Company: Optus Contact: Karen Le (Community Manager) Community: My Optus Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As Australia's second largest Telecommunication provider, Optus is in the business of connecting people. We offer a broad range of communications services including mobile, telephony, internet, business network services, satellite services and subscription television to over ten million customers every day.   While we are a company that is focused on enabling homes and businesses with technology and entertainment, our vision is to lead Australia in outstanding customer experience.   How community meets our customer care business goals   Like many companies, the provision of customer service through traditional channels contributes to a significant proportion of our operational cost base. This year, our overarching Customer Service Strategy has been firmly rooted in digital with the dual purpose of meeting the shift in customer preference and reducing support costs. The under-utilisation of community based customer support was recognised as a key area of opportunity. The resulting business objective was to actively drive My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre during FY16 (March ’15 to April ‘16). What we actually achieved was an incremental 500,000+ calls. There were a number of key initiatives that were implemented in order to achieve these goals;   Integration of Community within our digital assets   This focused on the inclusion of contextually relevant widgets that surface community conversation on the optus.com.au website, including the homepage, help & support, product and sales pages. Strong community CTA’s were on all electronic communications and a further extension of our online integration strategy has been to develop campaign landing pages directly within the community; giving customers the opportunity to directly ask questions, comment and respond directly. These questions are work flowed into to LSW where moderators are able to respond where required. This has worked so well that the Pre- Paid team have made the community landing page part of the customer on-boarding journey, allowing all new Pre-Paid customers ask questions at the time of setup to provide a seamless experience. Pre-Paid Welcome Hub   Default support channel within our Go to Market Programs   One of the most significant cultural changes was to position to community as THE default support channel for our Go To Market programs. When Optus launched a new mobile App in September, WiFi Talk (gives customers with limited indoor mobile coverage can use the app to make and receive calls over a WiFi connection), My Optus Community was used as the primary support channel and for the very first time all the customer broadcast communications directed customers to a blog post in My Optus Community with all of the key details. Over 67,000 people viewed the post, resulting in 230 comments. This was so effective that only 20 support calls were logged about WiFi Talk issues each week since it launched. This has been successfully replicated a number of times since with equal success and is now considered BAU practice. WiFi Talk Launch   Australia’s First Responsive Community   We’ve acknowledged the trend of needing support on-the-go by making My Optus Community the first fully responsive community in Australia, ensuring that members have the same experience across all of their devices. This has resulted in a jump from 510K mobile visits last financial year to 1.3 million this year. Today over 50% of our traffic is generated by mobile devices.   Driving traffic and informing customers through the Optus Blog   In June of 2015 we launched the My Optus Community Blog, which has played an important role in our content marketing strategy and has been an excellent vehicle for the discovery of community content. Since launch, we have maintained a steady rhythm of content production with over 125 articles published, which have received over 500,000 page views and contribute a significant proportion of search referrals.   My Optus Community Blog   Improving the Resolution Rate   In a world first, we customised the way that the Tribal Knowledgebase (TKB) module is traditionally used to change the way articles are created and published. In doing so, we give community members the control to identify support content they want and think other members might need, allowing us to scale through crowd sourcing. Threads can be nominated as Wiki articles by the community, who can also make updates to the content, giving them power to help other members. Since we launched this module in September, 63 articles have been authored and received over 26,000 views. My Optus Community Wiki   This combined with prioritised routing of unanswered posts into the social media team through LSW has seen the customer reported resolution rate increase from 9% to 37%.   Retaining & recognising our members   The implementation of a formalised Super User program and the introduction of Premium Gamification has seen the contributions made from our super users increase by almost 300% year on year. This translates to almost 1,500 hours being spent in the community by our top 5 users. The program runs on a 6 month cycle, is built on deep personal relationships (that extends into the ‘real’ world) and actively recruits users from other communities based on a set of attributes.   The execution of our strategy in combination with attentive and responsive community management has seen us exceed the 350,000 incremental call reduction target by more almost 60%, delivering a 230% increase on Opex saving.   Cost reductions from our community   The organisation’s business objective was to actively utilise My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre. These call reduction projections are used to plan for our voice channel workforce. The number of actual calls are recorded and tracked against the projection figures ensure that capacity planning and headcount is accurate and adjustments are made accordingly, and due to these reduced volumes we are able to incrementally increase capacity when unforeseen issues arise.   Also, through the increased participation by members there a reduction in the reliance on Optus moderators to input into the discussion by 40% in comparison to the previous financial year, meaning we were able to handle an 82% increase in engagement volume across social with minimal increase in resource (4 FTE).   Our results   The combination of executive support, solid strategy and a focused team has delivered an outstanding set of outcomes for My Optus Community including an incremental reduction of over 500,000 calls delivering 230% increase on Opex savings. There has been a considerable impact, not only on the number of calls reduced but in the way we organise and plan our headcount and workforce. This has meant we’ve been able to provide more support to customers when they need us as well as a significant reduction in our operational expenditure.   Listen to what the VP of Customer Service has to say about the results and the impact they’ve had on the organisation’s performance.    

Company:  TELUS Entry submitted by:Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager) Community: TELUS Neighbourhood Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, with $12.5 billion of annual revenue and 12.5 million customer connections, including 8.5 million wireless subscribers, 1.5 million residential network access lines, 1.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers and 1.0 million TELUS TV customers. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video, and is Canada's largest healthcare IT provider.   Reimagining our Social Strategy for Customer Care   In 2015, we reimagined our social strategy, developing a new operations team focused on not just customer service and engagement, but on content development and deep communication skills. We paired this team investment with LSW, which we use to listen and engage across Twitter and Facebook, and redesigned how we workgroup and flow potential cases. Most significantly, we also onboarded more teams internally to LSW, including Marketing Communications and PR, enabling better collaboration and swifter auctioning of support opportunities. With the launch of the Tribal Knowledge Base inside our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood, and LSW campaign and publishing capability, we have developed and implemented a virtuous cycle of customer listening, engagement, and needs fulfillment (see supporting visual).     Organizational Efficiency Through LSW   Through focused use of LSW and the redefinition of our operational team’s skillsets, we have consolidated a number of job functions within operations from our Marketing Communications team, and have further enabled the collaboration between operations, Marketing Communications, and PR teams. We have enabled efficiencies, reduced hand-offs, and optimized the customer experience by getting support opportunities identified and handled faster, also recognizing that experience and brand conversations often become support opportunities.   Leveraging both operations team expertise and the fact that more teams and functions were onboarded to LSW, we were able to further rethink team functions for efficiency, and maximize the value of our new operations team by consolidating some of the functions previously executed on by other teams.   Our Q1 2016 Support Savings Results   A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:   $3.6M in annual operational savings Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit) > 11,000 Twitter and Facebook conversations and over 30,000 responses sent 80% of Twitter conversations responded to un 35 minutes or less > 1,600 community posts, 90%+ community-created > 330,000 unique community visits 98% customer satisfaction 90% likelihood to recommend TELUS (NPS) 89% likelihood to share experience

Company: Telekom Deutschland GmbH Contact: Eva Heinrichs (Platform Owner Telekom hilft Community) Community: Telekom hilft Community Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Following our slogan “life is for sharing” Telekom Deutschland GmbH offers innovative products and services connecting people all over the word. Customers should be given easy access to the world of telephone, Internet, Internet TV and cloud services. As a telecommunications provider, it is Telekom's goal to enable this by providing the best possible communications and IT services. Meaning Telekom customers can enjoy the "life is for sharing" experience anytime, any place.   Telekom hilft Community, Europe’s largest telco community, is a pillar of Deutsche Telekom’s customer care -for both consumer and business customers. The focus is on support, but also leveraging product feedback and co-creation.   Our three pillars to leverage the community for support excellence   Established in 2014 we bundled three legacy forums to Telekom hilft Community to foster the peer-to-peer “customers help customers” concept. Steadily growing, the community has >550.000 registered users (growth of 50% since 2014). To enhance the involvement of our most active super users producing >50% of all content, we are using gamification elements. Furthermore the closed user group “Community Guides” with advanced editing rights enables us to gain customer insights for the platform development. Additionally, we also launched the closed user group “Telekom hilft Lab” connecting product managers with customers to develop and evaluate current as well as future products and services.   Title: Participants of the Community Manager Guides event with the superusers of Telekom hilft Community   Title: Example of promotion on Facebook for our CUG “Telekom hilft Lab”   Telekom hilft Community enables us to increase our permeability and customer proximity by facilitating involvement in closed user groups. Participation of super users and active listeners helps Deutsche Telekom to gain valuable customer insights. The project PM@ThC (product manager at Telekom hilft Community) helps for example product managers to receive precious feedback and also users to get profound answers from experts. The close relationship between customers and Deutsche Telekom’s employees has even effect on 3 rd party support, such as shorter on-site technical support time. These insights are communicated to the management board and are part of our early-warning system.   Recognizing the changing user behavior, a relaunch in 2015 included a responsive design to increase traffic of mobile phones and tablets, which now accounts for up to 30% of our overall traffic. Additionally, we integrated Telekom hilft Community in other DT websites such as Telekom eShop and help portal. They include a search widget, a service tab and customized landing pages informing about the Telekom hilft Community. Auto suggestions help customers to find relevant content and enrich the problem solving or buying process at all stages. Relevant discussion feeds were posted on Deutsche Telekom’s social media channels, enabling the community team to enrich their content and link to Telekom hilft Community by using synergies between the different platforms.   Title: Example of integration within geschaeftskunden.telekom.de via service tab   Title: Example of seamless integration of community posts within search results of other portals   Title: Example of a posting at Deutsche Telekom’s social media channels from the Telekom hilft Community: Why do my incoming calls always end directly on my mailbox?   The community’s impact on our customer care organization   Community Management is the new Service: By linking Community solutions on other social media channels, we are constantly promoting Telekom hilft Community. By doing so, we are increasing the relevance of our “user to user” centric platform. Adapting to the new business environment, customer service focuses now more on community management instead of just answering questions. Due to the community focused activities, we improved the solution rate within the community from 25% to 35% year to date.   Facilitating the permeability and customer proximity, the success of Telekom hilft Community is influencing the online strategy of Deutsche Telekom i.e. user generated content cements the reputation of Deutsche Telekom as a customer-centric company. Furthermore, providing a strong external reputation affects the employees who have learnt about the value of Telekom hilft Community and strengthen it through blog entries on blog.telekom.de.   Introducing new use cases steadily, we start social commerce with ratings and reviews at the business customers’ eShop to foster product recommendations and to assist in the buying process by giving additional information. By doing so, gamification elements motivate users to rate products while other users award those ratings with kudos. This encourages the overall community building of Telekom hilft Community. Title: Example of integration of ratings & reviews in business customers shop on geschaeftskunden.telekom.de   How we became leader in service through customer satisfaction and operational efficiency   Deutsche Telekom pursues a quality leadership strategy in the German market. Therefore customer satisfaction is an important part of the overall strategy. We believe that happy customers share their experiences just as troubled customers ask for help. 80% of the questions in the community are answered by other community members, mostly happy customers. Telekom support colleagues answer only 20% of the questions.   A recent survey by a big German business magazine, Focus Money, confirmed the leading role of Deutsche Telekom: The best online service across industries in Germany is provided by Deutsche Telekom. As Focus Money also says, “Telekom hilft” is rated as a most likeable service brand in Germany.   Title: Gero Niemayer, managing director customer service Telekom Deutschland, proudly presents Focus Money survey results on Twitter   Telekom hilft Community attracts on average approximately 1.6m unique visitors each month – trending up 22% on year to year comparison. Based on a 35% solution rate, we assume that >350,000 calls can be avoided per month. In addition to the value of deflected calls, we take advantage of priceless value from customer insights and increased reputation for Deutsche Telekom.   Before Telekom hilft Community started, Deutsche Telekom offered three different online platforms. Migrated and consolidated to one platform, Lithium helps us to streamline customer service and the IT landscape as well as to enhance usability and the user journey for our customers.  

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: 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: 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:  Telstra Entry submitted by: Richard Manley (Project Manager – Digital First) Community: Frontline Peer Support Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Telstra is on a journey to become a world class technology company. A key part of this strategy is the use of Digital to improve customer advocacy. Through our Digital transformation program Digital First, we’re transforming the way we engage and support our customers. A key part of this has been the adoption of Lithium in August 2015 across our Global Call Centres.    How we are implementing Community and LSW  to meet our customer care business goals     As an international business with 37,000 staff worldwide and a 100 year history, Telstra has introduced the Digital First program with the mission to digitise our channels, remove cost, and help us become a world class technology company. In August 2015, Telstra adopted Lithium to support our frontline call centres. The tool also captures the expert knowledge of our consultants so this can be shared across the company. The adoption of Peer Support by our front line represents a significant commitment to improving our support tools and driving increased efficiencies across our business.     With Peer Support, we have improved on our existing knowledge management systems. We now also have a question and solution model, where a solution can come from anyone in the business and be validated by empowered Moderators. Critical knowledge gaps are promptly identified and flowed back full circle to improve the scope and quality of our knowledge management systems.       To ensure rapid adoption across our business, we produced a series of Peer Support training videos that are both engaging and punchy. These videos represent part of our core induction experience for new starters, and enable them to intuitively start using Peer Support to find solutions from day 1.   Peer Support Training Videos:   Check them out here.             But the Peer Support story does not end there. Our customers have also benefited, through improved service levels. This is evidenced by results showing an increase in First Call Resolution, and a reduction in Multi-Agent Events since we rolled out the tool. For our customers, this means we’re getting it right first time more often, and we’re transferring customers less. All this equates to greater customer advocacy, and brings to life what it means for Telstra’s journey towards becoming a world class technology company.   Changes we implemented in our customer care organization because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community and LSW   Through Peer Support our frontline staff across different countries are able to support each other, and reduce reliance on support staff. It has also expedited the onboarding process for new starters.     Telstra agents are now able to draw on the huge wealth of knowledge captured in Peer Support.  We’re driving efficiency by being able to serve our customers better and with less transfers as agents have access to more information. And we’re giving our centres visibility of key metrics and performance through the Lithium Social Web Monitor Wall which is enabling us to embed Lithium into the way our centres operate.   The efficiencies realised by Peer Support has been a critical enabler in reducing our reliance on traditional support channels. A great example of this is we have been able to reduce support FTE in centres, which is a direct cost-reduction benefit to the business. These cost efficiencies, delivered by our Digital First transformation program, will continue as we progress and industrialize the tool across our organisation, and in our journey to becoming a world class technology company.   Our metrics   Peer Support has enjoyed significant success since launch in August 2015, with results showing an increase of 1.92 percentage points in First Call Resolution, and a reduction of 1.19 percentage points in Multi-Agent Events (call transfers).   These impressive results were proven using a robust data analysis and benefits model.     The natural language search capability in Peer Support has been a real game-changer for Telstra, enabling our consultants to search for a solution using phrases intrinsic to their business area. Our traditional knowledge bases have always found this challenging. This has enabled a reduction in training time for new starters, as they can get up to speed more quickly by searching for solutions as they learn on the job. Lithium’s natural language search capability, combined with our multi-faceted approach to enabling the Global Call Centres to adopt the tool, led to 320,000 page views in the first 6 months.  Our strategic focus on questions and solutions has led to 96,000 verified solution views in the same period. These figures alone show significant value is being extracted from the tool, and there’s much more to come with plans to industrialize Peer Support as the de facto support channel not only across our call centres, but also into our retail channels.  

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   The SmartBear Community provides 24/7 assistance for all product users. In addition, the Customer Care Team helps our customers resolve technical issues during normal business hours. Decreasing the load on our Support Team was one of the important tasks for 2015.   People should go to the Community first In 2015, we were concentrating on increasing the number of questions asked in the Community. For this, we launched different community programs oriented towards increasing the community visibility and boosting the activity of current community members.   We allocated one community manager who worked with community members, launched different community programs oriented towards new and existing community members.   To decrease the number of support cases, we have implemented the pre-submission search on the Contact Support form. When a customer submits a case, we show community topics where a similar question has already been discussed. Answering one specific question in the Community often means answering the same question for dozens of people.   The results of this implementation were great – many people went to the Community instead of contacting the Support Team.   Involve different teams into discussions As a rule, different teams don’t have time to read all community questions. However, we had a community manager who could refer an interesting question to a certain developer, QA engineer, technical writer, etc. They would find an answer faster when given a specific question and not having to review all community questions. Involving employees in the community brings great quality to practically all community discussions.   In addition, community members see that they can talk to developers of the product they use. They like it and often return to them to ask other interesting questions or provide some valuable feedback.   Case Deflection Increase Working on all of our initiatives helped us increase the number of deflected support cases (cases that would normally go to the Support Team, but were resolved in the Community). Last year, we doubled those metrics – at the end of 2015, we had 12% of deflected cases in comparison with 6.8% of deflected cases at the beginning of the same year.    

Company: Vodafone Spain     Contact: Alejandro Moreno ( Community Manager) Community:   Foro Vodafone  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone Spain is part of Vodafone Group, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and provides a range of services including voice, messaging, data and fixed communications. Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries, partners with mobile networks in 57 more, and fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. As of 31 December 2015, Vodafone had 461 million mobile customers and 13 million fixed broadband customers.   Vodafone Spain has 14.255.000 mobile customers and 2.960.000 fixed broadband customers. All of them get benefit of the experience and capacity of a world leader that helps its customers to be better connected. For more info: please visit: www.vodafone.es   How we are implementing Community our customer care business goals   Our target are: Increase total number of registered users. Increase Community Content counting number of created posts Increase community participation Acquire new “super-users” that help us as community mods. Increase NPS and Employees Resolution Rate.    Changes we implemented because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community   The changes we have made:   New community home: it’s more visual and accessible. We have used click map to detect the hotspots. Launch new mobile version enabling users easier access to the community for smartphones and tablets. New badges for super-users integrated on console. We create content based on Key trends such as movies, series and video games to increase user participation and gain awareness to promote eForum Channel. Our employees are continuously improving their answers and performance to encourage further volume of customers using eForum as the contact mechanism prior to Call Center contacts.   Our results   €3.7 M potentially saved on incoming Customer Call Center Calls.   

Company: Flybe Contact: Danielle Bassett (Customer Support Liaison Manager) Social channels:  https://twitter.com/flybe, https://www.facebook.com/Flybe  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Flybe is Europe's largest regional airline, operating more UK domestic flights than any other airline. They have received numerous accolades, including being named the top UK airline for punctuality in a report issued by UK consumer watchdog Which? and being honored as the ‘Best Short-Haul Airline’ at the 2016 Business Travel Awards.   Our road to Lithium Social Web (LSW)   Due to Flybe’s increasing volume of social customer service related queries, we recognized that social was quickly becoming a preferred channel for customer engagement. Our new focus was to use social as a customer care channel versus a marketing channel while still maintaining the ability to publish marketing posts when required. When the decision was made to set-up a dedicated social care team, we took the opportunity to re-assess their social tool, which was an inherited tool used by their in-house marketing team.   We explored other social care solutions, and we ultimately replaced our prior vendor with Lithium Social Web (LSW) to offer the ability to meet the needs of a growing social customer care team that could respond quickly and resolve issues efficiently.   How LSW has benefited our customer care organization   Our social media team works from different locations, but with LSW, the team is able to assign conversations that may require a corporate response or further investigation while not impacting response times. Even if you are not logged in to the tool, you are notified by an email alert that works really well. This has benefited a few key stakeholders outside of the social media team that use LSW, which include marketing and customer support management.   Flybe social media team   In addition, we currently utilize the LSW Shared Dashboard with other license holders, which enables greater real-time visibility throughout our organization. This ensures our customers are receiving the best possible service within business hours.   Our results with LSW   The implementation of Lithium enabled us to report immediately on the number of responses made within 15 minutes, half the time of that previously possible without LSW. As social channels are fast becoming the preferred communication method, it is important that we are able to promote our response times and shine amongst our competitors. LSW allows us to do that to address our customers’ needs.   Other metrics: 85% average response time within 15 min on Facebook 89% average response time within 15 min on Twitter Followers increased by 38% on Twitter and 50% on Facebook Incoming message volume increased 39% on Twitter and 57% on Facebook  

Company: giffgaff Contact: Gregg Baker (Head of Community) Community: giffgaff community Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   giffgaff, the UK based mobile network run by its members, has now been going strong for over 6 years. It was founded on the principal of having a community at the heart of everything. Be that Idea generation, business decisions and even our support.   We are an online only company, which means no retail stores and no pesky call centres to have to suffer when you need a helping hand. We found a better way, the right way, to do mobile with the support of our members.   Our customer care model   At giffgaff our peer to peer support model is not simply a way of saving money, or reducing cases, etc. It’s an approach we believe is the right way of doing things. Because of that, is is integral to how we function and operate as a business.    From day one, we wanted to give our members the best tools and platforms and sit back and let them decide how they should be used, what the purpose of them should be. Lithium was our platform of choice and our Community pushes it to it’s limits – more than we ever could.   The giffgaff approach   Our approach was born out of a desire to disrupt an industry, challenge ways of thinking and be a cause members would be driven to back. We stand proud of the difference our members made, taking it from a brave new idea to an industry expectation.   6 years of doing something different, 6 years of trusting our members, 6 years of having members come together and deliver a better way. This is the giffgaff way of doing things, putting metrics behind something which we just believe in is a HUGE challenge. So, this is our best metric, 6 years going on 7.