A Journey Through Sky Service
Customer service has always been key to Sky’s success. Let’s take a walk through three service projects at Sky that illustrate how Sky service has developed over time. The Meeting Place, the My Sky Concepts and the Sky Service App.
Project One: ‘Meeting Place’
Objective
The Future Service Pilot was created to provide a best-in-class online and personalised experience for customers – putting customers at the heart of the business and seamlessly connecting them to Sky content and people via social mechanisms they we’re familiar with. By simplifying and enhancing the service experience it was proposed that Sky customers would become more engaged in Sky products and services and ultimately improve customer retention.
What did we do?
The pilot was launched to 500k customers in Oxfordshire. Any channel a customer in this area interacted with Sky was met with a priority service. This included contact centres, engineers and online. The online part of the project was called ‘Meeting Place’, a new My Sky homepage as well as a collection of new features such as My Help Requests which was a trial of a new self-service dashboard of customer service updates, personalised video bills, live chat, co-browse and visual self-diagnostic flows - all helping triage top problems away from the call-centres and back into the hands of informed, self-serving customers. We balanced help info with engagement content encouraging regular returns, categorising in Help Me, Entertain Me and Reward Me sections.
Results
From the initial UAT, to the completion of the first phase the pilot achieved a positive set of outcomes. An 8% reduction in call centre calls in the first 3 months compared to before the pilot, the website received over twice the rate of return usage compared to existing My Sky key pages with a triple increase in self-service help journeys, NPS increased by 2.7 and many of the features in the pilot form the key elements of today’s Service experience at Sky.
Project Two: ‘My Sky Concepts’
Overview
Create a fresh new experience for My Sky that enhances content discovery as well as service. We created multiple concepts, the favourite of which was the Module and Sky Widget route. This work only ever stayed as a concepts due to management and strategy changes. It could have been great - the one that got away.
Route 1: Modules & The Sky Widget
Modules: Modular exploration system, panel scale relevant to personalised importance of the content, what you need to know intelligent system which opens out to larger contextual views. To take it further, the flexible structure of this concept lead to the ‘Sky widget’, a satellite companion on all Sky properties which could bring My Sky to the customer wherever they are.
Modules: Designed to show Service, Help, Value Add and Channel content, the Modules concept was a daring and elegant system to give customers what they need when they need it. The tip of the iceberg to the content beneath with simplicity and timely relevance at it’s heart.
Routes 2 and 3: Timeline & Cascade
Timeline was a real-time daily view of Sky that delivered personalised content accord to time and context. Cascade was an adaptive decision tree, unfolding the dynamic elements as you scrolled.
Project Three: ‘Hybrid Service App’
Overview
The Sky.com website was at nearly100% responsive compliance following a major redesign of all major sections. The growth of mobile device use for certain tasks, e.g. second screen TV content exploration, remote record, viewing bill, no satellite signal troubleshooting, contact us, programme your remote, showed a high propensity for a mobile first service to accompany the main Sky.com experience. The data evidenced that more people would access Help on a mobile or tablet than a desktop.
We created the Sky Service App
We proposed an initial hybrid app solution that firstly leveraged the responsive content on the Sky.com website for speed of delivery, then added additional value and user experience enhancements by deploying complimentary native features.
Concept Designs
Final Designs & Results
The brilliantly simple Sky Service app was the gateway to self-service help and account management and directed customers to what they needed quickly and effectively: clear language, icons and calls-to-action. Simple. It took its branding from the main Sky brand, utilising the spectrum logo on white with Sky text font, comfortably sitting alongside the responsive Sky.com design.
It had over a million downloads in it’s first year and as the primary focus for the ‘Digital First’ strategy, it helped deliver the overall objective to double call deflection and remove 20 million calls from the contact centres over a three year period. It paved the way for the next generation Sky service app, the My Sky App.
