Tre Sweden are disruptors in the Swedish telecoms market. Since 2003, their main priority has been to develop their products and network to provide their two million customers the best mobile experience possible. 

Tre Sweden believes that their culture—created by all of their staff—is the main ingredient in their recipe for success. That success also hinges largely on making sure their customers are served in the quickest and most effective way possible—and that’s where their community comes in.

Their community is just over a year and a half old and currently serves over 900,000 users. It answers 63% of all customer questions—resulting in a support cost saving of more than 660,000 Euros per year.  

In this case study we’ll take an in-depth look at how Tre Sweden’s community has been effectively serving their customers since its inception, its current business results and, of course, what they think of the partnership with inSided. 

Why a community?

The primary goal of ​​the community was to relieve pressure on Tre’s support teams.

Let’s start at the beginning and take a look at why Tre Sweden started a community in the first place. 

Of course, it goes without saying that finding answers to a question must be easy, and although a common FAQ can answer many questions, these answers are usually very general. In our industry, there are often several alternative solutions to a problem which is not always easy to keep track of and highlight in a simple way on the website. With the community, we have the opportunity to publish more rich guides while also allowing users to supplement them with their own solutions or ask new questions. In this way, together with our customers, we create an ever-growing knowledge base that is easy to navigate.

Erik Tagiev, Community Manager and Digital Service Specialist at Tre Sweden

This knowledge base, that is constantly updated with company-created and user-generated content, has led to some very impressive results:

Having initially worried about there being a negative tone on the community, Tre have found that the community hasn’t turned into a place for complaints. Quite the opposite—customers are helping each other and there is a positive vibe on the community. Of course, for those more complex queries that aren’t handled openly on the community, inSided’s integration with Zendesk means that tickets can be quickly escalated to the Customer Service team who promptly contact the customer with a solution. 

Importantly, for Tre Sweden the community is about more than just alleviating pressures on their support teams and serving their customers better. They have also created a secure environment where they can build closer relationships with their customers—somewhere to discuss ideas and receive feedback about their products and services. 

The community has become a good social listening tool which allows us to quickly find out if something is not working or what expectations our customers have.

Erik Tagiev, Community Manager and Digital Service Specialist at Tre Sweden

They’ve even included a sidebar widget so customers can quickly and easily submit feedback—check it out on the right hand side of their community homepage: 

How have inSided helped along the way?

When it comes to how Tre Sweden found the community implementation process, Erik explains: 

The implementation of the Community was easy and effortless thanks to the structured and interactive onboarding provided by the inSided Team. 

In the beginning, we weren’t sure if our customers would think that ”telco” was a topic interesting enough for them to get involved in a forum, and we worried that it would become a channel for negative feedback instead. Fortunately, thanks to expert help from inSided, we were on track relatively quickly and today we have an ever-growing community forum with interesting questions, discussions and relevant feedback from our customers.

Erik Tagiev, Community Manager and Digital Service Specialist at Tre Sweden

We asked Erik how Tre Sweden kickstarted their community in the beginning—his answer is a great lesson for anyone out there interested in starting their own community:

We started by analyzing data from our Contact Center and the most visited pages on our website to determine what content we needed to create before release, which resulted in about 80 articles. These articles and guides are also used to make our chat and email channels more efficient. The rest of the content is created by our customers.🚀

The Tre Community Team and their Super Users

The Community team at Tre Sweden consists of 1 Community Manager and 4 moderators who rotate on a weekly basis. The forum is staffed daily by 1,5 FTEs who welcome and engage with their members, participate in discussions, and ensure that guidelines are followed.

When they are not working with the 3Community, their moderators are taking care of Tre’s  other digital support channels, meaning they are constantly aware of all customer queries. It’s this breadth of knowledge, experience and customer-exposure that helps them to consistently create relevant content in their community. Their aim? To regularly publish relevant, engaging content that not only helps their customers, but gets them talking too.

Tre also benefits from great support offered by their super users—those customers on the community that eagerly take time to resolve other users’ questions as quickly and thoroughly as they can. What’s more, super users go far beyond simply answering questions. They also provide important feedback on products, services and features. 

“Super users are the real heroes here—at the moment they answer half of the questions asked on our community, so it’s incredibly important to pay attention to these individuals and create a sense of belonging for them with the company.”

Erik Tagiev, Community Manager and Digital Service Specialist at Tre Sweden

In order to do that, Tre Sweden have implemented a number of different ways to show recognition and appreciation for their super users. Showing this level of appreciation and treating super users as true ambassadors for your company gives you a unique and unparalleled way to help spread the positive word about your company. 

They’ve aptly named it the Superhero program. Here are just a few of the great initiatives they currently have running:

⭐️ Good to know: While the Tre community has only been around for a year and a half, the company has found that many loyal, life-long Tre customers have registered on the community to share their stories.

The results speak for themselves

As we have already seen, the 3Community has been a tremendous success from the get-go, continuously improving and providing value for the telco network as a whole. Importantly, the number of new community registrations continues to grow, as does community traffic. Visits to the community really took off when Tre added links navigating to the community across all of their support pages and today, the majority of their community traffic comes from organic search. All of this has led to really impressive business results. Let’s crunch the numbers: 

All of these great results amount to a total cost saving of over €660.000 per year thanks to the Tre community. 🎉

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