In addition to other methods, perhaps the strategic initiative we’re most proud of is our use of Lithium’s REST API to really leverage the Community as a support tool for the business.
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Company: AGL Energy Ltd
Entry submitted by: Liam Woods (Digital Community Channel Manager)
Community/Social Channels:
https://www.youtube.com/user/aglenergy
https://www.linkedin.com/company/agl
Lithy category: Support Savings Titan
AGL is one of Australia’s leading integrated energy companies. It is taking action to responsibly reduce its greenhouse gas emissions while providing secure and affordable energy to its customers. Drawing on over 175 years of experience, AGL serves its customers throughout eastern Australia with meeting their energy requirements, including gas, electricity, solar PV and related products and services. AGL has a diverse power generation portfolio including base, peaking and intermediate generation plants, spread across traditional thermal generation as well as renewable sources including hydro, wind, solar, landfill gas and biomass.
Social care goals
2016-2017 saw our team really begin to scale our social customer service model. With more dedicated resources allocated to the program, we were really able to start to build a model that enabled us to deliver a customer-centric support model that would operate at scale whilst aligning to business processes and strategy. This has led to outstanding results and an unrivaled experience via our social media channels.
In addition to other methods, perhaps the strategic initiative we’re most proud of is our use of Lithium’s REST API to really leverage the Community as a support tool for the business. We have created a customised, contextually relevant FAQ tool which we have inserted on 50 pages on the AGL website, enabling our customers to seek additional assistance at the perfect time – when the content we host on our domain is not enough, and right before they call our call centre. Through initiatives such as these, we have seen our customers begin to self-serve on their own without prompting, which was fantastic to see.
Simultaneously, we continued to build upon our Community knowledge base articles based on customer need. We built initiatives to intelligently link to the content at the right time of the customer journey, and ensured that helpful content was in a position to be seen on Community at any opportunity where it was appropriate.
In addition to this, we recently redesigned our IA to ensure that it conforms to the redesigned agl.com.au website. As a result, we are seeing a lower bounce rate and higher engagement as customers can make the connection between the Community and AGL’s digital brand. We also added a new single sign on capability in April 2017 which will link to other key AGL digital assets very soon, providing a brilliant experience for customers.
Customer care organization
Without the capability proved via the support cost deflections we have been able to show, we would not have the scalable support model our team are able to enjoy today. The cost reductions have enabled us to prove our worth to the organisation and continue to scale the model to provide outstanding support to our customers. 2 FTE have been added to our team this financial year as a direct result of this performance, with more planned for 2017-18.
We also have a dedicated, blended team of offshore and onshore support agents set up to support our social media interactions for the business, which is comprised of a team of approximately 20 rotating staff. This has increased from a core team of 3 year-on-year, and has enabled us to deliver a vastly improved experience for our customers.
The results
- $634,797 in cost savings through support deflections
- Approximately 8,000 support deflections per month
- Using only the Community business value metrics (and not taking in to account any value gained from the SMM platform), we are currently sitting at an annualised return on investment of over 106% for the entire investment in Lithium Technology tools.
- Consistent CSAT >85% via our social channels, managed by Lithium SMM
- 72% of all inquiries lodged through social media channels are responded to within an hour.
- Over 3,000 social interactions per month
- >50% of all conversations shift from a negative or neutral sentiment to positive
- Visits to Community have increased 110% year-on-year
- 55% increase in mobile visits year-on-year
- Through optimization and technical improvements, bounce rate within Community has decreased 61% year-on-year
- 29% improvement in agent first response times year-on-year
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