Lithys 2017: Constant Contact- Social Support Champion

We set out to build a help center that puts equal weight on all support channels. We are committed to giving the customer a choice in how they want to interact with us. We are looking to start testing the new Help Center in Q2 2017. 

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Company:  Constant Contact 

Entry submitted by:  Samantha O’Connor (Community Manager)

Community/social channels:

https://community.constantcontact.com/
https://twitter.com/ctcthelp
https://twitter.com/constantcontact
https://www.facebook.com/constantcontact/
http://www.pinterest.com/constantcontact/
http://www.linkedin.com/company/constant-contact
http://instagram.com/constantcontact 

Lithy category:  Social Support Champion  

Social Customer Service Goals

With Millennials settling into the work place, we needed to prepare for how we would handle change in support channel preferences. Constant Contact has primarily focused on our 1:1 support channels (phone and chat) in the past. We set out to build a help center that puts equal weight on all support channels. We are committed to giving the customer a choice in how they want to interact with us. We are looking to start testing the new Help Center in Q2 2017. 

We are also working to ensure our self-service channels are set to handle potential growth and that we serve up the right content in a way the customer wants. With video becoming a more relevant help tool, we made sure our knowledge base provided more video options. We started out with 25 videos in 2015 and grew that number to 70 by the end of 2016. In the same time span, video views grew from 105,000 to 566,000 views – more than doubling our year over year usage.

We are in the midst of testing an in-product help experience.

We also looked through our processes to ensure that if a customer chooses to interact with us on a Community or Social channel, we want to give them the best possible turnaround time and remain in the channel that the customer chooses. We were ranked #1 by an independent analyst in “Top 20 SaaS companies and Their Twitter Support Presence.” https://www.process.st/twitter-support/

We also reply on review sites like BBB, G2Crowd, TrustPilot and our own Marketplace. We address issues reported and also take the time to post “thank you’s” for praise. We value all the feedback we receive from our customers.

Customer satisfaction approach

We wanted to be there when and where our customers need us. Our Support Twitter handle (@CTCTHelp) was created in October 2008. Since then, we have organically grown our audience to over 13,000 followers. With our Community, we have grown to have over 500,000 members since the Community opened in 2006.

Through our Community (both through posts and comments on the Value Analytics Survey) and through our social channels, we listen to our customer’s feedback. The data showed us that our customers wanted support over the weekend. We are now able to provide that via Twitter and in the Community. Since starting this initiative, we have seen an increase in engagement on social and in the Community.

The results

• Constant Contact’s customer service team’s customer satisfaction scores are consistently 97% or higher
• The company’s Net Promoter Score for 2016 was 65
• Its customer retention rate is 97.8%.
• Within the Community, we have decreased our response time by 11% enabling us to get an answer to the customer faster.
• In Q1 of 2017, we have doubled the unique people that we interact with on social through our @CTCTHelp handle alone.
• In 2016, we averaged about 13K call deflections per month. So far in Q1 of 2017, this has jumped to over 17K – a 34% increase!
• Our customers are even delighted by our efforts on Social and in the Community (comments provided from Value Analytics survey):
  • “The community interface has been improved - thank you.”
  • “great site... very helpful. and a big improvement over previous one”
  • “Always appreciate the great support, which includes graphics and full explanations”