FOXTEL makes it easier for people to watch the TV they love all in one place.

The FOXTEL Group is at the forefront of Australia’s media and entertainment industry, providing customers with live and streamed content, including FOXTEL’s’ own award-winning productions as well as an unrivalled breadth of sports coverage.

Operating in a highly competitive market, FOXTEL also strives to provide a premium experience and is transforming with Salesforce to provide effortless service across its digital channels.

FOXTEL’s service transformation was partly born out of a need to simplify. The growth and expansion of the company’s services over the years had led to a buildup of legacy systems to manage.

“It’s not so much about the wow moments, but about making it as easy as possible for people to watch the TV that they love to watch,” said Jason Smith, Director of Customer Experience Design and Change Delivery at FOXTEL. “Part of delivering that experience is ensuring that the service experience is as seamless as possible when customers reach out to us for help.”

With more customers wanting to interact over digital channels, FOXTEL decided to make the leap from its legacy systems to a single platform for omnichannel engagement. The company chose Salesforce because it offered strong capabilities across all support channels, including messaging and social media.

Smith said FOXTEL was also attracted to Salesforce because of its focus on helping customers maximise the benefits of the platform.

“For us to be agile and do the things we want to do for our customers, we need to put more and more capabilities into the hands of our frontline employees. That’s why Salesforce’s focus on learning and acceleration is so important,” said Smith.

FOXTEL’s need to transform was accelerated by the pandemic and a corresponding increase in support traffic as people stayed home and watched more TV. Messaging was one of those channels in high demand, so FOXTEL focused on making it more efficient.

Leveraging Einstein Bots, for example, FOXTEL rebuilt its chatbots to help more customers find what they needed on their own. It also streamlined workflow and improved routing to help agents work more efficiently. The impacts of these initiatives were felt within eight weeks as FOXTEL reduced message handling time by half and increased inquiries handled by chatbots to 40 percent.

FOXTEL additionally reduced its support costs which Smith indicated was particularly significant in the current environment. “Uncovering new cost efficiencies while also increasing the level of service was exactly what we needed to do right now,” said Smith.

The transformation of FOXTEL’s support channels has continued at a record pace and has included the rollout of social customer service for more efficient and unified support. FOXTEL has also onboarded 200 agents and upskilled other business and technical teams on the platform. Smith shared that while most of the training had to be done at a safe social distance, the intuitive nature of Salesforce helped to smooth adoption and learning.

“With the fifty percent efficiency improvements, it is fair to say our agents’ jobs have been made easier with Salesforce. Agents are also now seeing the benefits of the broader strategy as well, like the opportunity to work on social,” said Smith.

Darren Yeo, Director of Enterprise and Solution Architecture at FOXTEL, said that the technical team working on the transformation felt similarly empowered. “As a greenfield deployment, we have been able to embrace best practice and re-establish how we collaborate with the business and how we make changes. We also have the right tools to feel more empowered,” said Yeo.

While FOXTEL’s transformation has delivered exceptional benefits to customers and employees, Yeo was quick to point out that this is just the beginning. The company is still building its 360 degree view of customers and plans to continually enrich this with more data and tools like machine learning. “It’s one thing to establish a single pane of glass across the business, but it’s another thing to be able to use that data to reach out to customers and provide a more personalised experience,” said Yeo.

A new Knowledge database is also on FOXTEL’s roadmap. This will be rolled out internally first and then integrated with chatbots so that customers can get the support they need even faster and get back to watching TV. Yeo and Smith shared that they’ve engaged a Salesforce program architect to support their future plans and they expect to continue innovating at speed.

“I like to do things quickly, but we’ve also made sure to take time out and understand what’s most important to our customers and employees. Identifying those non-negotiables is key to getting things right the first time and will ultimately save us time,” said Smith.