Frontier Communications began to focus on the social space in 2013, mainly via Facebook and Twitter.
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Company: Frontier Communications
Entry submitted by: Beau Mills (Manager, Social Media Customer Care)
Social Channels: @FrontierCorp, Frontier Communications Facebook Page
Lithy category: Digital CX All-Star
Frontier Communications Corporation is a leader in providing communications services to urban, suburban, and rural communities in 29 states. Frontier offers a variety of services to residential customers over its fiber-optic and copper networks, including video, high-speed internet, advanced voice, and Frontier Secure® digital protection solutions. Frontier’s video offerings include Frontier FiOS® and Vantage TV by Frontier™ with 100 percent HD picture quality, Total Home DVR, instant channel change, enhanced search, Video on Demand, and much more. Business Edge™ offers communications solutions to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.
Frontier Communications began to focus on the social space in 2013, mainly via Facebook and Twitter. We made the leap into social media due to increased customer demand for support in this space. Additionally, as Frontier began its transition from a phone company, to a broadband focused company, moving towards online support became more critical. As of May 2015, we moved forward with Lithium Social Media Management (SMM) for Service, which completely revolutionized and streamlined our customer support efforts. Now in 2016, we have optimized our customer support strategy. Lithium allows us to track our customer’s interaction history with us across multiple social pages, compile author details, and spot customer trends; this creates a uniform and easy experience for our customers, even when speaking to different community managers or on a subsequent conversation. This increased trend tracking has also enabled us to spot service outages in real time, allowing for nimble response and repair notifications.
Outside of Lithium SMM for Service, Frontier also utilizes a customized SharePoint ticketing system to document and track any customer concerns that are best addressed outside of the social space. This allows our back line support (Account Managers) to manage customer concerns, and our front line support (Community Managers) to keep up-to-date on these resolutions should the customer return to the social space seeking updates. We also utilize Crimson Hexagon as a listening tool to monitor broader trends, and Shoutlet for outgoing posts, mainly to alert customers to outage updates, and for educational content for our customers via our @AskFrontier support handle.
The greatest benefit of utilizing a platform like Lithium SMM for Service, is the organization of incoming data; with this clearer interface, customers are no longer being missed, and we are consistently responding within minutes. The accumulated customer conversation histories that collect under each username’s author profile allow our community managers to familiarize themselves with each customer’s prior experience on our social pages. This enables our community managers to instantly respond appropriately to each customer in a cohesive and fluid manner. This vastly improves the customer experience, because the customer no longer has to repeat themselves with each new person they interact with; any number of community managers can respond to this customer in the course of the day in one homogenous conversation.
Additionally, this organized historical data is a wonderful learning tool. The analytical information provided by Lithium SMM for Service has proven to be invaluable for coaching existing and new team members to improve quality and productivity. This analytical data is also key in our staffing model, allowing us to react to changing conversation volumes and adjust our scheduled coverage as needed. In particular, our social media team was able to utilize this data to anticipate the increased volumes we could expect during our recent acquisition of Verizon territories in CA, FL, and TX. We were able to take on the necessary temporary support staff to not only meet our customers’ needs during this transition, but to also simultaneously improve our response times during vastly increased incoming volume.
2016 was a year of tremendous growth for Frontier as a whole, and for Frontier’s social presence in particular. As of April 1, Frontier began to support former Verizon customers in Florida, Texas, and California. While Frontier’s Twitter and Facebook pages have experienced steady growth over the prior year, April 2016 alone saw a nearly 10 fold increase of incoming post and conversation volumes. As integration related customer concerns settled down, we approached new business as usual volumes in Q4 of approx. double our pre-integration conversation numbers. As of end of year 2016, our incoming conversation volume accounted for a total of 286,098 call deflections. This is approximately $3.4M in annual savings by our customers utilizing social media for their support needs.
With the increased customer demand for support via social media, as of Q2, Frontier was able to transition from a business hours only support model, to a full 24 hour support model. As of Q1, before this change, our Average Response Time was 5h 50m due to the off hours over night, and our Q1 Responses Meeting SLA was 81.67%. After shifting to 24 hour support in Q2, our results immediately improved to an Average Response Time of 1h 10m and Responses Meeting SLA at 92.33%. Both Response Time and Reponses Meeting SLA normalized in the second half of the year at approx. 15 m and 98% respectively.
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