Executive summary

The USAA family of companies provides insurance, banking, investments, retirement products and advice to over 12 million current and former members of the U.S. military and their families. Known for its legendary commitment to its members, USAA is consistently recognized for outstanding service, employee well-being, and financial strength. USAA knew that social was their customers’ channel of choice for servicing needs, but it was growing harder to reach their goal of reducing service costs across multiple business units while providing members a superior experience. To counteract this, USAA created a social media management strategy that drives social support savings initiatives and leveraged the Khoros platform to put their strategy into practice.

Before using the Khoros platform, USAA’s agents were bogged down in manual social media customer service documentation processes and a manual workflow. The time it took agents to record results sidelined them from working on other cases, leading to longer support wait times for USAA customers. Adding to the delays, important and frequent support processes like member identity validation and conversation routing to agents were not fully automated.

These issues made it exceedingly difficult to achieve USAA’s support savings cost reduction goal and maintain their service level agreements (SLAs). USAA began by determining the efficiency of social service processes with the identification of USAA’s Enterprise Social Customer Care SLA across multiple business partners. Next, USAA worked with Khoros to implement a social media management platform with time-saving features including real-time member name to social handle match and advanced agent routing techniques. Lastly, by integrating platform data into their Client Relationship Manager (CRM), USAA created a cross-channel 360 degree view of their members that allowed personalized and seamless experiences.

Working together, USAA and Khoros implemented Social Customer Care MSI (Member Service Index) in 11 major business units with six financial service business teams and trained 104 users in two days. As a result of onboarding Khoros and adopting their new social media management support strategy, USAA removed 25+ manual process while also realizing cost savings and 99% time on task savings. Today, USAA’s customers are receiving care more quickly and the social service business units are functioning efficiently.

“We cut down the time it takes for internal social customer care documentation from 24 hours to 1 hour–a 99% time on task savings!”

— Heather Cronin
Executive Director, Social Business, USAA