Company: Vodafone Turkey Entry submitted by:  Fahrünnisa Bilgin (FahrunnisaB)  Online Product Specialist - CMS & Social Media     Community:  Vodafone Forum (forum.vodafone.com.tr) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone revolutionized digital transformation in the Turkish telecommunication market. With a market share of %33,9 (Feb'15) Vodafone Turkey is in use of innovative online technologies and social media to service the special needs of Turkish mobile customers. Vodafone Forum launched in March 2012, as Turkey's first open discussion platform among competition is representing Vodafone Turkey with customer care on social media. Today Vodafone Forum is used as a marketing and support platform, increasing engagement of users through super user cultivation and brand advocacy.      Vodafone Forum is the “go-to” place for products and services, campaigns, apps, network coverage with peer-to-peer communication… providing a new channel for feedback and exchange between VF customers, customer operations, marketing and product teams. Our vision is to reach customers online and achieve first hand resolution. Vodafone Forum's business model contributes to reducing call centre costs by deflecting calls, decreasing response times and increasing user generated content.   With Vodafone Forum, we are reaching out to more than 600 K visitors, deflecting an average of 150 K calls monthly, making huge savings of more than 250 K USD annually.     We are saving response time with a moderation team of 12 dedicated people and 2 admins. We have got 12 super users, as customers with a certain knowledge; willing to help others, loving to spend time on Vodafone Forum. Most of them are helping users in  their leisure times. Our company is counting on them in cooperating with them for resolving customer needs.   Meet HamdullahH Hamdullah is Vodafone Forum's indispensable superuser, employed as store manager at the Vodafone Shop franchise in Bingöl. He's almost working as a full time moderator. He has got 5.251 kudos, 5.648 posts, 444 solutions. He says about himself:"When I'm driving the car I keep responding to posts during red light." HamdullahH is the happiest user about mobile forum.   Meet ZeynepK  ZeynepK was working at the Vodafone Shop franchise, she used to respond to posts in Vodafone Forum as daily routine. Vodafone Forum team was looking for a new team member, when ZeynepK was looking for an opportunity in social media, now she is employed in Vodafone Forum responding team.   Meet SeckinK SeckinK is a university student, his first Vodafone Forum post was a deep criticism about network performance. He later became a voluenteer of Forum when the social media team sent network people to his residence to solve the issue. Meanwhile SeckinK has gained expertise on devices, he's broadcasting videos on devices and Vodafone services. See SeckinK's latest video on Sony Xperia Z3.     Transferring support savings to e-commerce activities   The time and help amount realized by our superusers has an impact of 5 support agents which makes cost reduction up to 70 K USD annually. We had the choice to use these savings in marketing campaigns to boost e-commerce activities.    Our business results    Vodafone Forum has more than doubled its objectives in 3 years… - attracting 80 K + users (versus goal of 50 K) - 500 K + visitors per month (versus goal of 250 K) - we have achieved twice as much call deflection than our target estimations  - annually 250 K USD call deflection savings (versus goal of 150 K)   The results of the quality-based community growth strategy have made Vodafone Turkey the fastest-growing Forum in Vodafone Group’s 21 countries.        

Company: Turkcell   Entry submitted by: Mustafa Altay (mustafaaltay) UX Information Architect Community: Turkcell Forum (https://forum.turkcell.com.tr/) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   GSM-based mobile communication in Turkey began when Turkcell commenced operations in February 1994. Since then, it has continuously increased the variety of its services based on mobile audio and data communication, as well as on its quality levels and as a result, its number of subscribers.   Turkcell is a regional leader by being the market leader in five countries out of nine it operates in. Turkcell, with its wide coverage area and diverse range of services abroad, is able to provide its subscribers with mobile communication services both in Turkey and around the world.   Before Turkcell Forum implementation Turkcell only use social media channels like FB, twitter as two way communication. Customers became more online and want to touch companies online. Turkcell had to adapt these changes in customer behavior. So, Turkcell changed its digital strategy to one way communication to two-way communication. Turkcell believes that two-way communication reveals invaluable information about customer needs and buying habits, and this gives Turkcell a vital edge over its competitors.   Recently a large number of companies offering web-based customer opinion platforms have emerged worldwide, providing them with the opportunity to articulate their experiences and comments on products and services. Turkcell recognized that it is not about a platform, it is all about culture and strategy.   Turkcell has the best customer support in all areas. As a leading technology company, Turkcell believes in online channels. E-WOM is getting more pervasive and more important in purchase decision-making and customer support. Most of the companies sees online channels as an alternative to traditional support centers. We believe in our customers and omni channel interactions. As a strategy to shift from traditional customer care to digital customer care, we aim to implement true continuity of customer experience.   Turkcell aims to use the persuasive effect of E-WOM for following reasons and based its strategy according to them:   The information provided by WOM is perceived as being more credible than that provided commercially since most WOMs are from peers, relatives, friends and the third party whom one trusts more; WOM is a two-way communication, not a one-way propaganda; WOM provides potential customers with user experience to reduce purchase risk and uncertainty; Since WOM is live and can instantly respond to inquiries, it can provide more complete and relevant information. Word-of-mouth has been proven to be an effective method of obtaining useful information for purchase decisions.   Customers believe in peer advice and begin to respond customer queries and provide customer service. Thus, Turkcell defines its Digital customer care strategy in 3 categories:     Paradigm shift in customer experience is a long path and it must be considered as change management project. With these awareness Turkcell promotes first Forum implementation. After baby-sitting period, next phases started according to Business value-Complexity matrix in Q2 of 2015. Phase 2 covers all the items listed above.   Not only Turkcell aims to lower costs but also enhance customer care, richer differentiation and higher brand advocacy. After establishing a digital presence, Turkcell will start devising creative social strategies across all major platforms to engage with active audiences.   To sum up, Turkcell redesigns its organization around customers in a customized, relevant way. By listening customers, Turkcell will know exactly what customers are doing, and understand the context of where they are in their journey with Turkcell. This is all enabled by the right strategy and digital paradigm shift.   Changes in customer care organization   Turkcell wants to manage customer relationships in one place. With intelligent context and insights to customers, Turkcell can be quick, agile and smart with its relationships. Turkcell Forum is a central concept that businesses need to understand deeply and integrate fully, in order to serve the social customer. Turkcell will combine all digital customer care in a single organization. With dynamic FAQ creation, peer advice and user generated content will be the basis of success. So Turkcell begins digital paradigm shift and organization according to omnichannel strategy.   Business results   Social media and emerging technologies have transformed the way the world communicates. From being available on social networks to reaching out through interactive and mobile resources, businesses are evolving their customer experience efforts to support the new ‘Connected Consumer’. So, in order to shift in servicing and customer experience, you have to invest in your strategy. Turkcell is already aware of the process and measure every step in change management. With quantifiable results and targets it is easy to rationalize the investment in Turkcell E-Care solutions to top management.   Turkcell launches its Forum in June 2014. Turkcell plans to double every figure in Forum in the first half of 2015.   After the first steps taken and user base extended, Turkcell will implement other modules in E care platform.               

Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Lois Townsend (loisT) Director, Social Media and Community Community: Autodesk Community (Forums.autodesk.com) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Autodesk, Inc., is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries—including the last 19 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects—use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created. From blockbuster visual effects and buildings that create their own energy to electric cars and the batteries that power them, the work of our 3D software customers is everywhere you look.   Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art 3D software for global markets. Through our apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Android, we're also making design technology accessible to professional designers as well as amateur designers, homeowners, students, and casual creators. Whether it's a kid looking to build a new contraption, a seasoned pro sketching out a great new idea, or someone who just wants to amp up their creative output, we're taking technology originally built for movie studios, automakers, and architectural firms, and making it available to anyone who wants to create and share their ideas with the world.   Autodesk, one of the world leaders in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software is delivering on customers’ needs before they ask. Autodesk drives customer loyalty and product affinity through a Total Community strategy. The strategy includes activations on Facebook, nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter, more than 40 million views on YouTube, and a branded community, running on the Lithium platform, which has seen its unique visitors grow by 34% in the last year, with a membership of 2million+ customers. One of the pillars of the Autodesk social strategy is its branded community which is the main hub for directly connecting with customers.  Dating back to 1986, with Compuserve, Autodesk has leveraged community to foster peer-to-peer to support, drive greater brand affinity, and solidify relationships with its customers. It has evolved to focus on collaborating with and anticipating the needs of customers. Now its nine communities in multiple languages offer customers unique experiences by industry, region, and expertise level. The company shares product use information, solves potential product issues, and promotes best practices to proactively supply customers with the tools and information needed for a successful product experience supporting Autodesk’s customer care goals which are centered on rapid, relevant, service, support and learning for every customer.   Autodesk’s recently-launched Knowledge Network (AKN) as a place for users to find product solutions, learn more about products and link in to the community. When looking for support, top knowledge based articles appear in search results, which even include accepted solutions from the community. This speaks volumes to the importance of the Autodesk Community participation for quick problem solving capabilities, not to mention the Expert Elites our Super Users of Autodesk Community who answer support questions directly.  In the last 12 months, nearly 20 million unique visitors came to the AKN site to learn and explore, troubleshoot an issue, or download software.   Autodesk’s Expert Elite are the Super Fans and lifeblood of the Autodesk Community. The Autodesk Expert Elite program was created to recognize customers around the world who have contributed a significant amount of time, knowledge, and assistance to fellow customers.  These people have demonstrated a strong sense of leadership and use an engaging style of collaboration that contributes to a healthy and valuable customer community. The program now has over 200 members representing 23 different countries. They have delivered 7,000 accepted solutions, received 17,000 kudos and posted 60,000 replies. Autodesk has also recognized the importance of video content on the community, and last year piloted and launched a webinar program to proactively offer customers another way to learn about and experience Autodesk products. For instance, the Installation and Licensing Community hosted “Troubleshooting Desktop Subscription Licensing issues” webinar to give users the information they need to get the “software up and ready.”  The Autodesk Help webinar series is a virtual studio house, with regular, and in some cases weekly offerings.  Webinar attendance can be as high as 200 live attendees and videos posted online can reach over 5,000 views. Over 50% of webinar attendees are repeat participants because they derive continued value from the webinar content.   These programs provide information that helps our customers get their products up and running quickly.  Our goal is helping customers to optimize productivity and with these programs our service and support professionals can begin to shift reactive help to providing more proactive solutions to our customers.   Our business results   Autodesk’s collaborative and proactive approach supported by several key programs, including Expert Elite, Knowledge Network, and Autodesk Help Webinars. The tactics have delivered the following community success metrics: Autodesk Communities received over 27 million unique visits in the last 12 months. Autodesk Community successfully serves answers to millions of customers, yielding a multimillion dollar value to Autodesk and its customers. Customer success is tracked and measured via surveys to ensure that the community is providing actual solutions, and at an increasing rate. The community has more than 2 million registered members that have shared more than 135,000 kudos and over 20,000 newly accepted solutions in the last year.  

Company: Microsoft Mobile  Entry submitted by: Delfin Vassallo (DJVassallo) Social Media Operations Manager LSW social channels: Facebook- global, Twitter- global, plus local ones, in total 107 social presences managed Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services, devices and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.   In 2012, Microsoft Mobile (Nokia at the time) had a presence in social media with Twitter and Facebook accounts; however, many of the cases went unanswered and unaddressed. This was simply because they were not listening on social due to having insufficient tools with their first vendor and an inadequate team to manage social care requests.   Microsoft Mobile needed to invest in and get serious about social—and fast. They switched to a second vendor from 2012-2013, but their solution was falling short and they needed to operationalize their Social Care Practice on a bigger scale. That was the tipping point.   In 2013, the business—now Microsoft Mobile after Nokia’s acquisition—launched a critical quest for a new digital solution that offered multiple features and a stable platform that could grow with them over time.   GOAL Implement a new, long-term digital solution that can grow with Microsoft Mobile’s expanding needs on social media to offer customers top-tier customer service   In 2014, Microsoft Mobile chose Lithium Social Web (LSW) primarily because they needed a tool that they could trust in terms of stable, scalable technology.   To be successful on social, brands need three elements: 1) Adequate tools/technologies 2) Seamless processes for handling customer feedback 3) A team of people who are trained in the brand’s internal voice, as they are the stars of the show   If one of those three elements is broken, the whole solution doesn’t work. With LSW, Microsoft Mobile is now confident in the technology piece and that the tool will continue to evolve as the social media industry changes.   “LSW was implemented to provide social customer service across 100+ social media presences globally, in 24 languages with a 140+ staff working around the clock from 7 different locations. Our highly complex operation is coordinated by only four internal resources; Our LSW set up is one of the most complex of all Lithium clients,” said Delfin Vassallo, Social Media Operations Manager Europe at Microsoft.   Changes as a result of LSW implementation   Microsoft Mobile started this project with two Twitter handles in two languages and one Facebook page. Now with LSW, they are efficiently managing an entire expanded suite of social channels: 66 Facebook pages 34 Twitter handles 7 contact centers (working around the clock to service customers in 24 languages)   To organize and coordinate all of these channels, personnel, languages, and time zones is quite complex, but the LSW platform allows Microsoft Mobile to do it seamlessly.   They are handling 230% more volume of cases than before the adoption of LSW, while only increasing headcount by 15%.   LSW has given Microsoft Mobile the immediate ability to manage the astonishingly fast increase in volume (on average 70k unique cases per month) while making teams more efficient and productive in order to meet the target response times.   One of the most noticeable impacts to the Microsoft Mobile organization is the development of their Social Care team. In 2013, the global team comprised 90 staff members. Now they are at 145 full-time social media agents plus team leaders, quality monitors, and trainers.   With the right technology now in place, Microsoft Mobile is able to focus on developing and growing a very well-curated hiring and training program. Their management team saw the opportunity and decided to prioritize it by investing in the right tools and the right team to make their social customer support program world-class.   They predicted social would be big, but not THIS big. Through Lithium analytics and reporting, the Microsoft Mobile leadership team has been able to validate that they made the right decision to invest in social. Therefore, they continue to support the growing Social Care program due to the impressive results.   From a cross-functional perspective, LSW has allowed Microsoft Mobile to optimize resources in smaller, typically budget-constrained markets. Marketing now provides the content and creativity, and the Social Care team handles the social presence. The result of multiple teams working through one tool is that the customer receives one single answer through one unified brand voice.   “We could handle a 230% 2013-14 YoY volume increase by only increasing 15% our staff,” said Delfin Vassallo, Social Media Operations Manager Europe at Microsoft.   Business results   The Microsoft Mobile customers immediately saw a change with LSW. The Social Care team was flooded with positive comments, thanking them for the competent and quick responses on social.   Microsoft Mobile was able to get back to the customer faster than they expect (as quick as 4 minutes with an average response time of 2 hours vs. the industry benchmark of 7 hours)-- and with a meaningful and complete answer to their problem.   “Customers are becoming more demanding on social channels. They ask a lot of support questions and express doubts about products/services, so the key for brands is to answer fast. That sounds pretty simple, but if you don’t have the right tools in place, you aren’t able to do that. LSW allows us to service our customers quickly and competently. Lithium continues to stay ahead of the game with regards to customer behaviors and demands." Delfin Vassallo, Social Media Operations Manager, Microsoft Mobile Europe   Microsoft Mobile is able to resolve 95% of cases in-channel on social, which means they rarely redirect customers to other assisted channels such as phone or chat. As a result, their volume has skyrocketed, because the more they answer customer inquiries quickly and efficiently, the more customers trust them and want to ask additional questions.   Microsoft Mobile customers’ satisfaction is the ultimate metric of success— Microsoft Mobile is thrilled to receive overwhelmingly positive sentiments, indicating that they are making a huge impact on customers.   In summary, Microsoft Mobile agents’ productivity increased as they are now able to handle more cases and faster: First contact resolution rose to 95% (some languages keep a steady 100%) Average case handling time went down from 20 minutes to 9mins Response time was kept under 2 hours despite the overwhelming increase in demand. The overall cost saving of handling more cases in social rather than in traditional assisted channels was around 80%            

Company: Orange Spain   Entry submitted by: Santiago Martín Martín (tiako) Social Support Manager Community: Comunidad Orange (https://comunidad.orange.es) and La Comunidad amena.com (https://comunidad.amena.com) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Orange Espagne SAU is one of the biggest telecom companies in Spain with almost 15 million of customers. It is part of Orange Group and operates with three brands in the Spanish market: Orange, amena.com and Simyo.   In 2014, Orange Spain took the decision to take a big step in the social support of our customers. Lithium applications were a key enabler and platform for the execution of this new strategy.   The cornerstone of this strategy has been the launch of new communities, in our two brands (Orange and Amena.com) as a new space of conversation and help among our customers.   Our main business goal has been call deflection with a big focus in superusers cultivation program (see Marketing champion Orange Spain application). We have used extensively gamification facilities of Lithium community to get our superusers to create a big amount of solutions to other customers issues.     Orange Spain community replaced our old forums and it proved essential to not losing SEO positioning of main threads thanks to the easy and proper migration process.   Besides, we decided to put in place a new social customer support model, mainly in Facebook and Twitter, focusing on customer satisfaction, resolution and response time.   LSW has helped us to build this new model and to get the highest performance of our support and comms teams. We have made extensive usage of tagging, queuing and reporting facilities of the application, getting the better efficiency of our agents who only have to be focused in solving our customer request and incidents.   Our customer care organization changes as a result of cost reductions with Community and LSW   All the activity in communities and social media channels is managed by two different areas of the company: Comms and Customer Support, with more than 50 people conversing with our customers. In telco industry, main part or social activity is about customers asking support. It is a big challenge to be able to build a model that integrates social support seamlessly in the whole customer support processes.   LSW has allowed us to organize tasks and people and get the most of everyone. We have been able to integrate the work of community managers, support agents, web advisors and community moderators. All they know who is the responsible to answer any tweet or post coming to our social accounts thanks to the queues and rules that we have built over LSW.   We are proud of our highly motivated and skilled teams!!  Our business results   Regarding communities, we have got 300k monthly visits. Mainly, these visits are coming to communities to solve any doubt or problem. We have found that 27% of visitors surveyed, say that they get their problem solved in their visit, so we are saving costs consistently: around 500k euros at year.   We are very happy also with the contribution to the community of our superusers: 56% of topics of the last month, got a solution by one of them.   Regarding social media, Facebook and Twitter, we are very proud of achieving our goals of response time and customer satisfaction: we answer 90% of posts in our SLA time (2 hours), and we got 80% of customer satisfaction in these interactions.   These indicators have put us consistently in the top-5 of most socially devoted brands in Spain on Facebook, month by month, according to Social Bakers ranking.         

Company: giffgaff Entry submitted by: Gregg Baker (gregg) Head of Community Community: giffgaff Community (http://community.giffgaff.com) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP     giffgaff, founded 5 years ago and known as “the mobile network run by you”, utilizes Lithium to provide a first class experience for our members. At giffgaff we like to do things differently. We don’t believe in having shops on the high street, call centers you have to ring for help or generally just making life difficult for people. Instead we are online only and pass on the savings to our members.   ‘giffgaff’ itself is an ancient Scottish word meaning mutuality and from day one we ensured we founded a business built on mutual relationships and understanding. We built the business around having a community at the heart of it, suggesting ideas, helping each other and keeping us real. This allows us to operate a very lean business and pass on the savings to our members. Lithium as a platform allowed us to facilitate that and evolve our thinking even further.   Our community provides first line support for our business by utilizing the Lithium platform. Members answer support questions, create knowledgebase articles and even create tutorial videos. We utilize standard platform features as well as embedding a tool to ask the community on our product pages. We empower our Community members to be powerful advocates for us, driving acquisition, while also giving them the tools and the channel to be our front line support. Reflect on that for a moment, our members provide all support for us (apart from private account related issues). As a result, we have seen a contact rate from our customers of once every five years.   Community members write the articles that go into our Knowledge Base, they help create the video tutorials taking members through difficult set ups and they are on hand to answer member questions, with an average response time of just 90 seconds (that's well under the average of 11 minutes for call centers). Typically tracked in minutes or even hours, our Community can solve a situation in seconds and then have that solution seen by at least 50 other people a month.   On average we receive 10,000-11,000 questions a month, of which the solutions are viewed at least 500,000 times a month. That’s a lot of calls deflected. We estimate savings in the region of $35M a year thanks to all of the amazing work our Community does. The best part is that members are happy with the responses they receive, in fact so happy we even picked up an award from ‘Which?’, that’s a pretty big deal here in the UK. We even found a way to add some giffgaff charm to that by letting one of our Community members go and accept the award on our behalf.   We truly believe we have a better way of providing customer service and so far satisfaction scores of over 80% would agree.  

Company: Centrify  Entry submitted by: Raman Kumar, Sr. Director of Technical Support and Customer Success, and Anton Chiang (ac), Manager, Community and Support Programs Community: Centrify Community (http://community.centrify.com) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Centrify provides unified identity management across cloud, mobile and data center environments. Centrify solutions deliver single sign-on (SSO) for users, privilege management and auditing for security and compliance, and a simplified identity infrastructure for IT. Centrify is used by more than 5,000 customers worldwide, including half the Fortune 50.   Centrify provides unified identity management for end users and privileged users. With flagship products addressing needs for identity management across cloud, mobile and data centers the Support team interacts with IT admins every day with several skills sets spanning across *NIX, Windows, Active Directory, SAML to name a few. To Support this vas diversity of skills, the Centrify Support team believes that the Community (peers) of Centrify admins across the globe play an important role in collaborating with the experts at Centrify and on Customer premises.   As we grow our customer base, we are now taking a Community first approach to boot strap our Support team by virtually extending it to our MVP’s at thousands of customers’ locations. This has helped us two fold: first, we have happy customers who are constantly willing to share their knowledge and experience with other industry veterans in our space, and ensure that they share their best practices. Second, we are now able to reduce our costs to add engineers across every region, time zone and yet meet SLA’s and responsiveness by leveraging our Community on Lithium.   This has opened the doors for all our products to receive timely support. Our free product is only support by our Community, and this free peer support model is giving our champions (who have deployed in labs or very small environments) the support they need.   Our community categorized by different product lines: Centrify Server Suite (our on-premise product), Centrify Identity Service & Centrify Privilege Service (our cloud based product) and Centrify Express (our free product). All community members have read access to all categories and write access to our free Centrify Express forums. This enables Centrify to provide a positive user experience for our free product users, potentially leading to paid upgrade when their organizations expand.   For our paid customers, they have the option to ask their technical questions in the premium product forums. These questions are automatically escalated as support cases to our CRM if the community does not answer them within 24 hours. This ensures that our paid customers receive timely responses while Centrify reduces paid support contact volume.   Our organizational changes   At Centrify, we value support as a team that adds value to our customers and not a cost center. That being said, just like every successful and customer centric organization, we keep a close eye on our costs every year. The savings in Headcount to support our customers are re-purposed to make the Community and Centrify Support Portal more interactive and resourceful. With new products, new customers we are always innovating and ensuring that every type of customers who come to us for a help can easily find their answers. In the future, we will be enhancing the UI further to provide a single pane of glass for all existing customers to address their technical and product needs. The success of Community for our customers has also enabled the use of Community internally. It is a powerful tool that Support Engineers across the two Tiers and all locations worldwide use to collaborate, and ensure that the knowledge created is available for new engineers and cross functional on-boarding of engineers.   Our business results   Centrify Community started as a platform for our Express users to ask their questions and in the last 18 months we have opened this for every customer of our solution (paid or free).   In spite of growing our customers base and revenues by 2x, our team has been able to successfully support 5000+ customers and continuously achieve a 92%+ customers satisfaction*. Without enabling peer-to-peer community help, we would not be able to sustain such rapid growth while maintaining a high score for customer satisfaction.  Support Management at Centrify is always looking at metrics to drive more self-service, engineer efficiency and content creation (Knowledge articles).   *Customer Satisfaction is derived from 5 survey metrics that we collect from our customers. Every time a case that is opened with Technical Support team at Centrify, the customer will have an opportunity to provide their feedback on the products, people, and features / functionality of Centrify Solutions. Customer are asked to rate us on the 5 parameters (1) Case Owner Satisfaction (2) Overall Product Satisfaction (3) Product Quality (4)Features and Functionality and (5) Overall Support Satisfaction.   We’ve seen steady community growth in the past 3 years. Q1 2015 we saw a year over year increase of user sessions by 31 %, and 13% increase in topic replies   More than 30k visits per month in indirect contact deflection. 40+ technical topics are answered and turned into searchable community knowledge for future use.   Super-user Spotlight:   Rich Multimedia Content:     Wealth of technical information and resource in the community: In-depth Community Generated how-to articles:      

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Gustavo Casado (Piquio) Social Media Specialist Community: Foro.Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es/) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone Group is a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in London and with its registered office in Newbury, Berkshire. It is the world's 2nd-largest mobile telecommunications company measured by both subscribers and 2013 revenues (behind China Mobile), and had 434 million subscribers as of March 31, 2014.   Throughout the rankings and roles program, Vodafone Europe has been unique in applying customized loyalty programs focused on the use of our platform. We leverage personalized emails, depending on the number of registrations, use, frequency, and proficiency of Lithium features.   The complaints department bases their strategy upon our top terms queries from Lithium. We provide our complaints team with a list of terms frequently used on our eForum to give them a heads up on the complaints that they will receive that week. They proactively discuss with the appropriate departments related to those issues, and they search for the correct answers to provide customers in a timely fashion.

Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz), Jason Hurst (jashurst), Joana Dehanov (jdurande), Social Knowledge Program Managers Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.   At Cisco customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success.   Cisco's Support Community   The Services Business Capabilities team at Cisco has leveraged Lithium's capabilities to empower engineers in Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC) to easily capture knowledge created through collaboration, reuse it internally, and share it directly with Cisco customers. We implemented more than 80 custom components within the Lithium platform to deliver a solution called Tech Zone to the TAC organization that is optimized for their needs and integrated into their workflow. The TAC is staffed by over 3,000 engineers spanning 20 facilities worldwide, bringing support to Cisco customers in over 180 countries in 17 different languages. Tech Zone has become a preferred channel for TAC engineers to collaborate, and has transformed not only the way TAC manages their intellectual capital but how Cisco communicates, collaborates, and serves its partners and customers.   Our Innovations   Since its origins, Tech Zone has pushed the boundaries of what a Social Knowledge Management Environment is and what it can become. With the goal of empowering our support engineers to solve customer problems quickly and effectively, we have expanded the core capabilities of the Lithium platform by implementing many custom features to enhance the collaboration experience, streamline the support workflow, and provide additional channels for sharing content. Some examples are:   Raised Hand Subscription The "raise hand" feature allows users to draw attention to a discussion in progress in order to ask for additional help. Subject matter experts can subscribe to raised hand events as they do to other content, allowing them to be immediately notified when other engineers need assistance. Solution Buddy An internally developed tool we call Solution Buddy uses the Lithium APIs to integrate the platform with the salesforce.com instance TAC engineers use to manage support cases. It powers reuse of Tech Zone content by automatically surfacing relevant content within the salesforce.com interface, thereby enabling engineers to find answers to customer problems quickly without the need to search or leave their case management platform. It also lets them link relevant Tech Zone content to support cases, thus helping others solve similar problems in the future. Flag for Improvement With the proliferation of articles in Tech Zone, content was becoming outdated or sometimes contained errors. We addressed this by implementing a document maintenance process. Users can click a link to flag any article that needs improvement. Then they must choose an option that describes why they flagged it (critical information needed, inaccurate information, duplicate content, etc.) and provide comments explaining what needs updating. Flagged articles enter a Knowledge Base Article Dashboard re-purposed to manage the process of moving them through the improvement workflow, and an email notification is sent to the users responsible for the article. Those users then submit changes for review by the flagger or moderator. When the changes are accepted, the article is updated and exits the flagged state.   The screen shot below shows an article that has been flagged for improvement. The next available actions are shown in the Actions widget, which in different states could be: Flag for Improvement, Suggest Additional Improvements, Improvements Completed, and Review Improvements. Article Publication Workflow Leveraging Lithium REST APIs, we automated the process of publishing Tech Zone articles to our corporate website at Cisco.com and our mobile support app. Sharing the most valuable articles in Tech Zone multiplies their value by enabling customers to quickly find their own answers when and where they need them, thereby reducing the number of support cases they need to open. When an engineer reaches the rank of Associate Level 1 by participating in the community, they are given permission to "Nominate [Articles] for External Publication" from the Actions widget. Nominated articles are reviewed by technology specialists known as Technical Content Engineers, who then forward them to Technical Writers for further review and formatting before they are published to Cisco.com. The user interface includes links to move the article to the next step of the process and manage which users are collaborating to review the article. A Publishing Life Cycle widget lets users know the state of articles within the publishing pipeline.     Business Impact   Our innovations have increased productivity and reduced costs. The business impact driven by Tech Zone has grown significantly since the community was launched.   User activity in Tech Zone has increased steadily each year. We have driven user engagement through the unique use of leaderboards, and competitions such as Knowledge Champions League and TACode. As of the end of March 2015 there have been: 55,000+ Discussions Started 201,000+ Replies 32,000+ Articles Created 44,000+ Article Kudos 18,000+ Article Case Links 1,700+ Articles published to Cisco.com Our engagement initiatives and innovations both promote and facilitate user activity that leads to cost savings. Tech Zone articles shared with customers by publishing to Cisco.com and our mobile support app have saved Cisco over $24M so far this fiscal year (Aug 2014 through Mar 2015) by avoiding additional support cases, and are projected to save over $36M by the end of the year (July 2015). Last fiscal year the savings were over $17M, so the savings have nearly doubled year over year.    Cisco has embraced knowledge in an unprecedented way in order to transform our business and drive the success of our customers. The success of Tech Zone has proven that the Lithium platform is much more powerful than discussion boards. By pioneering new methodologies and human-centered behaviors that are not led only by tools, we have evolved to truly "social" knowledge management, which provides just-in-time, as well as institutional learning. Any organization can transition from email communications to a collaborative environment where knowledge valuable to the organization and its customers is naturally captured, enhanced, and reused by the community, and users that create and curate that content can be empowered and recognized. As word of our success spreads, our engagements have expanded to include onboarding Cisco Engineering, Professional Services, and Sales organizations, as well as expanding our technical support community to include Cisco Partners.

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

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