Company: AmBank (M) Berhad Entry submitted by:  Anna Ramly / Nurul Hana Mariana Muhammad (Assistant Manager) Community: TRUE by AmBank – TRUE Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   AmBank Group is one of Malaysia’s premier financial solutions Groups with 40 years of legacy in understanding Malaysian customers and provides a wide range of both conventional and Islamic financial products and services. While AmBank Group continues to grow dynamically and gain recognition as Malaysia’s preferred financial solutions group, its strategic partnerships with key global players has paved the way for greater international connectivity. Complementing its strong reputation as a key financial solution provider in Malaysia, its partnerships with Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), Insurance Australia Group (IAG) and MetLife Inc has brought new energy and value in how the Group conducts its business to better serve its markets. TRUE by AmBank, a solution designed for young professionals, is a new addition to the AmBank Group family and comprises not only of a TRUE Everyday Banking Kit (debit and credit card) but also the first bank in Malaysia to offer a digital community platform – TRUE Lab.   Our 2015 community goals    When we first launched TRUE Lab, the first digital community platform by a Financial Institution in Malaysia, we aimed to fulfill the following goals: Increase engagement rate of the brand Crowd source ideas on banking solutions and services Introduce the concept of TRUE Lab - a community platform to crowdsource for ideas. Grow a community financial education Introduce the power of community feedback and co-creation   Our focus areas and tactics to meet our goals   In order to achieve these goals, we came up with several campaigns designed to gain feedback, inspire creativity, stimulate ideas from our community and build brand loyalty among our members through our first gamification program.   TRUE Potential campaign   The introduction to TRUE Lab was through an emotional route. TRUE Potential was launched to listen to individuals who have always dreamed of realizing their TRUE potential and unleashing their capabilities that they could not pursue due to circumstances. This was in line with the objectives of TRUE Lab where we listen to the community and deliver their wants and needs. At the end of the campaign, we helped these well-deserved individuals discover their potential and realize their dreams, and at the same time, gained friends in the TRUE Lab community.     Community Connection   Besides TRUE Potential, we also ran nine other campaigns to instill a deeper connection with superfans and TRUE Lab members through initiatives like TRUE Love, TRUE Touch ‘N Go, TRUE Fortune, TRUE Mother’s Day, #TRUEgettingtoknowyou, #TRUEbyAmBankOOTD, TRUE@Uni Ideation, TRUE Goals, and our pilot gamification program, TRUE Quest 2015. During #TRUEgettingtoknowyou, community members were invited to share personal stories, anecdotes and their sense of style while getting to know other personalities lurking behind the usernames, including the individuals helming the TRUE Lab team. #TRUEbyAmBankOOTD, held in conjunction with TRUE Fashion Month, drove traffic for the months of August and September as they battled for the chance to be crowned TRUE Lab’s Most Fashionable Fashionista.   The gamification element of TRUE Lab was always a priority for us as we had already identified our superfans. By introducing our pilot gamification program in November, we had a simple game plan that would entail members to gain badges and rewards when they initiated content, encouraged ideation and discussion, and referred their friends and family members to TRUE Lab.       Our Results   TRUE Potential: During the three-month campaign period, we used the following methods to increase awareness to TRUE Lab: Facebook PPLA, Facebook PPVA, LinkedIn, YouTube Masthead, YouTube InVideo Overlay, Google Display Network and tie up with blog networks. Within six weeks, our TRUE Potential video reached 171,858 unique viewers and made 1,059,607 impressions. We also received over 250 submissions by March. The Lithium platform enabled members to share their ideas via the Lithium ‘Share’ function for Facebook and other social media outlets, and this helped their idea gain more kudos.     TRUE Potential Campaign Results   The marketing ringgit spent on Facebook PPLA, Facebook PPVA, YouTube pre-roll ads and Google Display Networks proved to be effective when there was traffic driven to TRUE Lab, which resulted in the increase of membership registration and participation of the campaign.   From this campaign alone, we received: 146,502 page views 80,852 visits 67,834 unique visitors 1,309 new members 256 ideas and 1358 kudos Facebook - 9,153,793 impressions LinkedIn – 99,026 impressions YouTube – 1,059,607 impressions, 232,448 views, 171,858 unique viewers YouTube Masthead (Mobile) – 135,781 clicks, 7,115,162 clicks   Overall TRUE Lab campaigns results   We introduced 10 campaigns in 2015 in the LSW community, which helped boost membership numbers, submission of ideas and activity in TRUE Lab. We went from 694 members at the beginning of the launch of TRUE Lab to 2,046 by the end of 2015, resulting in a membership increase of 195%. Since implementing LSW, we noticed a spike in unique visitors and page views particularly from mobile phones.  

Company: KPN  Entry submitted by: Lourens Reijgersberg, Hugo de Vries, and Thomas Pel (ThomasPel) Social Innovations Manager Community: KPN Community (http://forum.kpn.com)  Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch   KPN is a leading Dutch provider of ICT services. With a wide range of products and services, we operate with different brands many different customer groups – both at home and abroad. From prepaid calling in the US, to interactive HD television in the Netherlands.   The goal of our Community promotion   At the close of 2014 the KPN Community team got together and aimed to achieve a number of goals simultaneously in the first quarter of 2015. All of these goals would prove to be beneficial for both our customers as well as our peers in other departments.   To support the communication of our brand message and to maximize conversation surrounding the added value of KPN services of products we would set out to develop a fresh version of the KPN Blog which would include a new design and a number of new features, which included commenting via Facebook, whatsapp sharing and a clear categorization by connecting with the company wide / marketing content strategy.   To make sure our customers got a community experience which would beat their expectations, we developed a customized theme header. This ensured they wouldn’t miss out on relevant,  new or trending content from any part of the community (eg. Forum, blog, co-creation platform or even the TKB). Relevancy was the key goal here, so the theme header would function contextual and content would be relevant to the environment you are in. Theme header would also function as a bridge between different parts of the community and connect them in a seamless way.   At last, but certainly not least, the new blog had to be fully mobile supported to service the mobile traffic which was already about 70% of the total traffic of the blog. This was an important  pre-requisite in this endeavor and had to be executed in a way that would rival the most popular Dutch blogs.   Our strategy     The strategy of executing this many innovations simultaneously was to go live with a big bang and overwhelm the community with a lot of added value at once. This was set for the Easter weekend at the beginning of april and ingenuously combined with an ‘Easter egg hunt’ which was promoted via our external social channels. This ‘hunt’ would take our customers through the entire platform and playfully introduce them to all the added value that was now available.   At the same time a co-creation project started specifically aimed at the mobile environment. Customers we’re encouraged to suggest new features and uncover bugs that we might have missed. After all, even though we are a telco we simply don’t have all the handhelds at our disposal .. but the community does!   Meanwhile the theme header would be populated with content that was partially handpicked by community members, thereby making sure that the highlighted content was supported by the community.   Our results   Despite only happening a couple of weeks ago, we are already seeing some very promising results from the innovations and the promotions that we used to launch them.   The first blogpost on the new blog received 16 comments in the first days it was live, which was huge compared to the average 1 or 2 comments that most of the ‘old’ blogs used to receive. This is accredited both the easter egg promotion which directed a lot of people from Facebook directly into the blog post and the Facebook comments which are now possible.   The content that was highlighted in the theme header saw on average a 40% uplift in visits compared to content that wasn’t. This was especially true for blog and TKB content highlighted in the heavy trafficked parts of the forum.   As mentioned before, these promotions have taken place very recently, so we’re expecting most of the results to follow in the next few months.   Our video            

Company: KPN  Entry submitted by: Lourens Reijgersberg, Hugo de Vries, and Thomas Pel (ThomasPel) Social Innovations Manager Community: KPN Community (http://forum.kpn.com)  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   KPN is a leading Dutch provider of ICT services. With a wide range of products and services, we operate with different brands many different customer groups – both at home and abroad. From prepaid calling in the US, to interactive HD television in the Netherlands.   Meeting business goals and driving success with the KPN Customer Community In 2010 KPN set out on a journey to realize the ambition to become the best Dutch service provider in 2015, whilst also making a shift left and become an ‘online first’ company. The introduction of the Lithium community in 2011 was one of the key strategies to fast-track both ambitions.   From 2011 through 2013 the community has been experiencing a gradual growth of Dutchies interacting with each other around the KPN brand, products and services. Averaging around 2500 posts, 200K visits and 28000 answers found every month in 2013, the community eventually brought in 1,7M Euros in cost savings through call deflection at the end of 2013.   These results opened up more internal support and 2014 held the promise of becoming the year to professionalize and innovate the community in ways that hadn’t been done before. More manpower was added to the community team and internal development capacity was brought in to ensure maximum growth for the community, all the while adding up to the ultimate goal of becoming the best service provider for our clients.   Driving activity by adding Lithium badges KPN was the first customer worldwide to release Lithium Badges as part of the betáprogram and did so with great success. The added feature of well-designed badges rewarding various forms of activity (posts, kudos, accepted solutions) resulted in a 10% increase of activity among the lower and medium ranked members on the forums.   Customer driven Community Re-design In 2014 the entire KPN Community was revamped with a fresh, innovative design that implemented a number of features requested by the community, while still staying true to the broader brand-style. The addition of TKB and the profile gamification widget in particular we’re exceptionally well received by our userbase.   MyKPN Betá In august of 2014 the release of a dedicated co-creation platform on the community –aptly named ‘OurKPN’- coincided with the release of the new MyKPN portal. All the betáphase testing of the new KPN Client Portal (aka MyKPN) was done with community members, resulting in more actual client feedback than ever before and eventually in a better product!   Connecting employees with the Community In an effort to open up the immense amount of knowledge available in the minds of our employees for the community, we decided to connect our internal social platform for KPN employees (TeamKPN) to the community. Questions asked on the community can be highlighted in TeamKPN in an effort to involve employees with the relevant –often niche- knowledge in the discussion.   KPN Community driving change and innovation in the organization The addition of the community as an fully grown customer channel has driven a number of changes in our traditional customer care approach and some nifty innovations in the slipstream of said changes. While a certain amount of hesitation was expected from our side, these changes have actually been welcomed and applauded as a useful addition by the customer care organization.   Improved FAQ’s Clients connect and communicate with other clients in a manner that is rather different from the way most companies interact with their clients. This in itself isn’t much of an eye-opener, however when it comes to explaining detailed technical features or innovations around a particular product or service, this knowledge can be put to good use. We noticed that in some cases, community members were in actually better at explaining our products in a user-friendly way than we were. This led to us integrating community content within our existing internal and external FAQ’s and actually asking the community pro-actively to comment and feedback on some of them.  A large number of FAQ’s have now been curated through co-creation and their appreciation value has risen significantly since.   Customer Care using community content and TKB To maximize the use of community content and make the knowledge available to customers who haven’t been on the community yet, we made use of the integration options between Lithium and Salesforce. Through Salesforce knowledge our customer care agent now have the ability to pull relevant answers from the TKB and community content and share this with customers via phone, e-mail or other social channels.   KPN Community facts and figures 2014     The effect of all this added value to the community was overwhelming. The KPN Community experienced a dramatic increase in activity in it’s already active userbase. The number of monthly posts grew to 4000, which in turn led to even more customers finding their answers on the community. A massive number of 1 million answers were found in 2014, resulting in a cost saving of €4,5 million euros by the end of the 2014!   2015 and beyond The thriving state the community is at right now opens up countless possibilities. For the near future we are planning to enhance and innovate the platform even further, adding things like theme headers, a full blown co-creation platform and a smooth mobile design. From a community management perspective the focus will be on expanding the pilots and co-creation efforts as those are definitely something our members appreciate and the further professionalization of the superuser program. We’re looking forward to it!  

Company: Telefonica O2 UK  Entry submitted by: Marjo Hallapera (marion101) Head of Community Community: O2 UK Community (http://community.o2.co.uk/)  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   The O2 UK is a Telefónica-owned company, managing communities on an international scale in order to optimize and enhance the way in which brands interact and engage with their valued customers. One such community is O2 UK. With more than 20 million customers, O2 is one of the largest mobile telecommunications providers in the United Kingdom. It is supported by Telefónica whose strategy is to become the leading global communications company in the digital world with a goal of opening new pathways, which continue to transform possibilities into reality for their customers.   The O2 Community has gone from strength to strength in 2014, utilizing user-generated content (UGC) and site navigation in a number of ways to ensure our community content is as useful and cost-effective as possible.   Guides created by members on the O2 Community are consistently detailed, accurate and attract the trust of other members due to the supportive atmosphere encouraged and maintained by our Community Team. UGC is consistently useful for customer awareness and deflection to the 500,000+ unique users coming to our community every month.   Due to the high quality of the content created, we have begun to integrate it into our business on a wider scale. One guide for example is used for network self-diagnosis, a commonly queried issue in any telecoms company. This single community post, when used on Twitter, turns a normal 3-tweet customer interaction into a single tweet, attributing to a major cost savings per year. It frees the time up of many advisors, making them considerably more efficient. In 2015 we will repeat this process with a number of products and services, ensuring that our community content forms an even stronger base of knowledge. Below is a snippet of one of our great UGC pieces, with 280,500 views and constantly counting:   We welcome UGC in a number of forms. In 2014 alone, the community welcomed 47 video guides to be used by other customers. These video guides (including iPhone self-help, Operating System tutorials, etc.) have been created at absolutely no cost to O2, but can be used to help other customers as any professional video could – producing a single video elsewhere could otherwise cost the company $7k. This process also enables our customers to contribute to the business they use, and ultimately, to feel as valued as they truly are.   Due to the high volume of visits to certain pages on the community, such as details on services and products, they have attracted a high SEO value to the business. We have utilized this high volume by adding banners for other products within these community pages. This creates a huge amount of awareness for these products, as well as ensuring the community and its potential is tapped into as much as possible. This approach also mirrors in our OS and device announcements, where we often attract over 20,000 views to single update posts that are also shared across the web.   Finally, we have created a campaign within the community to help members to decide on which devices to purchase as a result of peer reviews. Try the Tech allows members to ‘borrow’ devices from us for a few weeks to test out. Every tester writes a thorough review and each content piece creates vibrant discussions about which devices to purchase. The quality of these reviews is so high that device manufacturers have reached out to us in order to gain high quality reviews on brand new devices that will increase sales. Testing and reviewing a device also gives the members more knowledge about the device itself and thus helps them out when offering advice to others on the community. Check out the link below for an example of the quality of content we attract.   Samsung Galaxy Note 4 review (TryThe Tech)   On top of all of these aspects of benefit the community provides for O2, the peer-to-peer advice concept methodology is ever-present, with members offering advice every day. The average response time on the community (when analyzing a full 24 hour cycle) is consistently under 300 minutes and often under 200 minutes, ensuring that any members who enter will have an answer quickly and efficiently. Our regular members are here each and every day, offering insights as well as advice. They have an online home in the community, which is easy to see when we consider that one of our more regular members posted more than 16,000 times in 2014.

Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Brief Company Info: Sony is one of the world’s leading companies in consumer electronics and entertainment offering state-of-the-art and innovative products, movies, music and much more. With our products and services we provide an incredible entertainment experience for our customers.   In June 2013, we successfully migrated our 12 year-old existing European Sony Electronics forum to Lithium, which is active in 9 languages in 34 different countries.   Goals: When we decided to pursue migration to Lithium, our main goal was to create a community where people do not only talk about their technical problems, but also engage with the rest of the community in their passions by reviewing user-generated content, company generated blogs as well as tutorials and workshops to help them get more out of their products and our services.   We aspired to provide a platform where our huge fan base of photo enthusiasts could share their content in galleries participating in monthly photo competitions. In doing so, we could help them increase their photography skills by providing workshops and tutorials as well as our excellent master classes moderated by Sony World Photography Awards winners. We wanted to keep the community simple and clear, while being easy to navigate. In this context, we radically reduced the number of different boards, and provided an overview on our homepage to help users navigate.   Lithium has provided a robust platform with flexibility to adapt and measure our strategic goals via different content types, developer tools and metrics. Thanks to this flexibility, we were able to create a compelling photo gallery, full integration with other Sony websites and a simple design that follows Sony brand DNA.   After the initial launch of our community with Lithium, we continuously added new functionalities to the platform based on the feedback we received from our volunteer super users. In this context, we initiated a complete redesign of the community to have a cleaner & well-designed look.   The homepage serves as a vitrine to give an initial idea on what type of content can be found. The new design allows visitors to see the whole community structure directly from the homepage in the cleanest way, so that users can directly access their areas of interest.   New homepage design:   This also allowed us to remove “sub-category” pages to reduce the number of steps to access the target destination. Photo gallery preview brings photo gallery submissions based on most recent, while the recent posts module is adapted to bring topics uniquely and display the most basic information in a neat design.   We have simplified the navigation, pages and community structure, hence helping users to find their topics of interest much faster. The big and present search bar helps users to find related content as easy as on Google. By removing the right hand elements and moving them to the bottom of the page we focus clearly on the main message of the page such as banners, galleries and boards.   New navigation structure on homepage:   We re-purposed the whole contest module and use it as a photo/ wallpaper gallery. We really forced the limits of the module to have the most compelling look while following brand DNA. The same module is also used to run monthly Sony World Photography Award competitions which add around 2000-4000 photo submissions per month from users in 15 countries. The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily manage on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated.     Lithium platform has been seamlessly integrated into our web presence and has been skinned accordingly to match our global look and feel to offer our customers the best social experience. Most elements have been simplified to provide an excellent customer journey without hassle. In addition big graphics, modern large fonts as well as the light layout give a fresh and innovative look and feel – even if you watch our community on a smartphone or tablet. Thanks to the clear design, customers can easily share their content and discuss products with each other.   The new community design is a big success! With 7,126,596 searches per month and 6,745 posts for 1,441 new topics, the community is thriving.           Additional design elements from our community   New board design:     New thread design:     New blog design:      

Company: Skype Entry submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Community (community.skype.com) Lithy category: Best Business ROI ___________________________________________________________________   Skype’s peer-to-peer community improves 1st contact resolution to 70% and reduces support cost by 10%   What happens if you flip on all switches for “Community” and put the spotlight on a previously hidden tech support forum? Skype did just that and turned it into a vibrant location for exchange around everything Skype, resulting in 1 st contact resolution at 70% and reduction of company-wide support costs by 10%. On top of that we discovered that community members are 30% more likely to use long-term subscriptions, connect on more platforms and show double usage of paid minutes.     With more than 200 million connected customers every month, Skype cannot rely on traditional, resource-intensive methods of customer support alone. Reflecting their truly global product Skype launched the community in ten languages to offer answers on new and trending support questions faster and deliver them on a more direct channel. The landing page was designed to showcase the various language communities and the current activities and hot topics. Members appreciated the fact that they could exchange in their language and had experts covering all time zones around the world. To drive direct exchange with their customers on product improvements, Skype launched #SkypeTalks live events where questions were streamed into a dedicated community board and Twitter and were replied by product managers inside Skype. This helped prioritize the developments sprints through the insight gained and gave users a very rewarding feedback experience.   Additionally Skype aimed at improving the capabilities of listening to its users through open discussions. Turning the previously used tech discussion forum to a real user community proved the answer to both demands. The community is looked after by a team of 30 moderators, both volunteer and Skype staff, and a team of 16 dedicated Super Users, expert users that like to share their knowledge and help other Skype users. The Skype Support Network community is offering support and discussions for the whole range of Skype products, from desktop via mobile to the living room. Within our first year already more than 400,000 individual topics have been replied on.   Solution Making the community a place you wanted to stay and return to was Skype’s primary goal.  To that end, Skype came up with several programs to reward their most engaged visitors.  The Community News highlights weekly activity, discussions and user participation.  Eventually the community helped Skype identify and resolve new product issues within 24 hours of a product launch that would normally have taken days to identify. Upon launch of a new product for the Android platform, the community compiled a list of problematic devices that prohibited them from using video calling. Armed with this critical feedback, Skype was able to issue a hotfix within days after the initial launch.   Another goal was to offer answers on new and trending support questions faster and deliver them on a more direct channel. Skype accomplished this by integrating the most helpful peer-submitted content called “Accepted Solutions” with related topics from their knowledge base to be prominently displayed on the Skype Support page. A category-based selection logic ensures that related topics are pulled from the correct community boards.                                                 Business Impact The Lithium-powered community is thriving with passionate users who share their expert knowledge and creative solutions on using Skype products.  Community helped Skype identify and resolve new product issues within 24 hours of launch that normally would have taken days. First contact resolution at 70% for 5 millions users/month 10% reduction in traditional support costs Community members are 30% more likely to use long-term subscriptions, connect on more platforms and show double usage of paid minutes  Visit: community.skype.com  

Company: Future Shop Entry submitted by: Laura Buchanan (LauraB) Social Community Manager Community: Future Shop Tech Yeah Steelbook Community (community.futureshop.ca/) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ___________________________________________________________________   This is the story of a group of superusers who came sort of out of nowhere to become influential in not only the community, but in the Future Shop movie business.     When we launched the Future Shop Community almost 6 years ago, it was always with the vision that it would be a place where our customers, employees and vendor partners would connect and engage directly. What’s happened in our Movies & TV Show forum over the past year has been a beautiful example of a niche group of passionate customers, an engaged merchant team & vendor partners who recognized the opportunity that this group of people represented.   Steelbooks are a special release of movies (new and old) that come in a metal packaging with different artwork than the regular DVD or Blu-ray releases. They are highly coveted among the collector community and Future Shop is in the unique position of being the sole distributor in Canada. Steelbooks are so sought after and produced in such limited quantities that you can find them re-selling for over $100!   The buyer team here at head office decided to start “leaking” Steelbook artwork and release information in the forum because it was easy to access and they could turn the “leaks” around quickly. When TheJord asked “What 2012 releases you would like to see in a steelbook?”, he got 24 replies and over 50,000 views on that single thread. Because of the engagement of all of the buyers & superfans, the Movies & TV Show board saw a 56% growth in board posts, a 59% growth in board views & a 75% growth in post views (YoY).                                               As the group of superusers continued to grow, so did their roles in the community – several rose quickly in the ranks and joined larger superuser programs in place for the entire community, our invite-only Community Ambassador program. They started posting Steelbook links for everyone to go place their pre-orders as soon as they were online.   Our vendor partners saw the passion that this group had for steelbooks and decided to tap into this by conducting polls in the forum to help them decide on what titles they would produce steelbooks for next. Future Shop produced approximately 80,000 steelbook last year and saw 60% comp growth online for last year – large in part due to the popularity of our Steelbook program.                                             The Steelbook superfans have also helped Future Shop to perfect the art of shipping Steelbooks without overpackaging them. Future Shop received lots of feedback on how to better package and ship Steelbooks so that they didn’t get dented or scratched, which was surfaced up to the teams who could directly impact this.   Shout-out to all of our Steelbook superfans! Atomic, kaw, Drum18, jceperley, debaser17, TheJord, ZeroX39, pioupiou, saybinator & many more.      

Company: SuccessFactors  Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Global Director, Customer Adoption Marketing Community: SuccessFactors Community (community.successfactors.com) Lithy category: Marketing Champion   SuccessFactors provides the leading cloud-based SuccessFactors HCM Suite, which comprises solutions that are complete, beautiful, and flexible, and which can help you optimize your workforce today and prepare it for tomorrow. SuccessFactors solutions are supported by a global partner ecosystem and the experience and commitment of SAP. Our solutions are innovative, but we also deliver process expertise and best practices insights from serving our broad and diverse customer base. Today, with more than 4,000 customers and 27 million subscription seats, we serve organizations of all sizes, from the large enterprises to small businesses, across more than 60 industries, in more than 177 countries, and in 37 languages.   It’s time to love work again! This motto is at the heart of our business. SuccessFactors, an SAP company, provides workforce management software designed to support the employee lifecycle, from recruit to retire.  Our customers support over 20 million workers in 177 countries, making SuccessFactors Human Capital Management (HCM) software one of the most adopted cloud-based solutions in the world. Our customers have a vision and vast goals to attract the best talent, align their workforce, optimize employee performance and gain workforce insight to make strategic decisions about their business.   Like any world-class technology company SuccessFactors develops applications that are relevant to our consumers. However, we understand that having great products is not enough. Without customer support built into the core of our business we would not be considered the leader in our industry. Lithium’s online community platform has played a significant role in helping us provide true support to our customers. Our Customer Community is a competitive differentiator and an important part of our marketing strategy. It is the gateway to fully realizing the value of our products and services and as marketers we shout this fact from the rooftops.   In our Community we bring together customers, product and support experts, industry thought leaders and implementation partners from around the world.  The knowledge exchanged in our Community is an indispensable resource for both new and established customers.    Our Community is a hub for training, implementation resources, documentation, events, and user group interaction. Members stay informed on new features, product updates, and news on HR trends and predictions. This is the place where product-enhancement ideas are shared and discussed with our product managers, providing critical feedback for advancing our products to new levels of innovation and business efficiencies.   Our Community is 34,000 + strong and growing by an average of 1,300 new members each month.  Not only is the Community growing in members but in time spent online.  Per month page views range between 200,000 and 300,000 and we see approximately 360 new ideas shared and over 2500 kudo clicks.   We’ve found that customers who engage in the Community have increased success and longevity with SuccessFactors. When customers find what they need, have their issues resolved, and get their questions answered, they are happy and eager to help others. It’s a win-win for everyone.     In addition to Lithium’s impact on our support and customer adoption marketing efforts it is also a valuable vehicle for education and brand awareness. Multiple marketing campaigns pump fresh content into our Community, which drives engagement and new membership. We’ve had remarkable success with our one and only “open” board that showcases our amazing thought leadership to the world. The “Did You Know” campaign has allowed end user customers to find the community destination doubling daily registration and adding valuable content with 100’s of posts with 1,000,000’s of page views. Did You Know? has a committed following of loyal influencers that use Lithium’s social share functionality to spread awareness and meaningful content to their communities.     Our team is also using Lithium to educate and influence our parent company’s on-premise HR customers to move to our cloud-based technology.  Moving to the Cloud from an on-premise solution can be an intimidating transition. There are many roads to success when taking on this endeavor.  Our “Welcome to the Cloud” marketing campaign invited our SAP HR family to join our Community and learn more about the advantages of cloud-based technology. Without In addition to valuable content, entry into our exclusive Community facilitates peer to peer conversation which expedites learning and reference inquiries. Our membership has increased by 8% since this campaign began in January, 2015 and we anticipate sales revenue to follow this uptake in interest from our on-premise customers.   Online engagement is a privilege of our time but our Community also supports in-person experiences for our customers.  Customer champions and super users are hosting “live” engagements that promote knowledge sharing across the SuccessFactors’ customer community. Each event focuses on effective talent management process design and deployment. VIP engagements are complimentary and exclusive to SuccessFactors customers as part of their current investment with our technology.  Thanks to Lithium’s interactivity customers learn about these events and participate in conversations before and after the “live” session to further enrich their experience.   Finally we want to bring attention to our customer excellence awards program. Our community hosts the SuccessConnect HR Excellence Awards annually. This program drives customers to tell their success story in their own voice and generates an exceptional amount of engagement through live voting. We use Lithium’s kudos click to cast votes. Thousands of votes were counted for our 2014 awards. The winners received a free pass to our SuccessConnect conference and an awards reception with leaders from our executive team. This is one of our favorite customer marketing opportunities because we get to uncover compelling customer stories and references and recognize and celebrate our customer’s accomplishments.  

Company: Canon  Entry submitted by: Patricia M. DiPasquale (pmdCanon) Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing Services Community: Canon Community (community.usa.canon.com/) LSW social channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram  Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Canon U.S.A., Inc., headquartered in Melville, New York, is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions to the United States and to Latin America and the Caribbean (excluding Mexico) markets.   With approximately $31 billion in global revenue, its parent company, Canon Inc. (NYSE:CAJ), ranks third overall in U.S. patents registered in 2014† and is one of Fortune Magazine’s World’s Most Admired Companies in 2015.   † Based on weekly patent counts issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office.   Our road to Lithium   The Canon approach to taking on new social platforms is that each has to meet objectives not already covered by other platforms, as well as being able to serve different audiences. There is crossover, of course, but there are unique characteristics as well.   Knowing that the conversation would go on with or without us, we decided to bring that conversation closer to home where we could be a part of it. We set out armed with a list of business objectives, criteria for success, and must-have requirements. After extensive research and comparing the features of available forum platforms, choosing the Lithium-powered Community was a no-brainer.   Of the seven business objectives set for our social platforms, the two main objectives we sought to fulfill with a forum were: Support our customers and build brand loyalty Gain customer insights & feedback   We don’t want to say that either of these are a problem, but the Forum was most certainly the solution. The Canon Community grew quickly, averaging well over 1,000 new members and over 200,000 unique visitors every month. Many answers come from the Community, but our Customer Support Center is there to fill in the gaps.   As one could imagine, having to moderate the Forum, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Vimeo for the wide range of Canon products, takes a lot of eyeballs and a variety of skillsets. However, once Lithium Social Web announced the inclusion of images as part of the moderation platform, we knew it would be the closest thing to a magic bullet that we could get.   Benefits of a Total Community   As stated earlier, LSW has transformed how our Customer Support Center operates. Previously, the forum was moderated by manually refreshing the page to review the latest posts. And rather than having to figure out where the last moderator left off via sticky notes and email, the tool clearly indicates where the next moderator can start his or her shift.   In regards to digital strategy, LSW allows for a more controlled social environment, meaning that there isn’t as much of a fear factor as there once was when introducing additional social platforms. The ability to moderate the Forum, Facebook and Twitter from a single location, have an automated workflow, and metrics that would satisfy the most finicky of analysts, truly made a difference for our Customer Support Center.   Every post made on the Community, Twitter or Facebook comes into LSW so the team can moderate, escalate, and assist as needed, ensuring that no posts are missed, and that the team can quickly act on trends. The moderators are also able to provide feedback on product complaints and work with product managers at Canon headquarters to help resolve customer issues as soon as a post is made.    Total Community results   While we do not have specific numbers to share, implementing LSW has increased efficiency across the board. The only growth in Customer Support headcount has been when new social channels have been added to the mix. And not even in the quantity that was originally forecasted, which is a huge savings in what is possibly the most expensive cost factor: human resources.   The tool has also improved the moderation of specific hashtags and handles, making it easier to watch for tweets from specific individuals, as well as easily add new hashtags as we see something that needs to be monitored.   By using the filtering functionality, Customer Support is able to weed out tweets from spam-generating handles. This has ensured that the moderators are viewing relevant customer interactions rather than spending time closing out spam.   Lastly, the metrics coming out of LSW have allowed the Customer Support Center to get real insight into the productivity of moderators in a way that they haven't been able to before. This information has been useful for providing a good baseline to create future performance goals for the moderators as well as to schedule staff adequately in the present.   We have received positive feedback from our Customer Support Center, which gives us the affirmation that our solution is working, internally and externally. Here's an example of the feedback we recently received from our Customer Support Center:   We're really happy with LSW and the support team at Lithium.   I wish we had some way to compare pre-LSW to now.  Getting LSW is like going from filling out stacks of paper forms to getting a computer and doing everything electronically; it's such an improvement.  We previously had to record every fan interaction manually (name, date, comment, platform, etc.).  Now, everything is done in a few mouse clicks.  It's honestly made a huge difference in our productivity and has allowed us to concentrate on fan interaction instead of record keeping.        

Company: Foxtel   Entry submitted by: Skye Forrester (skoogle) Head of Digital Customer Contact – Social Media & Community Community: Foxtel Community (http://community.foxtel.com.au/)  LSW: https://www.facebook.com/FOXTEL, https://twitter.com/Foxtel, https://twitter.com/FOXTEL_Help Lithy category: Total Community All Star     Foxtel is one of Australia's most progressive and dynamic media companies, directly employing more than 2,500 people, and delivering a diverse subscription television service to both regional and metropolitan areas over cable, satellite and broadband distribution.   With our fast-growing customer base, almost 870k Facebook Likes and 100k Twitter Followers (as of 22 April 2015), the company required a robust and integrated solution to manage and service both customers and non-customers online – a fresh (but in-demand) approach to support and relieve the company’s traditional and heavily trafficked inbound/outbound call centre. Central to our needs was the ability to (1) respond to Social Media enquiries with accuracy, speed and ease and (2) create the online destination, Foxtel Community, to tap into the audience’s passion for our industry and product; increase customer advocacy and engagement; and achieve call deflection through peer-to-peer and self-servicing.   Enter Lithium.   Benefits of a Total Community     Foxtel Community and Lithium Social Web (LSW) are managed in-house by the Digital Customer Contact Team (DCCT). DCCT is responsible for helping existing and prospective customers with all Foxtel servicing enquiries received via digital channels:   With the team split across two sites at either end of the country, it was imperative to equip agents with the right tools, training and ongoing support to provide a seamless and cohesive customer experience. To this end, LSW enables and supports us to:   Respond to all enquiries directed to Foxtel in Facebook and Twitter Take account level enquiries ‘offline’ to manage via phone, email or chat Refer escalated enquiries to our dedicated Customer Resolutions Team Moderate and implement a ‘3 warnings and you’re out’ system for page rule breaches to create a friendly, productive environment for all customers Integrate reporting to the wider business for a full customer journey view Crucially, LSW also enables early detection, root cause analysis and communication of customer impacting issues. In addition to the above, Lithium’s Community enables and supports us to:   Communicate customer impacting issues and updates through to resolution Conduct pilot/beta trials (closed groups) Troubleshoot with customers, the leading driver of visits to Foxtel Community Host our dedicated blog, The Green Room, to educate customers on our core offering – our programming Promote campaigns and products to increase customer satisfaction and company revenue Share Foxtel brand announcements Offer peer-to-peer and self-servicing options for contact deflection Build rapport with customers and potential customers to grow customer advocacy Contribute ideas, feedback and innovations to Foxtel products and services Implement a gamification strategy to keep community members engaged and active, and create subject matter experts Provide 24/7 support to consumers on any mobile or fixed device Optimize our Community using built-in SEO tools   Our Total Community results   We aim to answer all social media enquiries (Facebook and Twitter) within two hours during business hours, seven days a week, while posts in Foxtel Community that haven’t had a peer response are actioned after 48 hours. In 2014, Lithium tools enabled us to action more than 480k servicing enquiries through social media, and play host to more than 920k unique visitors and 2.2 million page views. In 2015 (up until 19 April 2015), we have so far experienced 157k servicing enquiries through social media, 699k unique visitors, and 1.76 million page views.   Importantly, Lithium Community and LSW greatly assisted us to manage major customer events – including the launch of our new pricing and packaging structure and the launch of our latest Personal Video Recorder, iQ3 – that would have previously been challenging for the business to handle due to the increase in customer contacts.   Customer Advocacy across digital servicing continues to increase YoY as a result of structured workflow (LSW and Community) for digital servicing.    

Company: Nextbit Contact: Kay Linayao (Program Manager, Community and Social Media)    Community: The Nextbit Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   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 community goals      Our goal is engagement, creating a strong sense of community, and leveraging peer-to-peer support.   Our unique design elements    Nextbit Robin (the product) has great design, and our community is no different. Most communities, as we’ve seen, are pretty plain and simple. We add a spice of life by adding lifestyle photography to our homepage: nextbit.com/community     How we executed our community design   To execute, we always kept our brand experience in mind. For example, the header and footer of the community is consistent across all nextbit.com websites.   Header: Footer:   Our results   We measure the success of our design based on: increased number of casual users v. observers, increased number of top contributors, page views, unique visits, traffic to website.   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: AmBank (M) Berhad Entry submitted by:  Anna Ramly / Nurul Hana Mariana Muhammad (Assistant Manager) Community: TRUE by AmBank – TRUE Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   AmBank Group is one of Malaysia’s premier financial solutions Groups with 40 years of legacy in understanding Malaysian customers and provides a wide range of both conventional and Islamic financial products and services. While AmBank Group continues to grow dynamically and gain recognition as Malaysia’s preferred financial solutions group, its strategic partnerships with key global players has paved the way for greater international connectivity. Complementing its strong reputation as a key financial solution provider in Malaysia, its partnerships with Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), Insurance Australia Group (IAG) and MetLife Inc has brought new energy and value in how the Group conducts its business to better serve its markets.  TRUE by AmBank, a solution designed for young professionals, is a new addition to the AmBank Group family and comprises not only of a TRUE Everyday Banking Kit (debit and credit card) but also the first bank in Malaysia to offer a digital community platform – TRUE Lab.   The TRUE by AmBank Story:   About two years ago, a group of young professionals sitting in an office in the city of vibrant Kuala Lumpur came up with an exciting concept to bring a fresh new perspective to banking.   The target market? Quite simply, young professionals. Thus came the creation of TRUE by AmBank, which was developed with the support of parent company AmBank (M) Berhad, one of the largest financial institutions in Malaysia, to attract an emerging and influential segment with strong purchasing power as well as abundance of ideas who’ll soon be shaping the future of the economy and the world.   The TRUE by AmBank brand consist of two concepts - The TRUE Everyday Banking Kit and TRUE Lab, Malaysia’s first digital, crowd-sourcing platform, designed to listen to the needs of young professionals (YPs) and banking customers nationwide.   Our unique promotion and goal   The TRUE Potential Campaign As part of the introduction to TRUE Lab, we designed a campaign to leverage on the power of online community to empower and engage in conversations with our target segment – Young Professionals.   The campaign concept was developed from insights that many Young Professionals are not exploring their true potential to have a more fulfilled life – and this could mean being a better human being or perhaps even a change in career path.   The goal was to crowd source participant’s untapped potential and dreams while sparking conversations and steer the community to actively engage in dialogues on TRUE Lab.   The campaign utilized the Lithium platform for participants to submit their entries on the ideation page, share and invite their family and friends to vote.     Our tactics and strategy for promotion   We went to the streets of Kuala Lumpur and quizzed Young Professionals on their dreams, goals and ambitions, only to uncover that most professionals stop pursuing their TRUE potential because of the rat race or money.   To create awareness, we developed an ad campaign targeted to the online digital space: ie YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Google, LinkedIn, Nom Nom and featured prominent Malaysian bloggers to entice those dream seekers to join TRUE Lab and share their ideas with their family and friends and invite them to vote or kudo their submissions. The kudo function was a factor in our judging criteria as the most popular ideas were then curated into the semifinals of the judging process.   The strategy of this campaign was to encourage users to share their dreams and aspirations, with the aim to get users to be familiar with using their voice in the community for future crowd-sourcing initiatives.     Campaign Results   The marketing ringgit spent on Facebook PPLA, Facebook PPVA, YouTube pre-roll ads and Google Display Networks proved to be effective when there was traffic driven to TRUE Lab, which resulted in the increase of membership registration and participation of the campaign. From this campaign alone, we received: 146,502 page views, 80,852 visits, 67,834 unique visitors, 1,309 new members 256 ideas and 1358 kudos Facebook - 9,153,793 impressions LinkedIn – 99,026 impressions YouTube – 1,059,607 impressions, 232,448 views, 171,858 unique viewers YouTube Masthead (Mobile) – 135,781 clicks, 7,115,162 clicks         YouTube Trueview Results over six-week period     Nom Nom Promoted Content (Blogs)   Impressions: 4,875,796 Clicks: 5,273       Key Learnings People loved the videos! – Facebook PPVA (Page Post Video Ad) achieved higher results than PPLA (Page Post Link Ad) with larger audience engagement level Mobile capability was essential to this campaign. Having a YouTube masthead for mobile helped increase clicks since it reached 2.8x more impressions than the desktop version. Kudo function enabled us to use this as part of our judging criteria to analyse popularity of ideas Having the ‘Share’ button in the Lithium platform allowed participants to share their submissions on social media, which helped bring more traffic into the website  

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops Community: Forums.comcast.com Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast, a Fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media and communications company in the world by revenue.  Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states.  Comcast strives to provide superior customer service through all channels – traditional and atypical.  An early adopter in using social media in the Care space, Comcast spends considerable energy and resources developing and implementing its digital strategy. Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer Operations.  Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and expanding product knowledge. While social care is still new to most organizations we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program. Being able to effectively measure our efforts and to tell our story to the broader organization is key to determining our impact on our business goals.    Comcast recognized the value of engaging with customers through social media early on and became an industry leader in the social environment. However, Comcast had no scalable, efficient solution that enabled employees to connect with customers.  It was difficult to understand how many resources were needed to support customer demand for social engagement.  Lithium’s solution has provided the scalable and seamless agent to agent and agent to customer workflow we required.  Comcast has been using Lithium for all social care engagement for a year and, through our robust social care scorecard, are now using social data to drive change in the organization. Among our core social care metrics are In Channel Resolution rate – resolving the customer’s issue immediately in the initial social channel – and Escalation Rate – forwarding the customer to another team for resolution.  Effective management of these business objectives requires clean, easily accessible data. With this specific, reliable data we made effective changes in our team management to consistently meet those objectives and have begun to develop scaled forecasting models. This means more in-channel solutions for richer content and increased peer-peer and self-service opportunities.  Comcast also utilizes the voice of the customer feature within LSW, achieving 100% customer satisfaction month after month. While a relatively small portion of overall Comcast customer contacts, the DMO team has also contributed to year over year increases in overall self-service, Voice of the Customer and JD Power & Associates scores. Specifically:   Since 2010, Comcast has improved J.D. Powers Overall Satisfaction +92pts (Video) and +77pts (HSD) This improvement is more than any other provider in the industry during the same period Comcast’s recent improvements (’12 v ’13) in High Speed Data have improved our ranking by +3 places Phone: All-time high rating with largest gains in Communications & Cost of Service HSD: All-time high rating with significant gains in Cost of Service & Communication TV: All-time high rating  with largest gains in Cost of Service, Communications & Billing Since 2010, we have reduced our performance gap to Top Provider by: 80pts (Video), 77pts (HSD), 58pts (Voice) Gained more than any other provider during the same period in HSD & Video The Digital Media Outreach team has been recognized for being at the forefront of social care by numerous high profile blogs, public news articles, published in numerous books and known as an industry leader within the social environment.   The Lithium tool enabled us to quickly identify opportunities to create a better customer experience.  Within three months the changes were made and scores increased significantly.  The top two KPI’s are in-channel resolution and tickets being escalated as you see color coded below. As you can see, our in channel resolution rates doubled since we began using LSW while our escalation rates have continued to decline:     SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand.  Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.       Below are some examples of DMO recognition in customer satisfaction.   1) http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/exceptional-customer-service-on-twitter/?utm_content=buffereee2f&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer       2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/the-top-100-most-social-c_b_3652508.html?utm_hp_ref=tw&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer4617c&utm_medium=twitter      

Company: Upwork Entry submitted by: Garnor Morantes  (Director) Community:  Upwork Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Upwork is an online global talent pool that connects professional freelancers with quality clients. We are the world’s largest talent marketplace with an annual run rate of over $1B+ in freelancer earnings. We have 4M clients and over 10M freelancers who have registered, with approximately 30,000 new freelancer registrations per week.   Our clients and freelancers are distributed globally. Our largest client regions are the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Our largest freelancer regions are US, South East Asia (India, Pakistan, Philippines) and Ukraine.   What Total Community means at Upwork   Filling a void in the future of work Our community platform is a mechanism for users to connect with each other and with the Upwork brand in ways that contribute to their professional and work-oriented marketplace experience. The forums are used to foster the learning, social and collaborative relationships that are otherwise difficult to come by for freelancers and clients who often work in solitary workspaces.   Giving the brand a Voice The community also serves as a communication mechanism for the Upwork brand, allowing us to notify and position key product, policy, feature and other changes to a large customer audience. Through our forums and other community channels, we highlight tips, best practices and help content, thereby aiding in case deflection for our customer support teams.   Knowing our customers As a business, Upwork has a unified digital strategy built on Lithium technologies to monitor, gather and report on customer activity. Through LSW and the Lithium community (LSI), we use these channels to identify: Site performance and incidents Feature usage and reaction Customer sentiment   These insights are then delivered directly to product and business owners and shared with the entire organization in a formal report each week. With this unified approach the organization is closely aligned with customer needs and sentiment and we are rarely, if ever, surprised by customer response.   More about our Community and how it’s evolved   In 2014, we hosted two separate community forums, one each for the Elance and oDesk marketplaces. These forums were hosted on Drupal, and resulted in a combined page view total of ~1.3 million/ year. In November 2014 we launched our Lithium Community for oDesk and migrated over those users and approximately 12 months of historic content.   Within the first 6 months of our Lithium Community, we had surpassed 1.5 million page views and now regularly exceed that number on a quarterly basis.       Performance Results of Our Total Community: Since launch, we’ve consistently maintained a CHI score of 700+ and now reach around 1.5 million page views, each quarter! Consumption is trending higher every month. Users are clicking around the site more with an average of 6 page views per visit. Registrations are continually trending upwards with roughly 1000 new registrations a week. SEO is working very well with the majority of the traffic (83%) coming from Google. We are Best In Class for consumption and join rates.       Expanding our Total Community - What’s Next?   The Upwork Community has done well to bring our company closer to its customers and to enable members to fill a void that many of us who work in a traditional work environment take for granted. Our high engagement metrics prove this.   We’ve also become a reliable source for information and other resources that can contribute to success on the Upwork marketplace. According to our latest Value Analytics survey, users are coming to the community for answers and find our Community to be a reliable source of customer information and support.   An increased focus on Community Support To further our progression as a resource for customer support, we recently redesigned our community with a focus on ways to help with case deflection and assist new users in finding the information they need. We changed the way our search worked and provided a convenient call to action so users would know to post their questions right from the search bar. We’ve also added more descriptive text and an introduction video that gives a tutorial style walk-thru for new users to navigate the community. With the new redesign and optimization we aim to achieve the following:    Case deflection of Customer Support tickets; Increased CHI; Organized content to improve the user experience.   Launching LSW   An important step in our connection with our Social and Support teams was the launch of LSW. LSW went live at Upwork on February 2, 2016 and has helped our teams to be better equipped when addressing user concerns. Through LSW’s capabilities our teams have been able to seamlessly engage with our users, escalate communications to other teams, and respond to user's posts, questions and requests better than before.   LSW has helped in the following areas: Time to reply (avg. 3 mins faster): Because our teams can manage all activity from one location and leverage macros, bulk responses, etc. they are able to respond faster on social and in the community. The Lithium App also allows our CS agents to access tickets/messages through their mobile devices, which helps them stay informed/reactive when an urgent case comes in outside of their work hours. Queue management: Posts are flagged and deposited into appropriate queues, based on “@” mentions and other keywords. As a result, the teams are able to assign areas to specific personnel.  Tags help our agents ensure that more urgent issues take precedence over others in case of a backlog. The queue and priority system makes it easy to ensure everyone's taking care of priority posts first and nothing gets missed. Visibility: Because of the cross-functional dashboards and supervisor views our community, social and CS teams can see activity across channels, allowing us to collaborate more intuitively.  For example, outages and other incident activity have been identified via email ahead of our Engineering teams allowing us to use LSW to help with incident alerting and management. Tracking/User management: Agents can add user notes and are quickly able to identify a user’s social influence (followers) and social history (past posts/tweets). The customer conversion history and internal notes make both internal coordination and customer responses easier and better. Agents can tag customers (VIP, problem customer, Upwork employee/associate, etc.), store customer information (UIDs, contact info) and make internal notes to build a collective knowledge base. This allows us to readily handle inquiries, giving each agent a full perspective of who that customer is.  

Company: Sony Electronics Entry submitted by: Doug Heavener (heavenerp) Community Manager Community: Sony Support Community (community.sony.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   Why should our Sony Community win the “Best New Community” Lithy Award? Well here’s just a few of the incredible things we think stand out with our community.   We get personal: We welcome all community members by embedding a welcome video into our community from our Sony Experts. We want our community members to immediately be able to relate/bond with our community experts.     We listen to our community: We have also embedded a monthly live webcast. These webcasts showcase Sony products and our Sony product experts. Our webcasts are geared towards our customers based on the types of questions we are seeing within the community. Our members are able to ask questions in real time and have them addressed by our product experts during the live webcasts.     We have the support of our employees: We are taking an aggressive approach to assist our community member by having a large amount of Sony employees actively participating in the community as product experts. Our employees spend an average/minimum of 1 hour a day moderating and answering member posts. This allows us to proactively address customer’s issues in a timely manner. Whether it’s a technical post or a customer service issue, we can address the customers’ needs in real time. For example, if a post comes in addressing poor customer service, our product experts will immediately escalate those post to our community relations team to handle. This has proven to be an effective way to keep issues from blowing up within the community. …. This is our way of trying to stay ahead of our customers and actively.   We showcase our expertise: We are using Sony Heritage for our upcoming Sony expert bios. Our current product experts that we have participating in the community have an average of 15 years of service with Sony. The amount of knowledge our employees have is incredible. You can say we’ve grown up with Sony products, have seen the technology grow and the products evolve to what they are today. But we still remember the first Walkman, first CD player, seen the technology Are our Sony Heritage goes beyond us…… to our parents, our grandparents, those who owned the first Sony TV, the first Transistor Radio, the first Walkman, etc. Our Sony heritage is strong. We’ve witnessed leaps and bounds in the evolution of our products and technology and we are all ready to share the knowledge we possess with our customers.   We get results: Our Search Engine Optimization using Google has increased to an incredible 490K. Our metrics continue to grow and have moved steady upward showing positive results. Lithium is one of the best customer service tools. None of them can even compare to the potential that the Sony Community brings to our customer service world. I can truly say, I have never been so excited about a customer service tool as I am about the Sony Community. It is an amazing tool that will change the way we do customer service forever!

Company: YouSendIt Entry submitted by: Ashish Seth (ashcool) Cloudsquads CEO and Founder Community: YouSendIt Community (support.yousendit.com) Lithy category: Best Business ROI ________________________________________________   At YouSendIt, our #1 goal as an organization is customer satisfaction.  Prior to deploying Lithium, we did not offer any support to our free users.  With Lithium, we now have various ways to provide support to free users.  This results in customer retention and increased brand equity because their positive experience propels them to recommend us to other users or pitch us in enterprise conversations.                                         The rate of support calls that come to our team should be lower than the rate of our company’s growth - basically call deflection is very important.  In 2011, case volume growth was 4% per month.  Lithium was implemented by Lithium partner, Cloudsquads, in December 2011, and in 2012, the case growth rate was decreased to 2.5% a month.  Customers want to get their answer quickly and efficiently.  Call deflection is good for the customer too as it gets them the answer they want quickly and the way they want it. When we rolled out, we saw a immediate 20% drop in call volume simply due to the much improved self-help options.  Phone calls are the most expensive support ticket to take, and we were able to take what could have been a 20% cost savings and reinvest into delivering an even better support experience, which translates to more product virality and higher lifetime value of our customers.   Since our deployment of Lithium and some of the customizations that CloudSquads has made, we’ve been able to significantly slow the incoming rate of new cases, and in turn manage the many costs associated with scaling our call center, while at the same time meeting our #1 objective of delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Organization Game Changer    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.    In launching a Community with Lithium, we have become the first major broker affiliated Community in Australia, giving us a key point of differentiation for our customers.   Recognizing the breadth of assets we have to draw on, we have built the Community experience around the ability to connect and learn from other traders, our expert analysts and our customer support teams.     We have realigned our business in a number of key areas to make it a success: -       The existing social team has been expanded to encompass Community management -       We’ve created specific environment for daily analyst commentary and encourage debate around this content -       In seeking to increase the ability for customers to make information easy to find and self serve, we have taken our FAQ library and expanded this into TKB content, adding a new level of depth and opportunity to cross promote where applicable in the forums. -       We have established a specific area for our new traders to tap into the collective knowledge of our other customers and support teams, with a dedicated team created to manage our customer support through this, and other social channels.   For us as a business, it helps create a better educated investor and at the same time facilitate greater customer experience and self service.   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.   Our new to trading board remains the 4 th most popular board within the Community, and has ~ 50% response rate on questions asked being answered by other Community members.

Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AdWords is one of Google’s main products with customers from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses and provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers. AdWords customers can access customer support via phone, email or chat channels and get in touch directly with a Google online specialist on a “one-to-one” basis. Google’s online specialists are subject-matter experts trained on a variety of Google online marketing tools. The online specialists provide support and help educate advertisers about the variety of advertising solutions.   Since early 2012 the AdWords Communidade discussion forum in Portuguese is the main platform for online conversations around Google’s online marketing tools, where users can discuss any relevant topics with other users and specialists from Google. We saw an opportunity to maximize the efficiency of direct customer support through active and deep engagement in the one-to-many channels in Portuguese, essentially scaling the “one-to-one” support model into “one-to-many”.   Internally the “one-to-one” and “one-to-many” customer support are provided by two different teams, and each would have a different set of success metrics. In the “one-to-many” team each market would have one Community Manager responsible for nurturing their online AdWords Community. And from user feedback, we know that users react well to a variety of Googlers engaged and creating content in the Community, especially when Googlers represent and actively share content from their various fields of expertise. Having high-quality online content available within a click, when a user is trying to solve an issue, can help customers save time and improve their knowledge, while having a direct impact on reduction of escalations to the “one-to-one” customer support teams.   Having an extensive content base created by online specialists from the “one-to-one” support team brings multiple benefits to customers. This is why establishing a productive relationship with the “one-to-one” customer support team is important, and is the reason why the Community Manager and the managers of “one-to-one” local teams in Brazil partnered to be able to offer an improved customer experience to local advertisers.   Bringing two teams to work on a shared goal proved to be initially an organizational challenge. The answer was to create an agile project team within the 1-to-1 support team that would focus on deliverables for the AdWords Communidade and social channels. The game changer with the team in Brazil was the amount of online specialists involved, and the variety of tasks they were completing.     Google’s full-time Community Manager for the Portuguese Community & Social channels received support to engage 13 online specialists into AdWords Communidade. The specialists had 1-2 days per week that they could to create content in various text and video formats, such as:   1) Articles with tips and use cases of AdWords to support various online marketing goals;     2) Quizzes to draw attention and give an opportunity to better learn about various features;     3) Hangouts on Air from online specialists from the AdWords customer support team two times per week. They focused on a variety of topics for new and advanced advertisers, for example: #sosadwords series was dedicated to the most popular escalations to the customer support team. The Hangouts are streamed live in the AdWords Communidade, and are available as recordings after that. The goal was to scale the content to as many advertisers as possible, and in a few months the team achieved over 800 viewers per Hangout with some topics reaching audience of over 1.4k viewers. In total 61 Hangouts on Air and 13 Hangout “office hours” were conducted in the second half of 2013. The feedback from advertisers was excellent: they see this as a great way to learn. Needless to say that the Hangouts on Air would not be possible without having subject matter experts from the customer support team actively engaged.     The Googlers from the one-to-one support teams became an active part of the user Community, by extensively sharing their experience with making most of the advertising solutions. In a way this means breaking the “wall” between the company and its users. We believe we have established a successful partnership between 1:1 customer support and 1:many team, which can become a model for community managers to adopt when designing org structure. Why we think this worked in case of AdWords Communidade is a good training of online specialists and breaking down the deliverables into specific workflow tasks with clear expectations on deliverables and success metrics (example of a task: conduct X Hangouts on Air with a minimum of Y Pageviews).   Looking at the bigger picture, we believe that by providing customers with targeted content related to their advertising goals enables a fast-track learning experience, ultimately helping AdWords users make the most of their experience with Google’s advertising products.   We were able to significantly increase the amount of new content pieces created, in particular build a good cadence and scale with the Hangouts on Air. On average the Hangouts received around 800 viewers with some topics getting as many as over 1.4k viewers. In total 61 Hangouts on Air and 13 Hangout “office hours” were conducted in the second half of 2013. All in all, hundreds of up-to-date and relevant pieces of content were created, which indirectly shows in the high % of traffic from organic search channel: over half of users come after performing a search query at Google.com.   This organizational structure in Brazil allowed for a faster user acquisition to the  AdWords Communidade(as compared with other AdWords online communities across different markets). In 2013 the traffic to AdWords Communidade grew 4x y/y, and in 2014 the growth stay high at ~3x year over year, which means that in January 2014 there were three times as many visitors as in January 2013. The growth was supported with high level of engagement as seen from the high speed of response: typically 4 out of 5 new questions receive a response within 6 hours.         

Company: Nextbit Contact: Kay Linayao (Program Manager, Community and Social Media)    Community: The Nextbit Community Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   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.   How community meets our customer care goals   We have a strong top contributor program and our goal is to leverage community to scale support by reducing call volume and get feedback back to Product/Engineering to improve product and address bugs/issues.   Reducing support costs   We’re leveraging more of the community as well as the call center to reduce costs. For example, we’ve badged support agents from our call center as “Product Experts” in the forum to scale support.       Our results   We measure our customer care results from the following: # of JIRA tickets filed to Prod/Eng from community escalation, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, and support agent utilization.   While we don’t have the above metrics to share yet at this early stage post-launch, we’re pleased to see these exciting results in the first two months of launching our community, indicating that our community is vibrant and headed for success: 21,144 Unique Visitors 79,714 Visits 12,867 Posts 531,186 Page Views 7,328 Kudos given