Executive summary

Sky, part of the Comcast group, is Europe’s leading media entertainment company. The Sky Community, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary, has more than 2.1 million members. In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic caused an unprecedented 500% spike in community posts as customers became even more reliant on their Sky services while in lockdown. At the same time, Sky lost over 70% of their customer-contact resources almost overnight. Sky quickly shifted more than 15 staff members to the community team and positioned the community more prominently within key pages of Sky.com. As customer questions became more complex, Sky added advisors and engineers to the community, which before was based almost exclusively on peer-to-peer interaction. Sky wanted to ensure that the presence of advisors wouldn’t be detrimental to peer-to-peer engagement, and they didn’t want their community to become a glorified live chat. They also needed to ensure that their advisors could address what they deemed Tier 2 queries: while Sky’s Tier 1 queries can be answered digitally, by super users, Tier 2 queries are account-based queries that might require a higher level of intervention. Sky sought an innovative solution: they partnered with Khoros to build community messaging.

Sky partnered with Khoros to build their community messaging capability to empower community advisors to address Tier 2 queries. Now, when a Sky community super user recognizes a Tier 2 post, they can escalate it for Sky’s advisors to address. After reading through the public thread to see what the customer has already tried, the advisor then sends an asynchronous, secure messaging invite to the customer via email. When the customer goes onto Sky’s community, they see a chat bubble that enables them to start a conversation with the advisor. Once the case is resolved, the customer is asked to complete a survey and the advisor who assisted goes back into the public thread and summarizes the solution to help future customers.

Sky partnered with Khoros to weather the worst of the COVID-19 crisis, and their community messaging system continues to help customers receive a high level of care. In fact, engagement on Sky’s community more than doubled from 2019 to 2020, from an increase in new discussions (128%), to new answers (119%), to badges (617%). Sky also discovered that customers who viewed a community query with a solution had a much lower rate of transfer from the community to an advisor on the phone than customers who did not view content with a solution on the community. In fact, customers who viewed answered content were 21% less likely to call Sky, saving the company over $150k per year. Sky plans to look at even more Community Health Metrics in the future, to prove the value of their community even more definitively.

Another key metric unique to Sky is transfer rate. They use this to measure digital transfers — that is, customers who have gone on any of their digital journeys, then called them within seven days. Sky’s proprietary technology alerts them when a customer can’t find help online, and tells them exactly where they were and when they decided to make a phone call instead. Then they can see which pages generate the most calls, and drill down to which threads are causing the most calls. Sky discovered that the transfer rate on their community, in general, was about one-third that of other their digital properties, and for threads marked as “solved,” it was even lower. By directing people to the community and encouraging them to mark questions as “solved,” Sky can maximize the value for customers as well as their bottom line.

Results

Not only has the number of customer interactions Sky handles each day increased, but performance metrics in many areas are also even better than they were pre-COVID-19. Most importantly, Sky has been able to work more efficiently, using the resources they have available to prioritize the acute needs of their most vulnerable customers. This year, the number of casual community users decreased while the number of active users increased. Historically, 91% of members were casual users while 8% were active users, but now the split is 87% and 12%, respectively. Engagement on Sky’s community also more than doubled this year.