fully understood the benefits derived from our Community. We live our core values daily and when everyone in the company works as one team phenomenal things can happen.  This is our ambition for our Community; “Make phenomenal things happen!” *Our recent TV advert “Jeffs World” where we encourage our customers to enjoy the freedom of a Better Connected Life with Three.   As a Digital Services Lead within our Commercial directorate, I manage a Community that influences a **wide array of company objectives and I promote the benefits that our Community brings to our business - improving self-serve containment, collecting vital marketing insights, reducing customer effort across all digital channels, and increasing our sales conversion rate generating more revenue and reducing expenditure. Along with my team, when I talk to my colleagues about the Community I speak about the rapid growth in membership, the wide array of functionality available – all fully customisable in-house and mobile responsive out of the box. ** A small sample of the variety of content we cover on Community. It’s now understood across Three the value of growing our membership base.  Our members want to get involved and we’ve experienced this with several members who have been with us for some time. Some of the positive feedback received when we reached 10,000 members in Q4 2021. It was important for us to give back to those loyal members, so over the past year we partnered with our loyalty team 3Plus to provide amazing prizes to our most valued and engaged members.  This has been a real hit with our base who now regularly win tickets to some amazing concert at the 3Arena and 3Olympia, two of Dublin’s best entertainment venues. We are also leveraging 3Community Events to promote our fantastic 3Live channel which broadcasts a live stream twice weekly, and here’s our very own Jen Ryan who is one of our broadcasters, talking to viewers about new products and services available.    3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible. We believe Community offers us a competitive advantage and can influence existing and new customers at every stage of the customer’s journey, here is a selection of some of our key results. We built a bespoke custom auto-login process for our staff knowledgebases – ensuring a secure and internationally accessible portal for all conversation support content. As a result, we saw ‘Right-First-Time’ scores across all assisted channels increase by 9% in Consumer teams and by 13% for our business teams over 2021. Customer survey results in 2021 also showed Net Promoter Scores (NPS) up by 10% in consumer and 12.2% in business. YoY we saw a 26.7% reduction in assisted contacts in consumer and 22.3% in business, all because of increased containment in all our digital channels – of which Community traffic accounts for over 10% of channel share.  Following Single Sign On deployment in November ‘21 our registered membership increased by 270%, over 220K page views / month from approx. 70K unique user visits / month.  Sales conversion is tracking at over 5% due in part to the new SSO deployment,  use of Community Product Association, 3Live video content promoted in our Events calendar and a host of custom components we designed in-house. Navigation is a measure of success and 11% more Community users stated they could now find what they were looking for year to date compared to 2021.  Why we believe we are a best-in-class Community: We are early adopters – and we quickly recognised the true value of an online Community.  We have stuck by our members when other companies were opting to abandon theirs. We have a clear vision of the future, and we’ve set out to leverage Community features to generate growth and accomplish our company mission. We’re all about creating a better connected life, and the growth in our Community membership has been a resounding confirmation from our base that we’re going in the right direction.       ... View more