Lecture i held for international MSc students on the Norwegian School of Business and Economics on social media, building a community forum and gamification.

1. Diving into Social Media and building a community forum
NHH Social Media Marketing / International MSc students
Trym Stene
Web Development Manager
@trymstene

2. Once upon a time ..
• Telenor looked into support-forums early (2001)
• The market wasn’t mature
• Customers not as connected as today
• Difficult to launch something of this size without thorough
analysis on return of investment
• Other big priorities
@trymstene

3. 2009
The beginning of a golden age within social media
business-engagement
At this time many companies worldwide have gotten
an interest for social media marketing
@trymstene

4. Tracked customers mentioning
Telenor on Twitter by using an
internally developed web
application
Called up
customers and
helped them
No official Twitter profile
• How would the customers react?
• Positive feedback from
customers
• 1 employee
@trymstene

5. First customer helped by Telenor
Erik_nufsaid: #telenorfail Ordered
iPhone from telenor. Promised delivery
in 5 working days. 12 days without a
phone. Customer service hangs up on
me
Erik_nufsaid: because #telenor
subcontractor claims to have sent a
text message I never received, must
wait another 5 days for phone. epic
servicefail
Customer Service calls Erik
Erik_nufsaid: #telenor just called
after reading the tweet about my lack
of iphone. promised to fix instantly.
school example of turning unhappy
customer to a fan
@trymstene

6. Official
Telenor-account
on
Twitter
Focused on customer service
Set an expectation to users that
we are present, listen and
respond
1 employee
@trymstene

7. Results of Twitter-support
6 500 messages that referred to Telenor
50 solved customer cases monthly
92 % of customers happy when called back
@trymstene

8. 2010
Launched Telenor Facebook page
• Spesific opening hours
• Focus on customer service
• Customers could send private messages
• 3 employees
• Established a core team
@trymstene

9. Market trends
• Strong trend and expectation in the
market that one should be present in
social media
• Major Norwegian brands in commerce
and service on social media
• Within the Norwegian telecom universe
all our competitors are on Facebook
and / or Twitter. But no forum.
• Many large telecom-companies in
Europe engages their customers
through a support forum
@trymstene

10. Whats happening in Norway?
.
Well integrated forum
• Uses different
methods to make
customers help
themselves
• Encourages to
discuss
Have a special
forum just for
its Bipper service.
- little activity
- well hidden
Customers have seen the
need for a forum related to
NextGenTel, and have
made one out of own
initiative. As NextGenTel
doesn’t have forums.
European telecom-companies are well established
with own support-forums
Communicates very
clear that the forums
are there for
customers helping
eachother
• 98% of all questions
answered by
customers
Have many employees
answering the
customers.
Makes it clear that the
forums are there for
customers to help
eachother
• Say they can choose
to interfere, but does
not let the customers
have those
expectations
@trymstene

11. Why establish a telecom support-forum?
• Give the customers a natural
place to interact and help
eachother
• Increase self service
– Reduce cost
– Increase customer satisfaction
• Make a difference
• Strenghten the social media
platform
• Create an arena where our
customers can talk about
and with us, and we can
listen and learn.
@trymstene

12. THE
CONCEPT
@trymstene

13. Customers help customers
Customers help customers
Set clear expectations that this is an arena for
the customers to help eachother
Heavy quality control and make the customers feel
like home
Focus on customer service
(No marketing or sales-pushing)
To make customers enjoy their stay, we need to:
Engage Reward activity and
quality
Create
superfans
Ble spørsmålet besvart?
@trymstene

14. Customers wants to be entertained
@trymstene

15. Seth Priebatsch
Building the game layer on top of the world
@trymstene

16. Give the customers the tools they need to reward good
and informative information.
Ble spørsmålet besvart?
When customers have received the answer to their
question they can mark their question as solved.
When other customers experiencing the same problem
visits the forum, the answer is already there.
@trymstene

17. Superfans
Answered over 5,000 questions
Thanked by 1,800 people
Rewarded with own blog @ Future
Shop
Verizon superfan
Justin McMurry
uses up to 20 hours a
week helping other
verizon customers
We do not wish to reward our users with gifts or money
Example: Recognition / cred, pilot participation,
participation in events organized by Telenor, and more.
@trymstene

18. Example of operating model
• We already have a social
media team, they can
handle a support forum
• Employees in Social media-team
can moderate the
forum when needed.
• Hire a community manager
to take full ownership of the
support forum
@trymstene

19. Needs to be a part of the Telenor social universe
• There must be a consistent experience, and we must
have a good customer journey for the customer
• We need to analyse how the callcentre, social media-teams
and help pages on telenor.no will interact with a
forum on our website
@trymstene

20. QUESTIONS?
@trymstene