Jon Buss, MD at Yext, shares how site search is serving Three’s customers during the pandemic.
During the coronavirus pandemic, with brick-and-mortar shops and branches closed to the public until recently (and some customers reluctant to venture out), brands have needed to make sure that their online presence is capable of serving customers in the same way.
For retailers, this mostly means selling and delivering goods. But for brands in sectors like finance or telecommunications, their websites have had to be capable of meeting people’s customer service needs during the lockdown, playing the same role that a local bank branch or mobile phone store plays in answering questions, providing support and guiding people towards a purchase.
Like countless other brands, mobile network Three experienced a spike in people visiting its website for information and to ask questions during the lockdown. The telco aimed to answer customers’ queries directly on the site, avoiding a costly call to a customer service helpline.
The key to this was a partnership with brand management and site search platform Yext that Three had formed before the pandemic. Initially, the company partnered with Yext to improve Three’s local search presence, before realising that they could also improve the answers and information they were surfacing within the website itself – saving customers a lot of time and frustration, and the company a lot of money in calls to support helplines.
I spoke to Jon Buss, MD at Yext, about the role played by site search in serving Three’s customers during the pandemic, the importance of understanding customer intent and ‘owning the truth’, and why answering customers’ questions accurately is more critical than ever as businesses begin to open back up. I also tested out the site search experience to get a sense of how well Three’s website can really answer customer queries.
From local discovery to on-site discovery
Three and Yext first entered into a partnership about two years ago, initially with the goal of improving Three’s location-based discovery.
“They had examples where they’d stood outside their own stores,” said Buss, “and would do a Google search on their mobile device for ‘mobile phone shop near me’ – and they weren’t showing up on the Google Maps app. Or if they were, they were on about the fifth page, which is as good as not being there. So, they wanted to solve the problem of being discoverable on all the places that people were searching for their products and services.”
As Three started to expand and improve on the external data about the business found across the web – branch locations, products sold, frequently asked questions – the conversation then turned to the information that Three was serving up on its website in answer to customers’ search queries. “One of the big challenges they were looking to solve for was – people were coming to their website, they weren’t getting the answers they were looking for, and then they were picking up the phone and calling the contact centre. So Three were getting inundated with calls with questions that, really, they should have been able to resolve by putting the correct answers on their website.”
For example, Three has made its 5G connectivity a focal point of its marketing and has boasted that it is “building the UK’s fastest 5G network” – but when visitors to the Three website searched for “What is 5G?”, the first result that was served was about how to cancel a contract with Three. “Clearly, that’s not the answer that they wanted to deliver to a question around ‘What is 5G?’” Buss said.
The problem faced by brands in the current era, Buss explained, is that internet users are used to the level of search experience that they get from Google – and they expect the same from internal site search. “Site search hasn’t kept up with the way that regular search works. With regular search, now, you ask a question and Google will deliver you an answer. The same goes for Alexa – so we’ve got this expectation, now, that these search solutions will deliver us answers. You go on a website these days, and the search experience is really, really poor.”
Yext’s solution, which is called Yext Answers, works by structuring the information that businesses want to serve up within a ‘knowledge graph’ (a term that readers might recognise from the Google knowledge base of the same name). “So, you do a search for, for example, ‘What is 5G’, and the website serves up a direct answer on your own webpage, with a call to action,” Buss explained.
“You’re either trying to get a sale out of delivering that answer, or you’re trying to avoid a call to a customer service centre. And at the same time, you’re getting a heap of insight into what customers are asking.”
I decided to run the same query on the Three website to experience for myself how the Answers technology handles customer queries. When visiting the Three website on desktop, customers who click into the search bar are presented with a dropdown of suggested queries, to show what kinds of questions they can ask – “What is 5G?” isn’t one of them, but the dropdown features queries like “Upgrade my Phone?” and “SIM only deals”. The experience is the same on mobile, although the search bar is a little tucked away inside a hamburger menu.
Three’s site search presents suggestions for questions that users can ask in its dropdown menu. (Image: Three)
Upon searching for ‘What is 5G?’ I was presented with a number of 5G-related FAQs. The top result read, “What 5G phones can I get?”, which didn’t exactly answer the query, but was something I might conceivably have asked after finding out the answer to my first question. The third result down was, “What’s 5G and how do I get it?” and selecting the heading revealed a few short paragraphs of information about the 5G network and its benefits.
Further down the search results page were product listings for 5G phones, again in case I wanted to browse the 5G-enabled devices on offer. Finally, at the bottom were links to on-site blog posts with titles like ‘What is 5G’ and ‘Is 5G safe for your health?’
Overall I would call it a pretty good experience in terms of answering my query, though I was a little surprised that the “What’s 5G and how do I get it?” FAQ didn’t rank at the top.
Three presents FAQs and product results in response to the question, ‘What is 5G?’ (Image: Three)
As a comparison, I tried out one of the suggested queries offered to me by the search dropdown menu, “SIM only deals.” This time, product results appeared at the top, with links advertising an ‘Unlimited SIM only 1 month plan’, a ’30GB SIM only 12 month plan’, and a ’12GB SIM only 12 month plan’. A separate call-to-action on the right hand side encouraged me to click through to ‘See all our SIM only plans’.
I also tried out a search for “Upgrade my phone” and received four FAQs relevant to my query, the first entitled ‘How do I upgrade and what do I need to know?’ and the second, ‘How do I upgrade my plan and when can I do it?’ The other two answers pertained to setting up a new phone and cancelling or changing an upgrade.
In both cases, the site search easily retrieved the information – or products – relevant to what I was looking for. If I were a customer, I think I would have been pretty satisfied with that experience.
Three surfaces product results first for a search for ‘SIM only deals’. (Image: Three)
Three implemented Yext’s Answers solution on their website some time before the coronavirus crisis hit – but when it did, they suddenly found themselves in a much better position than they otherwise would have been to deal with an abrupt spike in website visits, as well as queries and purchases through online channels.
“People couldn’t walk into their stores and ask questions,” said Buss. “So, Three were very fortunate that they could just add a new series of questions and answers related to coronavirus to their existing Knowledge Graph – and therefore they could field those types of questions in addition to the usual commercial, product, FAQ or location queries that they were answering before.”
He added that Yext has seen a ‘massive spike’ in web visits to clients who use its products in every sector – not just telecommunications. “Never before has this solution been so necessary – because we’ve all got questions, whether that’s for a retailer or for an airline – or for a government department. We’ve got questions, and we can’t go and ask them in person, so we’re asking them online.”
Understanding customer intent
After the first month of having the Yext Answers solution live – pre-Covid-19 – Three saw a 42% reduction in customers clicking ‘Contact Us’ after using the site’s internal search. Given that a call to Three’s customer centre costs the brand somewhere between £3 and £7 per call, this also led to a significant reduction in call centre costs.
Just as valuable to Three was the insight that they received into the kinds of questions that people were asking on their site. For example, the brand noticed a trend of customers enquiring after products that were no longer stocked, and made a point of adding more prominent information about the fact that Three no longer sold these products. Three also noticed that they were getting queries about a particular Apple product that they didn’t yet stock, and so were able to begin stocking it to meet demand.
“Again, there was a heap of insight they were getting off the back of that,” said Buss.
Buss sees this kind of intelligence – the ability to understand customer intent based on the queries they’re typing into site search engines – as particularly crucial for marketers in the current era. “Understanding customer intent has been one of the really critical things for marketers over the last few years,” he said. “In an era where you can do less push marketing – with browsers like Chrome and Safari blocking third-party cookies, and with the need to comply with GDPR – it’s harder and harder to gather insights.
“But if you can understand intent better, especially in real-time, you can answer customers’ questions immediately with a call-to-action, which means that you’ve got a much higher likelihood of converting that customer – and that’s what Three are really seeing. By answering the question there and then, based upon the intent that’s being served, they’re also improving their conversion rate for questions that can lead to a sale.”
Coming back to the current situation with the coronavirus crisis, we are now seeing a gradual reopening of some businesses and stores – on Monday 15th June, Three began to re-open its stores across England and some branches in Northern Ireland. I asked Buss if he thought that the trend of seeking answers and support online would continue, even as some physical business begin to reopen.
“The trend of asking questions and looking for truth and direct answers has always been around,” Buss replied, “but the pandemic has magnified it. People are looking online before they necessarily have a physical experience with a brand, and we’ve already seen data that shows they’re doing that significantly more than they did before – I think that trend will continue.
“And as businesses are re-opening, a lot of them want to have more control over the information that’s available online – if you’re a retailer that is re-opening some stores, people might not know that you’re re-opening them, or at which locations. They might want to know the opening times, or what the experience is going to be like, what the social distancing policy will be – companies should be putting all of that information on their website, so that customers can know what to expect before they go there.”
I decided to find out what kind of information Three’s internal site search would serve up for a query of this kind. To my pleasant surprise, when I typed in “Is my nearest store open” I was presented with location-based results first and foremost, with a map of stores in the London area and information below it on their opening times. Below the location results, there was also an FAQ answer for ‘Are Three stores open?’ which informed me that Three stores would be re-opening with reduced hours from 15th June.
Three returns location-based search results for the query ‘Is my nearest store open’, showing branch locations on a map with opening hours underneath. (Image: Three)
“What we’ve seen is a massive explosion in companies and brands – and government organisations – wanting to ‘own the truth’ on their website and deliver direct answers – more so than ever with this pandemic,” Buss concluded. “Three tapped into this as a solution well before the current pandemic, and so they were ready with their whole website experience and able to deliver direct answers, whether about products or locations. Which meant that they were able to very quickly adapt and integrate more information that was relevant to the pandemic.
“I think one of the things we really have seen is that the experience on many brands’ websites when it comes to search is pretty poor. We don’t really click on blue links on Google any more. Alexa doesn’t give us ten options; Alexa just gives us an answer. So, websites should be the same – and that’s exactly what Three wanted to tap into.”
