Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Fido connects Canadians to the things they love throug... See more...
Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.   Our Road to Lithium   In 2010, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the Fido Community. We wanted a best in class platform and a means for customers to self-serve, thereby deflecting calls from our contact centres. The support provided at that time was predominantly peer-to-peer technical support.   Around the same time, we launched our Social Support team, offering our customers a new and convenient support option. As such, we began to support and engage our customers on Twitter and Facebook. As our customers grew comfortable with these channels, they began to adopt this new means of social support and the number of followers grew.   In 2013, in order to further increase engagement on our social platforms, the scope of support provided in the Community expanded to include discussions on all consumer products and services.   Recognizing the need for optimizing responses and better reporting capabilities for our social support, we began searching for a social tool that would enable better customer engagement and provide valuable insights through data collection and reporting. After researching a number of social engagement tools, we found Lithium Social Web (LSW) to be the best option to meet our objectives and in 2014, the Social Support team was transitioned to the LSW platform. The transition proved valuable; giving us access to new functionalities and more insightful reporting.   In 2015, the company placed a huge emphasis on the Community and Social Media support, so we went ahead and included multiple enhancements and redesigns, which have proven to have a positive impact on our results. Thanks to the support and insights available through LSW and LSI, our Social Support team was able to consistently offer best-in-class service and deliver a NPS score amongst the highest throughout the company’s customer service channels.   When customers activate their Fido service, they receive this email:      Benefits of Having a Community and LSW   Having a Community is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Consumers have grown accustom to reading reviews and researching products online. “What do you recommend?” is a question anyone who’s worked in the servicing industry has heard. One of the greatest advantages of having a Community is that all this information is centralized, tabulated, searchable and kept up to date. Another great advantage is that some traffic directed to the Community is traffic deflected from our contact centres, resulting in the reduction in operational costs.   In most communities, questions are answered publicly, but our Lithium community allows us to answer our customers in private as well. This is very useful when customers have questions concerning their services or account, requiring us to discuss and exchange sensitive information. Our customers also love that we can treat their requests directly from the Community, as opposed to referring them to our other contact channels.   We also use the Community as a means of communication with our customers. For example, we inform our customers of upcoming software updates, Fido sponsored events, known issues, etc. This transparent approach is truly appreciated by our community members. But why stop there? Our contact centres also send our customers links to useful articles found in the Community, such as ways to pay your bill, ways to activate services, etc. The Community is used to support our customers even when they call in. Talk about versatility.   How do we keep track of all this information and manage all this traffic? That’s where LSW comes in.   LSW proved to be the perfect tool for our Community moderators, as it helped improve our response time by keeping on top of all Community posts, as opposed to sorting through them individually. To do this, we created a Community queue in LSW to receive all incoming Community posts. LSW allows us to “snooze” Community posts to allow time for our members to respond, based on our response strategy. We also created a common “FidoSolutions” Community profile, which we use for all of our Community PMs only, to make the process seamless from a customer perspective. In turn, this helped us be more efficient, improve our CHI score, response time, call deflection rates and resulted in cost savings.     LSW also proved efficient to help our Social Media Specialists to manage our incoming social media posts, improve on our response time and promote the Community thanks to the knowledge base feature. A single click allows us to answer our customers by sharing articles found within the Community and our website. It’s an incredible time saver and our Specialists and customers love it!   Here are some of the LSW features that help us deliver best in class service: Community response time: Moderators can “snooze” posts for a certain amount of time, based on our response strategy. The snooze functionality is essential to our Community moderation process. We snooze non-account specific inquiries, to give other Community members a chance to respond. If no one responds, we step in and assist. This incredibly useful functionality ensures no one is ever left unanswered. CommunityPMs: Moderators can take over the PM conversations from other moderators once their work shift has ended, greatly increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction. Information centralization: All customer information is now centralized, including contact info, and even notes for internal purposes. Profile merging: LSW allows us to merge customers various social profiles, so we always know who we are speaking with. Analytics and tags: This LSW feature helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…. Thanks to Analytics, we can clearly see what our customers are talking about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner. Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage with people who aren’t specifically reaching out to us. Klout: Allows us to prioritize influencers within our Queues and offer support accordingly.   Let’s not forget that we also utilize shared dashboards for real time reporting to specific people in the company and our launching a pilot for LSW experts in 2016 to hopefully improve our response time.   Our Results   LSW has helped us decrease our Community response time to 120 min in 2016 (93% improvement over 2014 and 34% over last year) while increasing our CHI score by 159 points. Our cost savings and call deflection rates continue to increase. In 2015, our customer survey results indicated over $385K in cost savings by deflecting calls from our contact centre. In the first quarter of 2016 alone, our customer surveys have shown we have already surpassed $625K in cost savings, and that is only for the Community.       For our Social Media Support, the implementation of LSW allowed us to maintain a response time of 15 minutes throughout 2015. The results from our customer surveys state that we recorded $329K in cost savings and ended 2015 with an NPS of over +60. We also ended the year with a Resolution rate of 90%, ascertaining our Social Support channels as a customer favourite.   Additionally, LSW allowed us to keep watch over our volumes and response time when we launched Facebook Messenger as a support channel through our website, and consequently, helped us to earn and keep the “very responsive” badge on Facebook.    
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Company: Barclaycard US Contact: Kati Driscoll (Community Manager) Community: Barclaycard Travel Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   BarclaycardUS is the 9th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building comm... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US Contact: Kati Driscoll (Community Manager) Community: Barclaycard Travel Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   BarclaycardUS is the 9th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building community environments supports our credit card products and creates a differentiated customer experience through enhanced support and engagement.   Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind the Barclaycard Travel Community. BarclaycardTravel.com is a unique travel community experience where Barclaycard cardmembers and non-cardmembers can share travel stories, look to other members for travel inspiration, and earn miles, which can be redeemed for rewards, for engaging in community activities.   Our unique promotion and objective   On July 2, 2015, changes to the Rewards Program Rules for the Barclaycard Arrival™ and Barclaycard Arrival Plus™ MasterCard® were announced. Community was part of a cross functional team initially formed to support customer care and manage complaint volumes, which were estimated to be higher than average, during the transition.   Rather than focusing on the minimal product changes being made, Social Media and Community teams suggested a different approach. Why not highlight the qualities of our award-winning travel card which remained unchanged?   We started with the question, "What is it about the experience of travel that drives our cardmembers' passion?" We discussed the emotions that travel evokes, especially the feeling when one arrives somewhere new. From there, we explored what it means to "arrive" as a symbol of status, connecting the existing social sentiment (#IHAVEARRIVED) to the way the Arrival card and its features enable and empower our cardmembers to have these same moments.   Our primary objective of the campaign was to promote and encourage positive product sentiment through proactive messaging of core featured benefits. This would be measured by a reduction in complaint volumes and an increase in positive social sentiment surrounding the brand.   Our secondary objective was to build loyalty and advocacy through an engagement campaign with our cardmembers and community members. This would be measured by content consumption & engagement on social media and within the community, content amplification, and cardmember behavior analysis.   Our strategy and tactics for our community   CONTENT STRATEGY Strategy for #IHaveArrived content focused on two types of content: #IHAVEARRIVED "moments" and Arrival product benefits     MOMENTS: Using Facebook audience insights based on our Arrival cardmember and community population, we created content which reflected lifestyle buckets Established Elite – represents America’s elite couples and singles. With no school-age children at home and the second highest income in the country, these households have enormous disposable incomes and pursue correlating luxuries and activities Summit Estates – families are enjoying the good life – luxury travel, entertainment and consumption of every kind are within easy reach Skyboxes and Suburbans – the best educated of all the clusters. These families shop at upscale stores, spend time feathering their nests and adhere to regular fitness programs. Corporate Clout – well educated and well compensated singles and couples in their 40s and 50s. These corporate executives and professionals are serious travelers, whether for work or pleasure and intelligent investors.     BENEFITS: We used community search and traffic trends, we developed content which helped users to better understand some of the most popular Arrival benefits while highlighting more obscure card features No foreign transaction fees No miles expiration Chip card technology Travel protections Rewards Access to Travel Community Access to Rewards Fan Zone Access to RewardsBoost MasterCard World Elite benefits Automatic World Elite status World Elite Concierge World Elite Luxury Travel benefits MasterCard Travel Services   DISTRIBUTION STRATEGY Content was posted across the following channels: Social Media Facebook Twitter Instagram YouTube Community Home page 5 separate user experiences PR Email Community Newsletter Arrival cardmember email Website Web tile Featured campaign content on the servicing site Integration with Arrival rewards – users could earn additional miles for registering for the community, sharing stories or using the #IHAVEARRIVED tag   PR 119M Media Impressions 225 outlets   SOCIAL 2M Social Media Impressions 961K Social Reach 125K Engagements 103K Video Views 91% decline in negative sentiment regarding the changes, our primary objective!   COMMUNITY 91K Page Views during Sweepstakes #IHAVEARRIVED generated 11% of 2015 community registrations 735 Travel Stories submitted   EMAIL 316K unique opens 20K unique CTR   CARDMEMBER 12% increase of arrival cardmembers registering in community Drove 5% increase of Arrival cardmembers linking accounts in the community   Key Learnings   SOCIAL Most engaged & cost effective age group for the contest: 18-34 (+20%) Most engaged & cost-effective age group for the benefits messaging was 25 – 34 (35%) Instagram ads proved to be cost effective but lacked the reach related to our Cardmember/Community audiences and fans Cardmembers who were Community Members, but were not linked were more inclined to enter the promotion via social Mobile is everything - 70% of the campaign reach was on a mobile device   COMMUNITY Best performing content spoke to our audience about benefits which provide a service for free or increase miles earns as opposed to benefits which save them money or offer convenience “If content is king, distribution is queen” - multichannel distribution is essential for content engagement success Content from promotion  
Company: Barclaycard US Contact: Jen Hitchens (Community Manager) Community: Barclaycard Ring Community  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   BarclaycardUS is the 9th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building commun... See more...
Company: Barclaycard US Contact: Jen Hitchens (Community Manager) Community: Barclaycard Ring Community  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   BarclaycardUS is the 9th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building community environments supports our credit card products and creates a differentiated customer experience through enhanced support and engagement.   Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind the Barclaycard Ring Community. 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 Community “Ask FICO” Online Event   According to CEB TowersGroup, a financial services industry analyst group, 90 percent of credit scores purchased by lenders are FICO® Scores. While BarclaycardUS has been a pioneer in FICO® Score access for its cardmembers, many consumers still harbor a flawed - and costly - understanding of their credit scores.   Knowing that access to one's credit score is a small part of the path to better credit, Barclaycard Ring embarked on a mission to provide cardmembers with a clearer path to credit health. Partnering with the team at FICO®, Barclaycard was able to connect cardmembers to expert answers while providing a platform to share their own credit success stories – at no additional cost to the business.   Our primary objective of the campaign was to promote and encourage a greater understanding of credit scores and the FICO® Score we share with our cardmembers.   Our secondary objective was to increase the number of registered users in the Ring Community, increase engagement as well as create evergreen content that could provide answers to questions other community members might have about FICO Scores.   Our strategy and tactics   CONTENT STRATEGY The content strategy for the “Ask FICO” event focused on communicating to our existing Ring cardmembers about the upcoming event, its exclusivity, as well as its benefit as a cardmember who is interested in their credit health and eager to learn more about financial literacy topics.     Communication Materials:   Working with FICO®, we developed a branded icon for the event (shown above) Developed an “Ask FICO” Blog Post focusing on the program and it’s focus (as well as the ‘rules’) The “Ask FICO” Blog Post was also featured in the Account Servicing part of the BarclaycardUS.com home page Initial email focused that it was an exclusive online event Last chance email focused on deadline   Initial email   Last chance email   Blog post     Our Results   COMMUNITY Cardmembers posted 130 questions in 12 days; each question was answered individually by FICO 19,000 page views (25% increase) 4,700 unique visits (20% increase) Ask FICO Q&A board had 459 posts and 222 kudos Ask FICO Q&A board received 51% of the overall traffic during the event Ask FICO blog post received 48% of all blog traffic during the event Over 400 new cardmembers converted to community members for the event; 6% of new registrants for the year Evergreen Content – post event, the “Ask FICO” Q&A board remains the #1 visited section of the Ring Community (surpassing the public blog page views in Q4)   EMAIL 35% Open Rate 11% CTR   CARDMEMBER Online event helped to increase cardmember registrations to 20% of portfolio Online event also helpe to re-engage some cardmembers who had not logged into the community in a while.   Key Learnings   COMMUNITY Q&A Board format worked very well for this online event; questions that members had were answered by other community members; however the FICO Representative answer could be selected as the accepted solution so viewers know the correct response/information. Created an easy to access “Ask FICO” board in the global navigation Don’t always need a big budget to have a large impact (budget for this event was zero!)  
Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guid... See more...
Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness.   Our 2015 goals for our Lithium-powered community and LSW   Fitbit helps people lead healthy and active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration, and guidance to reach their goals. Our community connects millions of users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.   Keeping focus on our brand commitment to excellent experiences, our 2015 goals centered around establishing better connections between customers and product support. We sought to increase our presence on social media, bring even more visitors to our established forum content, and ensure quick, consistent responses through all our channels.   We recognized that achieving these primary goals would also result in equally substantial secondary benefits. By providing excellent support via social platforms, we would deflect contacts from other support channels, which offer a more traditional one-to-one communication model. By surfacing relevant Community discussions and Accepted Solutions, we would have the opportunity to resolve customer inquiries before their question was even asked.   In addition, we were excited to begin routing all content through LSW, from social engagements and forum posts to marketing responses and app reviews. Through tagging, volume metrics, and social listening tools, we aimed to improve our understanding of what users are seeking when they reach out to us. This data is a vital part of improving our internal analytics and reporting to the business around milestone events.   Our focus areas and tactics    We set out to meet - and even surpass - these goals with an ambitious multi-pronged strategy.   The largest single move to unite customers with content involved transitioning our Community from private to full public accessibility. The ensuing SEO visibility resulted in 3x visits and page views.     In anticipation of this new traffic, we launched a major project to maximize the value of Accepted Solutions, which appear prominently in search results. Our team worked to ensure that every Community topic included a satisfactory response, which is an effort we continue with new threads today.   Another significant step toward this goal was promoting our Community and Twitter support channels on both the help site and contact page. As this is the most common avenue used to reach Fitbit via email, phone, and chat, we hoped the prospect of a more rapid response on our platforms would appeal to customers.   We recognized that this effort would only be worthwhile if we could indeed deliver on that promise of excellent and rapid resolutions. To this end, we developed a capacity plan and staffing model to accommodate the growing popularity of our social support channels, aiming for the 4 hour maximum response time featured on our contact page, 24 hours a day. Through collaboration with our social marketing teams, we aggressively added support for newly-established regional brand pages and new channels including Instagram and app store reviews. We also put LSW’s tagging logic to work by applying product, platform, and feature-based tags to content, allowing us to get deep insights into social and community commentary.   In addition to bolstering our social coverage, we began acknowledging emerging issues in real-time through proactive tweets, floated community threads, and help site banners (which often linked straight to community threads). We’ve also engaged our Community Council superuser group to escalate concerning posts for quick attention. With this infrastructure in place, we were on the right track to make Fitbit a leader in the social support realm!   Our results   As we compare our current state to where we began at the start of 2015, it’s clear that the aforementioned efforts have been wildly successful.     Social media interactions increased rapidly as we strengthened our support presence and featured these channels on our contact page. Per the above graph, we saw a 616% increase in contacts to our dedicated support handle on Twitter between January 2015 and January 2016 (compared to a 393% increase the year prior). We also noted a substantial gain in channel subscriptions as we passed 100,000 followers on Twitter. Our growing audience brings increased amplification and adds value to proactive tweets, aiding us us in our mission to further reduce support contacts. As depicted below, we've calculated that by providing Twitter support alone, we've saved approximately 29,000 agent hours in Q3 and Q4 of the past year, by resolving customer issues without the involvement of email, phone, or chat.     Our shift to a public Community was impossible to overlook, as forum content quickly occupied the top spots for relevant search results. We saw daily traffic more than double in the month following this change, and noted the balance shift to more than 60% mobile visitors. As we ramp down from the last Holiday season, we now find ourselves at about 500% traffic compared to the closed community of 6 months ago.   To better visualize the full value of this growth, we ran a series of Community surveys to gauge the likelihood for Community visitors to open support cases after their visit. Prior to the open community, we saw potential for about 500,000 annual case deflections. Following the public relaunch, we were able to greatly increase this ROI potential, even considering increased staffing costs. Per the results of these surveys, we estimate about 225% ROI for our Community last year.     The 2015 year was one of lofty goals and great strides for both our team and our platforms. These numbers give us confidence that our hard work has resulted in better support experiences for Fitbit customers around the world, and also that we continue to significantly contribute to an efficient, versatile, and economical Customer Support department.
Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration ... See more...
Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness.   Our road to Lithium   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness. Our community connects millions of Fitbit users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.   In the past few years, Fitbit has had a number of exciting opportunities to connect with its customers. Following a successful Lithium Community launch in late 2013, we stepped up our social media game by bringing LSW into the mix and integrating the toolset with our forums and CRM system.   LSW’s polished visual interface, customizable workspaces, and flexible backend settings have increased our productivity and allow us to quickly support our customers. LSW has also been one of the most intuitive and enjoyable platforms for us to use! Community Specialists leverage the advanced tagging and routing capabilities to surface emerging support issues, which helps us more quickly get our customers back on track.   Email Advocates benefit from the CRM integration, which equips them to handle escalations that come through our social channels, and offers a more complete view of each customer’s journey. Our management and partner teams appreciate the Mobile Shared Dashboards and extensible Smart View-based Analytics, and our BI team has made an easy time of report building with the APIs.   Before embarking on this journey with Lithium, we recognized that true community support involves listening and engaging with customers on their platform and medium of choice. Providing responses solely within a 9-5 workday left some customers waiting most of a day to hear back from us, which is a veritable eternity on social media. By using LSW to coordinate multiple teams around the globe, we are now able to provide stellar 24-hour support across our customers’ preferred channels. Growing our teams globally has given us the flexibility and bandwidth to continuously add new regional pages and channels, expanding the footprint of Fitbit’s social support brand.   Fitbit now engages millions of customers each month across its global Community Forums and an ever-increasing variety of social media channels. We are better positioned than ever before to continue growing Fitbit’s support presence and championing the voice of our customers.   The benefits of having both a community and LSW   Fitbit’s customer support strategy has always centered around delivery of clear help instructions. Our Community and LSW platforms contribute significantly toward providing our customers the help they need, when they need it.   The most architecturally complex example of our Community and LSW platform integration is our handling of product retailer and mobile app reviews. We are able to get visibility into 16 unique review channels across a variety of retail websites, as well as the Apple, Google, and Microsoft mobile app stores. Reviews from these sites automatically route to a Community board, where they appear as new topics organized by review ranking. LSW monitors our Community, collecting this content into a queue where our team of trained advocates responds to customer concerns and support opportunities. Their replies in LSW are posted to Community threads, where content is relayed via API to the review sites. While this may (accurately) sound like an elaborate construction of workflows, the end result is a familiar and straightforward process for our team and attentive support for customers who aren’t yet fully enjoying their Fitbit tracker.     Perhaps the most high-profile benefit of integration is LSW’s ability to intelligently escalate conversations based on key topical phrases, profile attributes like follower count, or past interaction with our team. This escalation ensures our ability to identify and resolve the highest priority conversations within a target of 30 minutes (and often more quickly than that). Since every Community post is routed through LSW, we’re able to provide this vigilant prioritization to all conversations.   Integrations contribute to our powerful listening capabilities. We’re able to support Fitbit marketing initiatives by providing keyword analytics and extracting crucial content into triage queues, so that we can respond without slowing productivity on other channels. We watch other non-traditional channels like Reddit to remain aware of brand-related conversations across their communities and providing us with a holistic view of the customer experience.   Our results   Our social tools enabled the Fitbit team to listen, evaluate, and apply our business rules to prioritize engagement for over 21,000 community posts, 27,500 tweets, 8,000 Facebook posts, 1,300 Instagram posts, and 3,000 consumer reviews across eight languages every week. Since these tools were implemented in May of 2015, we’ve added social media channels to our support contact page and are successfully handling about 150x the contact volume that we saw three years ago.     The flexibility of the rules engine greatly increased our ability to maneuver media blitzes, giving us the ability to respond to the most critical social conversations while we deliver unique customer insights back to the business. In the exciting time surrounding major product releases, our content and sentiment analysis contribute to our launch-related health reports.   While case deflection is the showstopper, we have defined 25 Community KPIs around growth, engagement, membership, and content, as well as three KPIs for social, including TAR, in-channel resolutions, and response rates.   The graph below illustrates community case deflections based on the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) Support Deflection Value model and our own survey data. The inflection point in November 2015 is a result of removing the login requirement and opening our community forums up to the public and to search. Today, nearly 70% of our traffic is organic, and we’re better able to meet the needs of our fast growing community by delivering effective content faster.     In addition to the KPIs above, we also illustrate  the diverse value of community through less traditional means. For example, members of the Community Team are involved in pulling together deep analysis on critical issues and themes for our product marketing, firmware, design, and other partner teams. We deliver uniquely tailored reports to make sense of customer input and raw support data, often unveiling insights unavailable before our integration with the LSW toolset . This ever-growing stack of virtual reports is one of our clearest value statements within the business.   We take pride in knowing that our unique vantage point, disciplined team structure, and versatility of subject matter make the Community Team a go-to resource for decision makers and leaders across the company as we continue to help them make informed decisions about our products.
Company: NetApp Inc. Contact: Teresa Peluso (Head of NetApp Community,  Customer Success &  Loyalty) Community: NetApp Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   NetApp, a leader in data management and storage solut... See more...
Company: NetApp Inc. Contact: Teresa Peluso (Head of NetApp Community,  Customer Success &  Loyalty) Community: NetApp Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   NetApp, a leader in data management and storage solutions, is committed to helping our customers achieve what matters most to them. Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future.   NetApp is a pioneer in online community building and launched an online community years ago to support its customers from around the world. The goal of the NetApp Community is to be a source of truth and belonging for our customers, partners and employees – a safe place to connect and share through a digital experience that cultivates relationships, conversations, and expertise. But most of all, NetApp realizes trust is earned and the community demonstrates NetApp’s commitment to ‘being there’ for its customers and partners.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives   NetApp has always valued and participated in online forums -- we launched our own online community years ago (2008) to support our customers from around the world. The goal of the NetApp Community was (and still is) to be a source of truth and belonging for our customers, partners and employees – a safe place to connect and share through a digital experience that cultivates relationships, conversations, and expertise. But most of all, NetApp realizes trust is earned and the community demonstrates NetApp’s commitment to ‘being there’ for its customers and partners.    In September 2014, we decided to take a bold step in order to stay true to that goal. We thought carefully about long-term community goals, analyzed the data, and realized we needed a new platform to support our marketing excellence strategy and customer-centric approach. NetApp migrated to a Lithium-powered community and transformed their entire digital customer experience for the better.   Transforming the NetApp community experience   We knew that to enable customer success and drive preference and loyalty for NetApp, we had to take stock. Was the community thriving? Are members happy with the experience? The solution became clear – we needed a powerful platform and a solid partner. By moving to a Lithium-powered community, we were on our way to greater ROI and increased customer engagement and satisfaction.   NetApp’s previous community platform and infrastructure did not meet their true goal of being customer focused. Prior to the relaunch, the NetApp community was plagued with technical issues. We were unable to focus on connecting with customers because we were inundated with cumbersome upgrades and spam. In fact, spam was so pervasive on the platform that NetApp employed a separate vendor to manage the problem. Plus, we did not have the controls required to govern for a robust and healthy community, so we knew massive overhaul was in order.   After a rigorous RFP process (no stone left unturned) , NetApp selected Lithium’s SaaS platform because it gave us the flexibility to make extensive customizations. Another benefit to choosing Lithium are the seamless bi-monthly technical upgrades, which is a huge improvement compared to before the move to Lithium. Lithium’s tools make it easy and simple to measure community performance and engagement. This real-time information has led to smarter decision-making based on hard data. The data has also helped us prove the value of our community investment.   Our results   Key metrics: 37,000+ registered members (1100 new members per month) 82% monthly average response rate +25% increase in accepted solutions since moving to Lithium +13.5% increase in community CSAT since moving to Lithium   NetApp now has a new look, new platform and a simplified structure. There have been several upgrades to the platform including site search, improved social sharing and browser support and have created a better mobile experience.   We now have a streamlined number of discussion boards to focus on three areas: Products and Solutions, Developer Network, and NetApp University & Training. We also consolidated and simplified the community structure for easier navigation. Using Lithium gives NetApp a competitive advantage by allowing customers to provide peer-to-peer support, share best practices, and connect with other NetApp influencers. We used this ‘fresh start’ to button up our governance, redefine user guidelines and moderation models (we now have ‘topic owners’ who are notified when new discussions are posted).   The NetApp community framework is based on member satisfaction balanced with business objectives. For measuring success, we established new custom index metric, which calculates different behaviors such as posts, kudos, replies, etc., into a weighted indices for engagement and satisfaction of the community. NetApp is also conducts an annual CSAT Survey which informs and validates the community roadmap from both a technical and program perspective. While there are always improvements to make, the member feedback has been positive.   “Our Lithium-powered community has continued to grow and to exceed all baseline metrics, including its newest key engagement metric, the number of kudos, which is a strong indicator of the customer’s overall satisfaction with content.” - Terri Peluso, Head of NetApp Communities,  Customer Success &  Loyalty  
Company: Flybe Contact: Danielle Bassett (Customer Support Liaison Manager) Social channels:  https://twitter.com/flybe, https://www.facebook.com/Flybe  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Flybe is Europe's largest regional airline, o... See more...
Company: Flybe Contact: Danielle Bassett (Customer Support Liaison Manager) Social channels:  https://twitter.com/flybe, https://www.facebook.com/Flybe  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Flybe is Europe's largest regional airline, operating more UK domestic flights than any other airline. They have received numerous accolades, including being named the top UK airline for punctuality in a report issued by UK consumer watchdog Which? and being honored as the ‘Best Short-Haul Airline’ at the 2016 Business Travel Awards.   Our road to Lithium Social Web (LSW)   Due to Flybe’s increasing volume of social customer service related queries, we recognized that social was quickly becoming a preferred channel for customer engagement. Our new focus was to use social as a customer care channel versus a marketing channel while still maintaining the ability to publish marketing posts when required. When the decision was made to set-up a dedicated social care team, we took the opportunity to re-assess their social tool, which was an inherited tool used by their in-house marketing team.   We explored other social care solutions, and we ultimately replaced our prior vendor with Lithium Social Web (LSW) to offer the ability to meet the needs of a growing social customer care team that could respond quickly and resolve issues efficiently.   How LSW has benefited our customer care organization   Our social media team works from different locations, but with LSW, the team is able to assign conversations that may require a corporate response or further investigation while not impacting response times. Even if you are not logged in to the tool, you are notified by an email alert that works really well. This has benefited a few key stakeholders outside of the social media team that use LSW, which include marketing and customer support management.   Flybe social media team   In addition, we currently utilize the LSW Shared Dashboard with other license holders, which enables greater real-time visibility throughout our organization. This ensures our customers are receiving the best possible service within business hours.   Our results with LSW   The implementation of Lithium enabled us to report immediately on the number of responses made within 15 minutes, half the time of that previously possible without LSW. As social channels are fast becoming the preferred communication method, it is important that we are able to promote our response times and shine amongst our competitors. LSW allows us to do that to address our customers’ needs.   Other metrics: 85% average response time within 15 min on Facebook 89% average response time within 15 min on Twitter Followers increased by 38% on Twitter and 50% on Facebook Incoming message volume increased 39% on Twitter and 57% on Facebook  
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Company: Siemens PLM Software Contact: Susan Alig (Community Administrator) Community: Siemens PLM Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year    Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Digital Factory Division, ... See more...
Company: Siemens PLM Software Contact: Susan Alig (Community Administrator) Community: Siemens PLM Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year    Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Digital Factory Division, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) and manufacturing operations management (MOM) software, systems and services with over nine million licensed seats and more than 77,000 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Siemens PLM Software works collaboratively with its customers to provide industry software solutions that help companies everywhere achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by making real the innovations that matter.   Our community goals   Just as we inspire our customers to realize innovation, we at Siemens PLM Software must do the same. Within the marketing organization, our job is to facilitate better conversations, and our customers and prospects are choosing to have more of these conversations online. To meet our customers where they are and make a difference for our business, one of the areas we are focusing on is an improved user experience across all of our digital properties through user-focused interactions and a visually engaging design. The first of our properties to achieve this is our Community. February 25, 2016 marked three years since Siemens PLM Software launched its first online, public community. To celebrate the occasion, the users of the Siemens PLM Community received the first set of changes for a radically improved user experience, which features a new visual design language based on Siemens AG standards. This new user experience (UX) was greatly needed update to the Community. The UX offers several key benefits to our customers. First, it makes user-generated content the focal point. This is important in the Community because customers want to easily and quickly find information in their area of interest; information created by customers, for customers. To improve usability, the design allows for faster navigation in the most trafficked areas where customers spend the majority of their time. This unique category navigation allows them to navigate freely between interaction styles without ever leaving their “home.” Our unique community design   Design Space- Our top complaint from users was why didn’t we use the entire real estate on the screen. In our previous design, there is a vast amount of unused white space. Our target audience accesses our site 95 percent from desktop because they are typically designers and engineers sitting at their desk with two or more monitors. The old site used less than 25 percent of the total real estate for a typical designer. Because we launched Phase 1 of our redesign one month from the date of this submission, we are currently working on Phase 2, which includes adjusting the design to mobile and tablet devices where we can take full advantage of Lithium Responsive. Stylization – Using the Responsive Lithium template required heavy customization with our CSS. By focusing our efforts on styling the OOB components, we are able to offer the right information to our users in the way they want it presented. We concentrated our efforts on four page types – Community Homepage, Category Page, Forum and Forum Article page. Tapping our Community Manager I&II training, we focused on building these pages for the “90%.” Our more active users appreciate the threaded forum replies as this directly relates to the “History Tree” in our software, tying together elements from our product to community. Navigation – Staying in your “home” was another user request. Many of our users will spend a significant amount of time in one category. Creating a navigational element so a user doesn’t need to use the “back button” was key. The result? Category navigation sits below the “hero” image and provides a black indicator of where the user is on the site.     How we executed our community design   With a new set of design guidelines, we needed a partner capable of interpreting the design language and applying that to the Lithium platform, all while keeping the user’s experience at the forefront. To do this we partnered with Lithium Professional Services. Who better to know the platform than the creators! Together we interpreted the design guidelines, created and validated our vision, and then set off on a six-month adventure to bring the new design to life. A complete set of wireframes and mockups were created for this project, utilizing as many out-of-the-box components as possible while also allowing us the ability to customize certain areas that called for it.   Our “super user” @SeanCresswell (90,000 messages read, 208,000 minutes online) said it best, “Wow, that certainly is a revamped looking site! A fantastic step forward though...congrats to all involved in this monster effort.” This before and after picture of the homepage tells a compelling story about the massive undertaking.     Our results   Metrics are an important piece of our complex puzzle in evaluating the success of our community. Here’s a small snapshot of how well our community performed since the launch of the new design on March 25, 2016. Let’s start by giving you a glimpse into the growth of our Community:     Our Community has steadily grown in the three years existence. In FY2015 (Oct-Sept) we saw a 229% growth in HPV. We are on track to exceed that percentage again for FY16. In the 32 days after the launch of the new design, we’ve seen the following increases versus our monthly averages: 44% increase in Unique Visitors** 40% increase in Kudos Given 31% increase in Registrations 23% increase in Posts ** Our Unique Visitors for FY16 to-date just surpassed the FY15 total For us, these are simply numbers; a way to ensure our changes, enhancements and decisions make a positive impact on the users who participate in our community day-in and day-out. It’s the engagement of our users whose use our site to help them do their job better and demonstrate an “ingenuity for life” that makes the real difference for us. User @Stefan_Pendl hit the proverbial nail on the head: “Thanks to you and your team for bringing the community to the next level of usefulness.”
Company: Magento Commerce Entry submitted by: Sherrie Rohde (Community Manager) Community: Magento Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   Trusted by more than 250,000 businesses worldwide, Magento Commerce is the leading prov... See more...
Company: Magento Commerce Entry submitted by: Sherrie Rohde (Community Manager) Community: Magento Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   Trusted by more than 250,000 businesses worldwide, Magento Commerce is the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation to retailers, brands and branded manufacturers across retail B2C and B2B industries. In addition to its flagship open source digital commerce platform, Magento Commerce boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-based omnichannel solutions empowering merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping experiences. With over $50B in gross merchandise volume transacted on the platform annually, Magento Commerce is the foremost provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000 and the Internet Retailer B2B 300, counting more than double the clients to the next closest competitor. Magento Commerce is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology partners, a highly active global developer community and the largest eCommerce marketplace for extensions available for download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found at www.magento.com.   Our unique promotion     While we can’t fully quantify the size of the Magento community, we know the Magento ecosystem comprises of 250,000 merchants, 300 partners, over 1,000 solution implementers, 130,000 developers with 5,900 of them being Magento certified.      In 2015, the Magento community created over 2,500 pull requests and issues for Magento 2.0 on Github, presented over 500 talks on Magento or at Magento-centric events, produced over 100 podcast episodes centered around Magento, organized conferences and meetups in over 24 different countries, wrote three books about Magento, contributed to official product documentation, wrote countless blog posts to raise awareness and education and answered thousands of questions on both StackExchange and the Magento Forums (Lithium Community).     As you can see, we have an amazing and highly active community who are constantly contributing to our product and advocating for our brand. However, until now, we have never had a formal recognition program in place. The absence of this program sometimes created confusion when looking to stakeholders for beta invites, feedback, event invites, etc.   This year, we created the Magento Masters (super user) program, the culmination of over six months of research and strategic planning to develop an initiative that elevates our most active community members, recognizes them for their contributions, and empowers them to help others learn more about the Magento platform and to succeed in our ecosystem.   Creating this program was no small feat as we really wanted to make sure that we had a full picture of our community contributions. We went through several revisions of a scoring algorithm asking various stakeholders if we were missing any aspect that helped those in our community move forward. For every type of contribution, we took the time to think through how we felt it should weight in relation to other contribution types based on the impact that contribution likely had on the community. After pulling data from multiple sources we had access to including Lithium Social Intelligence, we were able to start surfacing names. As we added to the data we were able to qualify the algorithm was what it should be. While some names were not a surprise, and shouldn’t be, it also gave us more insight to other members in the community who were less vocal contributors. Being able to connect with these contributors allowed us to really grow these relationships with key community leaders.   In addition to surfacing key community leaders that may not have been top of radar, this algorithm and data collection also allowed us to begin to share numbers like those above with our community. Our company was proud and our community was proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish together in just one year. In reality, that year barely scratches the surface. This data also gives us quick insights into community leaders by region, role and company type which is often needed when identifying who to connect with for initiatives and opportunities.   As we thought through the program, we tried to keep a “What’s in it for me?” mindset for our community leaders, not just for us. Magento Masters members benefit from recognition both online and offline. This means a special badge and rank created for them and applied to their account on our Lithium Community platform as well as access to a private Magento Masters Lounge there. We also recognized them on our blog and at our annual conference, where we presented them with a physical award, which we’ll expand on more while discussing the campaign. Magento Masters will have increased access to things like beta programs, roadmaps and feedback opportunities as they arise. Some of this will be facilitate via a quarterly call with our product team and other key team members. We were also able to host them for a VIP lunch event at our conference and offer discounts on both certification and events.     Our goal in creating the Magento Masters program was to create clarity within our organization on who to look to as community leaders at the same time as being able to recognize them in a way they truly deserve – valued in front of their peers. We strongly believe we accomplished this.   Our strategy and tactics   Before beginning promotion of the Magento Master program, we worked with our brand and design teams to create a unique visual identity. After many whiteboard sessions, we landed on Magento Masters with three types: Movers, Mentors and Makers: Movers are Magento’s top advocates and ecosystem thought leaders who have demonstrated their expertise in driving innovation through Magento solutions. They are influencers in the industry in delivering best-of-class Magento implementations and advocate for Magento at industry events. Mentors are top contributors to the Magento Community who are highly active educating others and developing resources for them. They have proven expertise on building successful Magento implementations. Makers are frequent contributors valued by Magento and other community members. They actively engage with others in the Magento Community, sharing ideas, insights, and constructive feedback.   By creating these types, we were able to share clarity around why each Magento Master was selected with individual reasons supplied for each one when announcing them on our blog.   We first announced this program during our MagentoLive France event in Paris: https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/introducing-new-magento-community-initiative-magento-masters https://twitter.com/magento/status/694477995839463424 https://twitter.com/ProductPaul/status/694477546386161664         Later that week, we echoed the announcement a presentation at a community-organized conference in Milan focused around how to get involved in the community and key people who were contributing in various areas of our community: http://www.slideshare.net/SherrieRohde/how-do-i-get-involved-in-the-magento-community-57914070.   Our 2016 Magento Masters were then selected and invited to the program based on their contributions to the community in 2015. Because our community is truly a “Total Community,” we created an algorithm that calculated their community contributions from key areas where we believe they truly help to move the community forward as a whole. These areas include our Lithium Community platform, StackExchange, Github code contributions, official documentation contributions, speaking engagements, blogging, published books and organizing both meetups and conferences.   We announced the Magento Masters via our social media channels, in our weekly community digests on the Lithium platform and on our blog: https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/meet-2016-magento-masters-movers https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/meet-2016-magento-masters-mentors https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/meet-2016-magento-masters-makers https://twitter.com/magento/status/703257126282461184 https://twitter.com/magento/status/704375271286132736 https://twitter.com/magento/status/704740099456536577 https://twitter.com/magento/status/705546325354536960 https://community.magento.com/t5/News-Announcements/MagentoMonday-Community-Digest-2016-02-29/m-p/30701 https://community.magento.com/t5/News-Announcements/MagentoMonday-Community-Digest-2016-03-07/td-p/31406   During our opening keynote at our 2016 6 th annual Imagine conference in Las Vegas, our CEO, Magento Evangelist and Community Manager were able to bring 16 of the 20 Magento Masters on stage to recognize and award them in front of 2,500 attendees.     Our results   The results of this program exceeded our expectations, to say the least. Our Magento Masters are so humble and talented, which really added to the experience in the best way. It’s hard to even know where to start with the impact Magento Masters has already had for both our community and our company. Our community organized podcast brought our Magento Evangelist and Community Manager on for an exclusive interview: http://magetalk.com/magetalk-episode-79-magento-masters/ One of our Magento Masters has added this to his LinkedIn https://pl.linkedin.com/in/snowdog, was celebrated by his company with both a party https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153675678633192.1073741837.71921053191&type=3 and a blog post: https://snow.dog/blog/kuba-zwolinski-announced-magento-master/ . Other Magento Masters were also announced on their companies’ blogs: http://creatuity.com/2016/03/25/creatuity-ceo-joins-magento-masters/ http://store.fooman.co.nz/blog/magento-masters-kudos-to-an-awesome-community-initiative.html https://blog.limesoda.com/2016/03/anna-voelkl-zum-magento-master-ausgezeichnet/ http://www.somethingdigital.com/Blog/Meet%20the%20Team/Magento%20Masters.aspx Several others mentioned Magento Masters in their Imagine recaps: https://blog.limesoda.com/2016/04/magento-imagine-2016-we-are-magento/ http://www.somethingdigital.com/Blog/Events/Imagine%202016%20Recap.aspx http://divante.co/blog/imagine-magento-general-session-magentos-future-day-2/ https://www.iweb.co.uk/2016/04/magento-imagine-conference-day-two-recap/   We of course gave them some love in our event recap as well: https://magento.com/blog/events/we-are-magento-imagine-2016-highlights   Creating this program has inspired ideas across our organization about how to better implement councils, or involve the Magento Masters, in various decisions going forwards. It has also given us massive insight into actually being able to quantify what it is our community brings to the table (e.g. the stats I provided at the beginning) which has astounded and impressed both the community and those across our team.   Even before we officially announced the program, we had various departments coming to our community team in search of community members for various things (e.g. EMEA developers) and we were able to provide them with this information quickly and efficiently from the scoring algorithm created for the Magento Masters program. We are finally equipped with a way to connect key community members with key opportunities. Since announcing the community, several who were once engaged in our old forums are now inspired to be more active on our new forums and the community team, comprising of four Magento Masters, that organizes a Q&A hackathon for the Magento StackExchange has discussed including the forums in their “MageStackDay” events.   Also, one of our Magento Masters has been repeatedly approached on how to get involved in the community and especially how to get started speaking about Magento and our female Magento Master (fingers crossed for more next year) is truly being looked to as a mentor for other women in our community, encouraging them to contribute more to qualify themselves for 2017.   Digging Into the Numbers The Magento Masters program launch received over 250 individual posts across Twitter in support from our team, including our executive team, as well as from the community.   Our initial tweet announcing Magento Masters remains one of our top 10 posts in the past 90 days with 443 total engagements and 15,061 impressions: https://twitter.com/magento/status/694477995839463424   In addition, our tweet announcing the Movers also logged in as a top tweet with 425 total engagements and 16,656 impressions while our top tweet announcing the Mentors received 574 total engagements with 25,487 impressions and the Makers top tweet received 415 total engagements and 16,114 total impressions. A final wrap up announcing all 20 Magento Masters logged in at 340 total engagements and 14,655 impressions and our tweet congratulating them during Imagine logged in at 355 total engagements and 8,422 impressions: https://twitter.com/magento/status/719935530427756544, while several in the audience created their own renditions and our Magento Masters and their companies celebrated on social media throughout the conference. Our blog post announcing the program is our 4th most popular blog post, excluding product announcements, in Q1 of 2016 while our announcement posts spotlighting the Movers, Mentors and Makers weigh in at 17th, 14th and 12th, respectively.   On our Lithium Community platform, Magento Masters visit 92% more than other members. In the first month of implementing the initiative, Magento Master participation increased by 56% while other members increased participation by 6%.   Overall we’ve had an overwhelmingly positive reception and heard from our community that this was greatly needed. The next step? Individual in-depth profiles on our blog for each of the Magento Masters as well as launching into our quarterly calls to learn more.  
Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digita... See more...
Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digital world. Our aim is to inspire our customers with the best network, superb offers and outstanding service. Swisscom is one of the most famous and popular brands in Switzerland.   Our service leadership is not only distinguished by the fact that we offer an outstanding level of service in our own service touchpoints, such as the hotline and shops, but also that we reach our customers where they are most active from day-to-day: online and especially on the social web.   Swisscom’s road to Lithium Total Community   The decision to use Lithium was made in 2009. As an early adopter, we were among the first ten European clients to launch a Lithium Community. Two years later, we were the second client in Europe to put LSW into operation. As soon as the partnership began, it became clear that Lithium would be able to help us assert our service leadership in the social web as well.     Fig. 1: Social Media Universe of Swisscom   LSW for service dialogue in four languages   For the digital avant-garde, we offer full-blown customer care on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Messenger. Simple service requests and complex issues alike are resolved on these channels. Our goal is to offer an end-to-end resolution of the customer’s request on the channel of his choice.   LSW allows not only for effective dialogue management, but also, and in particular, a smooth internal organisation. Service inquiries we receive in German, French, Italian, and English can be distributed easily among two teams in different locations. Since PR, Marketing, and Incident Management specialists also work with LSW, it is possible to provide qualified responses to such inquires as well.   Fig. 2: LSW Setup at Swisscom   Community forum for the “long tail” of service requests   With our quadrilingual customers-help-customers forum, we aim to bring together experts from the “crowd” with the niche requests of our customers. It is not our goal to treat every issue raised in the forum, but mainly those service inquiries:   whose problem must first be identified by way of dialogue/discussion, which largely depend on the customer context (e.g. technical setup) and for which no standard solutions exist, or which are not primarily related to our core products (fixed network, TV, web, mobile).   The majority of the service requests can be resolved by the customers themselves via our extensive online help pages. The community therefore plays a vital role in dealing with the “long tail” of customer requests.   Fig. 3: Positioning and Role of the Community within the Solution Space   The benefits of Total Community   With LSW and the community, we lay the foundation to fulfill the promises of our brand – being a trustworthy companion in the digital world and providing outstanding service – also on the social web. Furthermore, with the Total Community approach, we are able to address the fundamental points of our guiding principles in our social media strategy. As Swisscom, we particularly wish to stand by our customers, to make the first move toward meeting their needs by taking their requests seriously. Similarly, we are open to new ideas, which means we listen to and strive to understand our customers. We put these promises into action as follows:   LSW within our social media strategy   Thanks to LSW, we have a scalable solution to handle our ever-growing service requests in a quick and efficient manner and with high technical expertise by using also the extensive knowledge of our community. Our customers appreciate the simplicity of the interaction and the high level of problem-solving expertise in these channels. As a result, social media care has an excellent reputation.   Community within our social media strategy   In addition to customer insights which we gain by listening and engaging through LSW, the community also provides us with greater understanding of the thought processes of our customers. We are therefore better able to grasp what it is that motivates our customers, as well as recognize their needs and discover the issues they discuss with one another. Along with passive listening, we actively invite our customers to participate in product development. As an example, pilot users submitted over 900 posts with suggestions for improving our recently launched UHD TV receiver.   In order that the entire company may benefit from the knowledge derived from these activities, agents and community managers carry these insights on a regular basis to the relevant stakeholders within our company.   Fig. 4: Community and Forum Homepages   The results of Total Community   Since the community and LSW are mainly used in the area of customer care, the focus lies on reducing service costs while maintaining a high customer satisfaction.   Directly measurable savings   From an efficiency point of view, the community helps us deflecting a very substantial amount of calls (savings of about 6k hours/month). Customers who were able to resolve their issues with the help of the community would otherwise have phoned in 75% of the time. The workload savings excel the investments made to license and manage the community tenfold. Furthermore, interacting with customers through LSW has a strong effect on efficiency indicators as well. These overall positive effects are also a result of a community with a current Community Health Index of just over 700.   Fig. 5: Evolution of the Community Forum   Service recovery through social media dialogues   Along with the likewise high resolution rate of the LSW-administered dialogues, this service touchpoint is particularly impressive thanks to its high customer satisfaction index of 8.5 (on a scale of 10) and an above-average NPS compared to other service channels.   Indirectly measurable results within the company   In addition to directly measurable advantages, we clearly see also indirect business outcomes: Voice of the customer: Customer attitudes regarding our products and services are easily recognizable by all employees, which is especially advantageous for product managers. The monitoring of these online discussions helps us identify major problems promptly. Quick feedback loops: It is easy for community users to become involved in product development. This speeds up the development process and ensures customer needs get addressed. Easier troubleshooting: In the case of breakdown, forum discussions help to better understand the cause and thus repair the trouble faster. Thanks to the community’s link to our CRM, affected customers can be identified easily. The sharing of knowledge within the customer care department: Complex customer issues via traditional service touchpoints are often cleared up more quickly with the collective knowledge of the community    
Company: MEO Contact: Vanessa Simão (Community Manager) Community: MEO FÓRUM Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   MEO is a fully owned subsidiary of Altice group, and a leading telecommunications and multimedia operator based in Portug... See more...
Company: MEO Contact: Vanessa Simão (Community Manager) Community: MEO FÓRUM Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   MEO is a fully owned subsidiary of Altice group, and a leading telecommunications and multimedia operator based in Portugal. The company’s activities extend across all telecommunications segments: fixed line, mobile, multimedia, data and business solutions. In the Portuguese market, MEO is the leader in all segments it operates, with over 8 million mobile subscribers, 2.5 million wireline voice customers, 1.4 million pay-tv customers and 1.4 million broadband customers. MEO is the pioneer and the market leader of convergent services, with a comprehensive offer of 3Play and 4Play bundles. In 2015, domestic business revenues amounted to Eur 2,533 million.   PT Portugal's focus on the customer   In the Portuguese market, PT Portugal is a customer-oriented company, focused on innovation and execution to meet the needs of the digital consumer. PT Portugal is organized by customer segments, promoting collaboration between functions and platforms to ensure the best customer experience. PT Portugal’s priority is to create sustainable value for all customer segments.   In order to answer ever-changing consumer habits, the company has directed its provision towards convergence, mobility and virtualization of content and services.   How the Forum meets our customer care business goals   Helping people find solutions to their problems in a simple, fast and virtually free way, is the main purpose of the Forum, available 24x7 in the PC or smartphone. Good and credible aid is given either by peers or by selected moderators and company’s employees.   Recognizing that Meo’s site is still the first online place where customers try to find a solution to their problems, we incorporated the Forum into the site’s search results in September 2015. This means that people searching within the Meo site will also see any Forum posts, which are relevant to their search.   This change brought a 40% increase in referral traffic coming from the Meo ecosystem, when compared to the previous year.   Example of Meo site search with community content results.   In addition, we noted that one of the categories with more page views - Mobile Phones - required reorganization. So, we created an index of mobile phones that gathers every phone model and any written posts about them.     We also noticed that many users used the Forum to get their mobile phone’s instructions manuals. Thus, proactively, we created a new board, within the category of mobile phones, which serves as a repository for all manuals. The content is provided by company’s employees who are responsible for mobile phones certification, hence bringing them into the community, and then published both by company staff and Forum moderators.   Another way for costumers to get these manuals was through the self-care portal. We were getting 120 requests a month that had to be answered by our front office employees. Since the creation of this new board, we started redirecting these customers to the Forum, instead of allowing them to create a request that had to be analyzed and answered manually. With this change, we were able to free front office agents, allowing them to perform functions that are more complex.     Keeping Meo Forum present along the customer journey, we spread Meo Forum’s image throughout meo.pt and our self-care portal, with banners, and promoted the community in every email sent by our online store, after a purchase. We also promoted it in some of our online store’s weekly newsletters.   How our community has changed our customer care organization   We felt the need to connect our customer care assisted help with our community. So we integrated information about Meo Forum in every email sent to our customers, either through our CRM system or our self-care portal.   Both when the contact involved a complaint or a simple information request, in the footer of the email the customer would see a reference to Meo Forum with a simple message stating its purpose and a link to the community.   Pergunte, responda, contribua. Aceda já ao MEO Fórum. Ask, reply, contribute. Access MEO Forum. Moreover, we highlighted Meo Forum on the Meo Login dashboard, putting the community inside the Meo services’ ecosystem.     Today, our help and support team and customer care teams are regularly updating their contents and processes based on insights from this community, which demonstrates how the Meo Forum helped transform the way we serve our customers, beyond the digital frontier.   Our customer care business results   Call deflection   Since we launched Meo Forum, we recorded a decrease in the percentage of customers who need to use another customer care channel after visiting the Forum, either for posting or just browsing for a solution. We call this “Leakage” – nowadays, less than 13% of Meo Forum visitors have to contact a traditional customer care channel in the next 7 days.   Since peer-to-peer help was the focus of Meo Forum, we started directing personal customer inquiries and requests that concerned access to private information (such as invoice’s analysis or contracts’ end dates) to their self-care portal, where they could get a more personalized assistance. We have the Moderators for this purpose. They moderate the community by controlling the behaviour of members and providing support in most community questions, besides generating new content.   The majority of post replies are now provided by community members and only 10% of replies require company’s staff intervention, making the information richer.   Technical tutorials created by our Moderators and other loyal and more active members, are appreciated by the community and contribute greatly to this decrease. They have a high number of page views and are also used by our technical staff.   Search Engine Optimization   Meo Forum’s contribution for total organic search traffic in Meo site increased considerably in 2015. The community was responsible for 10% of all traffic coming to meo.pt.   Problems Scanning   Meo Forum is increasingly sought after by customers as a channel to seek solutions and post questions, increasing customer feedback. This allows us to monitor the conversations in a better way, contributing to the rapid identification of problems.   ROI   Based on the outcomes of a 667 online survey we conducted on the community website, during the period from March to October 2015, we built a ROI model where we estimate savings in customer contact deflection of approximately €550.000 in 2015.   The online survey is showed to each user who logs in to Meo Forum, and tries to determine if the original questions they had were solved during that visit. If the answer is positive, we also ask them if they would have used an assisted channel if had not found the answer in Meo Forum. With this model we can measure the amount of customers that solve their issues in Meo Forum without requiring a telephone or in person contact.      
Company: Sky UK Contact: Graham Henderson (Community Manager) Community: Sky Community Lithy category:  Excellence in  Customer Satisfaction   Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company. The group serves 21 million customers across fi... See more...
Company: Sky UK Contact: Graham Henderson (Community Manager) Community: Sky Community Lithy category:  Excellence in  Customer Satisfaction   Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company. The group serves 21 million customers across five countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK and Ireland. We offer the best and broadest range of content, deliver market-leading customer service and use innovative new technology to give customers a better TV experience, whenever and wherever they choose.   Our 2015 customer satisfaction initiatives   Community Oracle Programme   At Sky our service message is a simple one; “We want to offer the best service in the country”. The Sky Community was founded in 2010. Since inception we’ve adopted and tested a number of engagement models. At the outset we had a handful of staff and then moved to full service model with over 50 fulltime agents responding to customer posts in the Community. The long-term aim was for the Community to move to a peer to peer model when the user base was high enough. We felt the time was right at the end of 2015 when we had a staggering 1.5 million Community members. We now operate with a peer to peer model with strategic engagement from a team of 5 Community Engagement Specialists and one Community Manager. How can you go from 50 staff to 5 staff overnight while growing a community and out performing business KPI’s like NPS and call deflection? For us, the answer was simple! We had to empower our members by opening our doors and letting them look inside- a real challenge with multiple sites and over 30,000 employees across the UK. We had been running a community Superuser program since 2011 with a relatively small number of members, typically ranging from 8 to 12 members. Despite this small number, these particular members were responsible for creating the best engagement, sharing the best knowledge and generating balanced discussions. We’ve never had a formal Superuser structure in place. No events, no incentives, limited communication and no additional tools. We literally gave them a Superuser badge and said “off you go”. We realized that this had to change!   The most important customer issue we  were looking to solve via our Lithium implementation   We wanted to increase NPS, increase the number of accepted solutions and ultimately deflect calls. We wanted the community to become our customers first port of call, regardless of their interests and levels of digital platform usage. We had already identified our Superusers as the solution, but had to find a way to increase their contribution, offer them more support and grow our Superuser numbers. So what did we do? The first thing we did was listen! We asked our Superusers for feedback and spoke Lithium about best practice. Some of the feedback was great, but much of it was tough to hear. Our conclusion was simple; “we’re letting these members down and need to do more. We’ll never increase NPS or call deflection with this current model”. It was then that the “Oracle” programme was born. We launched in January 2016.   Features of the Oracle Program: Annual event – We introduced an all expenses paid annual event to show them how much we care. For the first time we brought the whole business together using our community. They viewed our product labs, touched Sky Q for the first time, toured our news and sports studios, sat in a McLaren F1 car and met some of our TV presenters.   Our Sky News HQ presenters left the studio to meet our Oracles. (from left to right: Natalie Sawyer (Presenter), Robbie (Oracle), Adam Leventhal (Presenter)   Our Oracles toured Sky studios and many fulfilled a lifetime dream to see and touch a real McLaren Mercedes F1 car.   Annual program that recycles every year. This allows us to keep the program fresh and current. It also allows us the ability to take time out to reward our best members. Incentives – for the first time our best members are rewarded. The annual program allows us to modify and improve the incentives as we learn through data and qualitative feedback. We also invite Oracles to adhoc events, such as the Sky Q press launch. Two Oracles attended and subsequently answered over 90% of all questions related to the product up until launch.   Andrew Olson (Director of New Products) presents Sky Q to the world during our London launch event. Our Oracles were there along with the press and VIP’s.   Quarterly hangouts – We jump on a call every quarter and tell our Oracles about our jobs what we’re working on. We also invite guest speakers from across Sky to answer their questions. They love the techie stuff! Badging- we implemented Lithium gamification and incorporated an Oracle badge to recognise their community contribution. Access to ALL product BETA trials. Our Oracles are the first customers in the UK to use our new products and apps. VIP access to priority customer service line.   Our metrics   After months of work, many late nights and a trip to SKY HQ we had to ask our Oracles for feedback. This is what they said about our first ever Oracle event held at Sky Studios, London:   A few quotes from our Oracles after our first ever oracle event:   “Great day”   “Lovely to see you all there Thank you for a lovely day. “   “It was great meeting you all and sure was a busy day. I’d just like to say a big thank you to all the staff involved in making this day possible, and to those of you who were able to come along”.   “Thanks again to all those there today, thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish”.   The Results   Our NPS rose by 71 points following the introduction of our Oracle programme.   Our accepted solutions more than trebled following the launch of the programme. We asked our Lithium Strategy Consultant to run a short session to explain how to write and structure posts. This was delivered to our Oracles in a fun and interactive session- the results speak for themselves!   Post volumes of Oracles that we invited to the Sky Q VIP launch. Following the event, they became advocates for our new product offering. The red line signifies the Sky Q launch and Sky Q comparison shown in relation to existing TV product..   In summary, we increased our net promoter score (NPS) by 1800%. Increasing accepted solutions by 467% was key to our uplift in NPS. We made solutions easier to find by installing the “featured thread” component and highlighting solutions at the start of all discussion threads- both Lithium features. Inviting Community Oracles to take part in our new product launch resulted in them responding to over 90% of all customer questions within that new product area. In addition, we promoted community blogs via our Twitter help handle by utilizing publisher in LSW. We focused on promoting digital services and Sky Q. This increased blog views by 682%.      
Company: Dixon Schwabl (representing Frontier Communications) Entry submitted by: Jessica DiLuglio    (Social Media Account Executive ) Social channel: https://www.facebook.com/FrontierCorp/ Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfa... See more...
Company: Dixon Schwabl (representing Frontier Communications) Entry submitted by: Jessica DiLuglio    (Social Media Account Executive ) Social channel: https://www.facebook.com/FrontierCorp/ Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Frontier Communications is an S&P 500 company and is included in the Fortune 1000 list of America’s largest corporations. Frontier serves predominantly a mix of urban, suburban, and rural areas across the U.S. The company offers a variety of services to customers over its fiber-optic and copper networks, including video, high-speed internet, advanced voice and Frontier Secure digital protection solutions. Frontier Business Edge offers communications solutions to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.   A focus on customer support   The company’s social media networks are primarily used for customer engagement, support and retention.   On April 1, 2016, Frontier acquired over three million customers from the states of California, Texas and Florida. To manage the anticipated volume of conversation, Frontier needed a tool that could coordinate community engagement between its 100+ customer service representatives, determine strategic workflow of responses and help the company easily serve its new customers.   With Lithium, Frontier was able to help listen to the conversation, identify pain points that customers were having and respond to the customers in a timely manner. Due to the efficiency of Lithium Social Web (LSW), social media became a key source of information for Frontier’s senior leadership. What are the main concerns of the customer? Where is the largest amount of volume occurring? How can we help the customer?   Thanks to LSW, Frontier was able to answer all of those questions and more in a timely and efficient manner. Plus, Lithium has made it easier for Frontier to prepare for business as usual conversations that occur on the page – and will help them transition forward with helping their customers at an optimal level.   LSW helps with customer retention   Frontier’s social media platform is a vibrant collection of customers and prospects that use the social channels to ask questions, seek customer support and learn new information. Since every interaction with the customer matters for Frontier, this online network is vitally important to the success of the company and its digital goals.   For these reasons, Frontier views their social media, and digital strategy, as a customer retention platform. If the customer remains happy they will continue to purchase the services that Frontier offers.   Lithium’s presence for Frontier allows its customer service team to be more efficient and knowledgeable with customers while keeping them happy throughout the communication process. In particular, the workflow operations enabled by LSW allow the Frontier team to work together while helping each customer, ensuring that customers are not seeing duplicate messages or requests.   Plus, Lithium’s data allows Frontier to stay ahead of the game when it comes to customer pain points and trending topics that the company needs to be aware of.   Frontier’s customer satisfaction results   Before the acquisition began, Frontier set a goal of an 85% SLA under 1 hour. During the first few days, Frontier looked at the data and realized that SLA was not reaching the target goal. Knowing what they were tracking at, Frontier was able to readjust and after April 5, the target SLA of 85% under one hour was met each time – it did not get back under 86%.   Other helpful metrics that Frontier was able to track were total inbound posts, volume of Facebook, Twitter and Spanish comments, response time, and top topics of what customers were talking about on social media. By being able to track volume of posts, to topics and its average response time, Frontier was able to find out how quickly customer questions were answered and compare concerns expressed by customers on social media to concerns expressed by customers calling into contact centers. This helped the company as a whole quickly identify service issues before they became widespread.   The Frontier digital management team has continually exceeded its SLA under one hour goals since April 1, and they have been able to do this despite the volume of the social media conversation increasing by 10x since March.  
Company: Breast Cancer Care Contact: Anna Brown (Digital Community Officer) Community: Breast Cancer Care Forum Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   The Breast Cancer Care Forum is the largest single cancer forum in the ... See more...
Company: Breast Cancer Care Contact: Anna Brown (Digital Community Officer) Community: Breast Cancer Care Forum Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   The Breast Cancer Care Forum is the largest single cancer forum in the UK.  It was the first peer support forum of its kind, originally launched in 1999/2000.  Our Lithium powered platform enables users to safely share their personal stories and receive emotional support from other people affected by breast cancer. Central to the success of the forum is an environment from which trust can develop, thereby encouraging empathy, human connections and interactions, albeit virtual; this in turn creates a safe space that lessens isolation and anxiety.  Real people-virtual connection:  Overcoming isolation using accessible technology. There are many ways to face breast cancer, we help people find theirs.   Our organization’s customer satisfaction initiatives in 2015   In 2015 we aimed to increase registrations, user engagement and widen our reach to be accessible to everyone affected by breast cancer. As a charity we looked at ways for delivering more for less and reduce our expenses whilst maintaining safety and integrity.   We are a user centric organisation and incorporate all user feedback, input or direct data from LSI to inform improvements to customer experience and user journey on the forum. By listening to our users in workshops and reading comments in posts, we know they want instant access to online support at the time they need it, for this reason we have removed first post moderation and implemented SSO so users only need one account for our Forum and breastcancercare.org.uk.   To support this reduced moderation we have customised the keyword and smut filter systems, as well as activating the abuse notifications and spam quarantine.  By doing this we have reduced our moderation team from 6 sessional moderators and 1 Coordinator to 1 Digital Community Officer and 1 Digital Community Assistant. Through this careful implementation we have not only preserved our outstanding reputation of being a safe and risk free environment, we have significantly built on it. We can safely rely on robust Lithium technology, and through all these changes we have simultaneously increased and expanded our customer engagement and service provision. To illustrate, below are our targets and achievements for the year.     User engagement and satisfaction We know that the ‘midnight terrors’ are real for many people, both newly diagnosed or further on in their treatment of breast cancer.  A popular thread used by many during the ‘witching hours’ is ‘The Night Birds’; where members of the community chat and reduce isolation when everyone else is asleep.   The community is an invaluable source of support and information regardless of the stage of breast cancer journey:  At the beginning when it is all new and frightening;   “i have been reading the forums since waiting for my results and found it a tower of strength. Thought it was time I joined in........”   Experiencing side effects of treatment;   “ I think the side effects affect us more than people realise and that is one reason why these forums help so much”   Coming out the other end of treatment and wanting to support others;   “EXTOLLING THE VIRTUES AND BENEFITS OF THIS WONDERFUL FORUM AND THE WONDERFUL PEOPLE ON IT. ALL OF WHOM, BASICALLY "SAVED MY LIFE". Our users regularly share their experiences both of online and offline services.  Increasing user engagement with the rest of Breast Cancer Care is important to us and our users are the best sources of referral:   “I’m part way through a course called Moving Forward run by Breast Cancer Care – it’s four morning sessions with other ladies who have recently finished treatment and we are covering topics such as diet, exercise, relationships, menopause symptoms, recurrence etc, and to be honest the most powerful thing is being in a room with ten other women who, just like you guys, absolutely get how I am feeling and thinking.  If this is your thing then I’d urge you to have a look and see if there is a course running near you.”   We recognise that for many users they receive the information and support they are looking for by reading posts rather than by actively contributing.  We wanted to encourage this group of forum users to still feel a member of the community and achieved this by introducing Hugs, customised from Kudos. Users are now able to connect with each other as well as show compassion and empathy by sending Hugs in response to a post.  This function has been very popular and from launch in December to the end of March a total of 3,948 Hugs have been given.     Another recent user focussed innovation has been the implementation of Community Champions.  We identified 21 possible users who naturally offer support and empathy as well as support new users and signpost to other areas of support.  100% of people contacted accepted the recognition:   “I’m knocked out ‘cos all i do is out of love and passion for my fellow womankind.  How wonderful.”     We have noticed a steady increase in engagement since this implementation and plan on building on this success.     Our plans for the very near future include a forum restructure. Using the data and analytics from LSI, we have identified areas of the forum which are underutilised.  The flexibility of the Lithium platform enables us to move categories and boards to reflect the needs of our users and to enhance the ease of user journey. Removing inactive areas allows us to introduce new areas which have been requested, such as a ‘Coffee Lounge’ where users can still connect in a safe online environment but in conversations which are cancer free.   Other new areas include a closed private group for our Community Champions and an innovative category, ‘Ask Our Nurses’. This is where users can directly ask questions to our highly regarded clinical specialists enhancing our Helpline and ‘Ask the nurse’ email service.       In the last 12 months our forum has grown by 40% and we have no intention of sitting back and settling for that.  With the ability to be reactive to our users’ needs and having the data, both quantitative and qualitative to support and underpin decisions, we will continue to grow from strength to strength.      
Company: Optus Contact: Karen Le (Community Manager) Community: My Optus Community Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   As Australia's second largest Telecommunication provider, Optus is in the business of connecting people. We offer a bro... See more...
Company: Optus Contact: Karen Le (Community Manager) Community: My Optus Community Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   As Australia's second largest Telecommunication provider, Optus is in the business of connecting people. We offer a broad range of communications services including mobile, telephony, internet, business network services, satellite services and subscription television to over ten million customers every day.   While we are a company that is focused on enabling homes and businesses with technology and entertainment, our vision is to lead Australia in providing outstanding customer experience.   Like many companies, the provision of customer service through traditional channels contributes to a significant proportion of our operational cost base. In parallel, we continue to see an ever increasing appetite from our customers to engage with us through digital channels - most notably, live chat and social media, with both achieving double digit growth in the preceding year. While these channels offer operational efficiencies over voice and retail channels, channel switching customers alone would not enable the organisation to achieve our cost reduction objectives. Optus is a Total Community customer, leveraging the Lithium Community Platform, Lithium Social Web and Social Media Analytics products.   Our 2015 goals for community and LSW Optus implemented a Lithium powered community in early 2012. After the hard yards of community establishment were carried out, the focus on fully leveraging the asset was lost, resulting in stagnation and faltering interest from it’s 20,000 members. The development of this year’s overarching Customer Service Strategy was firmly rooted in digital with the dual purpose of meeting the shift in customer expectation and reducing support costs. The underutilization of community based customer support was recognized as a key area of opportunity. The resulting business objective was to actively utilize My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call center during FY16 (March ’15 to April ‘16). In doing so, we would not only achieve in year financial benefits, but re-invigorate an asset and truly unlock the potential of peer-to-peer customer support.   In parallel, we also embarked on an ambitious goal of extending our best in class social response into the relatively unchartered territory of targeting apathetic competitor customers through active listening and considered engagement to generate sales.   Our focus areas and tactics Community: Our approach to achieving our ambitious cost reduction goals was made up of 3 parts: Secure executive sponsorship: By constructing a narrative around best practice, both within and outside telco, we were able to successfully articulate the size of the opportunity offered through peer to peer support. This proved critical in the removal of barriers that presented themselves around internal positioning of the community as the default support channel as well as securing the resources required to make it a reality. Strategy development: To capitalize on the executive sponsorship required the rapid development of a robust multi-pronged strategy which focused on 3 key pillars to drive call volume reduction, while ensuring that the customer experience was protected. Drive increased traffic to the community Increase the customer reported resolution rate Retain and recognize community participation     Investment in people: The execution of the plan required the establishment of small team of experienced community practitioners, that we capable of bringing the plan to life. This included a mix of internal staff with exceptional networks and external hires. The team was kept intentionally small (3 FTE) and dedicated to the delivery of the operational plan that was generated out of the strategy. This proved to be the single most important investment that we’ve made.   Social Response (LSW) By augmenting the existing service based response team with skilled sales agents, we set out to create the right processes, deploy the right technology and hire the right people. The team had to be highly visible both internally and externally and most importantly we wanted to enhance the customer experience in the new Optus brand.   To do this, the aim of the team is to respond to any post where an opportunity for a sale is clear in either of the following instances: When a prospect mentions @Optus or Optus in conversation and expresses an interest in taking a new product/service When a prospect indirectly references a competitor and expresses an interest in taking a new product/service   When any of the above references are made in the social space these are seen as clear opportunities (cries for help) to initiate a sales conversation. LSW makes the routing and prioritization of these instances to allow the team to engage immediately (within 30 min) with the prospect responding directly to their post. We utilize the Social profile to engage in a personalized, fun manner ensuring that we offer the customer a compelling reason to respond and engage. The results Community The combination of executive support, solid strategy and a focused team has delivered an outstanding set of outcomes for My Optus Community.   Listen to what the VP of Customer Service has to say about the results and the impact they’ve had on the organisation’s performance.       Increased Traffic and visitation: We have seen a 107% increase in traffic to the community over the course of the past 12 months, which has been driven through a number of key initiatives. This has included the inclusion of contextually relevant widgets that surface community conversation through the optus.com.au website, inclusion of strong CTA’s on all electronic communication, but most importantly we’ve made the significant cultural change to position to community as THE default support channel for our Go To Market programs. For example when Optus launched a new mobile App in September, WiFi Talk (gives customers with limited indoor mobile coverage can use the app to make and receive calls over a WiFi connection), My Optus Community was used as the primary support channel and for the very first time all the customer broadcast communications directed customers to My Optus Community with a blog post with all of the key details. Over 67,000 people viewed the post and resulted in 230 comments on the thread, yet only 20 support calls logged about WiFi Talk issues. This has been successfully replicated a number of times since with equal success and is now considered BAU practice. WiFi Talk Launch   An extension of our online integration strategy has been to develop campaign landing pages directly within the community, giving customers the opportunity to directly ask questions, comment and respond directly. These questions are work flowed into to LSW where moderators are able to respond where required. This has worked so well the Pre- Paid team have made the community landing page part of the customer on-boarding journey, allowing all new Pre-Paid customers ask questions at the time of setup in a seamless experience. Pre-Paid Welcome Hub In June of 2015 we launched the My Optus Community Blog, which has played an important role in our content marketing strategy and has been an excellent vehicle for the discovery of community content. Since launch, we have maintained a steady rhythm of content production with over 125 articles published, which have received over 500,000 page views and contribute a significant proportion of search referrals.   My Optus Community Blog We’ve acknowledged the trend of needing support on-the-go by making My Optus Community the first fully responsive community in Australia, ensuring that members have the same experience across all of their devices. This has resulted in a jump from 510K mobile visits last financial year to 1.3 million this year. Today over 50% of our traffic is generated by mobile devices. Resolution Rate: In a world first, we customized the way that the Tribal Knowledgebase (TKB) module is traditionally used to change the way articles are created and published. In doing so, we give community members the control to identify support content they want and think other members might need, allowing us to scale the volume of content available. Wiki articles can be nominated by the community, who can also make updates to the content, giving them power to help other members. Since we launched this module in September, 63 articles have been authored and received over 26,000 views.  My Optus Community Wiki This combined with prioritised routing of unanswered posts into the social media team through LSW has seen the customer reported resolution rate increase from 9% to 37%   Retain & Recognise: The implementation of a formalised Super User program and the implementation of Premium Gamification has seen the contributions made from our super users increase by almost 300% year on year. This translates to almost 1,500 hours being spent in the community by our top 5 users. The program runs on a 6 month cycle, is built on deep personal relationships (that extends into the ‘real’ world) and actively recruits users from other communities based on a set of attributes.   The execution of our strategy in combination with attentive and responsive community management has seen us exceed the 350,000 incremental call reduction target by more almost 60%, delivering a 230% increase on Opex saving. And this is just the beginning…     Social Response (LSW): The social service team been consistently recognized as the #1 Socially Devoted brand in Australia by Social Bakers for the past 4 quarters. We also received a top 10 global award in Q1 2015. The introduction of a sales capability into the response team has yielded some very encouraging early results. We have engaged almost 5,000 prospects over the course of the last year through intensive social listening. We have seen a staggering 89% engagement rate. Of those who did engage, we saw a 13% sales conversion which has contributed more than $400K of annualized revenue to the business. While the volumes remain relatively small, the performance of social as a prospecting channel significantly exceeds many of our traditional telesales cross sell campaigns.  
Company: Optus Contact: Karen Le (Community Manager) Community: My Optus Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As Australia's second largest Telecommunication provider, Optus is in the business of connecting people. We offer a ... See more...
Company: Optus Contact: Karen Le (Community Manager) Community: My Optus Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As Australia's second largest Telecommunication provider, Optus is in the business of connecting people. We offer a broad range of communications services including mobile, telephony, internet, business network services, satellite services and subscription television to over ten million customers every day.   While we are a company that is focused on enabling homes and businesses with technology and entertainment, our vision is to lead Australia in outstanding customer experience.   How community meets our customer care business goals   Like many companies, the provision of customer service through traditional channels contributes to a significant proportion of our operational cost base. This year, our overarching Customer Service Strategy has been firmly rooted in digital with the dual purpose of meeting the shift in customer preference and reducing support costs. The under-utilisation of community based customer support was recognised as a key area of opportunity. The resulting business objective was to actively drive My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre during FY16 (March ’15 to April ‘16). What we actually achieved was an incremental 500,000+ calls. There were a number of key initiatives that were implemented in order to achieve these goals;   Integration of Community within our digital assets   This focused on the inclusion of contextually relevant widgets that surface community conversation on the optus.com.au website, including the homepage, help & support, product and sales pages. Strong community CTA’s were on all electronic communications and a further extension of our online integration strategy has been to develop campaign landing pages directly within the community; giving customers the opportunity to directly ask questions, comment and respond directly. These questions are work flowed into to LSW where moderators are able to respond where required. This has worked so well that the Pre- Paid team have made the community landing page part of the customer on-boarding journey, allowing all new Pre-Paid customers ask questions at the time of setup to provide a seamless experience. Pre-Paid Welcome Hub   Default support channel within our Go to Market Programs   One of the most significant cultural changes was to position to community as THE default support channel for our Go To Market programs. When Optus launched a new mobile App in September, WiFi Talk (gives customers with limited indoor mobile coverage can use the app to make and receive calls over a WiFi connection), My Optus Community was used as the primary support channel and for the very first time all the customer broadcast communications directed customers to a blog post in My Optus Community with all of the key details. Over 67,000 people viewed the post, resulting in 230 comments. This was so effective that only 20 support calls were logged about WiFi Talk issues each week since it launched. This has been successfully replicated a number of times since with equal success and is now considered BAU practice. WiFi Talk Launch   Australia’s First Responsive Community   We’ve acknowledged the trend of needing support on-the-go by making My Optus Community the first fully responsive community in Australia, ensuring that members have the same experience across all of their devices. This has resulted in a jump from 510K mobile visits last financial year to 1.3 million this year. Today over 50% of our traffic is generated by mobile devices.   Driving traffic and informing customers through the Optus Blog   In June of 2015 we launched the My Optus Community Blog, which has played an important role in our content marketing strategy and has been an excellent vehicle for the discovery of community content. Since launch, we have maintained a steady rhythm of content production with over 125 articles published, which have received over 500,000 page views and contribute a significant proportion of search referrals.   My Optus Community Blog   Improving the Resolution Rate   In a world first, we customised the way that the Tribal Knowledgebase (TKB) module is traditionally used to change the way articles are created and published. In doing so, we give community members the control to identify support content they want and think other members might need, allowing us to scale through crowd sourcing. Threads can be nominated as Wiki articles by the community, who can also make updates to the content, giving them power to help other members. Since we launched this module in September, 63 articles have been authored and received over 26,000 views. My Optus Community Wiki   This combined with prioritised routing of unanswered posts into the social media team through LSW has seen the customer reported resolution rate increase from 9% to 37%.   Retaining & recognising our members   The implementation of a formalised Super User program and the introduction of Premium Gamification has seen the contributions made from our super users increase by almost 300% year on year. This translates to almost 1,500 hours being spent in the community by our top 5 users. The program runs on a 6 month cycle, is built on deep personal relationships (that extends into the ‘real’ world) and actively recruits users from other communities based on a set of attributes.   The execution of our strategy in combination with attentive and responsive community management has seen us exceed the 350,000 incremental call reduction target by more almost 60%, delivering a 230% increase on Opex saving.   Cost reductions from our community   The organisation’s business objective was to actively utilise My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre. These call reduction projections are used to plan for our voice channel workforce. The number of actual calls are recorded and tracked against the projection figures ensure that capacity planning and headcount is accurate and adjustments are made accordingly, and due to these reduced volumes we are able to incrementally increase capacity when unforeseen issues arise.   Also, through the increased participation by members there a reduction in the reliance on Optus moderators to input into the discussion by 40% in comparison to the previous financial year, meaning we were able to handle an 82% increase in engagement volume across social with minimal increase in resource (4 FTE).   Our results   The combination of executive support, solid strategy and a focused team has delivered an outstanding set of outcomes for My Optus Community including an incremental reduction of over 500,000 calls delivering 230% increase on Opex savings. There has been a considerable impact, not only on the number of calls reduced but in the way we organise and plan our headcount and workforce. This has meant we’ve been able to provide more support to customers when they need us as well as a significant reduction in our operational expenditure.   Listen to what the VP of Customer Service has to say about the results and the impact they’ve had on the organisation’s performance.    
Company: Hilton Worldwide Contact: Lee Diaz (Social Media Product Manager) Community: Hilton Suggests Twitter  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Hilton Worldwide is one of the largest hospitality companies in the worl... See more...
Company: Hilton Worldwide Contact: Lee Diaz (Social Media Product Manager) Community: Hilton Suggests Twitter  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Hilton Worldwide is one of the largest hospitality companies in the world, with mre than 4,600 hotels, resorts and properties in 100 countries and territories, and we’re growing faster than ever. Our 96-year history as pioneers in the industry makes us the preferred venue for travelers, developers, partners, and team members alike.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives of 2015   Hospitality and customer satisfaction should be extended to all travelers, even before they are your customers. With this focus, in 2015 we continued the expansion of the Hilton Suggests program to be an even broader global community of Hilton Worldwide team members, at all positions, that serve as a proactive resource for travelers visiting around 100 global markets. Hilton Suggests members give their time to listen for travelers’ questions, point unfamiliar travelers in the right direction, and even assist fellow locals seeking the next hidden gem for their bucket list. Through this, we deliver tweet tailored reccommendations for where to eat, what to see and what to do in our cities, to any traveler that needs a little direction.   A 2014 Study by Google on the Traveler’s Road to Decision showed that 83% of users that go online to find travel inspiration use social networking, video or photo sites. The @HiltonSuggests team helps develop some of that inspiration and alleviates some local research by surprising and delighting Twitter users seeking out travel advice with unique, local recommendations. By reaching travelers where they are, and when they are asking questions, we were able to share over 30,400 responses in 2015.     The most important customer issue we  were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation?    Travelers, as resourceful as they are, often need direction as they get ready to explore. Our focus is to help answer travelers’ questions of where to go, what to see, and where to eat that we all have as travelers to a new city. Even when they are not looking to Hilton Worldwide to answer their questions, we want to surprise and delight them with our focus actively listening, taking the time to respond, and delivering a quality piece of information from a local perspective.   Each suggestion is an authentic, first-hand recommendation based on the experiences of one of our local team members. And while we are happy to help travelers find a hotel - our primary focus is always to enhance the overall travel experience during a new-nomad’s visit.   We understand that it’s easier to appreciate the quirks and cultural nuances, too, when you’ve had a chance to experience the culture at its originator. We live and breathe the vision that our founder, Conrad Hilton, understood to be so important:   It’s our mission to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality - one tweet at a time.   Our metrics     Given our focus, to reach any traveler seeking local recommendations, our core satisfaction metric is based on our ability to connect to travelers: Response. In 2015, we had just over 90 Team Members Tweet over 30,400 responses to travelers’ questions.   We leverage Lithium’s Social Web to ensure that each Team Member is receiving traveler questions from their local city / region / market, and can quickly identify which questions they can answer based on their experiences in the city they live and work in.    
Company: Zuora Contact: Lana Lee  (Support Community Manager) Community: Zuora Community Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Zuora’s Relationship Business Management (RBM) solution helps businesses launch or shift produ... See more...
Company: Zuora Contact: Lana Lee  (Support Community Manager) Community: Zuora Community Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Zuora’s Relationship Business Management (RBM) solution helps businesses launch or shift products to subscription, implement pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain insights into subscriber behavior, open revenue streams, and disrupt market segments to gain competitive advantage. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, London, Paris, Munich, Beijing, Sydney, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Vienna, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Clients come from a wide range of industries: media, travel services, consumer packaged goods, cloud services, and telecommunications. Clients include Financial Times, Schneider Electric, Box, Honeywell, NCR, RTL, lynda.com, The Guardian, YP.com, BlueJeans, Shutterfly, TripAdvisor, Vivint and Trulia.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives   Customer Satisfaction Initiatives in 2015 was to establish more visibility on use cases, implementation and enhancement requests. Seeing how our customers, partners and internal Zuora staff interacts, opens a new world for us to give us better positioning on how to help our customers with a different level of approach (Voice of Customer, Customer Advocacy Program, etc.)   Focusing on customer support excellence Nothing stands in the way of excellence for Zuora’s multi-Stevie® Award winning Global Support Team. Our support team spans the world, giving our customers just-in-time solutions to help power their subscription business and grow in their Zuora expertise. With over 30 global support agents, Zuora support provides quick response, resolution times and received an average customer service rating of 95% for the entire team. By implementing Lithium for our Zuora Community, we’re continuing to focus on delivering the best customer service possible to aggregate content by bringing togther sources of knowledge and information, deflect support tickets to save costs and give customers an integrated visual experience with corporate branding. We believe that we’ve solved these customer issues and more with our cutting-edge Zuora Community that moves Zuora Support to a higher level with its innovative platform that enables peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and gives customers a voice in shaping Zuora’s product roadmap. Our Community User Groups give customers and partners a space where they can network, provide feedback and receive updates on the latest Zuora releases and features.   Our results   30% of our Community’s traffic is in our Ideas forum, which proves to be a popular Community destination since our product managers frequently interact with customers who give suggestions on improving Zuora. Time spent in the community is approximately 9 minutes per member and we see an average of 20k page views per month which shows us that our users are browsing ideas and forums for solutions. Using our Zendesk integration with our Community, any customer post that has no intial response within 48 hours will automatically create a Zendesk ticket. Once a Support agent answers the Zendesk ticket, the answer goes back to the Community as a response and is auto-selected as an accepted answer.  With over 30 support agents in our global Customer Support Services and Community team, we ensure that no issue is left unattended.    
Company: Zuora Contact: Lana Lee  (Support Community Manager) Community: Zuora Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Zuora’s Relationship Business Management (RBM) solution helps businesses launch or shift products to subscript... See more...
Company: Zuora Contact: Lana Lee  (Support Community Manager) Community: Zuora Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Zuora’s Relationship Business Management (RBM) solution helps businesses launch or shift products to subscription, implement pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain insights into subscriber behavior, open revenue streams, and disrupt market segments to gain competitive advantage. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, London, Paris, Munich, Beijing, Sydney, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Vienna, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Clients come from a wide range of industries: media, travel services, consumer packaged goods, cloud services, and telecommunications. Clients include Financial Times, Schneider Electric, Box, Honeywell, NCR, RTL, lynda.com, The Guardian, YP.com, BlueJeans, Shutterfly, TripAdvisor, Vivint and Trulia.   How our community meets our customer care business goals   The Zuora Community is a one-stop destination for our customer and partners to discover “just-in-time” solutions through peer-to-peer collaboration and easy access to knowledge documentation, contribute and vote on product ideas, learn about new product releases and grow in their Zuora expertise. Using our Zendesk integration with our Community, any non-Zuora community post that has no intial response within 48 hours will automatically create a Zendesk ticket. Once a Support agent answers the Zendesk ticket, the answer goes back to the Community as a response and is auto-selected as an accepted answer.  With over 30 support agents in our global Customer Support Services and Community team, we ensure that no issue is left unattended. Our Community uses Lithium’s topic discussion boards, blog, ideas, forums and user group features to engage with our customers: Our Topic Discussion Boards provide a collaborative space for customers to ask questions from Zuora staff and other users, gain credibility via kudos and accepted answers and share best practices. Our Announcements area informs customers about release notifications and product updates and allows Zuora to interact with our customers when they have questions. The Ideas forum is our most popular area because it allows our customers to interact with our Product Managers to potentially impact our product roadmap. We use User Groups to help connect users before events, network with each other locally and grant access to limited availability programs where customers can provide feedback to product managers on our latest releases and new features.   In only 3 months, at at an average of 20k page views per month, we trust that the Zuora Community is a “home run”  for our company and we look forward to its bright future. Since our Community launched, the reduction of support tickets was seen immediately which gives us time to become more focused on strategic initiatives such as customer advocacy, SME training, and increasing product adoption through self-service.   Our results Within a week of our community’s launch, the Support Team saw a 9% reduction of support tickets.  Now, in our third month post-launch, we have reduced support tickets by 11% - proving that the Zuora Community is rich with content that helps our customers easily find the information they need to power their subscription business.  
Company: Domo Contact: Dani Weinstein (Senior Community Manager) Community:   Dojo Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction    As the world’s first Business Cloud, Domo brings together all the data, all the people and all the ... See more...
Company: Domo Contact: Dani Weinstein (Senior Community Manager) Community:   Dojo Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction    As the world’s first Business Cloud, Domo brings together all the data, all the people and all the insights business users need to run their entire business to make faster, better-informed decisions to improve performance.   Dojo Community   Domo’s online customer community, the Dojo, includes more than 1500 members and serves as a platform for customers to collaborate with fellow customers, post and receive answers from Dojo experts, connect with peers, share best practices, offer ideas to improve the Domo product, participate in contests, events, rewards programs and much more.   Recently passing its one-year anniversary, the Dojo realized exceptional growth and customer adoption, increasing the number of community posts by over 200% by the 4 th quarter of its first year. With consistent growth, Dojo is cultivating a community of Domo super fans.   Dojo and Lithium Integration   Utilizing the Lithium platform, the Dojo community set out to increase customer participation and engagement including the creation of the Dojo Ideas Exchange.   The Ideas Exchange was created as a place for members to contribute thoughts and ideas surrounding the Domo products and services. Members can submit ideas or suggestions, facilitating conversations and allowing their voices to be heard with the goal of improving Domo’s products and services.   To date, the Ideas Exchange has generated nearly 500 customer ideas with almost 1 out of 7 ideas being approved and or implemented to date in product. By integrating the Lithium platform, the Dojo was able to develop a robust process using Domo software to pull in the data from the Ideas Exchange and providing a consumable and easy-to-view dashboard for our product management team that includes:   Real-time status updates for all ideas on the Ideas Exchange What product manager owns the specific idea, pending review and approval Hyperlinks to the Ideas Exchange allowing for updates and comments on specific data   Product managers can view ideas by status in a real-time pie chart     The moment a new idea has been posted and received at least one vote, Domo’s product management team receives an alert to assign that idea to a product manager for review. The goal is to ensure each idea that receives at least one vote, be assigned for review from a product manager. It’s easy for our product managers to see and track all of the ideas they have been assigned.     From there, product managers can drill down to see the detailed view with hyperlinks to the exchange where they can manage and update ideas status real time.     Nearly 14 percent of ideas submitted have been approved and executed in the Domo product thus far and a number of other ideas are pending serious consideration. Customers love this exchange because they have a voice in influencing the Domo product road map. Ideas are crowd-sourced and voted on by fellow members.   One of our Dojo members submitted an idea for a new card that would track how many Domo licenses they had used up and how many licenses were left open. We were able to create this Participant License Gauge to better track our customers license usage.     At our annual user conference that we held in March 2016, we honored one of two Ideation Champions (who delivered more than 70 combined ideas) during our Dojo VIP awards lunch.   The winner, Robyn Linden stated, “The Dojo has been an amazing resource for me. I know when I submit a question or idea, my voice is heard by Domo staff members. It’s great to know that my ideas are being reviewed and discussed to have a greater impact on the overall product.”   Linden posted a tweet following her win as Ideation Champion.     In the Dojo’s first year as a community, we achieved a 185% percent increase in the combined number of posts made and ideas submitted in comparison with the first quarter that the Dojo went live.     Finally, we have seen almost a 600% increase in idea votes received in Q1 2016, compared with Q2 2015, while we witnessed more than a 250% increase in likes received in Dojo during the same time frame. Customers love the Ideas Exchange which has driven community engagement and customer satisfaction!