Lithys 2017: Plusnet - Social Support Champion

Lithys 2017: Plusnet - Social Support Champion

For us at Plusnet, Social Media and the Community are one world and one team, with agents skilled to work on both channels, mixing it up throughout the day across both.

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Company: Plusnet                                                         logo.png

Entry submitted by: Louisa Martin (Digital Manager - Social Media and Community)

Community/Social Channels: 

Community: https://community.plus.net

Twitter@plusnethelp

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/plusnet 

Lithy category:  Social Support Champion

  

We're a friendly, no-nonsense, award-winning communications provider. We were born back in 1997 with a simple belief - everyone deserves to pay a fair price and still get great customer service. We provide great value broadband, phone, TV and now mobile, all with helpful friendly people on hand to sort stuff out.

 

Genuinely Helpful Customer Care

Plusnet ventured into the social media world quite a few years ago, but with no clear direction, guidance or understanding of how to operate in this area.

18 months ago we realised this had to change and started to focus on how to change it, bringing in social media experts and bringing in best practice platforms.

 

For us at Plusnet, Social Media and the Community are one world and one team, with agents skilled to work on both channels, mixing it up throughout the day across both.

We had 6 people skilled to deal with contacts on Twitter, Facebook and Community however, on Saturdays and evenings we only have 1 person responding to contacts, we don’t open on Sundays and we close before the call centre.

 

From mid June we’ll have a team of 15 responding from 8am to 9pm 7 days.

 

We have an always on approach and interact with commentators not only coming to our channels for customer care, but pushing out fun award winning content in line with our Yorkshire brand.


This is how we see Social Media and Community for us moving forward:

Building trust in our brand by delivering World Class service through open & honest conversations with existing & prospective customers’

 

So how do we change and try to rebuild trust?

 

Lithium Social Media Management

This allowed our social care team to spend time dealing with the customer instead of filling out excel spreadsheets, whilst all our management information was taken care of by the platform.

 

Response Times

Our customers don’t need an immediate response in every situation for example ‘my connection as gone and I need this for work’ needs a quicker response than ‘can you show me how to see how much I’m using’.


We can now prioritise these different contacts accordingly and deal with them as the user needs us to. This allows us to take the time to make sure we do everything for the customer and as a result have set our general response time to 1 hour.

 

We believe response times matter, when they matter and differentiate between different situations:

  • Vulnerable customers 30 minutes – Having no phone line when this is your medical line of contact is a urgent situation. Lithium SMM allows us to recognise these and prioritise, so they are dealt with immediately.

 

Multi-Skilled agents

We know we’re not always the first point of contact for our customers. In fact around 70% of customers contacting us have already contacted Plusnet through another channel and have been failed by that channel. We have to make sure when they come through to us, we are the final contact. Against standard procedure in Plusnet, we are up-skilling the social care team across all business areas, with a target of less than 10% of contacts being transferred out of the team.

Responsive and No Flushing

We believe everyone who mentions Plusnet has the right to have their comment read. Our customer service team then make the decision on whether to respond or not, on a case by case basis. We respond to 80% of comments across Facebook and Twitter and choose not to respond to continual trollers or commentators who we are in Legal dispute with or are spamming our channels.

 

We’ve changed how we interact with our customers

Previously we’ve been too quick to push customers to resolve their own faults. In these scenarios, customers don’t want this, they are contacting us because they want us to deal with it and not have to do the work themselves.

We have now acknowledged this and hand hold the customer through to full resolution. This includes proactive contact on the day of an engineers visit, to confirm our supplier will be out that day, or booking a new appointment if our supplier has had to cancel. We confirm all next steps and the customer never needs to be the one contacting us back, we do this for them.

48% of customers contacting us on social have a fault, so this is a large group of users we are having an impact on. 

We also know 6% of users contacting social media leave us within 60 days. 

42% of these are reporting a fault and weren’t leaving when they first came to social media.

 

What does this mean for the business?

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What do our customers think to the changes?

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And finally……Good campaigns on our brand social channel are helping to change sentiment too and therefore help the Customer Service channel

 

Plusnet’s Yorkshire Emoji

We designed 5 emoji based on our top Yorkshire traditions including:

  • Yorkshire Rose
  • Yorkshire Pudding
  • Flat Cap
  • Teapot complete with a tea cosy
  • Yorkshire Terrier

 

The idea was to hero a different one each day and get our followers to vote for their favourite, to then be submitted to be an official emoji.

 

People from all over got involved:

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