Executive summary

Sony Europe delivers creative entertainment across the continent. For a number of years, they employed a third-party agency to manage their social media accounts and assist with marketing campaigns. But the vendor didn’t engage in social customer service, relying instead on an escalation workflow to notify the Sony Europe support team of any customer issues. This led to slow response times, often exceeding 24 hours.

The brand-activation team also needed ways to help customers asking questions about products and services on social media. But Sony Europe was using social publishing and campaign software that wasn’t well-suited for engagement, as it required the team to manually route and assign social communications. So, Sony Europe began looking for a solution to provide faster, higher-quality social media customer service. After an extensive search, the brand team decided to onboard Khoros Care.

Initially, Sony Europe launched Khoros Care only for their Dutch-speaking market, and only on Facebook and Twitter. They expanded gradually, adding a new language every few months, doubling the size of their team to manage the new additions, and using Khoros to maintain efficiency throughout. Before Khoros, the brand activation team conducted manual reporting by exporting native social channel data into Excel. Now with Khoros Care connected to their social channels, the team has access to better, more accessible analytics.

They also enhanced the customer service experience by responding to initial public Twitter questions with a direct message button that invites customers to DM the brand to resolve their inquiries.

The first success for Sony Europe after onboarding Khoros Care was a significant gain in efficiency. They noted a 17% increase in agent efficiency right away, and over a period of four years, they doubled agent efficiency. Their purpose-built Khoros platform streamlined service, allowing the team to provide quicker responses to public conversations, helping both customers and prospects. Yet another increase in efficiency comes from their Khoros community, which allows the brand team to easily share information and experiences with customers. Super users in the online community can answer questions and escalate cases that need agent intervention, easing the volume load of the brand team. Sony Europe is now exploring additional Khoros products and services, including advanced search and SQL-based analytics.

Results

As soon as Sony Europe partnered with Khoros, they noted substantial efficiency gains and call deflection capabilities, and they were able to handle a much higher volume of incoming communications. They achieved a 17% year-over-year increase in agent efficiency, and over a period of four years, they doubled agent efficiency. Now, conversations land with the right team, without the customer having to wait through a lengthy, manual routing process. The team can provide quicker responses to public conversations, helping customers, prospects, and agents alike. In fact, when a Twitter user posted that his TV had just died and tagged several manufacturers asking for suggestions for his replacement, Sony Europe easily surfaced the Tweet with Khoros’ social listening capabilities, responded quickly with helpful suggestions, and made the sale.