Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Google Entry submitted by: Yuri Kleban (Program Manager) Community: Google Advertiser Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year    Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally acces... See more...
Company: Google Entry submitted by: Yuri Kleban (Program Manager) Community: Google Advertiser Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year    Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Our team supports many products such as AdWords, Google My Business and Google Analytics that help fund our company's moonshots.   Our Community Goals   The Google Advertiser Community exists to support our customers at scale by providing a platform to have their questions answered and to give them an opportunity to learn more about our product/s. This is done in a friendly and Googley way by our Community Members, Community Managers, Moderators and wide network of Google Top Contributors. We redesigned our community interface with three goals in mind. First, we had evolved from a product-focused community to a customer-focused community, and thus needed one place that provided a complete journey for an SMB, from getting their business online through GMB, then understanding their online performance through Google Analytics, to leveraging the marketing power of AdWords to increase the success of their businesses.   Second, through customer feedback we understood that there were issues with content findability and we needed a UI that supported easier content discovery in multiple formats (articles, videos, events). Finally, our customers are increasingly mobile; our community had to look good on smartphones and reflect Google’s Material Design standards.   The Advertiser Community's goals of education and supporting our customers at scale is done through three unique sections:   "Product Categories", where users can ask questions or discuss any area of our supported products and have open conversations with Google Employees, Community Managers, our Top Contributors, and each other; "Learn" , where customers can read in-depth articles about various themes, features and products, and "Events", where users can find upcoming (and watch past) live events broadcasted via Google Hangouts on Air and embedded in the Community. Google aims to provide a first class customer support experience regardless of channel, and the Advertiser Community aligns with our brand of delighting customers. Now, our Community allows us to do it at scale.   Our unique community design   Throughout the redesign process we ensured that Lithium's responsive design was in line with Google's Material Design standards (think mobile first). Additionally, we created various features that our users have been asking for. A few examples:   Guide Me’s- The Guide Me buttons are a unique way of helping users decide what to do next, and to drive further engagement on the Community. Notifications- Our users are active social network users too, and as any social network users have developed a strong need to stay up-to-date with what's happening on the platforms they engage on. We're now keeping them updated real-time by providing in-platform notifications when someone engages with their content or shares something of interest to them Experts- For our Top Contributors and Rising Stars, we dedicated a page to showcase all the hard work they do. We also ensured users know when an Expert is engaging with them on the Community by labelling them with distinct badges, and calling out the experts involved in all threads clearly next to the conversation. Users can also look for conversations where an expert has participated in through unique icons on each board. My Favorites- Our users love what they see, and when they see what they love they need a way to easily find it again. We've made it very easy for our users to mark content they want to get back to by adding "My Favorites"   How we executed our community design   The Google Advertiser Community redesign took place over the course of 10 months, with hard work from many individuals; the Google team is a Global team with members in 6 Google offices globally who worked closely with Kate and Kaela, as well as the rest of the the Lithium team. This process went through the following stages:   User data analysis from previous user studies Stakeholder interviews within the company and top contributors Design workshop 3 rounds of mocks and wireframes Numerous feedback iterations Internal marketing, policy, legal, trademark sign offs User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Implementation Days    Our  design excellence results   Doubled the traffic (as we brought more products into our communities), 2x our pages viewed per person & doubled our mobile traffic for most communities. Interesting fact: traffic took an initial hit because of the migration to a new URL (SEO), but we recovered as visitors were more engaged (more sessions per user)         Homepage    Before    After    Mobile   Before   After    Profile Page   Before   After
Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Fido connects Canadians to the things they l... See more...
Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   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.     Customer Satisfaction Initiatives   Our Community initiatives included: The optimization of our Community content, A complete redesign, and increase in customer support, Deliverance of a seamless self-serve flow for our customers.   The primary motivation behind our redesign was to increase customer satisfaction by making them feel welcome and comfortable to participate in the Community. Our optimization project in early 2015 served to clean up the content on the Community to ensure accuracy and relevancy, enriching the self-serve experience for our customers. In total, 6600 threads were reviewed and labelled and over 3000 posts were marked as the Accepted Solution. 2015 was also the year we increased the number of Community Moderators, for the purpose of offering better and timelier support. Furthermore, we’ve taken measures to be more transparent with our customers by keeping the Community up to date with information such as software and network updates, website changes, really anything that would be useful for customers to know.   For Social Media, our goal was to: Differentiate ourselves by delivering best in class service Improve and maintaining an excellent response time and resolution rate.   We created a team of multi-skilled specialists to service our customers on our Social channels and act as Fido brand ambassadors. Offering the best customer service while maintaining a great response time means having the best tools at your disposal. This is where LSW comes in as a game changer. Not only does LSW help our Specialists offer the best customer service thanks to features like Knowledge base and queue assignment, it also proved to be the perfect tool to keep on top of our response time. Our resolution rate and NPS score are testimony to how LSW has reshaped how we help our customers on Social Media.     Our Approach   For the Community, we wanted to improve our CHI score and response time while offering full customer support. As a company who takes pride in the quality of our customer service, we understand that answering customers in a consistent and timely manner is key to their satisfaction. The implementation of LSW and the redesign of our Community were crucial elements in achieving these objectives. The redesign and promotion of the Community attracted more members to participate, which in turn generated more traffic and liveliness overall. Over time, these steady increases resulted in a healthier and more active Community (significant increase in CHI score).   The implementation of LSW was essential in managing these new volumes of activity. Thanks to LSW, we were able to reduce, control and maintain our response time strategy for public and private messages, while ensuring no one ever remains unanswered.   With the help of Lithium, we have developed a world-class peer to peer support Community. The outcome of using LSW to process our customers’ requests in Community and Social Media channels was outstanding and resulted in our customers being incredibly satisfied.     For Social Media Support, we wanted to improve and maintain a best in class response time while increasing our NPS. LSW proved to be the best tool for us to achieve our goals, primarily thanks to the following features:   Analytics: Analytics helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…we can clearly see what our customers are chatting about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner. Tags: Tagging conversations gives us greater business insights, which in turn allow us to better serve our customers by identifying potential trends and proactively reacting to them, improving overall customer satisfaction. Coaching: LSW is also a useful tool for coaching our specialists as it provides access to the conversation history, which in turn helps us deliver a better service to our customers. Support: LSW helped us support the launch of FB Messenger and Twitter DM enhancement and in turn provided a better customer experience. Pending: Having pending conversations sent back to our queue after 48 hours allows us to follow up with customers who stopped replying to us and therefore improves the customer experience and making us look on top of everything. Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage and offer help to people who are talking about us but aren’t actually reaching out to us. This shows our customers that we’re always willing to help and we’re not afraid to be proactive.   Traffic control: The prioritization (Klout), snooze feature and ability to assign posts to different queues helps us better manage our responses, and keep a close eye on our response time.   Our results   Our CHI increased by 159 points (30% increase) and we successfully reduced our Community response time by 93%. For Social Support, we registered an NPS of over +60 by the end of 2015, and reduced our response time by 87%, meriting and keeping the Very Responsive Facebook badge on March 1 , 2016.    
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Company: Total Access Communication PLC Entry submitted by: Manida Thiensiripipat (AVP Online Strategy & Analytics) Community: dtac Online Community Lithy Category: Social ROI Titan   Total Access Communication Public Company Limited, co... See more...
Company: Total Access Communication PLC Entry submitted by: Manida Thiensiripipat (AVP Online Strategy & Analytics) Community: dtac Online Community Lithy Category: Social ROI Titan   Total Access Communication Public Company Limited, commonly known as dtac, was established in 1989. It is the second largest mobile operator in Thailand. Telenor became a shareholder of dtac in 2001. dtac was listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (the SET) on 22 June 2007 and became the only Thai company listed on both the Singapore Stock Exchange and the SET.   Our 2015 goals for Lithium-powered community implementation   We launched dtac online community in December 2014, so in 2015 our goals were to prove that having dtac online community can long-term gains and cost savings on service as documented in dtac business case (for budget approval for Lithium platform).   Our focus areas and tactics to meet our goals   Our primary focus were to ensure best user-journey and to increase members, super fans, engagement, useful content & solutions, and everything should be measureable.   Session comparison between C (community users) VS Not C who convert on online store.   Average Order Value comparison between C (Community Users) VS Not Community Users   One important tactics was analytics. We tracked user journey across platforms from online community to online store and vice versa. Moreover we created three segments between community users who convert, non-community users who convert, and all users who convert. We were able to prove conversation and content in community influenced purchase decisions of our customers resulting in transactions.   Moreover, we tracked average order value of community users and we found that they had an average order value (AOV) that was 60% higher than average.   (Translation: User “balke” asked “I just used internet for 15 days but now internet speed is throttled – can you help me solve this problem? I have to use internet for my work” User “book2001” a soon-to-be-super-users replied: “I’d like to suggest you to use Super Non Stop package –you’ll get 10GB at only 499 baht here is the link (url) I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. Moreover, if you don’t use it all up, you can save it for your next month usage)   Another tactic was when we cultivated super users and “dtac buddy” (volunteer employee) to build initial hype, solutions, and content. We educated and motivated them to embed links from dtac website and/or TKB when reply to posts. Some of these links led into online conversions (as shown in above screenshot).   Last tactic was convincing internal organization to utilize community on R&D before or during or after the products/service launch. So in the long run, we will get a more complete 360-degree view of customer database. Moreover these members became user and product promoter because they were involved in the product.   For example, we invited 10 super fans to beta test an internal application before launch in a private room in the community. We received many suggestions.     Our metrics   Community influenced online purchase conversion worth = 47,705,323 baht ($1,357,009 USD) Average Order Value (AOV) of community users = 60% higher than average Cost savings on Service Calls = 14,262,800 baht ($405,719 USD). Through intense focus on increasing TKB and accepted solutions, we were able to save costs on service calls in 2015 (exceeding savings in business case). Our measurement was based on 30% of TKB views plus 100% of accepted solution plus 30% of accepted solutions views/cost per call. Feedback & suggestions from customers = more than 6,000 piece of feedback  
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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: 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!    
Company: FOX SPORTS Australia Contact: Shae Marlow (Manager, Customer Experience & Community) Community:  The Crowd Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   FOX SPORTS is Australia’s leading producer of sports television coverage and is hom... See more...
Company: FOX SPORTS Australia Contact: Shae Marlow (Manager, Customer Experience & Community) Community:  The Crowd Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   FOX SPORTS is Australia’s leading producer of sports television coverage and is home to Australia's favourite subscription television sports channels as well as Australia's number one general sports website. FOX SPORTS operates the website www.foxsports.com.au which contains a wide range of video content and articles, including a citizen journalism community called, The Crowd. FOX SPORTS broadcasts over 10,000 hours of LIVE sports programming per year into 2.5 million homes around Australia.     Our unique promotion and the goal   In 2014, FOX SPORTS Australia launched The Crowd – a community forum created to be the home of sports conversations. Two years in, The Crowd has provided us with a strong foundation to expand our Community Strategy and launch a unique marketing content strategy, Citizen Journalism. In short, Citizen Journalism is the ultimate community engagement opportunity whereby community members submit articles to FOX SPORTS to be published on The Crowd. It has been marketed as ‘the training ground for aspiring journalists’. The initiative has allowed us to grow our community and promote our members, particularly superusers.   The goal has been to innovate the current marketing strategy for the community whilst supporting FOX SPORTS digital strategy, including: to increase digital viewership and audience lift the emotional connection to fans reach more Australians and a younger audience     Our strategy and tactics for  community   We identified the lack of opportunities for aspiring sports journalists and so developed our Citizen Journalism initiative, a place for journalists to sharpen their skills while gaining real life experience.   We introduced an integrated content marketing approach in three key phases.   PHASE ONE: TEST   The first phase was to test the initiative in a controlled environment, engaging just two universities and inviting their journalism students to participate as ‘Crowd Correspondents’.   Students utilised The Crowd forum, where articles were submitted for approval and moderation then published to a public board. The FOX SPORTS Editorial team would then review each article and select the best for publication on foxsports.com.au. Published Crowd Correspondent articles featured all the hallmarks of a professional journalist’s piece – including their very own byline plus a link back to their Crowd profile. Lastly, two of the contributing students were selected and offered a two week paid internship with the FOX SPORTS editorial team.     PHASE TWO: LEVERAGE & INTEGRATE   Our second phase involved formalising a program that built the credentials and profiles of our Crowd Correspondents. We updated their Profile Pages, creating a portfolio of each student’s contributions to FOX SPORTS. We then discovered they were adding their Crowd profile credentials to their LinkedIn pages and CVs. This established their profiles as writers within the community and also established their Crowd experience as a worthy qualification externally.     PHASE THREE: SCALE   The final stage was to scale and extend the program to 20+ universities across Australia. In order to market to these students, we interviewed our original Crowd Correspondent intern and created a promotional video, where we highlighted the benefits to other aspiring journalism students in becoming Crowd Correspondents themselves.   As the program matured, we ramped up promotion by integrating Crowd Correspondent articles into the FOX Sports App and established The Crowd’s Twitter account.   Our results   Within four months, phase one of The Crowd Correspondent marketing initiative nearly tripled its trial KPIs, with 14 Crowd Correspondents signing up (KPI was 5).   Now, in just over 7 months, the initiative has continued to exceed expectations, both from a business and community point of view, including: 14 active universities More than 80 Crowd Correspondents Articles/Content submitted to the community has doubled, with a total of 300 articles submitted to the community and 200 published onto foxsports.com.au Two internships successfully placed, with both interns now officially working for FOX SPORTS Australia Dramatic increase from 2.3 page views per unique visitor to 4.6 page views New community registrations have more than doubled from 120 to 300 per month In our most recent promotional phase, we’ve had the highest page views since launching in 2014.   The Crowd began as a small idea with big aspirations and it has since grown into a viable content engine. It’s surpassed all KPIs set yet most importantly, it has given university students a chance to experience the thrill of sports journalism and in doing so, give fans a unique perspective of sport through the lens of a younger pundit.        
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:  Critical Mass/Gyro/HP Entry submitted by: Dominic Ladden-Powell (Platform Director) Community: HP BusinessNow Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   HP Inc. is one of the world’s leading technology companies. Their miss... See more...
Company:  Critical Mass/Gyro/HP Entry submitted by: Dominic Ladden-Powell (Platform Director) Community: HP BusinessNow Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   HP Inc. is one of the world’s leading technology companies. Their mission is to create technology that helps businesses reinvent their competitive edge.   BusinessNow  is a content marketing programme that delivers useful, relevant news and advice to small and medium business decision makers establishing HP as a trusted advisor across 5 markets: UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.   Beginning life as ‘BusinessReady’ in a minor subcategory in another HP Lithium Community in early-2014, we moved BusinessNow into its own Lithium Community in February 2015 and obtained almost 3 million visits in the first year.   We launched the third iteration in February 2016.   Our community goals   BusinessNow aims to provide small to medium business owners and IT decision makers with insight and advice on issues that are important to them and can help them do their jobs better.   HP has a long-standing reputation within the technology industry for its products and services. BusinessNow is helping to position HP as a thought leader by offering insight and conversation around the prevailing themes and issues.   Search and social analytics inform the content to ensure it addresses what is important to the audience. This drives a regular programme of ‘always on’ content planned to support the overall market activity and providing a connected story that encourages the community to return for ongoing and regular advice.   Key to the strategy is elevating HP’s position as not only being a technology vendor who develops quality products but an organization that understands business. Content is amplified through social channels to drive traffic to the BusinessNow community and encourage interaction and debate building a brand experience that engages the audience.   Why our community is unique   We utilize Lithium’s blogging functionality as the sole use for our community and as such have found a great new use for the platform.   An in-depth user experience study was completed to drive the development of the design. A series of designs were then created and tested to ensure the audience’s needs and behaviours online were reflected.   The design represents the best of the best from publisher sites. This was a deliberate move to avoid the site becoming like every other IT content hub and compete against the best sources of digital and business insight like Mashable.   The clean fresh design is easy to navigate and digest and competes against some of the best publisher sites. Clever features such as the time it takes to read or view each piece helps the reader and parallax scrolling has been used to keep the sharing buttons always present and encourage the community to share.   Focusing purely on the blogging functionality provides a unique experience when compared to other Lithium communities as well as a unique content hub when compared to other IT vendor sites.   How we executed our community design   After working directly with Lithium’s engineers to create our first customized instance, we employed both front and back end developers to work within the Studio.   This, combined with the experience of community management we had accumulated within our previous communities, enabled us to augment existing components and functionality as well as create new page templates and components.   We use the API extensively to create dynamic pages based on custom filters and different language versions within single templates. Relying on existing functionality allowed us to ensure our community is as lightweight, dynamic and reliable as possible.   Metrics   We have only recently relaunched our new design but have already received encouraging metrics in the early weeks of operation including the following:     In addition to the above metrics, we have received funding from new HP corporate departments to produce custom content for their own individual campaigns as well as several inquiries about producing individual categories and communities for entirely separate departments within HP.   We took inspiration from popular online publications to create a, user-centered design, which tested extremely positively with audiences. The simple and clean design allows the content to shine on both desktop and mobile:     Within articles, the design remains clean and easy on the eye:  
Company: PayPal Entry submitted by: Carolynn Bae  (Head of APAC Customer Early Life) Community: PayPal Headstart Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile pay... See more...
Company: PayPal Entry submitted by: Carolynn Bae  (Head of APAC Customer Early Life) Community: PayPal Headstart Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile payments on behalf of consumers and merchants worldwide. We put our customers at the center of everything we do. We strive to increase our relevance for consumers, merchants, friends and family to access and move their money anywhere in the world, anytime, on any platform and through any device.   We provide safer and simpler ways for businesses of all sizes to accept payments from merchant websites, mobile devices and applications, and at offline retail locations through a wide range of payment solutions.   Our unique promotion   We launched the PayPal Headstart Community to increase engagement with small business owners in 6 countries to help them through to their first transaction after signing up for PayPal and for existing businesses to increase our share of checkout through PayPal. Rather than launch the new community in the usual way we gave business owners the opportunity to connect with experts through the community and ask a question that really mattered to them and their business simultaneously helping the community gain traction and also help the business owners. We called the campaign Ask an Expert and had 3x ecommerce experts and a $100 Google AdWords incentive to kickstart the conversation.     Our strategy and tactics for community promotion   We provided a small incentive to encourage businesses to open the invitation and to submit high quality questions. We leveraged the experts bio’s as an email and social media campaign utilizing Facebook custom audiences to capture the attention of our existing business and funnel them to the community. Our hypothesis was that business owners who are more engaged with us as they set up their business are more likely to successfully integrate PayPal into their businesses and receive their first transaction.     Our results   Within 3 months we had a 2.5% lift in number of businesses making their first successful PayPal transaction across all 6 markets. And unexpectedly we also had a significant 1.84x increase in number of transactions for business segment that had activated PayPal in the last 3 months. During the 2 week campaign period we had over 500 new posts and 100k views.   Value Analytics YTD Results as of 3/31/16: n = 266 75% of respondents indicated they were able to find the information they were looking for. 66% of those respondents indicated they would have phoned or emailed had they not found their answer.
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: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise ident... See more...
Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises. The Centrify Identity Platform protects against the leading point of attack used in data breaches ― compromised credentials — by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. Centrify delivers stronger security, continuous compliance and enhanced user productivity through single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring. Centrify is trusted by over 5000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50.   Our community goals   The Centrify Community’s mission is to provide our customers with a world class peer to peer collaboration space and technical resource center. By doing this, we aim to improve our customer journey by providing them with a positive support experience and deflect support costs. With Centrify’s website re-launch in 2015, we wanted to make sure that the community experience is an extension of our overall digital brand experience. SEO is one of our major go-to market strategies, and the rich technical content in our community is a great way to showcase Centrify’s identity solutions when prospects search for iDaaS solutions. When prospects and customers arrive at our community in search of solutions, we want to provide them with an excellent UX, allowing them to easily collaborate with Centrify Experts and other technical peers.   Our unique design elements    Centrify’s new community design is an excellent example of how to maximize screen real-estate utilization while improving aesthetics that’s consistent with the corporate brand. Our re-design mission was centered around two major themes: showcasing the rich community content with a new dynamic home page, and improving UX with a new skin that includes the most useful community elements laid out in a logical and visually pleasing manner.   From the top, the hero space of the community utilizes embedded videos to present useful rich media content to community members. In addition, a text announcement bar below the hero space points to the latest community news or notifications.   New global navigation lets users access the community from any page without taking up excessive space. We have simplified our community nodes to make it easier for user to get to the conversations they are looking for.     The user alias button acts as an options dropdown, with utility links for users and community dashboard for the community managers. This allows admins and regular users to access these frequently used links on every page.     “Ask the community” widget is a helpful new addition to help users quickly find community answers or post their questions. This widget dynamically display suggestions as the users type their questions. If answers are not found, the question can be quickly posted in the relevant forum.     To showcase our high quality community generated content, we placed 3 new widgets on the home page to show announcements, solutions and recent blogs from community. In addition, latest posts are also shown on the home page and category roots.     A right hand side scrolling marquee with a call to action enables us to promote company events.     How we executed our community design   We’ve started the re-design project by compiling community user feedback and creating a list of improvements and issues to resolve. The internal community team combined user feedback and industry best practice to create initial wireframes, requirements and node structures for our design and implementation partner Grazitti. With this initial sets of requirements, Grazitti provided us with mockups, feedback and additional recommendation to formulate the final design. Finally, Grazitti rapidly developed the new community design and structure on staging for UAT, and the entire project was done on time and on budget with an extremely aggressive deadline.   Our metrics Our new community design was launched on December 20 th , 2015. Following are some of the success metrics from 12/21/2015 to 3/7/2016 after launch: 78490 visits, 5.4% year to year increase (from 74,445 a year ago) Forums visit show a larger year-to-year increase at 9% (from 51163 to 55817) New forums topics increased by 38% yty (92 to 127) From 1/1/2015 to 2/29/2015: Registered user sessions (2435) saw an 64% year-to-year increase (up from 1483), showing a much stronger intent to interact. Completed registration also saw a year-to-year growth of 42% (546 from 385 a year ago)  
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:  ScottishPower Entry submitted by: Chris Brennan (Senior Search and Social Strategy Manager - Digital Marketing) Community:  https://twitter.com/sp_energypeople https://twitter.com/ScottishPower https://www.facebook.com/Scottish... See more...
Company:  ScottishPower Entry submitted by: Chris Brennan (Senior Search and Social Strategy Manager - Digital Marketing) Community:  https://twitter.com/sp_energypeople https://twitter.com/ScottishPower https://www.facebook.com/ScottishPower Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   ScottishPower supplies energy to over 5 million homes and businesses in the UK, as part of the Iberdrola Group, a global energy company and world leader in wind energy.   As the number one European utility by market capitalisation we are helping to change the energy market for the better, driving innovation from the way we generate and supply energy to how we interact with our staff and customers.   Social Media is at the heart of our strategic growth and our constant drive to be an Energy company you would be happy to recommend to friends and family.   Our  customer satisfaction initiatives: 360 o Customer View   During 2015, we faced a challenge in managing the perception and reputation of our customer service after a sustained period of instability post implementation of a new Billing and CRM system. Prior to this, our Social Media landscape was a healthy and vibrant small community of engaged advocates. This community rapidly grew and became steadily more negative as customer service complaints and media focus increased. With only two full-time staff operating during business hours our situation quickly became unmanageable and added to the negative perception around ScottishPower at the time.   Faced with this challenge, we conceived, developed and began implementation of our Customer 360 O program focusing on re-engaging with customers and improving satisfaction and reputation scores. Central to this was bringing social media closer to our tradition customer touch points with a truly Omni-channel approach to service. In delivering this approach, we embarked on three key social initiatives utilising LSW to deliver a truly exceptional Social Customer Care experience.   Filter out the noise: Utilise LSW tags and routing to allow our small customer service team to focus on real customer engagements   Prioritise those who need help the most: Energy is an important part of our daily lives. Utilising priority rules in LSW we have refined key word routing to ensure when someone loses their electricity supply or are a vulnerable customer we are able to intervene quickly to help.   Reducing repeat contacts: From social listening, we identified a pool of repeat customers. Using LSW we have been able to revise and resolve issues through improved end-2-end case management to minimise the reputational damage from serial dissenters.   The most important customer issues we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation   Focusing on delivering excellent customer service on social We have always had a proud history in delivering exceptional service to our customer and that had been impacted somewhat by the migration to our new billing system. Through social it was important that we re-engaged with our customers and restored their confidence in ScottishPower as their energy provider.   By embarking on the Customer 360 0 project, we have been able to improve our customer service performance on social dramatically. LSW has been central to this strategy and has provided the platform to re-engage with our customers and restore confidence in our brand. Through the metrics that we track regularly we have seen a significant improvement and with a 13 point improvement in our social sentiment post LSW implementation it is clear that our customers are also seeing the benefits of our enhanced social service.     The robustness and confidence we have been able to install in our team since implementing LSW led us to re-open and cleanse over 2.5k pervious social service cases reducing our repeat contacts by 30% and restore faith in previously dissatisfied customers.   Due to our increased focus on measurement and performance management, we have now extended our coverage to 24/7 and our team has trebled in size. Internally Social First is our new approach with Monitor Wall visible in key departments such as THE Digital Innovations team, Customer Services and shared with all appropriate C-Suite leaders.   Making it easier to do business with us In-depth routing and reporting capabilities have allowed us to focus on the root cause issues to drive service improvement. As such, we are now able to embark on a pro-active engagement campaign to educate and help consumers and reduce the need for them to individually contact us.     Metrics  Positive and neutral sentiment improved from 77% pre Lithium to 90% post Lithium Repeat social complaints reduced by 30% Average response time for Priority 1 cases reduced from 1 hour to 20 minutes. 80% of mentions responded to in less than 1 hour with 98% within 2 hours. 200 repeat customer cases fully reworked and helped through re-engagement using Lithium Recent Independent Industry benchmarking by Social Bakers showed we had the 2nd highest number of service engagement in the industry (highest of the major suppliers by customer base) yet the fastest response rate of all suppliers Overall Customer Satisfaction scores are improving with the percentage of Very Satisfied increasing by 20 percentage points over the last 6 months    
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Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities aga... See more...
Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises. The Centrify Identity Platform protects against the leading point of attack used in data breaches ― compromised credentials — by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. Centrify delivers stronger security, continuous compliance and enhanced user productivity through single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring. Centrify is trusted by over 5000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50.   How we are implementing Community to meet our customer care business goals   Centrify provides unified identity management for end users and privileged users, with flagship products addressing needs for identity management across cloud, mobile and data centers. Our support team interacts with IT admins with diverse skills sets spanning across *NIX, Windows, Active Directory and SAML, just to name a few.   The Centrify Support team believes that building a Community of Centrify admins across the globe plays an important role in providing world class support to our customer base. With a vibrant community, we are able to increase customer satisfaction with an ever growing library of user generated solutions, tech blogs and videos. In addition, we’re able to reduce support contact cost across all regions yet meet SLA’s and responsiveness by leveraging the community.   Our community consists of product forums, tech blogs and Ideas Exchange. All users have read access across all product forums and tech blogs. With our newly implemented “Ask the Community” widget, customers can quickly find existing answers in a wealth of accepted solutions and tech articles. All registered users are welcomed to post in our free Centrify Express forum. This enables Centrify to provide a positive user experience for our free product users, potentially leading to paid upgrade when their organizations expand.   For our paid customers, they have the option to ask questions in the premium product forums. These questions are automatically escalated to an internal “A-Team” of superusers if the community does not answer within 24 hours. This ensures that our paid customers receive timely responses while Centrify reduces support contact volume.   Our paid customers can also to post product enhancement ideas and vote on them in the Ideas Exchange. Here, Centrify’s product team members regularly engage in discussions with customers, providing them with an exclusive channel to share valuable feedback to the Centrify product team.   Changes we implemented  because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community    At Centrify, we value support as a team that adds value to our customers and not a cost center. That being said, just like every successful and customer centric organization, we keep a close eye on our costs every year. The savings in headcount to support our customers are re-invested to make the Community and Support Portal more interactive and resourceful. With new products, new customers we are always innovating and ensuring that every type of customers who come to us for a help can easily find their answers. We have re-launched our community several months ago with an improved design and structure, focusing on making the community easier to use for new and returning members alike. In the future, we will be enhancing the UI further to provide a single pane of glass for all existing customers to address their technical and product needs. The success of Community for our customers has also encouraged our internal teams to increase participation. Technical teams across Centrify now regularly create useful tech blog articles, how-to’s and videos to increase the value of this every growing library of user generated content.   Our customer care and business results    Centrify Community started as a platform for our freemium product (Centrify Express) users to ask their questions. Since then, we have opened up additional product forums, tech blogs and customer Idea Exchange.   In spite of growing our customers base and revenues by 2x, our team has been able to successfully support 5000+ customers and continuously achieve a 92%+ customers satisfaction*. Without enabling peer-to-peer community help, we would not be able to sustain such rapid growth while maintaining a high score for customer satisfaction. Support Management at Centrify is always looking at metrics to drive more self-service, engineer efficiency and content creation (Knowledge articles and how-to videos).   *Customer Satisfaction is derived from 5 survey metrics that we collect from our customers. Every time a case that is opened with Technical Support team at Centrify, the customer will have an opportunity to provide their feedback on the products, people, and features / functionality of Centrify Solutions. Customer are asked to rate us on the 5 parameters (1) Case Owner Satisfaction (2) Overall Product Satisfaction (3) Product Quality (4)Features and Functionality and (5) Overall Support Satisfaction.     We’ve seen steady community growth in the past 4 years. Q1 2016 we saw a year over year increase of user sessions by 38%.   More than 30k visits per month in indirect contact deflection. 40+ technical topics are answered and turned into searchable community knowledge for future use. 15+ technical blogs / video blogs are created monthly for our community member’s consumption.   Rich Multimedia Content in the community tech blog:     Wealth of technical information and resource in the community. “Ask the Community” widget makes it easy for users to get started:     Idea Exchange:        
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: Skype Contact: Claudius Henrichs (Community Manager) Community: Skype Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Skype is for doing things together, whenever you’re apart. Skype’s text, voice and video make it sim... See more...
Company: Skype Contact: Claudius Henrichs (Community Manager) Community: Skype Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Skype is for doing things together, whenever you’re apart. Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.   With Skype, you can share a story, celebrate a birthday, learn a language, hold a meeting, work with colleagues – just about anything you need to do together every day. You can use Skype on whatever works best for you - on your phone or computer or a TV with Skype on it. It is free to start using Skype - to speak, see and instant message other people on Skype for example.   Our community goals   Since 2011 the Skype Community is the place for customers and employees to meet and exchange and learn about everything Skype. With topics ranging from technical support through ideation all the way to tips and tricks it’s the place to become a Skype expert.   Our product organization is using community insight to obtain customer lead steering for the next iterations of product and features. A vibrant global community covering 11 languages is crucial to ensure that we understand and prioritize what is driving customers, from the newly registered all the way to the 10+ year superfan. At the same time Skype Community gives customers the opportunity to learn about the people at Skype: What made us come up with a certain feature, how we built it and how we operate to deliver against our mission to be customer obsessed. Our goal for this year was to deliver all of this on an awesome mobile and more personal community experience.   Our unique design elements    Over the course of the last 12 months we have honed in on our strategy to everywhere put our community members and their content first. At the same time since our last redesign in 2014 we have been working closer with our design team to ensure the Skype Community reflects the Skype brand. Skype iconography and design elements You feel right at home at the Skype Community thanks to the familiar buttons, colors and layout elements. Particularly the orange dot as an indicator for unread conversations is what you will find across the community UI: From your personal notifications down to topic level:     Skype avatars and emoticons Everyone loves the Skype emoticons which is why we’ve replaced the Lithium profile avatar collections with a Skype one (which proved to be quite challenging with 3M+ registered accounts already having selected a Lithium avatar):     ...and we did the same for the editor emoticons:   Mobile optimized– Scroll to top & Browse menu   Our responsive design doesn’t only reshuffle widget placements on smaller screen sizes, but we have also put some thought on how you quickly browse within long topics and the community using a dynamic scroll to top and a browse menu: All conveniently placed in reach for your right thumb:       Skype Hovercards Hovercards are getting common at Lithium communities, but we’ve taken them a bit further with small tweaks that visually invite discovering them via subtle avatar zooms when moving the mouse over it. And of course they follow the Skype branding and give a nice showcase for the badge icons:     How we executed our community design   First phase: Inventory & spring cleaning We started with an inventory of all our components – stock and custom ones – per each page and applied a strict triaging following out “members and content first” rule to determine which of them were to be kept. According to that we built up the page layouts. Second phase: Airbrush & Spraypaint We started off from the plain white Lithium responsive base skin and had the developer team apply all the basic styling elements according to the Skype style guideline: Font families and sizes, buttons, boxes, colors. So we weren’t actually working off pixel perfect designs for each page, but invited our design team on to our stage server and have them identify the necessary detailed tweaks (“30px top margins above all panels!”). As an outcome to this within 2 weeks we had a solid basic styling across all primary page layouts. Third phase: Review, Optimize, Rinse & repeat We had then entered the phase of optimizing the interactions on actual devices, so we focused on model devices for each category – mobile, tablet, large screen – and gave the design the necessary fine tune in the following 3-4 weeks. We involved our super fans here to ensure that the new site worked for their everyday flow as much as for the casual visitor. And honestly: We never exited this phase and versioning wise have already reached “Responsive 1.6”    Our results   A few weeks in the new responsive design has shown the following impact: Mobile registration 23% up – across all device sizes up 12% 84% more images uploaded thanks to the new media experience 19% referrer traffic increase Subscriptions up 57% Expected 400-500K unique visitor increase monthly thanks to new responsive community unlocking option for in-client community links on mobile    
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: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer ... See more...
Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer that focuses on nurturing powerful relationships between people and pets. We do this by providing the products, services, advice and experiences that keep pets physically fit, mentally alert, socially engaged and emotionally happy.   Our road to Lithium   Having pets undoubtedly means having questions about pet care. As a leading pet care retailer, Petco understands that pet parents often turn to online search first when they have questions, but also that the internet is fraught with misinformation about proper animal care. The concept of a Petco owned community was born out a clear need for expertly crafted and reviewed content that is based on years of animal care experience and knowledge.   In 2012, after careful review and consideration, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the first iteration of the Petco Community, called “Pet Talk Place.” Our goal was to live our brand values and realize our vision of being the “trusted source” for pet parents. In order to realize this goal, we needed a best in class platform that would allow us to connect with our customers, and connect our customers with each other—ultimately driving down customer service costs by providing a space for self-serve resolutions.   Despite fantastic results in the first few months following the launch of Pet Talk Place, we realized that we had run out of things to talk about, and there was growing need for fresh and relevant content. At the same time, we noticed a shift in customer expectations in terms of responsiveness. People wanted more content, and they wanted it fast. To address both of these issues, we implemented LSW in 2013. With LSW, we now have access to questions that are top of mind for our customers, and can determine the priority in which those questions need to be addressed based on frequency and influence of the person posting the question. We create at least five unique pieces of content each week, spanning all pet categories.   The benefits of having both Community and LSW   In 2012, we decided that if we were to going to successfully fulfill our goal of being the “most trusted source” for pet parents, we needed a clear digital customer experience strategy to help us shift from talking at our customers, to actively participating in conversations our customers wanted to have. In order to do this, we set out to rethink our approach and start with the basics—discover pet parent needs, put a plan in place to address those needs, execute based on those needs and then continue to reassess and build on our successes. The Lithium community platform—in conjunction with LSW—is what allows us to execute against that strategy.   The Petco Community combines expert information with peer-to-peer advice for a comprehensive site that provides blog content, forums, lead-generation contests and a unique knowledge base, each serving the range of pet verticals. LSW allows us to share community content with members, associates and prospective customers quickly and consistently. Having both tools means we are able to serve our customers wherever they are in the social web, on their terms, and in a consistent manner.   The enhanced reporting functionality offered by LSW not only enables us to better share our customer care story with leadership, it provides a more sophisticated reporting structure that demonstrates our support of the KPIs our social teams were goaled to achieve.   Our results   In short, with a Total Community approach, we have managed to meet digital customer expectations tenfold. One of our finest accomplishments this year was earning the “Facebook Responsive Badge” before any of our competitors, and before any other retailer, making us best in class in terms of social customer support. This means we are responding to 90% of our customers within five minutes of contact. To put that into perspective, four years ago, our average response time was 16 hours. Needless to say, our gains in efficiency have allowed us to respond to three times the volume of comments and questions, in a shorter time and in a manner that allowed us to build on each learning in the form of meaningful content.   Strong content and participation in our community has resulted in tremendous improvements year over year in terms of community health and traffic.   Community Health:   Average CHI score 2013 Average CHI score 2014 Average CHI score 2015 441 464 523   Traffic Totals for FY15: 62% increase YOY Total Page Views: 3,942,000 (FY14: 2,430,000) 68% increase YOY Visits: 2,852,000 (FY14: 1,702,000) 65% increase YOY Unique visitors: 2,533,000 (FY14: 1,538,000) 28% increase YOY Total Registered Member: 15,008 (FY14: 11,726) 22% increase YOY Completed registrations: 3,282 (FY14: 2,685)   An unexpected benefit from all of the content we have created for the community came in the form of efficiency in our social and digital ad spend thanks to pixels that allow us to retarget users with relevant promotions and sales that are based on content consumption behaviors. Our overall Facebook spend per ad has decreased by 60%, thanks to these efficiencies.
Co mpany:  Volia Entry submitted by: Yulia Shevchenko (Head of social media customer care) Community: Volia Club Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Ukraine is the biggest territory in Europe.   VOLIA is a nationwide... See more...
Co mpany:  Volia Entry submitted by: Yulia Shevchenko (Head of social media customer care) Community: Volia Club Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Ukraine is the biggest territory in Europe.   VOLIA is a nationwide Ukrainian telecommunication provider that offers a set of modern telecommunication services: analog, digital, HD and interactive TV “VOLIA Smart HD” (OTT), broadband Internet and cloud services of the biggest Ukrainian Data-Centre.   VOLIA has a business across all biggest (by population) cities (except Odessa). And we are #1 Internet and TV provider across our footprint! In 2015 the Company created and continue developing  six own TV channels − «VOLIA CINE+», «VOLIA CINE+ HD», «VOLIA CINE+ MIX», «VOLIA CINE+ LEGEND», «VOLIA CINE+ Hit HD» and «VOLIA CINE+ KIDS».         VOLIA is recognized as the best provider of digital entertainments by International Festival-Contest Choice of the Year 2015.   One of our company's strategic directions is digital care. Since 2014 Volia created client oriented and innovative environment to serve our customers online. In a year, we grew share of digital customer care from 48% to 71%.   Two great instruments – new customer self-care portal “My Cabinet” (my.volia.com) and customer’s community Volia Club (club.volia.com), drove that growth.   In March 2016, the customer self-care portal “My Cabinet” was awarded as Best Customer Experience Project on International Conference of Customer Experience in Budapest.   In 2015, we focused on answering 2 questions:   How to increase digital care possibilities to our customers – that impact CES and NPS How to become closer to our customers and make them a real part of Volia   In 2014, our self-care included several IVR modules, a little of SMS informing, an ugly self-care portal that was designed as an old-school excel and old forum, that was driven just by moderators. All these instruments covered ~48% of interaction.   At the end of 2014, we delivered 2 great online instruments (a new self-care Portal and a Lithium-powered customer Community) in parallel with updating of IVR / SMS management. And in 2015, we made a leapfrog from 48% to 71%. They're incredible results, and we are proud of it!     The most important customer service issue we were looking to  solve via Lithium implementation   We love our customers and want to be their beloved provider with a long-term relationship! That's why it is necessary to by open-minded and a close-to-customer company.  It seems customers trust other customers the most. And people like to help other people and to be proud of it – especially if you offer them a proper environment for this exchange.   Knowing this, we set out to create Volia's online community. This high-tech platform gives great possibilities to manage a huge number of customer questions with little participation of Volia moderators. In addition, it has greatly increased customer brand engagement.   It’s really another attitude and principle of customer care It's integrated not just with self-care but with Volia facebook/twitter account It has an in-built, strong gamification that helps to involve customers into customer care and grow super users that become brand advocates     Community implementation both increased customer engagement, improved business process and impacted our Internet users' NPS and CES greatly!   Metrics   1. Customer satisfaction In May of 2015, we started to measure our Volia Club’s customer satisfaction among registered users (by Survey Monkey). The questionnaire was focused on ease of use, speed, and quality of answers inside the Community. And the key question was «What is your total satisfaction with the Volia Club».   The highest score was for quality of answers – 8.41 from 10. It’s really cool as 50% of all answers were given by community members!     2. The readiness to recommend Volia among the Internet-services users increased by 19 points (against 15 planned) all over the country and by +23 points among the audience in TOP-3 Internet cities (Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv).     3. The chain of complicated request solving became twice shorter! Average response time decreased to 2 hours from 24 hours in 2014.   The chain of reply to customers now has 4 steps instead of 8.     Before Community launch   After Community launch   4. It’s impact on CES is improving! This is due to both business process simplification and listening to direct complaints of customers and quick resolution!       5. In addition we improved efficiency! The job of moderators has shortened by 39.3% (against 30% planned).   All visits were served by 4 people (2 FTE). Nearly 50% of inquiries are served by customers.   The share of the e-mail service assignment has shortened by 30% (against 25% planned).     We were the first and only provider in Ukraine that launched a customer driven community! In 2015, we arranged Volia’s top-management and best customer expert meeting to discuss Volia’s strategy. Our clients became part of the Volia transformation team!   As a result, community is one of quickest channels for customer feedback. It is first in asking, replying and clarifying information about all issues - from city outages to price changes and new product launches! Often urgent escalation helps to solve the problem before it has a big impact on business, or to prepare proper communications to the entire customer base, or to test new products before going to market!     At the end of 2015, Lithium implemented a new survey built into the system that allow to track CSAT among non-registered users! And it's our next target to increase satisfaction and engaging among newcomers in 2016!       The customers are positive towards the changes in the Company! The search and innovations implementation process is ongoing. Volia is open to the changes for the better!   During the year, 5 super-users* were developed in our community. They become the brand experts – they don’t only help us with answers to less experienced users, but also take a large part in testing of new products and giving recommendations to their development. * in communities 5+ years – normally up to 10 super-users
Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retaile... See more...
Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer that focuses on nurturing powerful relationships between people and pets. We do this by providing the products, services, advice and experiences that keep pets physically fit, mentally alert, socially engaged and emotionally happy.   Our community goals   Our goal is to establish Petco digital properties as the “go-to” source for pet care news, customer support, social commerce, education, information and fun. The Petco Community delivers on “The Power of Together” by creating and showcasing high-value, Petco-branded content that resonates with the communities we serve. We aim to engage and empower pet parents to enrich their pets’ lives.   The design elements that make our community unique    The Petco Community is a branded content hub where pet parents and animal lovers can connect, share pet stories, find solutions to pet care issues and more. The Community platform, with a new look and feel and a dramatically improved user experience, enables us to more effectively and efficiently engage, support and market to current and prospective customers. The design elements that make our community unique are the rich content immersion from our home page and throughout the community, and dynamic content recommendation at the blog level.   To Petco, the community is more than just Q&A forum content. It’s about engaging with pet parents in rich, meaningful ways. Our goal was to strike an important balance between Petco-generated and user-generated content. For instance, on the home page, we developed large components that enabled Petco to feature beautiful, unique pet imagery to entice users to engage and to communicate our expertise, while at the same time balancing that against user-generated discussion content across all pet categories.   The Community offers a variety of content in every pet category—including dog, cat, fish, small animal, reptile and bird. You’ll also find: Hundreds of blog posts (co-created and collaborative content written by SMEs, influencers, Petco partners, veterinarians, community super users and pet industry journalists) More than 6,500 forum posts (where community members can ask questions and share their pet parent experiences) A tribal knowledge base (where we provide the best answers to common questions) Infographics, Petco videos, photos, contests and more   How we executed our community design   We leveraged Lithium’s strategy consulting and technical services groups to conceive, design and implement a customized experience. Strategy consulting worked with us from the ground up, identifying our core business needs and matching that with an achievable but differentiated community experience, one that propelled us from a standard forum design to a rich, compelling community we could be proud of. Next, they worked hand-in-hand with their development team to ensure that many of the customized experiences we wanted could be executed on-time and within budget. Lastly, they continued to engage with us after implementation to make tweaks and improvements to the experience. In fact, we continue to work with them to convert the community to a responsive experience in the coming months.   Our metrics   All 2015 goals for the community were exceeded post community redesign launch.   Traffic Totals for FY15: 62% increase YOY Total Page Views: 3,942,000 (FY14: 2,430,000) 68% increase YOY Visits: 2,852,000 (FY14: 1,702,000) 65% increase YOY Unique visitors: 2,533,000 (FY14: 1,538,000) 28% increase YOY Total Registered Member: 15,008 (FY14: 11,726) 22% increase YOY Completed registrations: 3,282 (FY14: 2,685)