Executive summary

Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, has connected more than 16 million mobile users with each other and the rest of the world. Telstra knew that both customers and employees engaged digitally with them every day — to have their questions answered, problems resolved, or to share their experiences with Telstra’s products. As their digital interactions with customers increased, Telstra wanted to offer the same level of authenticity that they offered customers offline. To accomplish their goals, Telstra set out to create a complete customer care experience, in partnership with Khoros, and they onboarded Khoros Care and a Khoros-powered Community.

Telstra offered an excellent customer experience through more traditional means, like phone support, but they understood that their digital customer care was lagging. Most importantly, Telstra wanted to offer their customers an authentic experience with digital customer care. With the partnership of Khoros, Telstra built their online community, CrowdSupport. CrowdSupport connects Telstra’s customers on a platform where they can talk about products and services with each other, without Telstra playing an active role. CrowdSupport also connects customers to other customers and to Telstra for better problem resolution, insight, crowdsourced innovations, and the sharing of experiences at every digital touchpoint. Telstra also turned to Khoros for a game-changing customer service experience to offer the next wave of gamification and customer value exchange for their community members.

Khoros Care has enabled Telstra to deliver fantastic service experiences in digital customer care channels. The governance and audit trail that Khoros Care provides has also played an important role in the management of Telstra’s social media platforms. Khoros empowers Telstra team members to provide great customer service while ensuring brand safety. Telstra’s Khoros-powered community, CrowdSupport, is now a single search platform to enable store team members to directly connect digitally with their customers, which creates an omnichannel presence. They’ve also taken CrowdSupport live, which means community members are now able to sign up to conduct live chat information sessions directly with other customers.

“What’s brilliant about our customer community is the richness and authenticity of the feedback and interactions that are provided by our customers. We learn so much about how we can make our products better in the community through the quality feedback our customers provide.”

— Monty Hamilton
Digital Operations Director, Telstra