The Internet user base in India is 120 million, while the number of mobile users stands at 900 million. Social media has caught the attention of the people, and has emerged as an effective channel for customers to voice their queries and concerns relating to any service provider. The flip side for the service provider, however, is that these updates from customers tend to go viral, thereby creating a huge brand impact.
Vodafone, being the largest and a prominent mobile operator in Tier 1 cities in India, has a huge population of bloggers and is available for customers on social media. Vodafone possesses exceptional customer service support on call and through email. Though in recent times, there has been a gap in managing and providing customer support over the online social channels.
A huge amount of targeted conversions were happening online about the Vodafone brand. However, these conversations were going untracked and unattended. Traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are useful for scheduling and managing work, but they are woefully inadequate in identifying, assimilating, tracking, engaging and reporting, based on conversations happening over the Internet. Further, to ensure that issues on social media are addressed in line with the current customer service processes adds further to the complex and myriad challenges of addressing customers over such channels.
Therefore, we employed our understanding of online information systems and our experience in the customer support domain to implement an integrated solution that would reinforce the offline standing of the Vodafone brand on the social media, and redefine the way social Customer Relationship Management is executed.
The Solution
The core application has been built on Java and MySQL hosted on Enterprise Linux Servers. Various parts of the system are integrated with social platforms using API. The powerful listening and mining tools are optimized for performance and quality. The system makes full use of cloud hosting infrastructure. During peak hours, on-demand instances and nodes are utilized to ensure 100 percent uptime for the system.
Automated scripts have been created to read into Twitter feeds, Twitter trends, Facebook posts, RSS feeds from various blogs and articles, and ties into feeds for third party sites like forums. The crux of the system lies in the uniqueness of its structured work flow engine that mirrors CRM processes and practices and at the same time allowing collaboration between users. The system allows interaction with existing CRM applications at Vodafone.
The system further allows for a real-time charting of the data. It also maps to the core essence of customer service by using turn-around time as a metric to track engagements, ensuring that all the agreed SLAs are achieved.
The usual CRM metrics and reports are made available for regular operational needs, along with meaningful trends and analysis of social conversations.
The number of social media sites and the number of our customers visiting these sites is increasing by the day. Vodafone started out with a few hundreds listen points, when we started the social CRM project in Dec 2009. We now process around a few thousand requests per month from social media.
The ability to scan the web and social media sites to gather conversations about Vodafone, and select the ones that classify as queries, complaints and request, requires complex IT systems for data analysis and processing. Therefore, it was critical to be able to gather, analyze, filter and process data, and hence the need for IT. Today, Vodafone is providing this service on Twitter and Facebook which account for 65 percent traffic. We are also active on consumer forums and websites.
Win-Win for Customers
Online grievance management has led to faster query resolution along with increase in the number of incoming customers through mobile number portability (MNP) due to the current social engagement practices. The foremost impact of the system has been on customer servicing.
All customer conversations and grievances that are voiced online and on the social media are now being addressed by Vodafone in a process driven approach. Thanks to the system, we have ensured that we go where the customer is. It has helped us enhance customer satisfaction, and build deeper understanding of customer needs to serve them better.
