After introducing customer support via Facebook Messenger late last year, Rogers has become the first Canadian telecom brand to add direct Twitter support.
Effective immediately, Rogers and Fido customers can now reach customer support representatives at @RogersHelps – as well as @RogersBuzz, @FidoSolutions and @FidoMobile – to obtain assistance.
Rogers is among a group of companies including Apple, Sprint, T-Mobile and United Airlines using the new Twitter business support feature. Its features include a new page layout with a bigger direct message button, as well as published service times to let customers know when help is coming.
Participating companies can also pin the most important service-related tweets on their newsfeed in order to relay key information to customers.
“We want to make life easier for our customers, and what that’s really about is saving them time,” said Rogers’ chief customer officer Deepak Khandelwal. “We want to be able to allow them to interact with us wherever they are and with the channel they use.”
While Khendelwal did not provide statistics on how many customers have used Facebook Messenger support since it was introduced in December, he said that the company is seeing “continued growth” in the number of people wishing to interact with the company through these mechanisms.
Khandelwal said that the new tools also provide customers with greater flexibility, enabling them to conduct an authenticated conversation with a customer representative at their convenience, even pausing for lunch. He cited a recent case of a Rogers customer who used Facebook Messenger support while in Paris to resolve a service issue.
Rogers has seen its customer satisfaction scores increase 65% since the introduction of Facebook support, while complaints about Rogers to the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS) fell 26% last year and its year-over-year churn rate has fallen for two straight quarters.
“Customers are seeing that this is part of our overall strategy of overhauling the customer experience,” said Khandelwal. “Our churn numbers are down, our complaints are down dramatically, our contacts are down significantly, but at the end of the day the real reason we’re doing this is that we want to keep our customers happy.”
Khandelwal said that the initiatives are part of the continued evolution of the more customer-friendly “Rogers 3.0” promised by CEO Guy Laurence. The company invested $100 million in improving its customer service last year, and plans to invest an additional $100 million this year, said Khandelwal.
He said that Rogers has maintained staffing levels at its call centres, while doubling the size of its social media support team over the past year. He did not provide specifics.
Khandelwal said he expects to see customer support continue to move online, noting that 40% of its customer interactions now come via self-service methods such as Facebook Messenger and that it is the preferred method of communication for millennial customers.
“We’re going to move with our customer base,” said Khandelwal. “We track very carefully how customers want to interact with companies and what platforms they’re spending time on. Our goal is to be the number one company in social support in Canada.”
While some companies have introduced chatbots for customer interaction, Khandelwal said that Rogers has no immediate plans to follow suit. “Customers love interacting with our people, and it’s working with our satisfaction scores, so that all of our interactions are done with our people,” he said.
I don’t get…..how is this different than what most brands have been doing on Twitter for the last few years? Is it really just a “bigger direct message button”? That seems silly.
Friday, September 23 @ 9:01 am |