Company: SS&C Advent Entry submitted by: Ellen Pun (Community Manager) Community: Advent Community Lithy Category: Community Design of the Year   SS&C Technologies, Inc. provides mission-critical software and software-enabled services for the global financial services industry. SS&C has more than 7,500 employees worldwide, located in the Windsor, Connecticut headquarters, and offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Australia. SS&C provides the global financial services industry with a broad range of highly specialized software, software enabled-services and software as a service (SaaS) solutions for operational excellence. We deliver mission-critical processing for information management, analysis, trading, accounting, reporting and compliance.   Our community goals   Advent Community is intended to help our clients solve their problems through a variety of different channels. The community acts as a hub for content, connecting people, and a platform for interaction. It is a place for two way flow of communication between Advent and the ecosystem we interact with. We want to be able to connect our users with personalized and relevant content and capture feedback to help improve our software, services, and our community experience. It is our intention to make information and answers easy to access, with support, particularly phone support, being the last resort. We want our users to be able to share their thoughts with their peers and with Advent and know that they will be heard.   The design elements that make our community stand out   We designed community to be able to provide an easy way to access the information users are looking for while providing transparency into the future of our products.   We publish our product roadmaps on Community. Each product roadmap item is linked back to the product’s idea exchange, directly to the idea. We’re able to highlight which roadmap items originate from community members and we make it easy for others to comment and vote as well. By publishing Advent-originated items, we invite comments and questions from users about why features are important. Users are not only able to see the direct impact that they have on our product but we believe that knowing specifically where the product is going can help make the decision to upgrade an easier one.   We also publish our products’ known issues (called Fixes & Requests, or F&R) in an effort to be transparent and to help divert support requests. While the UI of these pages runs on Kendo UI, the backend of the page is a hidden Lithium discussion board. Each F&R item is posted as a topic to the board associated with the product. By leveraging the subscription capability of Lithium Discussions, users are updated when the product team makes an update rather than needing to start a support case.   We’ve made improvements to our site header and menu. We added “quick action” buttons to the header to start a new discussion post, create a new idea, or start a new support case. We highlighted these frequently used actions in order to help lower the barrier to engage. We’ve also added the ability to set and indicate your product version in the menu. By knowing what matters to the user, we’re able to deliver the most relevant content in search results.   How we executed our community design   We are always actively collecting feedback from clients both in person and online. Our CSM team incorporates a section on Community during their client quarterly business reviews. We speak with clients about Community during our annual client conference. During our session, we showed previews of upcoming ideas for improvements and often modify these ideas based on the conversations we have about them. We were able to survey s on different areas of the site to learn which areas of the site needed the most improvement. Most importantly, we collect information from the Feedback board on Community.   The Community team aggregated the feedback and brought it to our internal UI/UX team to ensure that we were not only creating a better site experience but one that was consistent with the look and feel of the Advent brand. The common color palate and use of shared technology platforms provide s with a consistent and seamless transition when moving between our software and Community.   Kendo UI’s intuitive design of the filters, groupings, and the clean aesthetic make the grids a great way for us to organize and sort through the large amounts of data that live within Fixes & Requests and our Product Roadmaps. We first applied the Kendo UI to our support case portal. After it was clear that it was intuitive to use, we then rolled it out to Fixes & Requests and the Product Roadmaps. Now that other internal teams have seen the benefits it has been integrated into future designs for other parts of our Community to be integrated later this year.   Our metrics   A large part of our site design is focused on the ability to surface relevant content as you browse different parts of the site. We also want to make your frequent actions easy to access.   We allow users to mark their favorite products with a star in the products menu. Starring the product not only makes the product easier to access within the menu, but it subscribes you to that product’s discussion board. Upon logging in, the primary part of the home page is focused on the user’s subscriptions. Updates to discussions about the products you use are front and center on the page.   To take that a step further, users have the option to set the product version they use. We store that information and use that to better surface relevant content within search results. By default, we’ll list information about the newest product version first but we don’t want users to have to sift through multiple results if they’re not using the latest version. Currently, 25% of our active user base has set product preferences. We redesigned and released our new-user experience last month which prompts and encourages users to set these preferences. We hope to see this number increase with time.   Our Fixes & Requests boards allow users to subscribe to over 23,000 product updates. While these settings and subscriptions (and discussion and idea subscriptions) allow us to better deliver information to users, we may have made things too easy to come. We’ve found that while many have subscriptions set up to their advantage, they are consuming the information via email rather than logging in. We actively post webinar recordings and other items that users can only access upon logging in but continue to work on campaigns to drive visitation and log in.   Home page with Subscriptions and Quick action buttons       Fixes & Requests and Subscription Ability     Product Roadmap with Client and Advent Ideas     Product Menu with Product and Version settings        

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG Entry submitted by: Claudia Religa (viktoria) Community Manager Community: A1 Support Community (a1.community.net) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________   In a rather small country like Austria with a population of 8.4 million people, A1 is the unique leading telecommunication provider with 5.2 million mobile and 2.3 million fixed subscribers.   Since launch in November 2011, our A1 Support Community grew significantly: our real substitution ranks around 25 percent (= percentage of users which perceive the A1 Support Community as primary service channel) and the crowd ratio is located around 80 percent. When looking at the charts, we managed to create a vitally and steady growing Community – but what are the qualitative actions we set to engage with our users and to motivate them to participate in the way they do?   On the one hand, it is all about motivation factors, gaming mechanics and gratification approaches: Transferring online into offline events: within 2012 we started the initiative “Community events”. We organized a guided tour at the A1 Technical Department. The Super Users were accompanied by A1 Device managers and the A1 Social Media management team for a meet & greets and to gain exclusive background-infos. “Community photo tour” – we exclusively invited users to a phototour to the Viennese zoo and equipped them with Hero-device smartphones to review the quality of the photo-cameras.   Hero of the month Award: Super Users – the most active users in our Community – are rewarded monthly for their outstanding contributions within the Community. Super Users as moderators: to show the most active Super Users our respect and trust, we gave them moderator roles within the Community. Now they are able to contribute even more to the content and quality of the A1 Support Community.                                               Exclusive boards, badges, ratings and rankings for Super Users are a matter of course as they were part of the concept when creating our new Community. On the other hand, we deeply link our A1 Social Media channels and provide target-group oriented content:   It all started by integrating the A1 Support Community in our Facebook fanpage. By doing so, we opened the Community to our established fan base on Facebook.   When comparing to our competitors in the Austrian telecommunications market , we keep a facebook fan-share of 59% and are therefore at the pole position with around 238,000 Facebook fans. On Facebook, three A1 Social Support agents provide fast and exclusive support. Additionally, we spread offers, lotteries and product information for our Facebook target group. Twitter is our channel for distributing company news as well as servicing support requests.   The A1 Blog provides product information, device and App reviews, etc. and is deeply linked with the A1 Support Community. The A1 Community actively creates content for our A1 Blog, eg. device reviews from users. The recruiting of our authors takes place via A1 Support Community and Facebook.   We take Customer experience one step further:   Initiatives like the Ideas concept take the customer experience to another level, where users can participate in the development and beta testing of products and solutions.   For that reason, we integrated our A1 Community in the development of the new “My A1” customer self-service area. Firstly, we asked them for ideas which functions they would like to see in the new Customer Self-Service area. After reviewing them, we gave them feedback concerning their ideas and invited them to join a workshop with the “My A1”-project managers. In one last step, the A1 Community had the chance to evaluate the scribbles made for “My A1” and give their feedback to be incorporated into the self-service area.                                         Not only the facts and figures proof that we are one the right path – in 2012, our A1 Support Community and Social Media commitment stood out at national and international Social Media and Community Awards.   In Hamburg, Germany, we were rewarded for the “Best Social Media Strategy” in the DACH region at the Social Media Economy Days 2012. At the Digital Communication Award 2012 the A1 Support Community was honored as the Best Online Community within the European online PR and communications branch as well as with the German Award for Online Communications 2012 in Berlin, Germany. In Austria, one of our integrated Social Media campaigns was rewarded with the Award for the Best Online- and Social Media communication granted by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Economy, Family and Youth.  

Company: Cortol Consors  Entry submitted by: Clemens Eckstein (CCornerstone) Senior Expert eBusiness Community: Die Wissenscommunity von Cortal Consors (https://wissen.cortalconsors.de) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Cortal Consors is a leading direct bank for investment: from trading to long term savings.   With sustainable innovations and a modern interpretation of banking services.   Our mission statement – what is our attitude? As a leading direct bank for private investment, we liberate our clients from the restrictions of classical German banks.   We empower them to self-directed financial independence with all the support the client demands. Our know-how, our ability to innovate, the independence of our product offerings, and our unique passion are what drives us.   »Cortal Consors is the first address for self-directed investment.« Our Business Goals -       Financial Empowerment of Banking Customers -       Transparency and Trustworthy Relationship with Customers -       Innovation leader   The Lithium software builds the foundation for the three business goals described above.   Financial Empowerment:   Using the Tribal Knowledge Base we have the perfect platform for building and gathering trusted content.   The Forum offers real and up to date help for customers and place to discuss about financial markets. Since many long-term customers have gathered significant knowledge and experience in a wide array of banking topics the community allows us to tap this resource.   The Blog is another way for us to provide well-founded education to our banking clientele.   Transparency and Trustworthy Relationship:   Next to our presence in the forum and blog where we able to answer the questions of our customers we also provide the possibility to rate & review our products and services as one of the first banks in Europe.   This is a bold move for us since it puts great power in the hands of our customers. By allowing this open and public feedback from existing customers on our own platform we provide absolute transparency on our strength and weaknesses. The strong integration of our customer support in case of bad reviews allows us also to communicate, solve issues and build up a trustworthy relationshop.    Our Business Results:   As it's only been 1 1/2 months, we are still undertaking the first steps. However, below you'll find some KPIs which already show significant improvement in comparison to our old “Knowledge” area.      Most Creative Promotion or Launch (Video Entry):   The promotional video -       Array of possibilities within the community (Community, Wiki, R&Rs,…) -       The development of a newbie to successful investment -       Social interaction   Together we know more – The new Cortal Consors Websection Knowledge   No matter if beginner or professional: The new Cortal Consors Websection Knowledge gives customers a voice. It provides a platform to communicate and supports its users to make the best financial decision. The new Websection Knowledge is supposed to address a wide target group. Every user should be able to help others with their expertise or can ask for help – there are no stupid questions.It´s important that users have fun to exchange their knowledge and that they are empowered to push their financial concerns further.   We want to convey all these contents in an easy, comprehendible and entertaining way. This is why we transport our message with moving images.   Our storytelling focuses on personal stories because its more emotional and less educational. The idea is to show by means of a personal success story how the Websection Knowledge works. Furthermore it boosts the attention and also the capacity for remembering.   The concept "Open Kitchen" is based on the idea that cooking brings people together: beginners learn from professionals, ideas are exchanged, like-minded persons get together, people support each other. We think: This is what the Websection Knowledge stands for and this is why we chose it to build the frame of our storyboard.   View our video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0gAUDIIf5w&feature=youtu.be      

Company: Time Warner Cable Entry submitted by: Phil Blum (TWC-PhilB) Social Media Customer Care Manager https://twitter.com/TWCableHelp Lithy category: Best Social Support Program _______________________________________________   Time Warner Cable is one of the largest providers of video, high-speed data and phone, supporting over 15 million customers in the United States.  In 2010, I was selected to lead the social media arm of TWC’s customer care operations.  Our mission was to provide high-quality service experience to customers on any channel for which they prefer to interact and we needed a solid social engagement and response platform that can help us manage the flow of service-related conversations and ensure that my team of social agents are able to address each and every customer need.   We launched Lithium Social Web in April 2012 to my team of 10 social customer care agents and we now have a streamlined platform to identify messages from Twitter and Facebook that need a response and provide timely resolutions.  Within 6 months, we have improved our social response rate by 30% and increased agent productivity by 57%.  This is driven by the integrated nature of the platform that allows my team to tackle cases more quickly and ability to respond without switching back and forth between different social tools. We were also very honored to be placed on the "Top 10 Socially Devoted Brand" list by AdWeek.   Our social support program proved critical in sustaining customer relationships during one of the worst storms in recent history.  As Hurricane Sandy devastated much of the East Coast in the fall of 2012, our customers were anxious to learn when their services would return.  Many of them turned to their only remaining avenue of contact: accessing Facebook and Twitter via their smartphones.  With the overwhelming increase in volume, my team was able to step up to the plate and even received kudos from grateful customers for their timely response.     Our social support strategy extends beyond this customer care team.  We will be launching a community soon because this is a critical way for us to provide support in a scalable way.  We also want to bring the conversations that are happening about us onto our own domain so we can engender goodwill, provide more transparency to our customers, and weigh in on those conversations where appropriate.  We’re excited to embark onto the next phase of our social support strategy!

Company: Vodafone New Zealand Ltd  Entry submitted by: Mike Hales (VF_MikeHales) Digital Content Manager Community: Vodafone Community (http://community.vodafone.co.nz) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone NZ has been New Zealand’s leading total telecommunications provider for nearly 20 years. It is a provider of mobile, fixed line telecommunication and television services over 4G, Fibre, cable and copper. It’s a key player in the wider New Zealand community through its Vodafone Foundation activities as well as sponsoring key music and sporting teams and events.   Our customer care business goals   Our core goal is to deflect customer call by either providing a dialogue and answer online or provide contextual links to relevant content that may also answer the question. So, we have implemented a programme of work to integrate FAQs (from RightNow) as well as User Guides (from World Manuals) in context in topics to draw customers to quick answers. Additionally, we have created sticky posts to sit at the top of topics to answer the most common questions. Finally, we have have embedded video content into topics and answers for the same reasons as above.   The changes we implemented   We have now provided prominent links and promotions from our most common service touchpoints to direct customers to the Community – on web, mobile and through Social Media such as Facebook and Twitter.   Our business results   Using the formula of Unique visitors X resolution rate X deflection rate X cost per call, supported by data from an online survey with a strong sample size, we have been able to prove cost savings of more than NZ $3 million over a 2-year period, we’re expecting in year 3 to further show an increased deflection rate through provision of further self-help content and tools.

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG Entry submitted by: Claudia Religa (viktoria) Community Manager Community: A1 Support Community (a1.community.net) Lithy category: Best Business ROI ________________________________________________   In a rather small country like Austria with a population of 8.4 million people, A1 is the unique leading telecommunication provider with 5.2 million mobile and 2.3 million fixed subscribers.   We claim the top position in terms of technology, so our mission is also to advance service innovation.   More than one year after launching our community it’s time to take a look at the benefits we gained from it. We had an average extraordinary 270% growth rate on requests since the start.                                           To generate our Real Substitution value we integrated a randomized onsite survey on our website (www.a1.net). It pops up for community users after some time of activity. To get a valid outcome the number of cases is exceeding 300 every month and the respondent gets the survey only once every three months.   The Real Substitution rate shows how many of our users come to visit the community without contacting any other service channel we offer – in other words: how many users perceive the community as primary service channel. Additionally we measure if community visitors find a solution for their problem in the A1 Support Community.   For 2012 we reached an amazing Real Substitution value of 25%! That sums up to 168,000 Saved Interactions in one year whereupon only posts and search requests count as interactions in the A1 Support Community. A remarkable 26% of community users found their solution in the first minutes of their visit.                                           Especially in the field of crisis communication we were able to prevent a shitstorm by actively informing our customers about tariff changes and keeping the protest wave to a minimum. In four months we attained 60,000 contacts on the board that has been set up especially for this task.   Increasing Customer satisfaction and Growing Loyalty With our special customer loyalty program we offer low smartphone prices for our community users on a monthly basis. Our logged-in members are able to accept the offers directly in the relevant boards.     To increase customer satisfaction we already involve our Super Users in service and product development processes to guarantee the best outcome for us and our customers. This year we launched the new self service are on our website where we used this co-creation approach.   To generate leads we organize competitions that are cross and deep linked through all of our social media channels. An example is our Sony Xperia go outdoor smartphone test where our users got the chance to design the screenplay with us and win a device. The success of over 1 million views on YouTube proves us right!   To sum it up: Community activities push the Digital Service Shift 80% Crowd Ratio (Crowd Ratio = percentage of user-generated content) – thereof 20% is created by our most active users Reduction of development and beta testing expenses Lead generation due to our customer loyalty program Real Substitution value of 25%, call reduction – up to 16,000 reduced Support calls and emails per month  

Company: Telefónica Digital Entry submitted by: Aurelien Poma (Elixor) Head of Community Community: TU Me Community (support.tumeap.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   Hello everyone, I would like to nominate the TU Me community for the Best New Community Lithys. TU Me is a free app, all-in-one global communicator for iOS and Android.   I’ll try to keep this short.   The aim of our newly opened community is customer support using the model giffgaff has brilliantly put in place: we empower community members and reward them for their help and contributions.   On top of providing amazing customer support the TU Me community has become a massive group of friends from all over the world.     To give you an idea, the map below is a snapshot of where users are registering from on the TU Me community.     In addition to the friendly, multicultural and multilingual atmosphere of the community, our members have suggested amazing features and improvements for the app.   Seven of their ideas have been developed and implemented in the app.   And another seven ideas have been accepted and will make it into the app. Having community members directly impact the development roadmap and influence the priorities for improvements made our work challenging and even more exciting.   We also received impressive new design suggestions for the app, new avatars for the Lithium forum and banners for our Facebook fan page.   Finally I thought I would share a nice story that happened a few weeks ago. To thank one of our community members from Bolivia for his positive contributions we decided to send him a goody bag as a present. This is what we got as a reply when we asked for his postal address:   I've just seen your message about the present, like I said I live in Bolivia, and over here we don't have a mailbox, the apartment where I live in doesn't have a mailbox, I think that the only place that has one is Cochabamba. To be honest, just being part of this community is super cool, and a very good present is to have had the pleasure of meeting you all.   Thank you for reading this nomination, I’ll just finish with one image which is our TU Me user of the week wall, so everyone in the office knows how great our community members are. (I wish we had a bigger wall though :D)    

Company: EE  Entry submitted by: Ben Kay (BenKay) Head of Digital Strategy & Social Community: EE Community (Community.ee.co.uk)  Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer     Organization Game Changer: Triage   As part of our drive to become #1 for Service in our sector we recognized a need to make a step change in our social support experience. While our EE Community plays a big part of that step change, we recognized the need to take a step back and operate differently.   Since launching our various social web presences we have suffered from an inefficient, unscalable social support operation. This was leading to response times in excess of 24hrs. This was causing considerable negative sentiment within social, and as a result was unsustainable.   We developed the concept of a triage to be the first point of contact for social customers and direct them to the appropriate destination for their query. The destinations included Digital (to support a wider organizational ambition around driving adoption of self service), Community (to support the Community Strategy), Executive Office (for serious complaints/issues), Brand (for marketing engagement) and Press (for media/journalist queries). We also implemented an escalation to ‘click to chat’ to allow account specific (private) conversations to happen between support agents and customer.   This triage concept would take the operational burden off frontline Customer Service agents (and free them up to deliver their core skills).   The goal was to deliver an efficient, scalable operation that opened up customer interactions to the relevant parts of the business responsible for the interaction. Since we have implemented this new way of working we have seen very dramatic results. Average response time decrease from >24hrs to <1hr Real-time interactions for marketing Real-time interactions for Press (on media interesting topics) LSW has enabled us to bring to reality our triage concept. We have tried a number of social interaction tools, most of which are aimed solely at a support/contact centre environment. LSW is helping break down organizational silo’s/barriers and allowing front line support agents and head office marketers to collaborate and share the social customer experience seamlessly.   Through clear direction setting, shared purpose and determination we have developed a customer experience that changed our customers experience overnight. Whilst simple, it is proving to be a very effective method of providing a completely new social customer experience, much more akin to customer expectations.   Through the implementation of the social triage we have seen: Dramatic reduction in the time to respond to customer interactions – Time to respond has dropped by 95% Average Agent Handle Time for Social Interaction down by 8% Reduction in inbound customer service support calls Reduced level of operational cost (numbers confidential)       Organization Game Changer- SocialHub   As part of our launch of a completely new brand in the UK market we set a very clear ambition to deliver the Best Network, Best Service, so customers trust us with their digital lives. This nod to the changing expectations of consumers, and the prevalence of digital within the customer experience. As part of this ambition we developed the ‘Social Hub’. The ambition was to create a capability that provides the organization with real-time social insight, to enable us to act faster and act smarter. This physical focal point for social within the organization, not only tracks real-time social conversations, but turns that into actionable insight for the business, from customer services to marketing to press and product development, the insights we gather and provide are acting as a catalyst to enable the organization to work better.   We see Lithium Community and Social Web as fundamental tools to enable us to manage our social conversations, the tools empower staff from across the organization to engage with customers in a manner never before seen.   The Social Hub has fundamentally changed how we operate as an organization. Whether it is from a large product launch to crisis management, the Hub provides physical (and virtual) orchestration of the social experience. Bringing together Digital, Brand, Marketing, CS, Legal and Press teams in a highly efficient, factually informed manner to make timely business decisions.   Watch our video about the EE Social Hub: http://vimeo.com/63160747   Through the orchestration of the social experience we have seen a significant cultural change in how social is managed, with historically disparate departments now working collaboratively on the entire social customer experience.  

Company: Webroot  Entry submitted by: Nicholas Tolstoshev (tolstoshev) Community Manager  Community: Webroot Community (https://community.webroot.com)  Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch   Webroot is the market leader in cloud-based, real-time internet threat detection for consumers, businesses and enterprises. We have revolutionized internet security to protect all the ways you connect online. Webroot delivers real-time advanced internet threat protection to customers through its BrightCloud® security intelligence platform, and its SecureAnywhere™ suite of security products for endpoints, mobile devices and corporate networks.   Webroot Brings the Online VIP Experience Offline!   This year, we’re proud to submit a Lithy nomination for “Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch” category based on an event we held for one of our super users. Here’s the story.   When the Webroot community was first started back in 2012, we set up a program to reward our power users and called it the Webroot VIP Program.  The community team built the program to recognize and reward the most active, influential members via a ranking system based on a combination of posts, kudos, accepted solutions, and other factors. The rewards were a mix of moderator abilities and gifts, and were based on members’ feedback so we were sure that they were the most valuable rewards we could offer.   One of the top rewards (at the Silver VIP level) was an all-expenses-paid trip to the nearest Webroot office, and in 2014 the first community member reached that level.  Known on the community as TripleHelix, Daniel Godin had been an active member of the community from the beginning.  He is a veteran of online communities and participates not only the Webroot community, but several other well-known communities.  His participation in various Microsoft communities earned him the coveted Microsoft MVP title several years running.   The Plan   When we initially determined the awards of each rank in the VIP program, we were unsure what the Silver VIP “visit the to the headquarters” would entail.  As Daniel approached this rank,  Anna Kim, Sr. Advocate Programs Manager, and I started to plan out what the visit would look like.  First we selected the date and length of the visit.  Daniel would fly in from Toronto and stay with us for two days.  Anna came up with an agenda of meetings with key teams that Daniel was excited to meet, and organized a welcome party for the first day.  I, as the person who interacted with Daniel the most, would pick him up from the airport and escort him around the office and go with him to meetings.  We set up meetings with folks form all different departments, from developers, to support, to marketing and the executive staff – even the CEO. We wanted to make sure his visit truly made him feel like a VIP.     The Visit – Day 1   When the day came, I drove to the airport to meet Daniel.  Things kicked off with him meeting the entire social media and community team, then jumped right into meetings with all the different Webroot staff.  He met with the senior product developers, a group meeting with the support, QA and threat research teams, and then followed up with a meeting with one of the top product managers.    Mid-day, we gathered the entire Colorado office together for a “VIP meet and greet” with a cake reception. Webroot employees were able to thank him in person and Daniel could take photos with them.     At the end of the first day we took Daniel into Boulder for dinner and some sightseeing.  After a bit of walking around, he was quite ready to call it an evening.  Between jetlag, travel, and a very full day, we’d worn him out, but he was very happy and excited.   The Visit – Day 2   The next morning Daniel had a breakfast meeting with our Executive VP of Products &  Strategy, Mike Malloy, after which Mike took him to a meeting of all of the executive staff and the CEO.  The CEO took him to the front of the room and introduced him and thanked him for all the help he had provided to Webroot through his participation in the community.  Then there was an opportunity for the executives to ask him questions about what he through of the product and any ideas for improvements he wanted to share. Daniel said that is really meant the world to him to be treated as he was by our executive staff – something that not many other companies would do.   He then hopped onto a Google hangout that Nic regularly leads for our VIPs. He mentioned that he had a surprise guest joining him and it was a fun delight for the rest of the VIPs to see Daniel standing with Nic (and a great way to encourage others to reach the Silver VIP level!)   His visit wrapped up with Daniel shadowing members of our community team and the best part – hitting the button to push our most recent product release live!   Positives outcomes from the visit Daniel’s first experience with Webroot was with a company called Prevx, that Webroot acquired and rebuilt their technology around.  The heart of Prevx was a whiz kid from the UK named Joe, who invented the new cloud-based technology.  Not only was he a programming whiz, but he also was a fan of online communities.  He participated in the Wilders Security Forum, which was a platform-agnostic place for security professionals and enthusiasts to discuss security and anti-virus.  Joe and Daniel connected there and became fast friends.  Joe instinctively grasped the importance of customer feedback through directly talking to customers, rather than getting that feedback through layers of employees.  He would give Daniel beta builds to test and ask him for his opinions on new features and design decisions.  Joe ended up leaving Webroot shortly before Daniel came to visit, to go work on another venture.  Daniel’s visit was well timed in that he got to make new connections with developers, product managers, and other folks here at Webroot, to replace the relationship he had with Joe.  As an outcome of this, we revamped our beta program and recruited more community members to work directly with PMs, devs, and QA in the private beta forum.  What started as an informal relationship grew to a formal beta program, thanks in part to Daniel’s visit.  We now have a Beta group with almost 200 members and thousands of posts discussing testing new features.  We got developers, QA folks and product managers posting in there and talking directly to customers, just the way Joe and Daniel used to. When Daniel visited Webroot, I had been with the company for less than a year.  I was still relatively new, and didn’t yet know as many people throughout the company as I needed to as a community manager.  Anna Kim is a 15 year veteran of Webroot, and the sister of the founder of the company.  She was able to use her knowledge and connections to select the right people to talk with.  Getting to escort Daniel to those meetings and helping facilitate them helped build connections for me as well as for him.  I got to know people at Webroot that I hadn’t met yet, and that helped propel the community to be more useful to employees at Webroot. We took many pictures from the visit and posted on the community to share Daniel’s visit with everyone, as you can see here: https://community.webroot.com/t5/Introduce-yourself-to-the/TripleHelix-visits-Webroot-HQ/m-p/126332 This allowed the rest of the community power users to share in the experience, and also be motivated towards the day when they would reach the VIP level and get their turn to visit.  That thread got over 1,000 pageviews, both for community members, users of the Webroot products, and Webroot employees. Meeting Daniel in person and getting to spend so much time with him cemented the relationship that we’d begun online.  That helped tide us over the ups and downs of any relationship (such as the time when I accidentally forgot to invite him to the new private Beta group and made him feel slighted).   Negative feedback from the visit: The one negative feedback that we heard from some Webroot employees was whether this visit was a suitable use of company resources.  Was it worth it to fly Daniel here, put him up in a hotel, and spend dozens of employee hours towards this project?  This showed us that the importance of customer feedback wasn’t completely well understood by everyone here at Webroot.  It made us realize that we still had work to do to evangelize the importance of community to the company at large.  That led us to kick off a project in 2015 to improve employee engagement in the community (which will hopefully be a story for a future Lithy award submission).   We asked Daniel to let us know what the experience was from his perspective, to make sure that the trip was valuable from his perspective.  And also to see if there was any feedback for improvements for next time.  Here’s what he had to say:   My visit to Webroot HQ was an awesome and once-in-a-lifetime experience that I will remember for the rest of my life. The first day Nic the Community Manager picked me up from the Denver airport and we drove up north to Broomfield where the Webroot Head Office is and we chatted all the way. Once we got there the Community & Social team had lunch ready for us and they all made me feel at home and very welcomed. Anna had an agenda made up for me for the afternoon and the next day, which allowed me to meet many groups of staff such as the Threat Research/Support teams and the Director of Threat Research let me push the button to release the latest Beta to Beta testers which was easy and fun. In the early afternoon they had a “Welcome to Webroot” cake and social hour with all the staff so I got to meet many people which I now call friends (and the Cake didn’t last too long!). Then I spent the rest of the afternoon with the Community & Social Teams to see what they do from their point of view and on the other side of the screen it’s a small world!   For the evening the Community & Social team took me out for dinner at a very nice place in Boulder, Colorado where Webroot had its beginning in 1997. Then we walked around Boulder for a couple of hours - what a nice city and the view of the mountains was so beautiful. The next morning I had breakfast with Mike Malloy, Executive VP of Products & Strategy and we had a very nice chat. Then he came and got me and had me come into an Executive Staff meeting and introduced me as an Ambassador of Webroot. Some of the senior staff had questions for me so I gave them my answers & advice, and in the end they all stood up and clapped to thank me and in turn I thanked them. As Mike was walking me out, the CEO Dick Williams shook my hand and said “thank you, and thank you for being an Ambassador of Webroot” - that really touched my heart, as they all were so nice. The rest of the day I spent my time with the Community/Social Groups and got to meet quite a few more Webroot staff such as the Development Group, and the Technical Product Manager. We had a nice chat and it was nice to meet them in person. The time went so fast, and then it was time for Nic to take me back to the airport to fly home. I really enjoyed myself with all the nice people I got to meet at Webroot HQ and I would like to thank all of them for making it a fantastic journey. Like I said, I will never forget it. Here are some very nice moments of my visit: https://community.webroot.com/t5/Introduce-yourself-to-the/TripleHelix-visits-Webroot-HQ/td-p/126332n   Thanks, Daniel A Godin     Goal of this promotion: Build a loyalty program to reward members of our community   Why it was unique: We invited one of our VIP members to come visit our office in an all-expenses paid visit.   Results of the promotion: Lots of good connections with our top VIP within the company as well as the opportunity to showcase the rewards that our VIPs receive for being advocates and participating in the community.   Our video:       

Company: Vodafone New Zealand Ltd  Entry submitted by: Mike Hales (VF_MikeHales) Digital Content Manager Community: Vodafone Community (http://community.vodafone.co.nz) Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   Vodafone NZ has been New Zealand’s leading total telecommunications provider for nearly 20 years. It is a provider of mobile, fixed line telecommunication and television services over 4G, Fibre, cable and copper. It’s a key player in the wider New Zealand community through its Vodafone Foundation activities as well as sponsoring key music and sporting teams and events.   Our 2014 objectives   Growth to 20,000 members and to deflect more than 170,000 calls by resolving customer queries online. Both were exceeded with 21,000 members and 174,000 calls being deflected.   Our results   By working with Vodafone Group and Lithium, we implemented a formula to give us a proven dollar value to the Community activities. Using that formula, we can now show that the Community is worth more than NZ $3million to the business and that every member acquired is worth +NZ $2.50. It also helped to show that we exceeded our 2-year plan by more than $200k.   Additional business achievements   Additionally, we have been able to demonstrate additional business value through SEO – acquiring more organic visits to the Community as well as into the website; engagement – through measuring positive interactions, we’re able to show that customers interact more than seven more than previously – posts, kudos, tagging etc; brand value – by creating original content, we have increased our transparency to our customers by giving them direct access to product owners as well as external partners; and lastly by making Community the ‘gateway’ into self-help content and services we’re making it easier for customers to help themselves (and each other).

Company: Sony Europe   Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) Head of Communities, Europe Community: Sony Europe Community (www.sony.co.uk/community) and European locale alternatives Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Sony Corporation is a leading manufacturer of audio, video, game, communications, key device and information technology products for the consumer and professional markets. With its music, pictures, computer entertainment and online businesses, Sony is uniquely positioned to be the leading electronics and entertainment company in the world.  Sony recorded consolidated annual sales of approximately $75 billion for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2014.   The Sony Europe Community has been setup to achieve and facilitate 3 pillars: Conversation – create a platform that enables end users to have conversation with other end-users so they can share experiences, issues, behaviors, etc with each other. This to be done through any media mean: forum, photo, competition etc… Self-service and Learning – Forums and How tos to enable customers to get the maximum out of their products and learn them how to become professionals using them (mainly photography and videography) Advocacy – Editorial blog strategy to support our social channels. Mainly create engaging content with high Like-ability and share-ability This year we have been strongly focusing on developing the 3 rd pillar. We have optimized our blog area and put it in the centre of our social strategy. 2-3 blogs per week are being posted in 5 different categories (Arts, design, Entertainment, Product & events, Education) and all of these are being used in FB, TW and G+ to drive traffic to the blog area. The ultimate goal being high engagement (putting the correct person in front of the blog) and then have them share the article back out in the social landscape.   UX flow is Post on social media linking to Blog   We also introduced a new Blog homepage: Our results   1) Blog traffic Traffic went up 3x versus previous year. We are now undergoing a new re-design exercise to further optimise the blog area and make it even better from a mobile friendly and responsiveness angle.  Making assets used in blogs easier to share   More focus on content Legend: in pink the sharing functions, in Blue the next content suggestion. Otherwise on the page no distractions from the content. now no assets are directly shareable but only full blogs are Vs future where each asset (video, picture etc…) will be shareable directly out to the social landscape. 2) Blog advocacy   Results after introducing the sharing buttons actively to the blog area: The additional reach produced by the social sharing buttons usage now exceeds the overall ORGANIC reach Sony has on FB, TW and G+. This allows us to compensate better when FB throttles further the posts displayed on end-users’ walls.

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG  Entry submitted by: Esther Groth (esther27) Market Development and Digital Business Community: A1 Support Community (www.a1community.net)  Lithy category: Total Community All Star   A1 Telekom Austria AG is Austria’s leading communications provider, encompassing more than 5.4 million mobile communications customers and almost 2.3 million fixed access lines. The offers by A1 include voice telephony, internet access, digital cable division, data and IT solutions, value added services, wholesale services and mobile business and payment solutions. With four strong and established brands (A1, bob, Red Bull Mobile and yesss!) A1 successfully targets various different markets, ranging from premium quality to low budget.   A1 is part of the Telekom Austria Group which holds eight international operations in eight CEE countries. Headquartered in Vienna, A1 employs approximately 8,600 employees.   In 2014, A1 started its largest infrastructure investment with the fiber optic broadband roll-out in cooperation with the Austrian government and the national broadband plan.   Placing the customer at the heart of A1’s business has been key for the company’s ambitions to continue leading the Austrian telecommunications industry. This has been emphasized in the core values “Close to the customers”, “Simple” and “Trendsetting”. Hence, the A1 support community aims to provide the best service for our customers, to efficiently distribute the A1 brand and to use the potential of our crowd to develop new products, services and authentic user-generated content.   Through the Lithium community platform and LSW we could successfully tackle our main challenge to understand our social customers in more depth (360° social customer profiles). By modeling the social history of all interactions in LSW and using the behavioral tools of the Lithium community we can generate quantifiable ROI in terms of increased sales and reduced service costs.   We could also improve the following points of our social customer care processes:   Technical feasibility – Adequate infrastructure for growing visitor flows looking for digital service   Workforce optimization. – Considerable volumes of community requests can be efficiently managed by social media agents via efficient routing and prioritizing measures   Linkage between public network and owned social properties via Facbook tab application –Facebook users can be directed to our own knowledge site and get a deeper level of engagement and experience among an articulated and curated crowd   Peer-to-peer engagement – In the A1 Support Community users help users and with LSW social media agents can effectively assess and steer the need of providing additional answers to the user-generated content   Trend intelligence – By engaging community members in idea exchange boards and through intelligent tagging we can identify trending topics and connect them with observations from our other social media channels   Premature crisis management – LSW enables qualitative sentiment analysis of community content and helps to raise awareness for customer dissatisfaction with our service   Benefits of having a Lithium Community and LSW for our digital strategy   With our Lithium-powered Community and LSW we are able to exercise full control over the digital service topics incurring within the service tools of the A1.net online portal or on the other A1 social media channels. A specific process has been established for fast improvement measures where service issues were reported by community users. This process entails the identification of service issues, e.g. with the disrupted transmission of A1 TV on customers’ TV screens, by the A1 social media team. With LSW the social media team was able to assign new tags to this kind of issue and to observe the sentiments resulting from this topic. The service disruption as well as the magnitude of concerned customers was reported to the A1 customer and field service to prepare and sensitize all customer touch points. In a second step the A1 TV product management was informed and presented with the LSW analysis. Consequently, reasons for the service disruptions were analyzed and the product management could take up the depth of the issue by receiving daily updates from the community. The A1 TV product management team was also able to actively listen to the community discussions of the TV issues and the proposed solutions by members. As the share of negative sentiments towards A1 TV began to rise the corporate communications department was integrated in order to create unified statements regarding criticism in other media. Subsequently, a broader project team responsible for fast corrections of the detected issues with A1 TV was built. By involving the A1 social media team into the project, informal feedback and solutions posted by the community crowd were taken into account and directly integrated into the product improvements. Within 12 days A1 managed to provide A1 TV customers with a new interface, improved connectivity and a reduction in switching time.   The A1 Support Community currently counts 25,000 logins per month and has acquired 175,000 registered members so far. With an average real service substitution rate of 25%, A1 was able to save about 50.000 service interaction in January 2015 (calls and e-mails per month) and could therefore strongly increase its agent efficiency gains. What is more, although the amount of total community visits dropped in summer 2014 because community posts were then also integrated into the A1.net portal search the traffic began to soar up again in the following months. In addition, the weighted average for the real service substitution rate also increased and refers to an even more purposeful visitor stream.     With 80% of user-generated content A1 is also able to draw detailed insights from the community posts and create more innovative and competitive services for its subscribers.  

Company: Autodesk, Inc. Entry submitted by: Katinka Sante, Strategic Social Programs Manager Community: Autodesk Expert Elite Lithy category: Best Social Support Program, Best Superfan Story or Insight, Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   On November 28, 2012 at Autodesk University, Autodesk’s annual user conference, we announced our formal customer advocacy program: Autodesk Expert Elite. This program is designed to recognize community members who make extraordinary contributions to the company's online community. The program builds on, and is an evolution of the Autodesk Community rank and reputation model.   Members of the Expert Elite group are characterized by their regular and responsive participation in Autodesk's discussion forums, advanced knowledge of the company and its products, and leadership in the user community.   Individuals are selected after a detailed review of their Autodesk Community contributions, which include assisting other customers by sharing product knowledge and displaying engaging and positive styles of communication and collaboration. The goal of the Autodesk Expert Elite program is to deeply engage this important group of individuals and empower them to better assist their peers and support the Autodesk community. The program has a one year term and members are reviewed bi-annually.    As part of the Autodesk Expert Elite program, members receive a number of benefits including access Autodesk’s portfolio of design products, access to a private forum known as the Expert Elite Lounge. This Lounge is only available to our Autodesk Expert Elite members and is geared toward opening the lines of communication between Autodesk and its most valuable customers.   Expert Elites are also given additional administrative permissions within Lithium to help curate and highlight valuable forum content. For example, our Expert Elite members can accept solutions for their posts as well as posts authored by other customers. Additionally, Expert Elites have the ability to escalate their own posts into our CRM system for support assistance. We’ve also created an Expert Elite community badge for members to include in their forum profiles, which they are very proud of.   Today, Autodesk has 64 Expert Elite members from 11 different countries.  These 64 members represent 28% of all posts, 30% of all accepted solutions and 27% of our community kudos. Here are just a few of our Expert Elite members: - Adrianna Schneider - R.K. McSwain   Our Expert Elite members are a key group of stakeholders helping us shape our community programs, strategy and policy.   Watch this video to hear from some of our Expert Elite members as they talk about the importance of supporting our community http://youtu.be/xNsDzbZc58I  

Company: Mozy by EMC Entry submitted by: Zach Moffett (zachm) Community Manager Community: Mozy Support Community (community.mozy.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation _________________________________________________   Three years ago we created the Mozy community to add a level of support for our customers.  The community has helped decrease the number of support cases that have been created by customers while keeping a high level of customer satisfaction.  We rely on our super users to help answer questions for their peers but we find ourselves asking support agents to answer questions in the community.  We know there will always be a need for Mozy support agents to work with customers but would like the community involvement to answer a majority of the questions.   Since we launched our community we have been cultivating users to participate more frequently and with a higher level of knowledge.  We provide knowledgebase articles, tutorials, and technical blogs for them to pull their information from.  This process has helped us further reduce support costs while keeping customer satisfaction over what we agreed to be an acceptable level.  Gamification has been a huge influence on the processes we have implemented to drive this participation.   As processes of gamification grow, so does the need to have a leveling system in place. To complement the Lithium rank structure we have implemented a leveling scale that shows the progress to the next rank.  As community members participate and work towards the next level in the community, they can see their progress and have an idea of what it will take to get to the next level. We built a custom slider bar that shows how close the customer is to the next rank.  Once the customer ranks up the slider bar refreshes to show what it takes to get to the next rank.   We have also implemented a rank system so community members can start off as a villager and work their way up to cook, ninjas, and eventually the overlord through participation.  We used the default Lithium measurements for the rank system but changed the names and provided corresponding avatars.  For example, when the user reaches the rank of Sensei the new avatar becomes available.  We modified our notifications to not only alert customers that their rank has increased but that they can change their avatar as well.   To augment the new features we wanted to provide our community members with more context for the gamification concept. We wrote a story that goes through our protagonist’s life story and how he started off as a lowly villager and through much learning, dedication and will, worked his way up to be the Overlord and eventually the Emperor.  The story can be found at http://community.mozy.com/t5/community-story/ct-p/communitystory . The story changes dynamically as the community member’s rank increases.  If you were to visit this page while not logged in you would not see any information.  If you create an account then you will see the first part of the story.  Once you level up then more of the story will become available.    A member of our staff created all of the avatars along with full size images.  We went through multiple versions of the story but eventually agreed on the story that is now available.  We have had great feedback from our customers and staff members on this process.  

Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   CommSec is Australia’s leading online trading platform and a subsidiary of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank. We introduced CommSec Community in May 2013.   CommSec Community’s goal is simple - to be the largest active investor community in Australia. As a business, we recognized the potential to create a vibrant community where investors and traders can discuss trading strategies and ideas, and a place where  those new to trading could learn from each other and feel free to ask questions about entering the market.    Building on the out of the box Lithium platform, we introduced a number of customizations at launch, including:   Automatic Board Assignment   To facilitate a breadth of discussion, our Community has been divided up into a range of boards, including general markets, charting, sections for new and advanced traders and sector specific boards to discuss individual stocks.   To make it easy for users to find the right boards, we created a stock code field in the new post pages which automatically assigns the best board for a post, and turns the stock code into a tag automatically.     Most discussed Stocks   The automatic assignment of a stock code to a tag helps us drive the Most Discussed Stock module that runs across various parts of the site and allows users to get an insight into the stock discussions that are trending over the past 5 days (this time period was set at a period dictated by the community).   This is presented at a Community wide level on general pages and the Community homepage, and at a sector specific level on board relating to areas such as materials and tech stocks.     Stock Sentiment   A further enhancement to the post creation page is the ability to add a sentiment towards a particular stock. This is built on conditional logic, and will only appear if a stock code is added. Users can select one of 5 types of sentiment – buy, accumulate, hold, reduce, sell – depending on their opinion of the stock at that particular time.   We then add this aggregated sentiment to the most discussed stocks to give a rounded picture of the Community’s activity and discussions.     Live Stock Pricing   We have also integrated the ability to buy and sell directly from the discussions.   At the top of stock specific discussions, we have included live pricing information about the stock, covering current price, change, bid and offer, 52 week high and low and volume. From there we offer users the ability to add a stock to their watchlist and alerts, get a detailed quote, as well as buy and sell.       We see the Community as an important piece of the overall research customers should do in deciding what stocks to purchase.   We have integrated the ability to interact with Community from a number of our key areas of the site.   Watchlists:    Quotes and Research:      In the first 12 months, the CommSec Community now has over 10,000 registered users having made nearly 50,000 posts, and another 8,000 active guests who return each week to read the content.   We have seen in excess of 13,500 trading actions commenced from Community – either addition of stocks to watchlists, or quotes, and over 3,000 trades placed via the platform.  

Company: Constant Contact  Entry submitted by: Rosalind Morville/CTCT Community Team (rosmorville) Senior Manager, Community and Social Support Community: Constant Contact (https://community.constantcontact.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Constant Contact®, Inc. wrote the book on Engagement Marketing™ — the new marketing success formula that helps small organizations create and grow customer relationships in today’s socially connected world. Through its unique combination of online marketing tools and free personalized coaching, Constant Contact helps small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect and engage with their next great customer, client, or member. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact has long championed the needs of small organizations, providing them with an easy and affordable way to create and build successful, lasting customer relationships.   Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Constant Contact also has offices in Loveland, CO; Delray Beach, FL; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY and London, England. Constant Contact has been honored with numerous industry accolades and has ranked on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 for five years running, most recently at number 179.   In 2013, the company continued to make significant product improvements across our offering of online marketing tools. Knowing that change can be difficult and feedback can only make our products stronger, we needed a way to harness our valuable customer feedback without incurring significant cost or introducing a new technology to monitor. We wanted the feedback to be readily available to the Product Owners and easily actionable for varied members of a multi-leveled support team.  As a company that highly values the customer experience and promotes transparency, we wanted the feedback to be public and accessible to all of our customers.  We also wanted our customers to be able to monitor the status of their ideas. Finally, as our early tests with other tools indicated, many of the “feedback ideas” our customers submitted were actually support issues that required moving out of feedback into a place where that support could be received in a timely manner. By knowing the areas where our customers had the most issues and using their ideas to further the products in the direction the customer wanted, we aimed to increase not just the usability of our products but also customer loyalty.   After evaluating out of the box products, we decided to develop our own “in product feedback widget” that would provide an avenue to learn more about our customers’ reactions to system changes and provide a quick way to incorporate feedback into the product development cycle. We decided to base this widget on the Lithium platform.   We determined that the idea exchange within Lithium provided the features we wanted:   the ability to vote and raise the most critical ideas to the top; a direct line to the customer making the suggestion to ask for more details when needed; the capability to rapidly move “Support” issues to the appropriate area of the Community to be answered by peers or our trained Community team; a way for our customers to easily see the status of their ideas; the ability for multiple people to view, edit and comment on ideas from all areas of the company be it product, support, or another; and an easy and visible way for our product team to demonstrate their empathy and involvement with our customers.   We added the widget to multiple pages within our current products and most critically to a new version of our Contacts Management tool.  With this widget, a customer clicks one button and provides their feedback directly to the people that can make the changes.   Due to the success of the widget in 2013, in 2014 we are implementing the widget across hundreds pages of our product and dividing this feedback across 16 idea exchanges in the Community.  The success of the widget is evident when you glance at how many posts exist today:   In Contacts alone (granted the most active area of our feedback forums, but also the most critical as we rolled out this new tool), we received 4600 ideas, 3498 comments and 274,056 page views to that area alone between July and December!  The product team has been able to deliver 71 implemented ideas that are directly attributable to the Lithium feedback widget.   Another area where we launched a redesign was in our Library area. The feedback through the widget was vital for improving the new design. The new design began rolling out on August 28 th , 2013. Between this date and December 2013 we received 949 ideas, 624 comments and 12,478 page views. So far, we have been able to implement 14 ideas based on this feedback.   Customers are given a “feedback” button within the flow of a task. Pop ups were not used to avoid distracting an engaged customer while the pervasive nature of the button on multiple screens allows a customer to enter feedback at any friction point.     When a customer clicks the feedback button, a pop up window appears. The customer selects a topic (labels), enters a subject, and then enters text (the idea body). They click “post to public forum” and the idea is posted to the idea exchange as a new idea with the right labels. There is also an opportunity here for the customer to identify that they need help. If the customer chooses “Get Help” from the drop down they post directly into a corresponding product board for help from the Community.      Once an idea is submitted, the window closes and a customer can continue wherever it is they left off. Feedback is a gift to us while not being difficult for the customer to provide.      

Company: Best Buy  Entry submitted by: Gina Debogovich (Gina) Senior Manager Community: Best Buy Unboxed (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Best Buy is the world’s largest multi-channel consumer electronics retailer with stores in the United States, Canada, China, and Mexico. BestBuy.com is among the top ten retail websites in the United States and we have the number one customer loyalty program of its kind. There are more than 1 billion visitors to our website and 600 million visits to our U.S. stores each year. Our Blue Shirts sales associates and Geek Squad Agents are committed to delivering on our Customer Promise:   1. The latest devices and services — all in one place 2. Knowledgeable, impartial advice 3. Competitive prices 4. The ability to shop when and where you want 5. To support you for the life of your products   Our online community brings our customer promises to life.  It is an online destination that connects our customers, Community Super Users, Blue Shirts and Geek Squad Agents together.  The Community provides impartial and knowledgeable advice that is crowdsourced through these peer-to-peer interactions.     In 2013, we re-designed our Best Buy U.S. online community (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) making searching for content even easier. We recognized that it was cumbersome for customers to locate helpful information embedded within earlier threads and that topics would sometimes repeat because the content was not easy to locate. Visitors are now served a large "ask a question" box which searches published content and peer-to-peer support.   The re-design resulted in a 500 percent increase in searches since November 2013. As a result, customers found the information they were looking for and we saw a twelve percent decrease in the number of posts. Through identifying hot topics and trends, we publish knowledge articles for customers to understand policies, procedures, buying guides and troubleshooting.      

Company: Nextbit Contact: Kay Linayao (Program Manager, Community and Social Media)    Community: The Nextbit Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Nextbit has created the only cloud-first, design-forward smartphone for anyone who wants to be freed from the limits of today’s mobile technology.   Nextbit was founded in 2013 by early Android veterans Tom Moss and Mike Chan, and is based in San Francisco. In order to produce a high-end, groundbreaking phone that would surmount common smartphone shortcomings, Moss and Chan brought on former HTC design lead Scott Croyle, best known for designing the iconic HTC One M7 and M8. Croyle was hired in 2014 and serves as Chief Design and Product Officer. The team has developed an elegant, cloud-first Android smartphone that will extend the storage capabilities of the phone beyond what the specifications currently allow, designed from start to finish in San Francisco.   Nexbit investors include Google Ventures and Accel Partners.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives   As a startup, we launched in February 2016 (just a few months ago). With the tools that we have, we base our customer satisfaction on community sentiment, sense of community, and top contributor nominations (quality referrals).      Focusing on scaling support   We are focused on scaling support through peer-to-peer support. Our vision for community: the first place users go for excellence in customer service.   Our metrics    Our customer satisfaction results are focused on sentiment, decreased customer complaints, and traffic to our store.   We’ve seen these exciting results in the first two months of launching our community: 21,144 Unique Visitors 79,714 Visits 12,867 Posts 531,186 Page Views 7,328 Kudos given  

Company: GoDaddy Contact: Rachel Makool (Sr. Product Manager, Community) Community: GoDaddy Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Our unique promotion    One of GoDaddy’s top “rocks” = goals is to “Extend and Enhance our Customer Relationships” and as part of this, we launched our Community.   Our goals are to: Provide quick and immediate answers to customer questions to save them time while in the flow of their work. Encourage engagement of our customers to aid in learning of GoDaddy products and services to enhance usage. Enhance learning and engagement for our employees to increase understanding of customer's needs and expectations of GoDaddy   In order to kick off our new Community, we wanted to seed a lot of content. We decided to recruit customers that we named “Community Founders” to help us seed the content before going live.   Our strategy and tactics    The strategy was to get a group of customers to help us seed content before going live. The tactics were to recruit customers through multiple methods like emails, phone calls and article in our Help content. We set a lofty goal of 200 customers. Asked them to sign up so we could reach out to them with more detail.   We recruited a group of customers through email campaigns and by reaching out to individuals to be “Community Founders”. We had 300 express interest and 50% of them (150 customers) registered and signed into the Community to help us seed content before the site went live on March 31st. These 150 customers were comprised of professionals (people who create websites, etc for other customers) and other small business owners. We spent 5 weeks working closely with them to create compelling content to launch the site with. They all earned a “Community Founder” badge and rank as a thank you and also to give them recognition in the Community as leaders.   Founder badge and rank icon:     The customers we recruited as Founders were GoDaddy customers for at least 1 year, active and own more than 3 of our products.   One of our Founders (username LoDoWeb) stated, "The community thus far is a great place to meet people. So far I enjoy it.”   In addition to the Founders badges, we created an “Early Bird” badge for any customer who registers within the first month of the launch in April.     We also created a “GoDaddy Pro” badge to recognize all “Pros” who are part of our GoDaddy Pro program. We will also have a rank icon for them shortly. This is a way for them to highlight their business expertise and potentially get business from someone who needs help building a website.     Our results   We exceeded our goals and got 300 customers to sign up. As of today, March 23 rd , we have 80 customers registered and posting. We plan on launching within the next two weeks and hope to have more customers registered and posting before going live. Their posts have been very engaging! We created a “Founder” Badge to give them recognition for being early birds in our Community and will also create a “Founder” rank in order to attach a badge to their user name.   In the first month, we’ll have received 50,000-70,000 page views through email promotion, Twitter promotion (see below screenshot), exposure in Help (see below screenshot) and SEO.          In addition, we have achieved over 2,000 completed registrations in the first month of our community launch.