In 2016, Sprint made a commitment to overhaul their approach to Social Support and improve Customer engagement & satisfaction.
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Entry submitted by: Allison Fasching, Brien Hall, Christy Wolf (Social Strategy, Community & Engagement Managers)
Community: Sprint Community, Boost Mobile Community, Virgin Mobile US Community
Lithy category: Social Support Champion
Sprint Corporation is the fourth largest telecommunications company in the U.S. with over 60 million customers; we have wireless service in more than 200 destinations around world. Sprint offers wireless voice, messaging, and broadband services through its various subsidiaries under the Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, and Assurance Wireless brands, and wholesale access to its wireless networks to mobile virtual network operators.
Our organization’s social customer service initiatives in 2016-2017
In 2016, Sprint made a commitment to change their approach to Social Support and improve customer engagement & satisfaction. In August 2016, we launched two online communities for Virgin Mobile & Boost Mobile prepaid brands. In December 2016, we migrated a failing Sprint community to a newly designed Lithium responsive Community. In February 2017, we began the upgrade to Lithium Social Media Management for our Social Agents.
Ways we wanted to improve customer engagement and satisfaction:
- Increase Community users.
- Increase call deflection.
- Improve the quality and quantity of content.
- Reduce AHT (average handle time) and CPC (cost per conversation).
Customer support satisfaction thru engagement and experience was something we were struggling to improve upon.
Our focus is not just customer support it is customer advocacy; we strive to be the voice of the customer, by listening and engaging directly. By creating our own branded communities, we are able to create a trusted environment and social engagement experience. A place where customers, employees, agents and enthusiast can engage in discussions to solve problems, provide feedback and share experiences.
We have several types of experts on Community all the time.
- Social Care Agents: Specially trained agents that respond in our Social Networks like Facebook & Twitter, as well as Communities.
- Product Ambassadors: Sprint product experts who blog about all the new and cool features on the latest phones.
- Customer advocates: Also called or “super users” are probably the most important experts we have, they love to answer questions and help other members of the community to find what the need.
- Most importantly, we provide the same engaging level of service and solutions for account questions on all of our platforms.
We have also introduced several new types of content to meet the needs of our customers.
The TKB (tribal knowledgebase) articles are quickly becoming the go-to topics for finding the best answers. We review frequently-viewed threads to ensure that they’re answered with Accepted Solutions, curate those Accepted Solutions posted by customers and build out “Voice of Customer” TKBs in natural language with easy to follow instructions. Some of our more popular TKB articles:
- View Text Messages.
- Sprint Text Short Codes.
- Adding an authorized user to your Sprint account.
- What are my phone purchase options?
- Com Password Requirements.
We have also created several new blog series:
- Sprint Five: Buzzfeed style “Five Things” articles created and designed around our most searched-for terms and questions from SEO data, designed to answer hot topics, targeted questions.
- Captain’s Log: Our regular updates about what’s new in the Community
- Product Ambassador blogs: All about the latest and greatest devices
- Buzz About Wireless: Any and all thing wireless; rumors about upcoming device launches, industry trends, even the way we live with our devices
Our results
- Boost & Virgin Communities, launched at 200% over target and are seeing a 32% increase in call deflection with 200K users per month.
- Sprint Community, set a target of 747K new users per month in the first year. We met that goal in 3 months and we continue to move the needle upwards.
- Accepted Solutions have increased by 175%, page views are over 3M per month
- Blog readership has increased by 200%
- Call deflection for all communities has resulted in ~$3M deflection
- We recently launched Lithium SMM for agents, to assist in responding to social support posts. Initial results week-over-week compared to our previous solution.
- 25% decrease in handle time
- 100-second reduction in AHT
- 148-second reduction in Conversation AHT
- Agents reported an easy transition switching from our previous solution to Lithium with very positive feedback on the SMM tool’s user friendliness and efficiency gained. They also reported the majority of First Responses happening within 15 minutes of a customer’s post.
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