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Hi everyone, I hope you're having a good week so far and keeping safe. 
We haven't had a chance to post our usual monthly community recap topic for a while due to the current situation, but thought it would be great to end the week with a general update on a few things we'd like to highlight!
It's been a very challenging time as you're all aware but we are starting to see some positive changes both on the Community side as well as Customer Service, which we'd love to share.
General community updates
We've seen lots of new members come to the community and start discussions:
You've all noticed the big increase in new members and posts here on the community during the lockdown period, especially when many of our call centres and our stores had to close. So first of all, we'd again like to say a huge thank you to our regular members 
who have been super duper helpful during this challenging time.
Just to highlight how busy things have been on the community and how you guys have really been invaluable, here's a few interesting numbers for you:
- During the first week of lockdown you guys engaged with over 370% more discussion topics on the community compared to the previous week! During the month of April, the number of new topics posted was almost 1300% more than April last year (not joking!). These increased numbers have continued for several weeks since the lockdown, although we are now starting to see the volumes getting lower.
- Our regular members, since the lockdown started, have collectively spent over 141,300 minutes online (that's over 2,300 hours.... and almost 100 days!) on the community!
- We got a huge jump in new community members joining us during the first lockdown week as well. Over 500% 👀 more members registered than the week before. Number of new members in April this year has been (again, not joking) over 1600% higher than April last year.
- In terms of help content and specifically, the number of replies that have been authored by our knowledgeable members and marked as Accepted Solutions, was higher in April than it was during January-March combined. Looking at the number of solutions in April, we saw over 400% more compared to April 2019! This is a lot of help you have provided guys, and will end up helping out lots more people who visit the community and view these solved topics in the future.
- You've clicked the Kudos button on posts to say thank you for help, to show appreciation, because you found something funny, interesting or otherwise worthwhile - over 100% more during April compared to the average month before the lockdown.
As mentioned above we are seeing the forum numbers getting a bit lower now, which coincides with the continuous improvements made on the customer service side of things (see update below).
A new space and support group has joined:
After having to close our stores, we got a total of 25 store Gurus to join the community for additional help with general and technical queries! So even if you cannot visit our stores to see a Guru, you can now ask them a question here on the community. We have updated the info topic here if you'd like to check who they are and say hello! A new O2 Gurus board was also opened for your questions.
Central info on COVID-19:
- Help & Support from O2 during COVID-19 - information on what types of queries are classed as essential and non-essential, how to get in contact with CS and what additional support is available during the crisis.
- COVID-19 support page on the O2 website here (for O2 Business, see here)
A quick look into our Customer Service channels
We've been working hard in the background to get as much of our service operations back up and running as normal. We still have work to do, but we are seeing an ever-improving picture across our Voice and Chat channels. We're still currently offering a limited service in our Voice channel, but with more and more people being set up for homeworking and offices being set up to support our colleagues, we are seeing more and more staff availability every day.
Chat is currently working on a few key pages across the website and it also proactively pops up on other pages too. We're working on a plan of how we introduce more options in the coming days, including the in-app messaging service within My O2. Our social channels have been extremely busy and as such our response times have been longer than normal, but again we are seeing improvements here and we're starting to get back to some normal levels in response time, which we hope will continue to improve in the coming days and week(s).
Our retail estate is currently working through plans based around the latest government guidance, and as soon as we have more information we can share on this, we'll let you know.
It's safe to say this has been an extremely busy and challenging period, and in the past several weeks we have set up thousands of our staff and colleagues to enable them to work effectively and efficiently from home. We're planning not just for the immediate impact, but also the future to ensure we safeguard our people, the services we offer, and to make sure we're available for when our customers need us, wherever that may be.
Stay safe everyone, and have a great bank holiday weekend ahead.
- The Community Team & our friends at O2
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Thank you @Marjo for the thread.
It is nice to see the regular members of this Community being recognised for their help, support and guidance in answering literally hundreds of questions from O2 customers during the current difficult times.
The facts and figures only give bare statistics of the hours which these members have given to providing a service, sometimes under stressful circumstances when customers have been angry or frustrated at not being able to contact customer services.
Throughout all of this, I can honestly say that each of the "regulars" has kept their sense of humour, has been as friendly and as welcoming as always, and has still found time to join in with banter and games.
As I have said before, each of them is a hero of this Community 
