Overview
Britain’s leading green energy supplier, the Ecotricity group, manages a diverse portfolio of brands. Maintaining and maximising its online presence across 20 different social channels, all with distinct identities, was proving a challenge. It needed to find a more efficient method to securely manage and grow its social marketing and social customer service operations.
A Need To Streamline
During an end of year evaluation of their social strategies, Ecotricity realised that gaps in its technology and practices was preventing it from fully-leveraging its social channels, and restricting its potential. The Ecotricity Group’s main goal was to manage multiple social identities from within one central hub, ensuring that all activity was recorded and enabling it to decentralise social media and incorporate wider departments. It realised that in order to build a bold social presence, drive tangible ROI and provide their customers with high-quality social customer service, it needed to redefine its social strategy and management tools. Ecotricity wanted a platform that minimised the risk of missed inbound messages, while also simplifying the process of scheduling and analysing marketing campaigns.
The Ability To Redirect
One of the key problems that the Ecotricity Group faced was inbound messages being sent to the wrong social channels on a daily basis. Customers were contacting “@Ecotricity” to ask queries concerning the electric car charging company, “@ElecHighway”. This was due to them both being part of the Ecotricity group and ‘Ecotricity’ being mentioned on the charging stations. With Ecotricity and Electric Highway being two separate divisions of the same group, only the Electric Highway team could respond in an informed and effective way. To counteract this problem, Ecotricity wanted to find a social solution that had the ability to instantly route messages internally to the most appropriate person.
Effective Social Customer Care
When the Ecotricity Group discovered SocialSignIn, it immediately saw the platform’s ability to have individual workflows in place would be highly relevant. Paul Sargeant, the Online Community Manager at Ecotricity, said, “SocialSignIn provides all the tools we need to decentralise our accounts and grant specialist teams access, while still maintaining central control and protected from any potential social crisis. This meant that we could give our customers direct access to the right people through our social channels, decreasing the time it took for them to receive an informed response. The demands and expectations of our customers are constantly growing, thankfully social media platforms such as SocialSignIn’s are matching this rate of change – it’s obvious they pride themselves on developing their platform to meet shifting trends.”
Year One ROI
Since partnering with SocialSignIn, The Ecotricity Group has been able to dramatically reduce its response time to incoming messages, providing leading levels of customer service in a highly-competitive market. It has grown its social community by over 52,000 in less than 12 months and leveraged this to produce 33 per cent more web traffic and an 84 per cent uplift in socially-driven sales. Paul said, “We can now publicly resolve issues more quickly and effectively, reflecting our brand values and highlighting our dedication to providing exceptional customer experiences. With SocialSignIn’s assistance we have been able to build an active, engaged and loyal following, which is reflected in our fantastic customer satisfaction ratings.”