Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: SAS Entry submitted by: Shelley Sessoms (Online Community Manager) Community: SAS Support Communities Lithy category: Marketing Champion (2 of 2 entries)   SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, busine... See more...
Company: SAS Entry submitted by: Shelley Sessoms (Online Community Manager) Community: SAS Support Communities Lithy category: Marketing Champion (2 of 2 entries)   SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 80,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW ® .   Our Unique Promotion   We launched external and internal Super User programs to give a recognition and commitment boost to super active community members. These programs publicly honored our strongest members for their outstanding contributions and gave them tools to expand their community leadership so they can get more out of their community experience – and help the community as a whole.   External SAS Super Users felt special because they: Received a badge and special rank icon that appears on their community avatar:  Had access to a private "Super Users" forum, where they can confer with their fellow "supers" and the SAS community managers. Were invited to "Super Users"-only meetings with SAS staff, where they get the inside scoop on SAS communities and other SAS goings-on. Received privileges like moving stray posts to the proper board and marking spam. Received periodic surprise community/SAS swag and personal gifts in the mail. They completed a “What are your favorites” Q/A so we knew what to send them. On their birthdays, we posted a “Happy Birthday” message on the community homepage banner that is visible only to the member with a birthday.       Internal SAS Super FREQs (FREQ is a name of a commonly used SAS procedure) received:   A special rank icon and badge:  Community management rights such as moving stray posts, featuring good ones and editing topics that need clarity. Note of appreciation and thanks to each of their managers. Choice of community swag: branded coffee cup or USB charger.     Our Promotional Strategy and Tactics   We identified our first pool of super members by analyzing community activity from Lithium bulk data. We decided to appoint a new group of Super Users/FREQS every six months and that “alumni” members will be awarded an Emeritus status and special badge. Example for Super Users:   We then defined program parameters like: Guidelines complete with “how-to” instructions for executing special tasks, posted on private board:   Promotions to serve two purposes: recognize super members and elevate awareness of communities in general.   Promotional tactics include:   Super Users Community Memo blog post and Getting Started TKB article. Feature on community home page: Social updates on SAS corporate, user-specific and personal channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, and external SAS-related communities, using multiple text variations, headlines and this social tile:     Super FREQS: Intranet article that highlighted employee contributions and what it means to participate in the community, including quotes from the Super FREQs themselves on their activity. Intranet video about how being a community star is like being a super hero.   Be a Hero       Results   Expanded community management coverage Using bulk data from Lithium, we saw that Super Users acted on new privileges like topic moves. From Feb. 1 – March 27, Super Users moved 92 topics to appropriate boards while the community management team moved 35. What’s more, these moves occurred at all hours of the day/night due to the global scope of our Super Users. In effect, the Super User program allowed for 24/7 community moderation; our Super Users became an extension of the SAS communities team.   Our Super Users increased their participation in the communities, as well. Analyzing the 60 days prior to the inception of the Super User program with the 60 days post-program launch we saw:   Super Users increased their shared content/messages posted between 18-90%. The number of accepted solutions given to Super Users increased between 30%-300%. Yes, you read that right: 300% for one Super User in particular.   Super User social sharing of program perks In one instance, a Super User shared a piece of Super User swag through a creative social update. The swag installment sent to Super Users was a pen made out of reclaimed wood from an old SAS building on campus headquarters. The package included an article about the building’s history and a note from SAS Co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight. One of the Super Users tweeted about the pen, thanking Dr. Goodnight publicly for the gift.  
Company: SFR Entry submitted by: Sandie Hodiesne (SH) Social Media Manager Community: Le Forum SFR (forum.sfr.fr) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________   SFR Forum, an online ... See more...
Company: SFR Entry submitted by: Sandie Hodiesne (SH) Social Media Manager Community: Le Forum SFR (forum.sfr.fr) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________   SFR Forum, an online Adventure, a great Human Adventure!   SFR Forum exists since 2008. It’s a place where web advisors used to respond automatically to customer requests either in a public or private mode.   During spring 2012, we faced a big challenge: Moving from an online customer services model to a 100% peer-to-peer Support Community model. A new way of thinking and managing information - a complete break and a real step forward into the world of online peer-to-peer Communities.   We decided to give to our future community as much space and autonomy as we could provide them with. We decided to take drastic decision. We kept the name but started from a white sheet without capitalizing on the old threads and existing content which could remind us of our previous operating processes.   We identified about thirty Super-users on our various social media properties (“Atelier SFR”, old “SFR Forum”, “HUB”). With the active help of our community managers, we gathered contact details for all of the super-users. A first contact was made through email. Afterward we contacted them all by phone and explained them this huge new project. Out of the 30 contacts, 29 were very enthusiastic and immediately ready to engage in this Adventure. Sandie (SFR’s Social Media Manager) set up 2 video conference meetings to discuss with the super-users in order to decrease the growing fear regarding the new community, to answer to remarks such as “it was better before with the old forum”, and to create the first relationships between participants. Fabien and Manuella, two community managers from the beginning, were collaborating with Sandie during these meetings and suggested a Beta test phase of one month. We explained to our super-users what would be their role and why it would be beneficial for them to be part of the New Forum beta phase. During this month, they would be able contribute to the community editorial content, create their own content, find new ways to communicate with the community management team in a public mode and embrace a heads-on the philosophy of the new Forum.   The day before the D-Day, the enthusiasm and the engagement of our “Founders” was very big. Dartagnan, Michel2, DocMac, RafCorDel, Rebel, Kendokanne and all the others were very excited to be launched in the open and exposed to a new audience and a new community.   January 15 th at 5pm, great emotion and vibes: first discussions, first ranks reached, first Private Message conversations… The SFR peer-to-peer Community where users could share their customer experiences and help each other was born!   Our “Founders” were recognizable with their specific “Founders” badges created for them and quickly took care of the new users. The SFR community is their community and they are deciding everything about the choice of discussion to highlight, what to post on the blog or the Wikisphere … These super fans defend strongly this new philosophy. We could witness comments like « But where are the SFR advisors?” or “Here, there is only us, the community, satisfied customers happy to help and support others. If you need to access your confidential customer data, the community won’t be able to answer.” When the community is unable to answer you, we guide you to the right contact points after the diagnostic is made. In this community, we always try to find a solution!   Our super-users have a dedicated space, a “private room”, invisible from the other members. Through this private room, we inform them about cases that members face regularly and the answers we have and that they can be spread out across the community. They can also give us their feedback on what is working or not with the platform and further needed developments… It’s also in this private room that we discuss about our next video conference, meetings, special events such as call for topics for the blog.                                                                                                   To transmit these values across the community, members must have taken the ownership of this online space. For this magic to operate, the online community needs to resonate with the members. Each members needs to feel comfortable navigating this online community. The customer experience must be positive.   The video launch takes the advantage of this simplicity: the ability to create something great together.   The ranking starts in a reference universe known from all but gradually draws references from the gaming world, while relying on the values of the Forum:                 - The “Builders” who by their contributions and exchanges secure and solidify the base of collective knowledge:                 - The “Enchanters” are recognized both for the quality of information they provide and the benevolence that radiates around them:                 After only 1 month and a half, our community has now 40 super-users with a high level of posts - Vindedious (1600), Kendokanne (1700), Boriswap (1300), Dartagnan (1400)…  They are some of our heroes you can visit in the “Forum SFR” community.   Discussions between all the community members and the super-users give us the opportunity to detect very quickly any malfunction and to inform the community when a problem is solved. For example, Kendonkanne initiative helped to qualify a problem with sms billing, to solve it very quickly and to relay the information in a public mode. This enabled to reassure our customers that have send us a lot of sweet words.                             40 Super-users provide 50% of the Community content   In addition of this efficiency, pleasure of sharing and conviviality moved in : Almost 2,100 posts shared within our Community on the “Discussion du Comptoir” pages. In a month and half, discussions are as well about music and cinema as Art in general.   The strength brought by our Community Management team are: Sincerity and authenticity, the wish to humanize the online relationships, the genuine desire to develop and reward anonymous expert by making them shine under the limelight. We will meet for real and for the first time our super-users on March 22 nd . It’s our way to celebrate Spring!   Goal : The official launch of our super-users program and share its content – Virtual Workshop and meeting with SFR experts, SFR site visits, game to participate to events such as new mobile launch, celebration and more.   Their first mission, find a name to the program. And to close the day, a great surprise is waiting for them. One of the founders of the Manau Group will be there to explain the story of “La tribu de Dana”, a very well known song in the 90’s, before we capture a great picture of all our superusers with our Polaroid.   The relationship between and with our super-users is essential and strong. The idea for this year is to offer them a customized T-Shirt with their username, a way for us to build a story together… See you soon with more input about this great Adventure.   Sandie & the community management team : Cindy, Manuela, Fabien, Fanja & Emmanuelle   http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-est-la-Social-Media-Manager/ba-p/18598 http://forum.sfr.fr/t5/Les-news/Qui-sont-vos-Community-Managers/ba-p/9936  
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Company: Centrify  Entry submitted by: Raman Kumar, Sr. Director of Technical Support and Customer Success, and Anton Chiang (ac), Manager, Community and Support Programs Community: Centrify Community (http://community.centrify.com) Lithy ... See more...
Company: Centrify  Entry submitted by: Raman Kumar, Sr. Director of Technical Support and Customer Success, and Anton Chiang (ac), Manager, Community and Support Programs Community: Centrify Community (http://community.centrify.com) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Centrify provides unified identity management across cloud, mobile and data center environments. Centrify solutions deliver single sign-on (SSO) for users, privilege management and auditing for security and compliance, and a simplified identity infrastructure for IT. Centrify is used by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, including half the Fortune 50.   Centrify provides unified identity management for end users and privileged users. With flagship products addressing needs for identity management across cloud, mobile and data centers the Support team interacts with IT admins every day with several skills sets spanning across *NIX, Windows, Active Directory, SAML to name a few. To Support this vas diversity of skills, the Centrify Support team believes that the Community (peers) of Centrify admins across the globe play an important role in collaborating with the experts at Centrify and on Customer premises.   As we grow our customer base, we are now taking a Community first approach to boot strap our Support team by virtually extending it to our MVP’s at thousands of customers’ locations. This has helped us two fold: first, we have happy customers who are constantly willing to share their knowledge and experience with other industry veterans in our space, and ensure that they share their best practices. Second, we are now able to reduce our costs to add engineers across every region, time zone and yet meet SLA’s and responsiveness by leveraging our Community on Lithium.   This has opened the doors for all our products to receive timely support. Our free product is only support by our Community, and this free peer support model is giving our champions (who have deployed in labs or very small environments) the support they need.   Our community categorized by different product lines: Centrify Server Suite (our on-premise product), Centrify Identity Service & Centrify Privilege Service (our cloud based product) and Centrify Express (our free product). All community members have read access to all categories and write access to our free Centrify Express forums. This enables Centrify to provide a positive user experience for our free product users, potentially leading to paid upgrade when their organizations expand.   For our paid customers, they have the option to ask their technical questions in the premium product forums. These questions are automatically escalated as support cases to our CRM if the community does not answer them within 24 hours. This ensures that our paid customers receive timely responses while Centrify reduces paid support contact volume.   Our organizational changes   At Centrify, we value support as a team that adds value to our customers and not a cost center. That being said, just like every successful and customer centric organization, we keep a close eye on our costs every year. The savings in Headcount to support our customers are re-purposed to make the Community and Centrify Support Portal more interactive and resourceful. With new products, new customers we are always innovating and ensuring that every type of customers who come to us for a help can easily find their answers. In the future, we will be enhancing the UI further to provide a single pane of glass for all existing customers to address their technical and product needs. The success of Community for our customers has also enabled the use of Community internally. It is a powerful tool that Support Engineers across the two Tiers and all locations worldwide use to collaborate, and ensure that the knowledge created is available for new engineers and cross functional on-boarding of engineers.   Our business results   Centrify Community started as a platform for our Express users to ask their questions and in the last 18 months we have opened this for every customer of our solution (paid or free).   In spite of growing our customers base and revenues by 2x, our team has been able to successfully support 5000+ customers and continuously achieve a 92%+ customers satisfaction*. Without enabling peer-to-peer community help, we would not be able to sustain such rapid growth while maintaining a high score for customer satisfaction.  Support Management at Centrify is always looking at metrics to drive more self-service, engineer efficiency and content creation (Knowledge articles).   *Customer Satisfaction is derived from 5 survey metrics that we collect from our customers. Every time a case that is opened with Technical Support team at Centrify, the customer will have an opportunity to provide their feedback on the products, people, and features / functionality of Centrify Solutions. Customer are asked to rate us on the 5 parameters (1) Case Owner Satisfaction (2) Overall Product Satisfaction (3) Product Quality (4)Features and Functionality and (5) Overall Support Satisfaction.   We’ve seen steady community growth in the past 3 years. Q1 2015 we saw a year over year increase of user sessions by 31 %, and 13% increase in topic replies   More than 30k visits per month in indirect contact deflection. 40+ technical topics are answered and turned into searchable community knowledge for future use.   Super-user Spotlight:   Rich Multimedia Content:     Wealth of technical information and resource in the community: In-depth Community Generated how-to articles:      
Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jen Hitchens (JenH) Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Social Marketing Program ____________________________________________________... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jen Hitchens (JenH) Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Social Marketing Program ___________________________________________________________________   Barclaycard Ring MasterCard © is a very simple credit card product with a low interest rate, simple terms and no annual or balance transfer fees. But what sets Barclaycard Ring apart is its use of online communities in an innovative way to talk with card members about the product and how it should evolve. The Barclaycard Ring team also developed the industry’s first profit sharing program with card members, called Giveback™. This aligns the interests of both bank and card member like never before and opens the door for both to advance the cause of charities. And to help crystalize the trust, the team posts the financial statistics for the program on the website and discuss the results each month.   Barclaycard Ring possesses true integration in its overall marketing strategy by creating cohesive, branded messaging across all internal and external platforms. The primary focus of communications is centered on the engagement of the Barclaycard Ring community and is supported by a content creation strategy designed to build relationships with the card members. Barclaycard Ring provides multi-channel access for to this unique content through its Facebook page, Twitter channel, Google + page, YouTube channel as well as email marketing messages. The ‘public-facing’ site, BarclaycardRing.com also enables visitors (without logging in to the secure account servicing site) to consume and share out blog content via Facebook, Twitter and Google+.     Social Media Integration   Social Sharing and Referral   Social Sharing via External Site   Social Media Marketing   Integration with Email Marketing ‘The weekly’ email provides a summary to community members of the latest activity within the community. This high level recap has yielded a consistent CTR and provides a lift in site visitation and engagement. ‘The Weekly’ email features blog content, trending discussion thread, “Quote of the Week” featuring a specific community member, their avatar and rank, a recent comment, recent statistics, current survey or voting option as well as the Top 4 contributing community members and links to all of the Barclaycard Ring social media platforms. Through our social media marketing initiatives, Barclaycard Ring has been able to improve our card member experience, provide a new platform for servicing our customers, and has built new advocacy programs and increase brand loyalty. Our objectives focus on: Improving customer experience by leveraging the community for digital servicing Increase loyalty and usage of the card Create content and build relationships to positively impact the financial literacy of the community   Improving Top Line Revenue & Loyalty Barclaycard Ring has only been live for 10 months and generated over $500K in revenue.  The future looks even brighter for Barclaycard Ring, as the customers engaged in our community close far less often and are remaining loyal to Barclaycard at record levels.     Industry Recognition for Improved Customer Experience
Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Gustavo Casado (Piquio) Social Media Specialist Community: Foro.Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es/) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone Group is a British multinational telecommun... See more...
Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Gustavo Casado (Piquio) Social Media Specialist Community: Foro.Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es/) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone Group is a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in London and with its registered office in Newbury, Berkshire. It is the world's 2nd-largest mobile telecommunications company measured by both subscribers and 2013 revenues (behind China Mobile), and had 434 million subscribers as of March 31, 2014.   Throughout the rankings and roles program, Vodafone Europe has been unique in applying customized loyalty programs focused on the use of our platform. We leverage personalized emails, depending on the number of registrations, use, frequency, and proficiency of Lithium features.   The complaints department bases their strategy upon our top terms queries from Lithium. We provide our complaints team with a list of terms frequently used on our eForum to give them a heads up on the complaints that they will receive that week. They proactively discuss with the appropriate departments related to those issues, and they search for the correct answers to provide customers in a timely fashion.
Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________    ... See more...
Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight ________________________________________________     Best Superfan Story/Insight BSkyB 2013   In July 2012 we introduced our innovative Super User Program on the Sky Help Forum Community, recognising the super contributions from some of our forum members. Our Sky Help Community Super Users are individuals from within our Community who are the ultimate Sky boffins. Their technical prowess, detailed knowledge and broad range of expertise mean that they are the most valuable commodity in sourcing answers to our Customers questions. Whether they are technical aficionados looking to get the optimum performance of advanced applications or a technophile looking to simply decipher the jargon our Super Users can offer insight and support across our Customer base. All of our Super Users are independent of Sky and offer a true Customer insight in how to get the best from our products and services.   We wanted to implement a Super User program which truly recognised those active members within our Community who were advocates of sharing knowledge and best practice and wholeheartedly encompassed our methodology of peer to peer support and inclusion.   In being an advocate of our Customers and understanding their viewpoint our Super Users can offer a definitive insight into the sentiment of our audience and work with us to envisage a cohesive community built upon our core values. Our current base of 12 Super Users, have been recognised not only by Sky but by their peers as frequent, knowledgeable contributors with the Kudos and Accepted solutions to prove they are ‘worthy’ 🙂   To recognise the contribution of our band of expert Superfans we provide them with enhanced access to encapsulate them as part of the Sky team. “The Boardroom” our Private Community boiler room allows us to engage with our Super Users at a unique level understanding their views, ideas and feedback on new product trials, services and general discussions about almost everything. Not only that, but their contributions to our dedicated Knowledge Base and Monthly Blog articles truly gives a unique view of what it means to be a Super User and a true Sky Superfan.   One of our original community members on the Sky Help Forum was Annie+UK who registered on 27th October 2010 and has become a mainstay Sky boffin across our Help Forum offering insightful help and support to our Customers.     As a respected senior member within our community Annie+UK is our ultimate Superfan and was a first choice to join our Super User Program when launched.   However, it wasn’t always that way. During the early days, Annie+UK felt frustrations with regard to issues she was having related to her service provision and how this was handled from a customer support point of view, all of her frustrations were evident in her posts. A lot of this had to do with transparency, product development and honest communication. In case managing the issues experienced by Annie+UK we began to develop a foundation of open communication and feedback which offered us key insights into the sentiment of our wider community. Her insight was invaluable as a true testament of the value of our Customer’s knowledge and experience. Cultivating a strong relationship based on a mutual support and shared knowledge has integrated Annie+UK and our wider Super Users into the Sky team.   Being part of the Super User program and having the opportunity to build relationships with the Sky team allowed us to be more open and honest and along with having the opportunity to be involved in beta trials has helped change Annie+Uk’s opinion and rather than leaving the community she has become an advocate, this is evident in her having read 90%of all posts across our Community Forum and in supporting her peer customer group has responded to in excess of 2,750 Customer queries.                                             Her continued support of our Community members in sharing her knowledge and advice has assured her respected status as one of our key Super Users. She is not afraid to ask difficult questions and pose feedback directly to us based on Customer experiences which, assures that we can continually improve our service for our Customers. Her inspirational and engaging manner has assured she is an advocate of both our Customers and Sky which, has been key in the continued development of our Community and indeed our service provision.     In essence, Annie+UK has spent over 1 ½ years logged into the community, for a community that is less than 3 years old…making Annie+UK our ultimate Super Fan.      
Company: Avon Entry submitted by: Rene Calvey (eCommerce Community Lead ) Community: Avon Beauty Connects Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   About Avon Products, Inc.   Avon is the Company that for 130 years has proudly stood for... See more...
Company: Avon Entry submitted by: Rene Calvey (eCommerce Community Lead ) Community: Avon Beauty Connects Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   About Avon Products, Inc.   Avon is the Company that for 130 years has proudly stood for beauty, innovation, optimism and, above all, women. Avon products include well-recognized and beloved brands such as ANEW, Avon Colour, Avon Care, Skin-So-Soft, and Advance Techniques. Sold through nearly 6 million active independent Avon Sales Representatives, Avon products delight consumers in approximately 70 countries worldwide. Learn more about  Avon and its products at www.avoncompany.com.   Avon now reaches one in three women in the UK, with six million women seeing an Avon brochure every three weeks.   In 2015, 22,000 shoppers voted Avon as the UK’s Best Health and Beauty Retailer 2015 in Verdict’s Customer Satisfaction Awards.   As the company for women, Avon is committed to supporting the causes that matter most to women; breast cancer and domestic violence. To the end of 2015, Avon and the Avon Foundation for Women donated more than $1billion in 50 countries to women’s causes.  In the UK £16.8 million has been donated to breast cancer charities through the Avon breast cancer crusade and £1.6 million to domestic violence charities through its Speak Out programme.   Goals for our Lithium-powered community    We wanted to create a community for both B2C and B2B members both for very different purposes. We wanted to engage customers with relevant content, enabling them to quickly find looks/products and conversations that would enable them to engage with one another and Avon.   For our Representatives we wanted to create a seamless journey from their ordering page using SSO and again present relevant business content and information while encouraging conversation.   Overall we wanted to a fun, engaging and supportive community that would serve Representatives and Customers one and the same.   Our focus areas and tactics to meet these goals   We wanted to focus on creating the right content for both areas of the community, by focusing on working with the wider business on B2B content and working with a content agency to supply blogger and beauty content we felt we had the right strategy for success. Traffic driving was also a big goal, we had to ensure that for the B2B area we could drive traffic internally through our eMail, newsletters and links from our ordering sites as SEO would not reach us! We also ensured that we had strong links with our social team and everything public facing we did had SEO in mind.   Social shopping and selling is also a huge part of our strategy, so by engaging our users with our ‘Reward beauty, receive beauty’ scheme we are able to send them a product in return for a nice piece of user generated content which left them feeling engaged and valued.     Our results   We recently undertook research that looked at Representatives that have NEVER logged into the community vs those that have logged on at least three times in a certain period. We found that those Representatives that are regularly using Avon Beauty Connects had a 137% higher rate of retention with the business, had a 47% higher order value and 83% higher average earnings per campaign. Representatives regularly using Avon Beauty Connects also had a 43% increase in Customers.   So the value of community in their engagement and support in running their own businesses is truly working!   We have also recently launched Knowledge Base which is creating a great collection of business guides and UGC for tips and tricks to run an Avon business.   Overall we have proved that we retain and engage our audience and provide an fun and friendly and business oriented community for the Avon Representative and his or her Customers.  
Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Our group was able to leverage Lithium's capab... See more...
Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Our group was able to leverage Lithium's capabilities to enhance the influence of Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers, enabling them to easily capture knowledge created through collaboration and share it directly with Cisco customers.  We implemented more than 80 custom components in Lithium to deliver a solution called Tech Zone to the TAC organization that is optimized for their needs and fits within their standard workflow. We utilized Lithium's REST APIs to create an externalization channel to migrate the most useful articles from Tech Zone to Cisco.com.  Moreover, we extended our platform to enable our partners to collaborate with us on joint customer opportunities and challenges, and to retain these interactions as part of corporate memory.   The business impact for Cisco's TAC grew significantly in 2013 due to increasing participation driven by further integration of the Lithium platform within the existing workflow, mobile access, and content externalization.  Articles published on Cisco.com that resulted from collaboration within Tech Zone received 1.7 million views and saved Cisco nearly $10M due to case avoidance from February 2013 through January 2014.  The rate of cost savings due to external articles has grown significantly each quarter, and this trend is projected to continue.  For example, the quarterly cost savings increased by 48% over the last two fiscal quarters.   The Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) is staffed by over 3,000 engineers; this team spans 20 TAC facilities worldwide, bringing support to Cisco customers in over 180 countries and in 17 different languages.  Cisco's TAC, enhanced by Lithium's capabilities, continues to change the way engineers think about collaboration with robust, organic Social Knowledge Management Environments.  Powered by Cisco’s Intellectual Capital Transformation group (ICT), Tech Zone has become a preferred channel for these engineers to collaborate, share and publish valuable content directly to customers via the web or mobile applications.  Since its launch over two years ago, Tech Zone has transformed not only the way TAC manages their intellectual capital but how Cisco communicates, collaborates, and serves partners and customers.  In addition, Tech Zone influences other engineering and consulting business units inside Cisco seeking similar benefits from Social Knowledge Management Environments.            Since its origins, Tech Zone has been pushing the boundaries of what a Social Knowledge Management Environment (SKME) is and what it can become. In addition to Lithium out of the box capabilities, we have enhanced the collaboration experience of the engineers with features such as:        Raise Hand Subscription The "raise hand" feature allows users to draw attention to a discussion in progress in order to ask for additional help. This feature was enhanced by allowing users to subscribe to raised hand events, enabling community experts to be easily notified when other engineers need assistance.     You can enable this subscription under your My Settings > Notification Settings            Solution Buddy Solution Buddy powers the reuse of the Tech Zone content by automatically surfacing relevant content directly within the salesforce.com interface that will assist the engineer in solving the customer issue quickly without the need to search or leave the salesforce.com interface.            Externalization Workflow Leveraging Lithium REST APIs, we created a path from within Tech Zone to externalize valuable content to our corporate website at Cisco.com. In addition to powering the externalization channel, we created a publishing lifecycle widget that lets engineers know the state of articles within the externalization pipeline:            Collaborative Review for External Publication To reduce redundant efforts to externally publish the same article, engineers can now see and join other engineers that are preparing an article. If no engineers are working on the same article, the default option is 'Initiate External Publication'. However, if engineers are already working on the document, others may 'Join'. Engineers may 'Unjoin' at any time, and if the engineer is the last to 'Unjoin',  the available option is 'Cancel External Process'.     Example actions for collaborating on external publication of documents        Related Content One of the key missions of Tech Zone is promoting content reuse. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we want to ensure engineers are consuming and leveraging already existing content, and adding to it as appropriate. With this in mind, we developed a widget that returns articles and posts containing content similar to the one being viewed (especially content related to the linked case in salesforce.com).            Empower External Publication of Naturally Captured Content Discussions that have accepted solutions will trigger the button "Share it for External Publication". This button triggers the Lithium feature "Start Article" from a discussion.          Me Too Integration with Case Linkages We enhanced the Lithium "Me Too" feature by triggering a pop-up to capture the case number in which the engineer is facing the same issue as described in the thread.        Label Widget We implemented a widget to highlight the labels assigned to the article being viewed. If the engineer clicks any of these labels, a list of all articles containing that label is presented.            Injecting Content Impact into Federated Search Results Results from our enterprise search engine now take into consideration the Content Quality Factor (CQF), which means the most valuable and useful content will be presented at the top of the search results. In addition, discussion threads with posts marked as Accepted Solutions will also appear at the top of the results.    Tech Zone's success is the result of three main components:   End-to-End Content Creation and Consumption: Collaborations between TAC engineers often contain large amounts of information spread out over multiple emails, messages, and tools. Tech Zone is able to act as an environment that captures and compiles these chunks of information into cohesive articles that can be cataloged and later referenced by engineers experiencing similar problems. The most helpful articles are published outside Cisco where they can be directly consumed by customers either on the corporate website or via the Cisco mobile application.   Fully Integrated Workflow: Tech Zone takes collaboration to the next level by not only providing an environment for TAC engineers to work together, but also integrates within the existing TAC workflow.  The Solution Buddy application binds Tech Zone with the TAC engineer case handling tool, MyWorkZone (Salesforce.com), to surface relevant Tech Zone content for assisting engineers in solving open customer issues.   Solution Buddy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyhbWZ4L3s   Reputation and Gamification: Gamification is leveraged to drive user engagement and innovation. Tech Zone recently launched a competition called "Knowledge Champions League" to empower engineers and drive the creation of valuable content in their respective technology spaces by teaming them up with similar engineers from different countries. Winners will be able to travel around the world to meet their colleagues.   Another successful gamification initiative was the “Best Greasemonkey Widget Contest,” for which engineers competed to create widgets that could enhance the Tech Zone user experience. Over 300 engineers submitted unique widgets and several were selected by the engineers to be implemented directly into Tech Zone.   1) Value Tech Zone initially focused on creating an internal repository for content that TAC engineers could leverage to collaborate, improve, and reuse to better solve customers’ cases. The next step was to share this content with Cisco's customers by externalizing TAC-authored content from Tech Zone to the Cisco website. These externalized articles have saved Cisco a total of nearly $10 million from February 2013 to January 2014.   2) Participation Participation in Tech Zone has skyrocketed since its launch. Tech Zone's user base has increased by 103% since 2012 to more than 26,500 registered users and content has grown by 145% to more than 23,300 TAC-authored articles. Although Tech Zone initially targeted TAC engineers, the user base has grown exponentially; so much so that the original TAC engineers represent only 21.6% of the population of Tech Zone.     Feedback from TAC engineers:    "Tech Zone has given a lot to TAC newbies like me and I sure would want to give back in whatever way I can!" - Vinay Raichur, Voice TAC Engineer from India    “This is an excellent website, I didn't know this existed until a couple days ago. The reason I like Tech Zone is the contributors are doing a fantastic job explaining concepts in simple and easy to understand language. I myself was able to understand quite a few concepts.” - Rahul Munot, Sales Engineer from US   Tech Zone has successfully created a model for dynamic corporate memory, displaying how knowledge can be leveraged, not only internally, but externally across Cisco as well. So well, in fact, that other organizations within Cisco and Cisco partners have requested Social Knowledge Management Environments similar to Tech Zone.   3) Mobility Starting December 2013, content from Tech Zone has been included in the new Mobile application (Cisco Technical Support), available for both iOS and Android. Since then, there have been almost 18,000 application downloads, and TAC authored articles from Tech Zone have received a total of almost 12,000 mobile views. The addition of these documents to the Cisco Technical Support mobile app has been well received by the Tech Zone community.   Feedback from customers:   "[Tech Zone Docs] are the publicly available documents that TAC has written to recommended best practices or address common customer issues, and many of them are pure gold! …Priceless" - Review by Ethan Banks, Network Architect, Chase Paymentech Solutions, Co- Host of Packet Pushers  
Company: British Gas   Entry submitted by: Louisa Martin (louisamartin) Social Media Manager- Communities Social channels: https://www.facebook.com/britishgas, https://twitter.com/britishgas Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfact... See more...
Company: British Gas   Entry submitted by: Louisa Martin (louisamartin) Social Media Manager- Communities Social channels: https://www.facebook.com/britishgas, https://twitter.com/britishgas Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   British Gas is the UK’s leading energy supplier, serving around 11 million homes, as well as providing energy to nearly one million UK business supply points. Affordability is a key concern for both residential and business customers and our extensive coverage is both a strength and a responsibility. Our challenge in 2014, as an energy industry, is to innovate to drive growth and service excellence while continuing to work hard to win our customers’ trust. We are working with our customers to change British Gas for the better.     Genuinely Helpful customer care and Meaningful Conversations   British Gas ventured into the social media world, with  no clear direction, guidance or understanding of how to operate in this area. 18 months ago we had 4 people skilled to deal with contacts on Twitter and Facebook however, we only had 1 person responding to contacts for c6 hrs per day and this was only if calls were not busy or they weren’t needed on webchat.   Today we have a team of 16FTE responding from 8am to 10pm 7 days.   We have an always on approach and interact with commentators not only coming to our channels for customer care, but people talking about life events and situations, where we feel we can be genuinely helpful to them through personalised conversations and content. This is how we see Social Media for us moving forward:   ‘To lead British Gas to Smooth Running, by having millions of meaningful & helpful conversations...   Building trust in a brand where little exists today   Our customers are at the heart of everything we do, every time we speak with them   We asked all our followers across Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for their opinions, to make sure we could meet their expectations.   Response Times 17% of customers expect to be responded to in under 1 hour 34% want a response within a few hours 36% are happy with the end of the day 13% are happy to wait a couple of days   This points to the fact customer don’t want an immediate response, they just want the right response   What are they interested in? 62% come for customer service 61% for Energy saving tips 61% want money saving tips   This shows us our followers don’t want us to sell to them through our content but they want us to help them reduce their bills through helpful advice and information.   So how did we change and try to rebuild trust?   LSW This allowed our social care team to spend time dealing with the customer instead of filling our excel spreadsheets, whilst all our MI was taken care of by the platform.   Response Times Our customers said they didn’t need an immediate response, this allows us to take the time to make sure we do everything for the customer and as a result have set our General response time to 2.5hrs. However, we believe response times do matter, when they matter. We therefore differentiate between different situations: Vulnerable customers 30mins – Having heating or not can be a life or death situation for our most vulnerable customers. LSW allows us to recognise these and prioritise, so they are dealt with immediately. Time sensitive (appointments) 45mins – Tweeting asking us where an engineer is, when you need to go on the school run, is a priority, in that moment.   Multi-Skilled agents 74% of customers contacting us have already contact BG through another channel and have been failed by that channel, we had to make sure when they came through to us, we were the final contact. Against standard procedure in British Gas, we have upskilled the social care team across all business areas, with a target of less than 10% of contacts being transferred out of the team.   Responsive and no flushing We believe everyone who mentions British Gas has the right to have their comment read. Our care team then make the decision on whether to respond or not. We respond to 93% of comments across Facebook and Twitter and choose not to respond to continual trollers or commentators who we are in Legal dispute with.   What did our customers think about the changes?   NPS All customer care conversations are issued with our NPS survey with our key questions representing the increases below, after changing the way we work and putting the customer first:   On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being not at all likely and 10 being extremely likely, how likely are you to recommend British Gas to a friend, family member or colleague? -9 Mar 2014 +18 Mar 2015   What is your overall opinion of British Gas on Social Media? (Top 3 box – customers who rated us Good, Very good or Excellent) 85% Mar 2014 100% Mar 2015   How would you rate the social media team who deal with your enquiry (Top 3 box – customers who rated us Good, Very good or Excellent) and Top box (Excellent) Mar 2014 Top 3 box 80% and Top box 70% Mar 2015 Top 3 box 100% and Top box 82%   These results represent significant changes to the way our customers see British Gas and interact with us on our social channels. Agent scores and channel opinion are significantly higher than voice, email and webchat and over the next 12 months we will work with these channels to feedback how the social media way of working, can be integrated into their areas. Ownership and full resolution in one contact is of paramount importance to social media care and this is now coming through in our results.   We’re doing something with Lithium no-one else is...   Proactive conversations – We’re doing something with Lithium no-one else is...   This year we have been reaching out to social media commentators who are in situations where they need help, but not mentioning British Gas. We’re having 800+ meaningful conversations per month with people to rebuild trust in our brand. We’ve worked closely with Neerav, Luke and the LSW team to manipulate the platform so these conversations can be identified, brought in and served to the appropriate team. This activity is about rebuilding trust in a brand, where it doesn’t exist anymore. If a commentator is talking about having a cold shower due to a broken boiler, we’re intercepting the conversation with a link to a self diagnosis tool on our website. This isn’t about selling our Home Service products, this is simply about showing the commentator we can be helpful. We step away from the customer once we have sent the helpful content and don't re-engage, unless the customer asks for it. Behavioural economics show, by being helpful in these types of situation, if presented with your brand in the future, you will be perceived in a more favourable light.   LSW allows us to have these conversations with influential commentators by delivering conversations from commentators over preset Klout.   This strategy is helping us build relationships with key influencers and stakeholders and has had a +5 impact on our brand sentiment score.   Proactive Conversations These conversations are having a +7pt impact on our brand sentiment, helping us combat comments similar to:     
Company:  Covered California/Campbell Ewald Entry submitted by: Amanda McCartney  (Senior Marketing Specialist) Community:  https://www.facebook.com/CoveredCA/ https://www.facebook.com/CoveredCAEspanol https://twitter.com/CoveredCA htt... See more...
Company:  Covered California/Campbell Ewald Entry submitted by: Amanda McCartney  (Senior Marketing Specialist) Community:  https://www.facebook.com/CoveredCA/ https://www.facebook.com/CoveredCAEspanol https://twitter.com/CoveredCA https://twitter.com/CoveredCA_es Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Covered California is California’s health insurance marketplace, established by the Affordable Care Act. It is the only place to receive financial assistance to make health coverage more affordable. Over two million Californians served.     Our customer satisfaction initiatives in 2015 In the fall of 2014, with the second Open Enrollment period approaching, Covered California was faced with a decision.   During the first year, its social media channels had been frequently visited by ideological opponents, some of whom antagonized Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) supporters and dissuaded potential customers from enrolling. At the same time, there were thousands of incoming posts and messages from distressed customers seeking assistance – many going unaddressed.   Concerns over purpose, functionality, practicality, and public relations were raised. Was it worth it to maintain social channels? Or, could these channels be turned in to functional marketing and customer support platforms? The latter path was chosen, and just in time for the start of Open Enrollment 2, Covered California embraced the Lithium Social Web platform in November 2014 as the solution to its customer service woes on social media.    With a mandate to offer a robust, responsive customer support channel option, a team was deployed using the LSW platform to handle Covered California’s thousands of incoming posts. By the end of Open Enrollment 2 in February 2015, and with a small team of four agents, Covered California Social Support successfully handled over 17,000 conversations with a 73% TAR (responses within 2 hours). This performance was celebrated as a success – Covered California’s social channels were no longer seen as a liability, but an opportunity.   Months later, and with a new agency, goals for the Social Customer Support Team remained high – seeking even faster response times and improved customer sentiment. For Open Enrollment 3 in Fall 2015, conversation sentiment conversion was tracked, showing a direct reduction of ‘negative’ and ‘neutral’ posts by half, with increased ‘positive’ sentiment (250%+). The team also improved TAR to 82% within 2 hours. Improving sentiment, responding more quickly and thoroughly, and converting upset customers into fans. Goals met.   The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via Lithium implementation   Covered California, being the largest state-based insurance exchange program, is in a unique position. It is a new governmental institution, offering exclusive services and savings to Californians, who are [now] required to purchase health insurance. Since the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, millions of Americans have had questions about what to do and where to get coverage/access health insurance.   The requirement, or “individual mandate,” elicits strong reactions in both support and opposition, expressed often on social media.   The solution is Covered California offering responsive, friendly, informative, and patient social support for consumers who are often frustrated or confused with the recent and significant changes in health care policy.   Using Lithium Social Web, the Covered California Customer Support Team is able to easily organize, prioritize, and quickly respond to the thousands of incoming posts. It has also allowed Covered California to build relationships with customers by thoroughly answering their questions, offering assistance, and escalating their issues when necessary.   Through these efforts, numerous customer issues are resolved via social media without the need for the customer to call the Covered California Service Center – which, particularly during Open Enrollment, can be overwhelmed.   The Covered California Customer Support Team is small (growing to six during Open Enrollment 3), but is prepared to address any issue that may arise. The team has successfully transformed Covered California’s social accounts into effective customer support platforms, helping thousands of Californians get the health coverage they need. Below are direct quotes from customers after receiving assistance from the team:     Our metrics   All below stats from Open Enrollment 3 – Nov 1, 2015 - Jan 31, 2016 – Covered California’s busiest time of year:   23,742 posts received à 13,965 Conversations handled and closed à 6,713 replies posted 82% response rate within 2 hour target goal Conversation sentiment conversion: Positive increased 250%, Neutral reduced 51%, Negative reduced 50%     Due to the success of social customer support during Open Enrollment 2, Covered California put more dollars behind promoting content in Open Enrollment 3 to increase reach, engagement, and fan/follower growth. The campaign was successful, resulting in an increase across all channels, especially Spanish-language, highlighting a demand for in-language assistance for California’s Latino community.   Growth November December January TOTAL GROWTH New Facebook Fans (English) 1,422 3,445 6,725 11,592 New Facebook Fans (Spanish) 1,248 448 2,975 4,671 New Twitter Followers (English) 316 624 522 1,462 New Twitter Followers (Spanish) 39 52 198 289    
Company:  Electronic Arts Entry submitted by:  Jennifer Hughes (Director WWCE Social & Community) Community: Answers HQ  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star      The Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) organization provides supp... See more...
Company:  Electronic Arts Entry submitted by:  Jennifer Hughes (Director WWCE Social & Community) Community: Answers HQ  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star      The Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) organization provides support to customers across all the games that Electronic Arts (EA) publishes. The Social and Community team manages the Answers HQ Community and engages with players on social media channels. To provide the best customer experience, there for our players where they need us, when they need us. Social media and online communities are an integral part of our customer experience strategy and an important way that we support and engage with our players.   The AHQ online community is significant, with over 10.8M registered users and more than 277k new topics over the past year across five languages. In LSW, we monitor 75 social media channels with over 11.2M posts in the past year. Having an integrated approach to total community provides our team with a consistent experience that can be measured in LSI.   Total Community Details We have used Lithium Community for AHQ since its inception in 2012. In 2014, we added LSW for social media workflow.   LSW Each game that EA publishes has a unique brand and social media presence, resulting in a large volume of social media to monitor. We have leveraged LSW to manage these channels through 42 queues, 6 priorities, and 95 tags. We use custom close reasons to get the reporting that we need.   We recently deepened our unified approach by adding the Lithium Community into LSW for improved workflow capabilities. This addition enables us to prioritize incoming topics based on the types of issues that the community cannot solve in place. We expect to see an improvement in response times and first response rates.   Lithium Community AHQ is a player-to-player support community at its core, but it also allows for enthusiast conversations. Again, supporting many different titles we have used Lithium to provide a different look, feel, and overall experience for EA’s different games.     We have deployed a number of different features that make AHQ a robust community with high levels of participation. Instead of our customers calling in to report a game bug, the online contact routing system takes them directly to AHQ for self reporting. From there, we report bugs to studios and provide updates to players. AHQ also has a exceptional badging system that acknowledges community participation. We have issued over 7.4M badges since launching the program in September 2015.   LSI We Having detailed bulk data allows us to slice and dice our community and gain valuable insights, especially when connected with other data sources. The direct integration of community posts into our CRM tool allows for a unified 360-degree view across chat, phone, email, and Answers HQ. Community and social media data plays a vital role in helping us understand the full customer journey. We also use this data as an early warning system for emerging issues. The ability to tap seamlessly into a wealth of information provided by Lithium APIs is driving actions that are improving the overall customer experience with EA.   Total Community Advantage By working with one partner to leverage both the Lithium community and LSW to execute our social media and community support, we work more efficiently with a holistic strategy that best supports our players.  
Company: BRP  Entry submitted by: Jasmin Boudreau (Jasmin) Community Manager Community: BRP Community (https://community.bossweb.brp.com), a private B2B community Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer     BRP: Who we are, wha... See more...
Company: BRP  Entry submitted by: Jasmin Boudreau (Jasmin) Community Manager Community: BRP Community (https://community.bossweb.brp.com), a private B2B community Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer     BRP: Who we are, what we do and what’s our story!   BRP is the world leader in the design, manufacturing, distribution and marketing of motorized recreational vehicles and power sports engines. BRP products are distributed in over 100 countries by more than 3,500 dealers and distributors.   What makes your heart race? How often to you take the time to smile ear to ear and share good time with your family   We push ourselves for it. We come together to earn it. We try and try and try again to reach that prize. It's our motivation, our inspiration to move forward. It's the reason why we stand back up every time we fall. What are we talking about?   We are the company that invented the snowmobile and we`ve built 3,000,000 sleds to date!!!!!     We are not bringing you to the water; we are the company that brings the water to YOU.     We believe in a world where everyone can experience the exhilaration of the open road.     The riders. The ultimate rush. The Can-AM off-road thrills are never-ending.     LIVING THE LIFESTYLE. SHARING THE PASSION.   Take a deeper look at our culture in this short but powerful video: BRP - The history is made of stories   Now that you have a better understanding of who we are and what we do, you will better understand why we did our transformation and the pressure was high. We will also show you all of the reasons that explain why we deserve this award.   The Organization Game Changer   The BRP Community links all of the BRP dealerships and BRP together across the world to share advice, technical expertise and to connect in a completely different way. This community is the ONLY one in the power sports industry.   Our Community is a private Business to Business community and has been active since February 2012. We are still relatively young but have shown a tremendous growth and success since our go-live.   For years our North America after-sales support department have supported our dealer network by picking up the phone and answering questions. Considering our large dealer network, our continual growth of business, the complexity of vehicles and the large call volumes, we needed to change our methods of supporting our dealers.   Combined with the complexity of questions, the increasing volume of requests, the dealer survey results and the on-going frustration of not being able to provide more added–value in our customer lives, we decided it was time to change. We needed to look at the service experience and the structure of our after-sales department to address the challenges our network was facing in their day to day and meet their expectations of our company.   We decided to change our call center to a contact center by using new technologies to move towards a Dealer service transformation (DST).   2013 was the year of transformation for our BRP North-American after-sales service team and we changed the way we interacted with our dealers.   The changes took place with 4 key pillars 1)    Leveraging our Knowledge center 2)    Increasing the community usage and integrating it in our dealer`s day to day operations 3)    Introduction of webcases to receive questions from our dealers 4)    Changing the team structure to support our dealers by Regional Teams accessible via multiple channels instead of reaching departments and silos.   What does this mean to you, to us, to our customers?    We want to make sure our customer’s vehicles are fixed right the first time and that our customers never lose a ride!   Where Lithium does comes into play against our business goals?     The BRP Community powered by Lithium is a critical asset in our transformation.   “We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are!”   At this point, we are no longer a call center but rather a complete hands-on contact center.   Whenever a Dealer in service is looking for BRP information the 4 steps we ask them to take are the following: 1- First look on the Knowledge Center.   Dealers can now type a VIN (vehicle identification number or serial number) or use the keyword box to search hundreds of articles and technical information related to the unit in their service bay. They now have access to a VIN centric tool simplifying the amount of time and effort to have the information right away. They now have access to the best knowledge information from our top technicians 24/7 without calling in.   Our networking is consulting over 43 000 technical articles per year. 2. Go to Community and use the search tool for the network to provide support.   Our dealers can now follow BRP in this live environment and be informed on a daily basis on all parts, technical, and warranty related questions or any other after-sales service topics within this one stop shop. It’s also allowing them to access other techs around the globe. It’s given the chance for dealers to leverage the thousands of years of experience with BRP vehicles where before they were limited to their facility.   In the last 3 months, during our biggest Ski-doo season, we saw amazing numbers on our Community. Over 865 000 pages were viewed by 41 000 visitors. Remember, we are in a B2B environment so we are limited in the amount of users we can have and we need to keep them coming.   Again, this is not a typical community with customers coming in for their own personal interests. These are technicians and service managers that are taking time from their typical day to day activities to go in an environment that isn’t truly natural to them. Considering these users are not computer enthusiast, they could have felt that an online community was a waste of time and money but this was not the case as we see them coming back over and over again. This demonstrates our true success.      In the event they didn't find they were looking for, the step 3 comes into play. 3. Dealers can also submit a Webcase to get support from our Regional Teams.   We now have an online webcase system that allows for dealers to reach us whenever they feel the need to send inquires. We can prioritize their requests and within the same dedicated amount of time we will answer them. No more wait times on the phone, nor do they need to adjust their needs with our schedule.   We can provide a direct answer through the webcase and point them in the direction of the Knowledge Center or Community when necessary.   4. The Contact Center: For more complex or pressing issues, the BRP phone service also supported by our Regional Team is also available for our dealers. We receive hundreds and hundreds phone calls from our network.   Because of our Knowledge Center, Community and Webcase tool dealers can now use the time to phone us in order to discuss more complex issues without being rushed or having to wait on hold for long periods of time. Why is BRP the ideal candidate for this award?   We are the only manufacturer in the entire power sport industry with a dealer community (B2B) in place.  This is a tremendous achievement for our organization to have such innovation and success while being able to have our dealer network support this change.   The dealers, mostly multi-brands, are recognizing the power and benefits of our approach. It was a very big challenge for BRP to have them change their habits of going from phone to using our online community. We`ve heard so many times at the beginning of this transformation: “I don’t want my tech to lose time on the internet.” Or “I’m paying him to wrench, not to push keys on a keyboard” and the typical “Why would I spend time using your tool if I can just call you?”   Today we are no longer getting these comments, we are simply getting accolades and dealers will tell you that they cannot imagine working without these tools.   We are a Canadian company using technologies to outperform larger American or international competitors. It’s not an unfair battle; it’s a question of innovation, creativity and passion.   One of the ways to define our culture and company comes from this short video: The ultimate power sport experience - BRP the power to the go!   The partnership, a similar culture and passion and the will to change   The partnership between Lithium and BRP becomes a natural fit for our transformation but also falls within our culture of passion and willingness to do more for our customers and to strive in being the best at what we do.   The BRP community helps in so many ways:   Increasing shop efficiency and faster turnaround time: It’s much easier for our dealers to get answers to fix units of customers: The service is never closed at BRP since the community connects the planet together.   Securing vehicles that are fixed right the first time It’s allowing dealers to find the right information in minimal time and preventing customers to have to bring back the vehicle due to an improper fix.   Better CSI scores and greater chances of not losing a week-end of fun:  It’s helping dealers increasing the customer satisfaction by increasing technician’s knowledge and skills.   Service experience and greater connection between BRP and the dealer network: It’s allowing BRP to secure strategic initiatives to help secure MOTs (Moment of truth). The service MOT is one of the key pillars for our customer satisfaction.   Access to our partners in ways we never seen before: It’s allowing BRP to receive instant feed-back from our network in a real time environment and benefit from a continuous communication stream.   Remove pressure on our Contact center: The users and the MVPs in the community are allowing us to focus on more complex cases and offer added-value where it counts while the rest of the network is supporting each other by deflecting request to us and allowing dealers to have answers outside our business hours.   The question you have: Yes, that's all nice but what does it mean in numbers?   Within our closed environment where we operate with a limited amount of dealers and distributors, our metrics are not the same as the typical B2C ou P2P. For others, our metrics may look marginal but for us, and based on Lithium internal benchmark, we know we have outstanding results and a fantastic story to share.  History is made of stories; our story can also be understood with numbers.   We have seen incredible growth in 2013.  In the last 12 months Overall posts: 41 000 and 80% growth Logins: 1 344 000 and 134% growth User sessions: 1 200 000 and 252% growth Accepted solutions: 3 100 and 77% growth Searches: 100 000 and 51% growth Combining theses metrics to some of the previous numbers on the community we`ve shared at the beginning of this submission, you can see our dealer support transformation unfolding right before your eyes.   We truly believe that The Organization Game Changer award is meant for us. We have changed the communication method used by a thousand dealers after decades of habits; We were able to completely remodel and reshape our internal departments to remove silos; We leveraged new technologies to everyone’s benefit; We now have put the customer at the center of the operations.   More importantly, all of this transformation wasn’t possible if we didn’t have a strong community, powered by Lithium, supporting our goal and vision.    What are our next challenges? We will find new creative ways to push these innovations and support mechanism to uncharted territories and show our competition, within our industry, that we are true leaders. Everywhere & every time we put our mind, passion and efforts in our service and in our products is one more step closer towards providing our customers the ultimate experience.   You don’t believe it? If we did this, nothing can stop us. Just  Watch us!   --------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the following deck to better understand the overall transformation that took place in 2013 in our NA after-sales department:                                
Company: AT&T  Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww) Social Media- Sr. Strategy Manager Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://att.com/forums) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier comm... See more...
Company: AT&T  Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww) Social Media- Sr. Strategy Manager Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://att.com/forums) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier communications holding company and one of the most honored companies in the world. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and internationally.   The AT&T Community was founded in 2002 as a place for AT&T wireless customers to engage in online peer-to-peer support. Initially, the community continued to grow with minimal investment from AT&T. However, in 2010, two main factors stagnated community growth:   1.         Fragmented engagement that resulted from additional product lines being added to the community.  (A U-verse community was added in July, 2007, and a DSL/Internet community in August, 2009.) 2.         Consumers were turning to social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and other unbranded communities.   At the same time, the proliferation of connected consumers led to a drastic increase in customers which expected to get support from and engage directly with brands on digital channels.   From 2002 until 2012, the AT&T Community was home to a group of grassroots community leaders, a combination of citizen and advocate influencers participating in the forum and providing support. The community leaders engaged in discussions and answered questions in their areas of expertise with little interaction with each other. The solutions provided on the forums - a key metric for a support community - stalled with no signs of growth, despite community leader participation.   In 2011, AT&T leadership made the strategic decision to increase investment in the community to help customers get support 24/7 on social channels. We knew an appealing program would drive success by spurring our influencers to engage in more dialogs, create more solutions, and give us feedback. We needed their participation to improve the quality of our content and get valuable feedback on multiple initiatives.   We created an influencer program – the “Award for Community Excellence” (ACE)” - to formally identify and engage both citizen and advocate influencers. In preparation for a late 2012 launch, we engaged experienced outside vendors – including Lithium - to ensure we created a scalable, sustainable program. They analyzed the opportunity, performed a competitive analysis and aligned our team on influencer business objectives.  We concluded that we needed to improve the reach and connectivity of the influencer network, the ability of individuals to influence both content and their own presence, and the degree of enthusiasm towards the AT&T Community.   AT&T delivered the ACE program which identified and nominated outstanding community achievement. Selection methodology has two steps: First, a quantitative analysis determines users who demonstrate top participation in the community based on key metrics, and second, we perform a qualitative analysis to evaluate whether or not those top users embody the influencer attributes we wish to recognize. The quantitative analysis is performed by pulling the metrics for the community members and applying an algorithm that ranks them based on the number of posts they made, solutions they provided and kudos they received. (Kudos are a feature that allows one community member to say “thanks!” to another community member.) We then narrow the list of members under consideration to those who scored above the standard deviation of the dataset. Our community managers then use a qualitative scorecard to grade each member’s performance against key influencer attributes. We use a three-point scale to grade each member on:   •           Exhibiting a neutral to positive degree of enthusiasm towards AT&T •           Having visited the community recently •           Frequency of posts •           Quality of their replies •           Two-way engagement with community members and AT&T •           Authority, credibility and expertise   We established a cutoff score from the resulting scorecard to identify potential recipients (nominees) of the Award for Community Excellence (ACE.)    Program components include:   a. “ACE of the Month” recognition in the public community and “with photo” in the private ACE category  On our home and on our category pages:      In the private ACE blog:     b. Monthly newsletter (in our first-ever use of the blog style) c. Custom signature green-ribbon badge d. Unique ACE role (ranks include Professor, Guru, Expert, etc.) e. Occasional, infrequent AT&T-branded small gifts f. Personal assistance with any AT&T-related service issue g. Additional moderation privileges   In 2013, we improved the program with: a. Selection and induction of new ACEs b. Creation of a video promoting the ACES linked to from our ACE Page   c. Development of an AT&T Philanthropy program specific to ACEs.  ACEs nominated dozens and ultimately selected five local 501C3 charities to each receive $5,000 gifts from AT&T.   ACEs accompanied AT&T External Affairs managers in delivering checks. ACE dcookie (second from right) and her son with AT&T External Affairs presenting a $5,000 check to the local 501C3 charity she nominated – The Arc of Luzerne County   d. Offering ACEs the opportunity to attend a quarterly conference with AT&T SME’s to cover topics of mutual interest – including community enhancements e. Opportunities for ACEs to trial AT&T online tools   Today the AT&T Community Forums boasts 59 ACEs representing 23 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.  The ACEs represent a cross-section of our Community and our customer base with professions including a chemist, NASA engineer, butter co-op manager, orthodontic assistant, film producer, seamstress, retiree, etc.     Lithium – as our long-time platform partner – worked with us to create:   a. A rotating carrousel of ACE avatars and stats on our home page  b. A dedicated ACE information page to which every ACE signature links c. A private ACE category in which AT&T and the ACEs can communicate freely and within that private space – our first-ever blog usage d. Right-rail recognition of “ACE of the Month” e. A trial of @mentions in the private ACE category In addition, we consult with our Lithium Success Manager frequently to share ideas and Lithium moderators routinely advise of threads of interest involving ACEs.   One of the greatest outcomes of the program is the change in perception of AT&T and the community that has occurred since the program began. Our survey showed that 30 percent of ACEs said that the program improved their opinion of AT&T.  The kudos use has increased by 36 percent since the program launch. This tells us that our members are more engaged and that they find the AT&T Community to be a helpful and supportive environment.    The last and perhaps greatest outcome of the program has been the increase in customer solutions provided on the community. The monthly average solutions have increased by 58 percent since the launch. This increase provides huge benefit back to AT&T by allowing us to focus on assisting customers with other important service needs, since many questions are answered on the AT&T Community. The solutions are high-quality content that can be reused throughout att.com and found in search results.    The ACE program has greatly benefitted AT&T by building stronger relationships with top influencers, who in turn increase their participation on the community and assist customers with answers to support questions.   The program is popular with the ACEs themselves. The ACEs rated their satisfaction with the program as 8.8 out of 10 on our inaugural survey designed to measure ACE experience and gather feedback. ACE achiever Dcookie expressed her appreciation of the program in the ACE Community in February, writing: “… maybe some of us would have never met or chatted if it hadn’t been for us becoming ACEs. I found that there are really good people here that I’m happy to have met. So I thought I’d say, THANKS, to whoever thought of this idea, it was a good decision…”     We are building strong relationships with the ACEs. Before the launch of the ACE program and its improvements, we did not feel that we could engage the top influencers for feedback because we lacked a connection with them. They were on our community helping our customers, but we had no way to formally and consistently thank them. Now we continually learn about them through the ACE of the month posts, collect their feedback and ideas in conference calls and the private ACE Community, connect with them about support issues and keep up an ongoing conversation. In fact, 90 percent of the ACEs cited the connection with AT&T staff (specifically, our full-time ACE program manager) as being a favorite program component in the survey.   Before the launch of the ACE program, top users did not communicate with each other across product lines (e.g. a Wireless top user never crossed paths with a U-verse ® top user). Now the ACEs have great relationships with one another, sharing information and ideas amongst themselves in the private ACE Community. Our survey found that 74 percent of ACEs cited the connection with other ACEs as being another favorite component of the program.  The ACEs regularly congratulate one another for being named ACE of the month or for having one of their solutions highlighted within a support article on att.com.  Recently, a U-verse ACE and a Wireless ACE shared knowledge in the ACE Lounge to solve a product problem. A third ACE chimed in and authored an easily-understood history of telephony that we subsequently published in the larger, public community.  Another ACE has authored his own technical guide.   We are grateful to Lithium for helping build our ACE program.  We’re proud of our ACEs and delighted with the success we’ve seen with the program. We’ve designed the program to be sustainable and enduring and we will continue to recognize and thank exceptional community contributions in the years to come.    
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Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________       ... See more...
Company: BSkyB Entry submitted by: Jenny Stewart (JST03) Community Content Manager Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program ________________________________________________       Best Social Support Program BSkyB 2013   BskyB has become an integral part of our modern entertainment society with in excess of 10 million subscribers across the UK and Ireland.   As part of our core vision of “Believe in Better” we have implemented a multi-platform Customer interaction and engagement model to create a culture of entertaining, exciting and inspiring our Customers. As a pioneer of modern entertainment and Customer service we developed a fully integrated Social support Customer program encapsulating Sky Help Forums, Facebook and Twitter delivering service excellence whenever and wherever our Customers need us.   Our Vision   “To ensure our existing Community and Social Media channels are kept relevant, informative and engaging. To develop emergent channels to engage our current subscribers, enhance our brand/recognition with our Online Customer base.”   Our core goal in implementing a cohesive Customer Service structure is centered upon the integration of our Social Channels and Customer support services, whilst promoting a culture of peer to peer support and online self-help.   Empowering our Customers to utilise the wealth of self-service options online supports the fast paced lifestyles of our Customer base allowing them to access the information they need at the click of a button at a time that suits them. In increasing community traffic and engagement, we have identified a core improvement in Customer first time resolution, Customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Scores.   Our Strategy   Our core methodology within Sky is “Believe in Better” from investing in our Customers, our product and our people we have created a culture of continuous improvement and development. Our social support streams are unique in their integration as a cohesive Social Customer Support program combining an end to end Customer experience.   The Sky Help Forum launched in October 2010 since then our community has grown to nearly 250,000 registered users, which is 250% up on last year.   We have seen our engagement on the community increase in the last year and we now have 9,708 marked accepted solutions. Over the last six months our thread views have reached in excess of 1.5 million each week.   We have also introduced Ask a Question and a Knowledge Base to help support our Customers in getting an answer to their query or issue quickly.   Our Knowledge Base is proving a great success to both our Community and Sky as a whole. We currently have 65 articles within the Knowledge Base with in excess of 127,813 article views in one month alone (February – March 2013) Our Knowledge Base is fast becoming a “One Stop Shop” for troubleshooting guides, hints & tips and ‘How To’ guides for our Community members and visitors.   To enrich support for our Customers we have expanded our Communities & Social Media team at Sky to incorporate a Community & Engagement team and a Designated Case Handling team. In optimising our Customer Service strategy in terms of social support we have utilised both the traditional Customer insight frameworks based upon KPIs of Customer sentiment, traffic and SEO analysis but also we have implemented a core Customer insight strategy to ensure that we continue to improve the service we offer our audience.   Our Customer insight strategy includes the implementation of Customer direct feedback sessions based both in an online WebEx environment and Customer closeness events to understand the experiences of our Customers. This insight has proved invaluable in the continued improvement of Customer support with the future implementation of gamification and supportive resources. The insight provided in terms of the continued optimisation of our social platforms, use of KPI metrics in terms of sentiment, SEO analytics and Customer satisfaction also support continued improvement across our Contact Centre operations providing key insight into service provision, product insight and Customer engagement thus influencing improvement programs across the organisation.   As part of our Customer improvement initiatives we have launched the One Service Programme offering an individualised Customer support stream within our Contact Centres and our dedicated One Service online Community.   The core ethos of One Service is to provide our Customers with continued Service Excellence in their end to end Customer journey from joining Sky to help and support. The initial One Service programme has launched to a pilot group customer base of 400,000 Customers in a key geographical location.   The measures of success in terms of individualised support have been resoundingly successful in terms of core operational metrics of Customer First Time resolution, Customer satisfaction and NPS. We have introduced brand new online features exclusively for One Service Customers including “My Help Request” that allows our Customers to manage their account and get in touch with us should they have any questions or experience any issues.   The My Help Request Portal is a central hub to raise help requests and manage any existing enquiries related to Sky products and services. All My Help Requests are case managed by our team of specialist trained Sky staff who resolve queries and answer any questions within 24 hours providing updates via text alerts or email.   In offering our Customers multi-platform help it was key that our internal structure in terms of processes and insight was robust and inclusive in terms of shared knowledge and best practice. Developing a core network of Specialists across our varying products and services assures that our audience demographic receives simply great service regardless of their chosen channel. Historically, our internal operational structure and process was designed to support Customer interaction in a standardised contact centre format however, with the inception of help and support across social channels outlining Customer journeys based upon each individual social channel was imperative in offering tailored solutions based on the method of contact.   Our core Customer Response Management system is now reflective of each individual Customer’s journey across all products and contact channels. Individual case management of each Customer’s enquiries across both our Lithium Social Monitoring/Social interaction platform and our internal Customer Response Management system provides a holistic view of each Customer’s activity and interactions allowing our people to provide an individualised service in understanding our Customers.   “Just knowing this has been achieved with the customer only needing their use of their smartphone/tablet/laptop opens up a world of possibilities. No more waiting on hold, no more call flows or robotic responses, just 100% satisfaction! And the best part of it all? The system is still in its infancy and will get even better with future updates!” - Dave Charleston, Community Co-Ordinator   Outcome/Results   As a pioneer of multi-platform entertainment and Customer interaction we continue to develop new and innovative ways to engage and offer support to our Customers. From Social Media to Interactive help via their Remote Control we have assured that our Customers are at the heart of our business.   The introduction of social interaction across multiple platforms has shown not only seen an increase in interactivity– over 82,000 interactions per month - but an increase in Customer satisfaction to 87%. Similarly, NPS for both Twitter and Chat Services has also increased substantially to 61% and 64% respectively.   In addition to increased usage and satisfaction, BSkyB has seen significant savings through call deflection with circa 11% Customers saying their visit to the forum partially resolved their query; and a further 29% of customers surveyed within the forum stating their query had been fully resolved to their satisfaction negating the requirement to contact us via telephone.   “I think that our use of social media along with our own in-house help forum is second to none due to the interaction we are enabled to have with our customers. Actually dealing with their inquiries through this form of communication allows us to deal with a customer at a time which is convenient for them, but it also allows us to deal with a customer from their initial query all the way through to a resolution for the most part.” - Fraser Hughes, Community Co-Ordinator      
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Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz), Jason Hurst (jashurst), Joana Dehanov (jdurande), Social Knowledge Program Managers Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Support Savings MV... See more...
Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz), Jason Hurst (jashurst), Joana Dehanov (jdurande), Social Knowledge Program Managers Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.   At Cisco customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success.   Cisco's Support Community   The Services Business Capabilities team at Cisco has leveraged Lithium's capabilities to empower engineers in Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to easily capture knowledge created through collaboration, reuse it internally, and share it directly with Cisco customers. We implemented more than 80 custom components within the Lithium platform to deliver a solution called Tech Zone to the TAC organization that is optimized for their needs and integrated into their workflow. The TAC is staffed by over 3,000 engineers spanning 20 facilities worldwide, bringing support to Cisco customers in over 180 countries in 17 different languages. Tech Zone has become a preferred channel for TAC engineers to collaborate, and has transformed not only the way TAC manages their intellectual capital but how Cisco communicates, collaborates, and serves its partners and customers.   Our Innovations   Since its origins, Tech Zone has pushed the boundaries of what a Social Knowledge Management Environment is and what it can become. With the goal of empowering our support engineers to solve customer problems quickly and effectively, we have expanded the core capabilities of the Lithium platform by implementing many custom features to enhance the collaboration experience, streamline the support workflow, and provide additional channels for sharing content. Some examples are:   Raised Hand Subscription The "raise hand" feature allows users to draw attention to a discussion in progress in order to ask for additional help. Subject matter experts can subscribe to raised hand events as they do to other content, allowing them to be immediately notified when other engineers need assistance. Solution Buddy An internally developed tool we call Solution Buddy uses the Lithium APIs to integrate the platform with the salesforce.com instance TAC engineers use to manage support cases. It powers reuse of Tech Zone content by automatically surfacing relevant content within the salesforce.com interface, thereby enabling engineers to find answers to customer problems quickly without the need to search or leave their case management platform. It also lets them link relevant Tech Zone content to support cases, thus helping others solve similar problems in the future. Flag for Improvement With the proliferation of articles in Tech Zone, content was becoming outdated or sometimes contained errors. We addressed this by implementing a document maintenance process. Users can click a link to flag any article that needs improvement. Then they must choose an option that describes why they flagged it (critical information needed, inaccurate information, duplicate content, etc.) and provide comments explaining what needs updating. Flagged articles enter a Knowledge Base Article Dashboard re-purposed to manage the process of moving them through the improvement workflow, and an email notification is sent to the users responsible for the article. Those users then submit changes for review by the flagger or moderator. When the changes are accepted, the article is updated and exits the flagged state.   The screen shot below shows an article that has been flagged for improvement. The next available actions are shown in the Actions widget, which in different states could be: Flag for Improvement, Suggest Additional Improvements, Improvements Completed, and Review Improvements. Article Publication Workflow Leveraging Lithium REST APIs, we automated the process of publishing Tech Zone articles to our corporate website at Cisco.com and our mobile support app. Sharing the most valuable articles in Tech Zone multiplies their value by enabling customers to quickly find their own answers when and where they need them, thereby reducing the number of support cases they need to open. When an engineer reaches the rank of Associate Level 1 by participating in the community, they are given permission to "Nominate [Articles] for External Publication" from the Actions widget. Nominated articles are reviewed by technology specialists known as Technical Content Engineers, who then forward them to Technical Writers for further review and formatting before they are published to Cisco.com. The user interface includes links to move the article to the next step of the process and manage which users are collaborating to review the article. A Publishing Life Cycle widget lets users know the state of articles within the publishing pipeline.     Business Impact   Our innovations have increased productivity and reduced costs. The business impact driven by Tech Zone has grown significantly since the community was launched.   User activity in Tech Zone has increased steadily each year. We have driven user engagement through the unique use of leaderboards, and competitions such as Knowledge Champions League and TACode. As of the end of March 2015 there have been: 55,000+ Discussions Started 201,000+ Replies 32,000+ Articles Created 44,000+ Article Kudos 18,000+ Article Case Links 1,700+ Articles published to Cisco.com Our engagement initiatives and innovations both promote and facilitate user activity that leads to cost savings. Tech Zone articles shared with customers by publishing to Cisco.com and our mobile support app have saved Cisco over $24M so far this fiscal year (Aug 2014 through Mar 2015) by avoiding additional support cases, and are projected to save over $36M by the end of the year (July 2015). Last fiscal year the savings were over $17M, so the savings have nearly doubled year over year.    Cisco has embraced knowledge in an unprecedented way in order to transform our business and drive the success of our customers. The success of Tech Zone has proven that the Lithium platform is much more powerful than discussion boards. By pioneering new methodologies and human-centered behaviors that are not led only by tools, we have evolved to truly "social" knowledge management, which provides just-in-time, as well as institutional learning. Any organization can transition from email communications to a collaborative environment where knowledge valuable to the organization and its customers is naturally captured, enhanced, and reused by the community, and users that create and curate that content can be empowered and recognized. As word of our success spreads, our engagements have expanded to include onboarding Cisco Engineering, Professional Services, and Sales organizations, as well as expanding our technical support community to include Cisco Partners.
Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Sr. Director, Consumer Markets Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ___________________________... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Sr. Director, Consumer Markets Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ___________________________________________________________________   Barclaycard Ring’s innovative online community is a seamless customer experience that integrates five distinct entities (Lithium, Barclaycard, Epsilon, Curata and Survey Gizmo) using service calls, APIs, SSO integration, daily batch files and other methods. For the first time in the financial services industry, a customer can service their account and seamlessly engage in community activities ranging from reading blogs or 3 rd party articles, commenting on discussion threads, earning badges, donating to charity, voting on product features and looking at the bank’s financial stats. A complex set of technical interactions were developed with the vision of a seamless and rich customer experience and Barclaycard Ring fully delivers on that promise.   Seamless Customer Experience Lithium community is seamlessly integrated with Barclaycard servicing site so customers can service their accounts and interact with the community.   Your performance “ring” is built using a custom javascript library that selects from a finite set of images based on a customer’s progress.   Community Financials Financial metrics are systematically sent from Barclaycard data warehouse to Lithium.  The site uses the values to product the graphical displays.   3 rd party content is displayed using the Curata API to retrieve the title, content and URL of “tagged” articles.  Moderation tools developed for Lithium backend are used to support the display of articles.                                                 Gamification The ultimate in credit card gamification: Servicing & Community metrics are evaluated in near real-time to build the 4 color sections of the ring.  A combination of community activity, SSO attributes and daily batch file data are utilized to build the ring.   Product Behavior Badges - A daily batch file from Barclaycard is provided to Lithium to activate or deactivate certain badges.     Refer a Friend Refer a Friend is a module that is presented through the site to encourage customers to share Barclaycard Ring with their friends.  A unique refID is created for track referral applications along with driving the recruiter and campaign manager badges. Barclaycard servicing site is called for the referral ID. If an email is entered then a 3rd party vendor Epsilon deploys the invite.   Polling Community members VOTE on product features. Polls integrate with Survey Gizmo so that each individual’s vote is tracked and survey results are captured using Survey Gizmo API.     Integration with Card Servicing On the card’s servicing page, there is a seamless integration to the community and the main features of the community, including Blog, Financial Stats, Discussions, Refer A Friend and Profile links are presented on this page using the Lithium API.   Profit Sharing Barclaycard Ring shares its profits with members.  Customers see the amount of profit share they’ve received on their personal page. A Barclaycard service is calledto present the exact financial amount.  Customers use the sliding scale to donate their profit share portion to a charity they have selected and the same service is calledto capture the customer’s donation.                                                   Promotional Site BarclaycardRing.com is a public facing site that is part of the same community instanceas the private community, allowing customers to see the benefits of the Barclaycard Ring community as they consider applying for the card.  
Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (jenh) Community Manager/Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Why BarclaycardTrave... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (jenh) Community Manager/Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Why BarclaycardTravel.com Should Win The Lithy Award for Best Community Design   The Barclaycard Travel Community is a one-of-a-kind design with an emphasis on travel photos that creates an aesthetically beautiful website. Community Members are encouraged to explore the site for travel inspiration and share their travel experiences to earn miles that can be redeemed for travel rewards or e-certificates.   A few key areas that differentiate the Barclaycard Travel Community design:   Real time home page updates display Community Members posted Travel Stories. Community Members enjoy an immediate gratification of seeing their Travel Story and photos directly on the Home Page. Rotating photo slide area of home page highlights the visual nature of the design and enables the Community Manager to highlight Blog and User Generated Travel Story content. Design includes an easy-to-post Travel Story process that includes a drag and drop options for uploading multiple photos seamlessly. Customized Blog Content area highlights the visual assets of each blog post as well as the Expert Travel blogger profiles. Enhanced Discussion area includes a real time Twitter feed. Revolutionary capability for both Barclaycard Arrival™ cardmembers and non-cardmembers the ability to earn miles for sharing their travel stories redeemable for travel rewards or Amazon e-certificates. Between the beautiful elegance of the design and the differentiating elements above, we believe Barclaycard Travel Community provides a step-change vision for the way digital communities will be designed in the future.   Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page features a rotating image area with emphasis on visually engaging photo content.      Cascading Travel Story tiles feature Community Member generated travel stories that emphasize the visual allure of exploring travel adventures.     Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page also contains an interactive map that encourages visitors to explore Travel Stories via location.     Barclaycard Travel  - Home Page & Search       Barclaycard Travel  - Easy Travel Storytelling     Barclaycard Travel  - Designed Blog Content     Blog format provides a highly stylized design that focuses on photos and expert travel blogger bios for easy consumption.     Each blog contains photos, kudos and comment capability as well as the ability to share out easily to social networks.     Barclaycard Travel  - Customized Discussion         Barclaycard Travel  - Unique User Profile     Barclaycard Travel  - Email Designs   Community members also receive Daily Alert emails when they have earned miles in the community. This follow-up email communication has increased engagement.     A monthly Travel Community Newsletter helps to drive increased registrations and provides an update on trending topics and blogs within the community. User generated content is also prominently featured.        
Company:  SANE Australia Entry submitted by: Nicole Thomas (Community Manager) Community: SANE Forums Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   SANE’s mission is to help all Australians affected by mental illness lead a bett... See more...
Company:  SANE Australia Entry submitted by: Nicole Thomas (Community Manager) Community: SANE Forums Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   SANE’s mission is to help all Australians affected by mental illness lead a better life. SANE does this through three key areas of activity to promote a better life for all Australians affected by mental illness: Support, Training, and Education.   As part of the activity of Support, SANE runs an online peer support community for people affected by mental illness. This is done through two communities – one for carers of people affected by mental illness and one for those with a lived experience.   Our  customer satisfaction initiatives   Help those with affected by mental illness feel less alone: ‘Friday Feast’ (see discussion here) started in 2015, as an opportunity for members to come together on a Friday night, bring a virtual ‘plate of food’ and have dinner together. Friday Feast is one of our most visited discussions, and received Australia wide media attention during Christmas, when members who were alone for Christmas Dinner logged on to be less alone.   Service integration: Giving people a seamless experience between sane.org and saneforums.org through Lithium discussion tagging ability.   Strengthening and growth of the community: To increase the sense of community, a new Role/Rank was created for members who have demonstrated loyalty and commitment to the community. The new role/rank of ‘Community Guide’ was given to members who have now taken on extra responsibilities to nurture and grow the community through one on one interactions with new members or members who need extra support.   Live community events: Hosting “live sessions” for members to connect with experts conducted through the Lithium platform, to increase knowledge, skills and encourage help seeking. Topics of live sessions have included: Caring for someone with Bipolar Managing and changing your thoughts Myths of Borderline Personality Disorder   The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation   Member safety and those at risk of harm are identified and managed quickly, through 24/7 moderation: In 2015, SANE Australia built their moderation team to 77. The team is made up of SANE Australia’s Help Centre team and staff from our partner organisations, who are geographically spread across Australia. Through the Lithium Platform and specifically Moderator Manager, we have been able to create a strong team of moderators, who are consistent in monitoring guidelines and the safety of members. Alongside Moderator Manager, the Lithium platform has given us the ability to house training videos and to communicate with each other, in a ‘moderator only’ space. This communication has been vital to the consistency and quality of the team.   Increased access to people geographically or socially isolated, to connection, support and a community to belong to: Through our partnership syndicated model, more people have had the opportunity to access the Forums. We have continued to grow our partnership pool from 15 partners in 2014, to 35 partners by December 2015. (example of syndication)   Live Community Events: These sessions have given people access to information, advice and skill building opportunities to improve their mental health, which they may not have otherwise, due to their geographic or social isolation. In these two hour live session we see, on average, between 60 – 110 posts and thousands of views.       ‘Friday Feast’ has been particularly successful in reducing the sense of isolation, giving members a place to connect, sharing a virtual ‘plate of food’ and forget about their mental health difficulties. Over the Christmas period, Friday Feast gained extensive media coverage, as a place people who were alone on Christmas night could connect.     Website and community integration: We have provided people with a seamless transition between the SANE Australia website and SANE Forums. We have utilized Lithium’s integration ability by tagging forum discussions to be visible on SANE Australia’s website in specific and relevant locations (Example: below and SANE website factsheet).   Our metrics   Feedback: "I am a SANE community member for the long haul ..its in my home town ... not just a virtual reality existence."   “I cannot express how much hope you have given me. Thank you so much for sharing your experience because before I read that tonight I thought there was no hope.”   “Reading posts and sharing on this forum has been very important to me .. like the first time I feel fully accepted among a group of people .. like finding my tribe.”   “The forums have also helped me find motivation to do some important things I'd been putting off in my depression. This was with encouragement from other members and moderators. “I enjoy the 'Topic Tuesdays' (aka Live Forum Events), these are worth watching out for. They are like workshops where members and moderators are online participating at the same time. It's fine to be quiet or to add comments. The last one which happened about a week ago felt therapeutic. Thanks for running it”   2015 Evaluation: 82% reported feeling safe in the Forums 71% reported experiencing the support from peers in the Forums 77% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed they felt comfortable sharing their experiences   Metrics CHI average increased throughout the year and didn’t dip below 600 between August 2015 – December 2015, with 709 being our highest score in October.   Overall in 2015, 86% of posts were generated by members, demonstrating the peer to peer connection between members.   Since launch (5 May 2014) to 20 March 2016 Posts: 42,537 New discussions: 2316 Total members: 2816 Page Views - Total: 1,065,203 Page Views - Mobile: 260,860 Page Views - Tablet 59,964 Unique visitors: 110,746
Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Brief Company Info: Sony... See more...
Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   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.   The biggest innovation we brought was to re-purpose 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.   Gallery integration on homepage, achieved by REST API calls to retrieve recent contest entries:   The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily be managed on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated. Finally, small customizations have been added to improve user experience, like adapting “new entry” buttons based on what users want to submit: a photo, wallpaper or a board post.   Slideshow:   Data display of image detail:     Gallery entries:     Photo detail view:     We create a single competition each month that is referenced from multiple language communities. We adapt the page language of this competition page depending on the country user’s are accessing it from.   Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( English version):     Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( German version):     In addition to the photo gallery, Lithium is now fully integrated into our web presence, by sharing the same navigation, authentication and search functionality. This way, we can display the same header/footer navigation in different sites, which also has an integrated central authentication system. When a user is logged in in our marketing site, we also authenticate him in community, and retrieve its user details to welcome her in community header.      Search on our global website shows results from our community as well and customers can directly access our community to discuss with other customers. This is achieved by REST API calls to the related language community, incorporating the search term. As a result, we retrieve number of results in community and the first 3 results to display in an overview page to our users. Also support website is linked to our community by targeted REST APIs to give customers the best experience when looking for solutions. Here, we adapt the REST APIs based on product model and product category, to ensure users get the most relevant data as result.   Search on Global site with links to community search results:     Support Webpage, giving link to community results in each product support page:   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.   The new community 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 product features   Simplified navigation:     Search bar:  
Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Sr. Director, Consumer Markets Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design _____________________________________________... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Sr. Director, Consumer Markets Community: Barclaycard Ring (www.barclaycardring.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Barclaycard Ring’s community design is aesthetically beautiful and additionally there are 3 important elements that differentiate the site from other communities.   “Barclaycard Ring” is not only the name of the product but a Ring graphic also visually plays into individual member identity while symbolizing that the member is part of a community. We’ve designed the Ring to be a functional object that not only denotes individual accomplishment but encapsulates the community experience created in the site itself. Ring is a site within a site and the design represents a visual integration of a community inside a credit card servicing site. The visual elements of the two sites are perfectly blended and the resulting single site has its own identity, navigation and rules. The design is simple and elegant and requires almost no learning curve for the user. Even though the site concept is completely new and innovative members know exactly how to navigate between the various features on the site. Between the beautiful elegance of the design and the 3 differentiating elements above, we believe Barclaycard Ring’s community provides a step-change vision for the way digital communities will be designed in the future.   Beautiful “Pinterest-like” timeline gives members a snapshot of Barclaycard Ring’s ongoing story.     Card members can see their private information and then click over to participate in the community. As members navigate from servicing to community they move from a blue to orange background.                                       We show our members the financials for the product in an elegant and simple way.  Even more financial details are revealed to the curious community member.                                       Members can easily elect to donate all or a portion of their Giveback™ to charity by using the slide rule function.                                               Members vote on product features and evolve the core product.                                                     Member achievements are displayed in their “ring” and are illustrated by a wide assortment of colors that represent potential activities to improve the community.