Company: Leroy Merlin Espańa Entry submitted by: Francisco Campos Dominguez (PacoCampos) Social Media Manager Community: Comunidad Leroy Merlin Lithy Category:  Total Community All Star   Leroy Merlin is the home improvement leader with +60 stores and has been in Spain for the last 25 years. Part of the ADEO Group, Leroy Merlin is the European home improvement retail leader.   The company culture of sharing, co-constructing and co-directing, is in the DNA of each "collaborator" and therefore Leroy Merlin Spain is a “community” in itself.   The Community: The heart of social evolution   The strategy was to "truly be social and not just seem social.”  This means that each "partner" should know the opportunities and concerns that the new environment poses in the company’s "mission" and every individual in the company is responsible to seize it. The option of trying to “seem social” in all the social activity in the marketing department was discarded.   Beyond our objectives with Total Community, you will find the promotion and support between clients encouraging self-learning DIY, decoration, etc. These existing activities provide the best user experience for our customers but also a relief in the workload of our employees in the brick and mortar stores.    On the other hand, we obtained an increase in sales both indirectly in stores through workshops, tips/ideas shown in Bricopedia (Wikitips), and the Project Gallery. In addition, people can directly purchase in the online store by gathering all the materials required directly from the shared project in the community.   Finally, we achieve a greater commitment from our employees. They are getting to know the customers and their needs and discovering customers with a very high commitment when responding to complex questions, technical issues, or questions requiring advanced knowledge.    Benefits of a Total Community A Lithium community and LSW are very important to our social strategy of providing customers. LSW enables seamless engagement with our customers, allowing us to respond to their support requests on Facebook, Twitter, Instragram and our community that help us as source of relevant content creating sinergies between our social channels. In the community you can buy some projects in one click.  The UGC is integrated in Newsletters, brochures and guides welcome you to interact, visiting the webpage, participating in workshops or sharing your passion about homes in the community. Too, the best projects become the protagonist in the most popular TV program in the country.    Social networks and Community build the "Social Ecosystem Leroy Merlin" with more that 3MM followers: + 720.000 Followers in Facebook +65.000 Followers in twitter +63.000 suscriptors in youtube +12.000 followers in pinterest and instagram. +2MM users uniques in the Community 32% Blogs 21% Forum 27% Projects (Ideas) 18% Bricopedias (TKB)     To measure the success of the Community, Leroy Merlin focused on 3 main KPIs:  +2MM Number of visits: Whenever a client resolves a question by visiting the Community, the company saves hours of customer service in stores, improves brand image and increases commercial potential +23.000  Number of content generated: Whenever members of the Community generate content for free, the company saves the cost of producing marketing/corporate materials +20.000Number of visits to the store: Every time the Community drives a customer to visit the online store a sales opportunity is generated     You cant see it, but you can perceive that it is a company that listens its clients, that tries to help them and that wants to improve every day.    

Company: Rogers Entry submitted by: Margaret Tsuji (Community Forums and Social Media Support Manager)  Community: Rogers Community Forums Lithy Category: Total Community All Star   Rogers Communications is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada's largest provider of wireless communications services and one of Canada's leading providers of cable television, high speed internet and telephony services.     In 2014, we launched a multi-year plan, called Rogers 3.0, to revitalize the company’s legacy of innovation and growth. The plan is centered around delivering a better experience for our customers. We are focused on fixing the basics, creating a more consistent experience and improving customer self-service.   Our road to Lithium   In 2010, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the Rogers Community Forums. We wanted a best-in-class platform and a means for customers to self-serve, thereby deflecting calls from our contact centres. The support provided at that time was predominantly peer-to-peer technical support.   With the successful launch of the Rogers Community Forums, we sought new opportunities to engage with our customers; Twitter and Facebook were the obvious choices.   In 2011, we launched our Social Media Support team, offering our customers a new and convenient support option. As such, we began to support and engage with our customers on Twitter and Facebook. As we earned their trust through the provision of reliable support and information, customers began to adopt this new means of social support and the volume of customer interactions in social media grew exponentially.   Recognizing the need for better reporting capabilities for our social support, we began searching for a social tool that would enable better customer engagement and provide valuable insights through data collection and reporting. After researching a number of social engagement tools, we settled on Lithium Social Web (LSW) and in 2014, the Social Media Support team was transitioned to the LSW platform. The transition gave us access to more insightful reporting and new capabilities.   Our Social Media Support team started off as a small group providing customer support on Facebook, Twitter and moderation of the Rogers Community Forums. We now have a significantly larger team supporting customers in social media and for the first time ever, we have a dedicated moderator team for the Rogers Community Forums.   The benefits of having both a  community and LSW   A Lithium community and LSW are important to our social strategy of providing customers with convenience through self-serve. LSW enables seamless engagement with our customers, allowing us to respond to their support requests on Facebook/Twitter via PM/DM or in public, while the Community Forums serve as a lasting source of relevant and helpful content.   In 2015, we optimized the Rogers Community Forums by leveraging insights from Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI). Our focus was set on content optimization, customer support and redesigning the Community Forums. We underwent a significant clean up and optimization exercise where we reviewed each and every post (all the way back from 2010) to ensure accuracy and relevance of information, accepted or provided solutions, and then creation of new content via posts, videos and blogs which aligned to contact centre top call driver results.   In addition to a significant community redesign in partnership with Lithium, we also launched Gamification in 2015. Take a look at some of our badges:     And we were one of the first Lithium communities to undergo a Responsive redesign. Over 30% of our traffic comes in from mobile devices and we expect this number to increase.     We also shifted from a purely peer-to-peer support model and started to provide direct support to customers in the Community Forums when our Super Users or other users are unable to assist. We created a common handle called @CommunityHelps to PM with users in the Community Forums. This helps our interactions look and feel seamless to the user and allows us to house all PM conversations in a single, easily-accessed inbox.     Our super user program is a key pillar of our overall Community Forums strategy. In 2015, we created “Front of the Line” service for our Super Users. In LSW, we have tagged our Super Users as priority customers so they receive even faster service through our social channels if they need it. It’s a small token of appreciation for their help in the Community Forums and it’s made possible by LSW.     Our Total Community results   Today, the Rogers Community Forums is staffed to support customers from 8 am to midnight, 7 days a week. Our response time has dropped dramatically to under 60 minutes. We create content daily using blogs, posts, videos and live Rogers Ask an Expert events. Our marketing teams have created detailed communication plans to promote the Rogers Community Forums as a destination for self-serve. We are also invited to every go-to-market activity across the company; Community Forums are now seen as a channel in which we can communicate new product/service launches AND obtain valuable customer insights/feedback post-launch.   Take a look at some of the promotional material designed to drive traffic to the Rogers Community Forums:     We achieved some amazing results from all of our efforts in 2015 (chart below). We have set some aspirational targets for 2016 and are confident that we are well on our way to our goal of offering a best-in-class customer experience.   KPI 2015 Results Registered users 20% YoY ↑ Page views 60% YoY ↑ CHI All time high 787 in Sept Response time <60 minutes Call deflection Deflected 160k+ calls Super users 11 super users spent 4,713 hours online    

Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.   Our Road to Lithium   In 2010, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the Fido Community. We wanted a best in class platform and a means for customers to self-serve, thereby deflecting calls from our contact centres. The support provided at that time was predominantly peer-to-peer technical support.   Around the same time, we launched our Social Support team, offering our customers a new and convenient support option. As such, we began to support and engage our customers on Twitter and Facebook. As our customers grew comfortable with these channels, they began to adopt this new means of social support and the number of followers grew.   In 2013, in order to further increase engagement on our social platforms, the scope of support provided in the Community expanded to include discussions on all consumer products and services.   Recognizing the need for optimizing responses and better reporting capabilities for our social support, we began searching for a social tool that would enable better customer engagement and provide valuable insights through data collection and reporting. After researching a number of social engagement tools, we found Lithium Social Web (LSW) to be the best option to meet our objectives and in 2014, the Social Support team was transitioned to the LSW platform. The transition proved valuable; giving us access to new functionalities and more insightful reporting.   In 2015, the company placed a huge emphasis on the Community and Social Media support, so we went ahead and included multiple enhancements and redesigns, which have proven to have a positive impact on our results. Thanks to the support and insights available through LSW and LSI, our Social Support team was able to consistently offer best-in-class service and deliver a NPS score amongst the highest throughout the company’s customer service channels.   When customers activate their Fido service, they receive this email:      Benefits of Having a Community and LSW   Having a Community is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Consumers have grown accustom to reading reviews and researching products online. “What do you recommend?” is a question anyone who’s worked in the servicing industry has heard. One of the greatest advantages of having a Community is that all this information is centralized, tabulated, searchable and kept up to date. Another great advantage is that some traffic directed to the Community is traffic deflected from our contact centres, resulting in the reduction in operational costs.   In most communities, questions are answered publicly, but our Lithium community allows us to answer our customers in private as well. This is very useful when customers have questions concerning their services or account, requiring us to discuss and exchange sensitive information. Our customers also love that we can treat their requests directly from the Community, as opposed to referring them to our other contact channels.   We also use the Community as a means of communication with our customers. For example, we inform our customers of upcoming software updates, Fido sponsored events, known issues, etc. This transparent approach is truly appreciated by our community members. But why stop there? Our contact centres also send our customers links to useful articles found in the Community, such as ways to pay your bill, ways to activate services, etc. The Community is used to support our customers even when they call in. Talk about versatility.   How do we keep track of all this information and manage all this traffic? That’s where LSW comes in.   LSW proved to be the perfect tool for our Community moderators, as it helped improve our response time by keeping on top of all Community posts, as opposed to sorting through them individually. To do this, we created a Community queue in LSW to receive all incoming Community posts. LSW allows us to “snooze” Community posts to allow time for our members to respond, based on our response strategy. We also created a common “FidoSolutions” Community profile, which we use for all of our Community PMs only, to make the process seamless from a customer perspective. In turn, this helped us be more efficient, improve our CHI score, response time, call deflection rates and resulted in cost savings.     LSW also proved efficient to help our Social Media Specialists to manage our incoming social media posts, improve on our response time and promote the Community thanks to the knowledge base feature. A single click allows us to answer our customers by sharing articles found within the Community and our website. It’s an incredible time saver and our Specialists and customers love it!   Here are some of the LSW features that help us deliver best in class service: Community response time: Moderators can “snooze” posts for a certain amount of time, based on our response strategy. The snooze functionality is essential to our Community moderation process. We snooze non-account specific inquiries, to give other Community members a chance to respond. If no one responds, we step in and assist. This incredibly useful functionality ensures no one is ever left unanswered. CommunityPMs: Moderators can take over the PM conversations from other moderators once their work shift has ended, greatly increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction. Information centralization: All customer information is now centralized, including contact info, and even notes for internal purposes. Profile merging: LSW allows us to merge customers various social profiles, so we always know who we are speaking with. Analytics and tags: This LSW feature helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…. Thanks to Analytics, we can clearly see what our customers are talking about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner. Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage with people who aren’t specifically reaching out to us. Klout: Allows us to prioritize influencers within our Queues and offer support accordingly.   Let’s not forget that we also utilize shared dashboards for real time reporting to specific people in the company and our launching a pilot for LSW experts in 2016 to hopefully improve our response time.   Our Results   LSW has helped us decrease our Community response time to 120 min in 2016 (93% improvement over 2014 and 34% over last year) while increasing our CHI score by 159 points. Our cost savings and call deflection rates continue to increase. In 2015, our customer survey results indicated over $385K in cost savings by deflecting calls from our contact centre. In the first quarter of 2016 alone, our customer surveys have shown we have already surpassed $625K in cost savings, and that is only for the Community.       For our Social Media Support, the implementation of LSW allowed us to maintain a response time of 15 minutes throughout 2015. The results from our customer surveys state that we recorded $329K in cost savings and ended 2015 with an NPS of over +60. We also ended the year with a Resolution rate of 90%, ascertaining our Social Support channels as a customer favourite.   Additionally, LSW allowed us to keep watch over our volumes and response time when we launched Facebook Messenger as a support channel through our website, and consequently, helped us to earn and keep the “very responsive” badge on Facebook.    

Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer that focuses on nurturing powerful relationships between people and pets. We do this by providing the products, services, advice and experiences that keep pets physically fit, mentally alert, socially engaged and emotionally happy.   Our road to Lithium   Having pets undoubtedly means having questions about pet care. As a leading pet care retailer, Petco understands that pet parents often turn to online search first when they have questions, but also that the internet is fraught with misinformation about proper animal care. The concept of a Petco owned community was born out a clear need for expertly crafted and reviewed content that is based on years of animal care experience and knowledge.   In 2012, after careful review and consideration, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the first iteration of the Petco Community, called “Pet Talk Place.” Our goal was to live our brand values and realize our vision of being the “trusted source” for pet parents. In order to realize this goal, we needed a best in class platform that would allow us to connect with our customers, and connect our customers with each other—ultimately driving down customer service costs by providing a space for self-serve resolutions.   Despite fantastic results in the first few months following the launch of Pet Talk Place, we realized that we had run out of things to talk about, and there was growing need for fresh and relevant content. At the same time, we noticed a shift in customer expectations in terms of responsiveness. People wanted more content, and they wanted it fast. To address both of these issues, we implemented LSW in 2013. With LSW, we now have access to questions that are top of mind for our customers, and can determine the priority in which those questions need to be addressed based on frequency and influence of the person posting the question. We create at least five unique pieces of content each week, spanning all pet categories.   The benefits of having both Community and LSW   In 2012, we decided that if we were to going to successfully fulfill our goal of being the “most trusted source” for pet parents, we needed a clear digital customer experience strategy to help us shift from talking at our customers, to actively participating in conversations our customers wanted to have. In order to do this, we set out to rethink our approach and start with the basics—discover pet parent needs, put a plan in place to address those needs, execute based on those needs and then continue to reassess and build on our successes. The Lithium community platform—in conjunction with LSW—is what allows us to execute against that strategy.   The Petco Community combines expert information with peer-to-peer advice for a comprehensive site that provides blog content, forums, lead-generation contests and a unique knowledge base, each serving the range of pet verticals. LSW allows us to share community content with members, associates and prospective customers quickly and consistently. Having both tools means we are able to serve our customers wherever they are in the social web, on their terms, and in a consistent manner.   The enhanced reporting functionality offered by LSW not only enables us to better share our customer care story with leadership, it provides a more sophisticated reporting structure that demonstrates our support of the KPIs our social teams were goaled to achieve.   Our results   In short, with a Total Community approach, we have managed to meet digital customer expectations tenfold. One of our finest accomplishments this year was earning the “Facebook Responsive Badge” before any of our competitors, and before any other retailer, making us best in class in terms of social customer support. This means we are responding to 90% of our customers within five minutes of contact. To put that into perspective, four years ago, our average response time was 16 hours. Needless to say, our gains in efficiency have allowed us to respond to three times the volume of comments and questions, in a shorter time and in a manner that allowed us to build on each learning in the form of meaningful content.   Strong content and participation in our community has resulted in tremendous improvements year over year in terms of community health and traffic.   Community Health:   Average CHI score 2013 Average CHI score 2014 Average CHI score 2015 441 464 523   Traffic Totals for FY15: 62% increase YOY Total Page Views: 3,942,000 (FY14: 2,430,000) 68% increase YOY Visits: 2,852,000 (FY14: 1,702,000) 65% increase YOY Unique visitors: 2,533,000 (FY14: 1,538,000) 28% increase YOY Total Registered Member: 15,008 (FY14: 11,726) 22% increase YOY Completed registrations: 3,282 (FY14: 2,685)   An unexpected benefit from all of the content we have created for the community came in the form of efficiency in our social and digital ad spend thanks to pixels that allow us to retarget users with relevant promotions and sales that are based on content consumption behaviors. Our overall Facebook spend per ad has decreased by 60%, thanks to these efficiencies.

Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build a sophisticated network that delivers the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Comcast’s number one goal is to transform our customers’ experience with us. Social media has become a strong and effective service channel for our customers. In 2015 we expanded the use of Lithium Social Web and completely redesigned Comcast’s community. The Digital Care team works to resolve all customer inquiries in a timely matter with a heavy focus on quality interactions. Lithium’s LSW and Community solutions both provide significant support in our goal to provide excellent service 24x7x365. With these solutions, we are able to measure success and track volume and engagement from each social platform.   Key 2015 Milestones: Created and deployed NPS survey program Achieved higher than industry average NPS score based on nearly 60% survey response rate Increase in channel (social) resolution rates to 99%+ Deployed a Quality program for our team which focused on the customer experience and the behaviors necessary to change customer perceptions & sentiments from negative to positive Deployed Spanish Language support for Xfinity Latino Twitter and Facebook Reduced non-social channel escalations per month from 4000 to 400 5M Page Views in the Help & Support Community 5M Unique Visitors to our community - nearly 10M from mobile and tablet devices More than 8.25M Solution Views - a 13% increase year over year More than 5.4M registered community users   My Account App integration with @comcastcares The XFINITY My Account app is a self help tool for the customer. Customers are guided through interactive troubleshooting guides. If the issue persists after completion of basic troubleshooting, customers are given the option to tweet @comcastcares. Utilizing LSW’s Routing features we are able to seamlessly support customer inquiries received via this channel.     Expert Help Lithium’s Expert help feature has been a game changing addition for the Digital Care team. From any platform we support we are able to escalate the conversation to key stakeholders within the company. This helps the Digital Care team provide the best customer experience by getting to the right solutions as quickly as possible. This also helps alert key stakeholders within the company about potential issues with the products and services under their direction.     Smart View Smart Views have allowed us to significantly enhance our approach to queue management. This has given us the ability, based on event, topic or outage, to capture the volume and help shift resources to the specific event or topic. As most issues found on social media are time sensitive, we have the ability to provide reactive statements and provide real-time communication to internal stakeholders.     Approvals The Digital Care team has had significant growth over the past few years. Due to this growth we have found that LSW’s Approval feature has helped our team with training new hires and our quality program. The Approval feature gives our team’s SMEs (subject matter experts) the ability to approve new hire posts to ensure they meet the Digital Care quality standards. This also helps with developing the necessary confidence to engage on social and provides a cleaner method of learning the brand’s social voice. This allows us to focus on providing the best overall customer experience.     Dashboards/Alerts The Digital Care Team utilizes dashboards to provide micro level operational insights to our Digital Care leaders and broader information to key stakeholders from throughout the company. This feature has changed the way Digital Care Team communicates with our colleagues. We no longer have to capture the volume and send an email alerting the stakeholders. We currently have 165 users with dashboard access. Many are also set up for alerts pertaining to what product or service they support. This provides real time alerts and insight to what is happening on social media.     Forums Links to Related Content When viewing a discussion thread, the bottom of the page now has links to related content that may help answer questions and green check marks to let customers quickly see that the question in that thread has an approved solution.     KB integration With the Knowledge Base integration, we are able to respond to customers on Twitter or Facebook with self-help or approved solutions from our community. This allows us to not only provide accurate information, but also helps us introduce potential new users to our growing Community. In addition to driving new users to our community, we are also able to introduce the new community user to our solution, thus furthering our reach from one-to-one to one-to-many solutions.  

Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digital world. Our aim is to inspire our customers with the best network, superb offers and outstanding service. Swisscom is one of the most famous and popular brands in Switzerland.   Our service leadership is not only distinguished by the fact that we offer an outstanding level of service in our own service touchpoints, such as the hotline and shops, but also that we reach our customers where they are most active from day-to-day: online and especially on the social web.   Swisscom’s road to Lithium Total Community   The decision to use Lithium was made in 2009. As an early adopter, we were among the first ten European clients to launch a Lithium Community. Two years later, we were the second client in Europe to put LSW into operation. As soon as the partnership began, it became clear that Lithium would be able to help us assert our service leadership in the social web as well.     Fig. 1: Social Media Universe of Swisscom   LSW for service dialogue in four languages   For the digital avant-garde, we offer full-blown customer care on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Messenger. Simple service requests and complex issues alike are resolved on these channels. Our goal is to offer an end-to-end resolution of the customer’s request on the channel of his choice.   LSW allows not only for effective dialogue management, but also, and in particular, a smooth internal organisation. Service inquiries we receive in German, French, Italian, and English can be distributed easily among two teams in different locations. Since PR, Marketing, and Incident Management specialists also work with LSW, it is possible to provide qualified responses to such inquires as well.   Fig. 2: LSW Setup at Swisscom   Community forum for the “long tail” of service requests   With our quadrilingual customers-help-customers forum, we aim to bring together experts from the “crowd” with the niche requests of our customers. It is not our goal to treat every issue raised in the forum, but mainly those service inquiries:   whose problem must first be identified by way of dialogue/discussion, which largely depend on the customer context (e.g. technical setup) and for which no standard solutions exist, or which are not primarily related to our core products (fixed network, TV, web, mobile).   The majority of the service requests can be resolved by the customers themselves via our extensive online help pages. The community therefore plays a vital role in dealing with the “long tail” of customer requests.   Fig. 3: Positioning and Role of the Community within the Solution Space   The benefits of Total Community   With LSW and the community, we lay the foundation to fulfill the promises of our brand – being a trustworthy companion in the digital world and providing outstanding service – also on the social web. Furthermore, with the Total Community approach, we are able to address the fundamental points of our guiding principles in our social media strategy. As Swisscom, we particularly wish to stand by our customers, to make the first move toward meeting their needs by taking their requests seriously. Similarly, we are open to new ideas, which means we listen to and strive to understand our customers. We put these promises into action as follows:   LSW within our social media strategy   Thanks to LSW, we have a scalable solution to handle our ever-growing service requests in a quick and efficient manner and with high technical expertise by using also the extensive knowledge of our community. Our customers appreciate the simplicity of the interaction and the high level of problem-solving expertise in these channels. As a result, social media care has an excellent reputation.   Community within our social media strategy   In addition to customer insights which we gain by listening and engaging through LSW, the community also provides us with greater understanding of the thought processes of our customers. We are therefore better able to grasp what it is that motivates our customers, as well as recognize their needs and discover the issues they discuss with one another. Along with passive listening, we actively invite our customers to participate in product development. As an example, pilot users submitted over 900 posts with suggestions for improving our recently launched UHD TV receiver.   In order that the entire company may benefit from the knowledge derived from these activities, agents and community managers carry these insights on a regular basis to the relevant stakeholders within our company.   Fig. 4: Community and Forum Homepages   The results of Total Community   Since the community and LSW are mainly used in the area of customer care, the focus lies on reducing service costs while maintaining a high customer satisfaction.   Directly measurable savings   From an efficiency point of view, the community helps us deflecting a very substantial amount of calls (savings of about 6k hours/month). Customers who were able to resolve their issues with the help of the community would otherwise have phoned in 75% of the time. The workload savings excel the investments made to license and manage the community tenfold. Furthermore, interacting with customers through LSW has a strong effect on efficiency indicators as well. These overall positive effects are also a result of a community with a current Community Health Index of just over 700.   Fig. 5: Evolution of the Community Forum   Service recovery through social media dialogues   Along with the likewise high resolution rate of the LSW-administered dialogues, this service touchpoint is particularly impressive thanks to its high customer satisfaction index of 8.5 (on a scale of 10) and an above-average NPS compared to other service channels.   Indirectly measurable results within the company   In addition to directly measurable advantages, we clearly see also indirect business outcomes: Voice of the customer: Customer attitudes regarding our products and services are easily recognizable by all employees, which is especially advantageous for product managers. The monitoring of these online discussions helps us identify major problems promptly. Quick feedback loops: It is easy for community users to become involved in product development. This speeds up the development process and ensures customer needs get addressed. Easier troubleshooting: In the case of breakdown, forum discussions help to better understand the cause and thus repair the trouble faster. Thanks to the community’s link to our CRM, affected customers can be identified easily. The sharing of knowledge within the customer care department: Complex customer issues via traditional service touchpoints are often cleared up more quickly with the collective knowledge of the community    

Company:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star     Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impact on the way we live. As the UK’s first provider of all four broadband, TV, mobile phone and home phone services, it’s not just the technology that interests us – what matters is how it can improve the lives and prospects of everyone.   Virgin Media is a part of Liberty Global plc, the world’s largest international cable company. Together Virgin Media and Liberty Global serve 24 million customers across 14 countries, helping connect people to the digital world and enabling them to discover and experience its endless possibilities.   Our road to Lithium At Virgin Media, we believe in digital technology that makes good things happen for people, communities and businesses. We do everything we can to ensure technology is a force for good. This is why we’re committed to providing the best guidance, support and services – and working with Lithium has helped us to make this a reality.   We’ve been prominent on social media for around eight years now, and a Lithium-hosted community was established in 2009, and brought into the growing eService team in 2012. As these channels developed into popular care and support destinations, it became increasingly vital for us to be able to manage these conversations within an efficient, easy to use, reliable, configurable and data-rich environment.   After trying and testing every response tool, it was quickly clear that Lithium Social Web was the best match for our demanding requirements. We started using it towards the end of 2013 on the big three – Twitter, Facebook and Community – and haven’t looked back. Targeted queues, comment threading, publishing tools, advanced analytics and tagging – these are just some of the standard LSW features that we’ve now come to rely on as part of our day-to-day operation.   After one year of LSW we were already working 30% more efficiently. We no longer miss posts, delay responding to priority queries, and we can offer an individually tailored customer experience with true case ownership and empowerment for our people.   The benefits of having both a community and LSW    Our priority is providing the very best eService customer care experience. We’re firm believers in finding the next best action for our customers – and we utilize every aspect of our social media platforms and tools to do just that. We encourage and evangelize across our organization to think ‘Community First’. It now sits at the heart of our social media operation – the hub of our own Total Community. Our Twitter operation continues to go from strength to strength, Last year we became the first ISP to hit 1million tweets: 12 months on and we’ve added another half a million – all through LSW.   Our team respond to conventional care requests, as well as managing those conversations that result from marketing or brand posts. LSW’s smart tagging and work queues allow us to ensure the right conversations are handled by the right people – whether it’s prospective customers responding to hidden posts on Facebook, or having some light-hearted on-brand chat about sports on Twitter.   We understand that Twitter and Facebook aren’t always the appropriate channel for certain queries. If our teams can’t resolve the issue directly, we draw upon our YouTube help video collection, web-chat, a revamped and finely-tuned service status page, and a vast database of helpful links to make sure that we can get customers to the right place to answer their query. More and more, we’re encouraging them to visit our community.     We’re able to be more intelligent in this channel switching. We can optimise the incredible peer-to-peer power of the community, increase the visibility of curated trending topics and helpful answers, and encourage and stimulate the conversations customers need to have to get the help they need, and to bring them close to the business.   Results   The results of placing LSW and our Lithium Community at the centre of our next best action / community first philosophy are clear.   Our primary indicator is call reduction.   We’re seeing more Helpful Answers (Accepted Solutions) and views than ever before. Answers were up 22% from 2014-2015, while views rocketed 48% in the same time period.       It’s therefore no surprise that using a combination of our own benchmarking and Lithium’s value proposition, even a conservative estimate sees the community deflecting over 10,000 calls per week in 2016.   We know that membership of the community has a great value too – 87% of members who have sought help in the past will think ‘Community first’ the next time they need assistance from Virgin Media.     Analyzing customer journeys shows that the number of tweeters we refer to the community is increasing, and our cross-site promotion initiative means that we’re seeing a 54% increase in visitor referrals from other parts of VirginMedia.com.   Our newly launched Digital Life blog is also bringing our tech-smart Twitter followers into the community, introducing them to an environment where they can ask us the kind of questions that would take far more than 140 characters to answer.   Our social media and community teams are the place to go for sentiment and verbatim on any development or project. The information we can leverage from our social toolkit, especially that from LSW and LSI, mean we can provide both high-level data and in-depth analysis – the real voice of the customer.   The internal visibility and success of the community has led to an increase in opportunities to add further value to the wider business. On our last major trial had over 5000 forum posts between the project team and the triallists as they made sure we were ready to go to market.   We’re seeing more requests than ever before to run feedback trials and host focus groups.   As a result, with every new product we launch, with every potential contact-driver, Virgin Media is seeing the benefits of embracing our Total Community, first.

Company: USAA Entry submitted by:  Bill Gerth (Director, Social Business) Community: USAA Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   USAA provides a full range of financial products and services to the military community and their families. Our world-class employees are committed to delivering superior products, appropriate guidance and exceptional customer service. We started as a word of mouth company, in 1922 when 25 Army officers met in San Antonio, Texas and decided to insure each other's vehicles they laid the foundation for an organization that would one day serve millions of members. USAA has earned its member’s trust by providing years of award-winning service through a comprehensive suite of financial products and advice. Our members expect excellence in customer service from a financial services organization that’s served generations of military families. Service, Loyalty, Honesty and Integrity, USAA stands ready to serve.   Organizational Background and total Community Digital Customer Strategy   When someone joins USAA they have immediate access to free financial resources and personalized products and services — we understand the unique needs of our membership because we’re an organization founded by military members for military members. Our customers rely on us to suggest products and services that meet their financial needs and access to the tools and advice they need to make critical life decisions. Our customer care solutions and Member Community afford USAA’s member’s access to world-class employees that are personally committed to delivering excellent service and superior assistance in their social channel of choice.   USAA recognizes that social media is an important member service channel. We’re committed to delivering the gold standard for social customer care in our managed and owned social media properties. USAA is laser focused in our approach to the discovery of a members service issues in social channels with rapid issue resolution or the recommendation of advice which meets an immediate need.   USAA determined that online profile recognition methods were disconnected from a member’s true identity and out of sync with our internal CRM systems. Across the social customer care industry and CRM platforms the inability to identity stitch public and private customer profile information together proved to be a key issue in successful social customer handling, dialogue management and customer contact amendment.   One of our largest initiatives in 2015 was to develop a solution integrating information from our managed social properties, Lithium Member Community and CRM systems together to provide a 'single member profile’. The ‘single member profile’ would allow USAA to associate social insights with known member information and offer relevant personalized service in social networks or our Member community. USAA knows that the key to personalized service in social channels is immediate recognition of a member in their social channel of choice.   Total Community Benefits and Results   In 2015 USAA leveraged its Lithium Member Community and planned LSW integration to build a scalable 'single member profile’ we call the Unified Member View. This “360 degree customer view” is the centerpiece of our Total Community Strategy. The Unified Member View includes the Lithium Member Community identity, external social identities and Member Online profile data into a 'single member profile’. USAA’s digital strategy for Total Community focuses on the member profile; our efforts include connecting USAA’s official customer record with all of the public and private social profile attributes that we see emerging.            The holistic view of the member profile allows USAA to deliver a new level of digital experience and features informed by expanded awareness and insight. Digital features include; personalization informed by social insights or declared life events, member segmentation, peer to peer connection features that match an individual’s needs with member provided advice and solutions. USAA combined the Community Profile with formal customer profile data to create a single social customer experience anchor point Members can now select from personal details (location/military background) directly pulled from their formal profile to share The combined profile provides integrated access to USAA’s Community for our member base of over 10 million individuals The combined profile serves as the comprehensive external social network identity record for all members The aggregation of all member social profiles will be written to the CRM record and reused for customer outreach and promotion 2015 Unified Member View project for Total Community led to broader exposure of the Community Profiles, a 5x monthly increase in Member Community registrations (10,000 Registrations per month on average) LSW, USAA CRM Member Match Technology gives USAA a 5 FTE savings for looking up Member Profile Information and syncing that data to social handles    

Company:  Electronic Arts Entry submitted by:  Jennifer Hughes (Director WWCE Social & Community) Community: Answers HQ  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star      The Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) organization provides support to customers across all the games that Electronic Arts (EA) publishes. The Social and Community team manages the Answers HQ Community and engages with players on social media channels. To provide the best customer experience, there for our players where they need us, when they need us. Social media and online communities are an integral part of our customer experience strategy and an important way that we support and engage with our players.   The AHQ online community is significant, with over 10.8M registered users and more than 277k new topics over the past year across five languages. In LSW, we monitor 75 social media channels with over 11.2M posts in the past year. Having an integrated approach to total community provides our team with a consistent experience that can be measured in LSI.   Total Community Details We have used Lithium Community for AHQ since its inception in 2012. In 2014, we added LSW for social media workflow.   LSW Each game that EA publishes has a unique brand and social media presence, resulting in a large volume of social media to monitor. We have leveraged LSW to manage these channels through 42 queues, 6 priorities, and 95 tags. We use custom close reasons to get the reporting that we need.   We recently deepened our unified approach by adding the Lithium Community into LSW for improved workflow capabilities. This addition enables us to prioritize incoming topics based on the types of issues that the community cannot solve in place. We expect to see an improvement in response times and first response rates.   Lithium Community AHQ is a player-to-player support community at its core, but it also allows for enthusiast conversations. Again, supporting many different titles we have used Lithium to provide a different look, feel, and overall experience for EA’s different games.     We have deployed a number of different features that make AHQ a robust community with high levels of participation. Instead of our customers calling in to report a game bug, the online contact routing system takes them directly to AHQ for self reporting. From there, we report bugs to studios and provide updates to players. AHQ also has a exceptional badging system that acknowledges community participation. We have issued over 7.4M badges since launching the program in September 2015.   LSI We Having detailed bulk data allows us to slice and dice our community and gain valuable insights, especially when connected with other data sources. The direct integration of community posts into our CRM tool allows for a unified 360-degree view across chat, phone, email, and Answers HQ. Community and social media data plays a vital role in helping us understand the full customer journey. We also use this data as an early warning system for emerging issues. The ability to tap seamlessly into a wealth of information provided by Lithium APIs is driving actions that are improving the overall customer experience with EA.   Total Community Advantage By working with one partner to leverage both the Lithium community and LSW to execute our social media and community support, we work more efficiently with a holistic strategy that best supports our players.  

Company: Upwork Entry submitted by: Garnor Morantes  (Director) Community:  Upwork Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Upwork is an online global talent pool that connects professional freelancers with quality clients. We are the world’s largest talent marketplace with an annual run rate of over $1B+ in freelancer earnings. We have 4M clients and over 10M freelancers who have registered, with approximately 30,000 new freelancer registrations per week.   Our clients and freelancers are distributed globally. Our largest client regions are the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Our largest freelancer regions are US, South East Asia (India, Pakistan, Philippines) and Ukraine.   What Total Community means at Upwork   Filling a void in the future of work Our community platform is a mechanism for users to connect with each other and with the Upwork brand in ways that contribute to their professional and work-oriented marketplace experience. The forums are used to foster the learning, social and collaborative relationships that are otherwise difficult to come by for freelancers and clients who often work in solitary workspaces.   Giving the brand a Voice The community also serves as a communication mechanism for the Upwork brand, allowing us to notify and position key product, policy, feature and other changes to a large customer audience. Through our forums and other community channels, we highlight tips, best practices and help content, thereby aiding in case deflection for our customer support teams.   Knowing our customers As a business, Upwork has a unified digital strategy built on Lithium technologies to monitor, gather and report on customer activity. Through LSW and the Lithium community (LSI), we use these channels to identify: Site performance and incidents Feature usage and reaction Customer sentiment   These insights are then delivered directly to product and business owners and shared with the entire organization in a formal report each week. With this unified approach the organization is closely aligned with customer needs and sentiment and we are rarely, if ever, surprised by customer response.   More about our Community and how it’s evolved   In 2014, we hosted two separate community forums, one each for the Elance and oDesk marketplaces. These forums were hosted on Drupal, and resulted in a combined page view total of ~1.3 million/ year. In November 2014 we launched our Lithium Community for oDesk and migrated over those users and approximately 12 months of historic content.   Within the first 6 months of our Lithium Community, we had surpassed 1.5 million page views and now regularly exceed that number on a quarterly basis.       Performance Results of Our Total Community: Since launch, we’ve consistently maintained a CHI score of 700+ and now reach around 1.5 million page views, each quarter! Consumption is trending higher every month. Users are clicking around the site more with an average of 6 page views per visit. Registrations are continually trending upwards with roughly 1000 new registrations a week. SEO is working very well with the majority of the traffic (83%) coming from Google. We are Best In Class for consumption and join rates.       Expanding our Total Community - What’s Next?   The Upwork Community has done well to bring our company closer to its customers and to enable members to fill a void that many of us who work in a traditional work environment take for granted. Our high engagement metrics prove this.   We’ve also become a reliable source for information and other resources that can contribute to success on the Upwork marketplace. According to our latest Value Analytics survey, users are coming to the community for answers and find our Community to be a reliable source of customer information and support.   An increased focus on Community Support To further our progression as a resource for customer support, we recently redesigned our community with a focus on ways to help with case deflection and assist new users in finding the information they need. We changed the way our search worked and provided a convenient call to action so users would know to post their questions right from the search bar. We’ve also added more descriptive text and an introduction video that gives a tutorial style walk-thru for new users to navigate the community. With the new redesign and optimization we aim to achieve the following:    Case deflection of Customer Support tickets; Increased CHI; Organized content to improve the user experience.   Launching LSW   An important step in our connection with our Social and Support teams was the launch of LSW. LSW went live at Upwork on February 2, 2016 and has helped our teams to be better equipped when addressing user concerns. Through LSW’s capabilities our teams have been able to seamlessly engage with our users, escalate communications to other teams, and respond to user's posts, questions and requests better than before.   LSW has helped in the following areas: Time to reply (avg. 3 mins faster): Because our teams can manage all activity from one location and leverage macros, bulk responses, etc. they are able to respond faster on social and in the community. The Lithium App also allows our CS agents to access tickets/messages through their mobile devices, which helps them stay informed/reactive when an urgent case comes in outside of their work hours. Queue management: Posts are flagged and deposited into appropriate queues, based on “@” mentions and other keywords. As a result, the teams are able to assign areas to specific personnel.  Tags help our agents ensure that more urgent issues take precedence over others in case of a backlog. The queue and priority system makes it easy to ensure everyone's taking care of priority posts first and nothing gets missed. Visibility: Because of the cross-functional dashboards and supervisor views our community, social and CS teams can see activity across channels, allowing us to collaborate more intuitively.  For example, outages and other incident activity have been identified via email ahead of our Engineering teams allowing us to use LSW to help with incident alerting and management. Tracking/User management: Agents can add user notes and are quickly able to identify a user’s social influence (followers) and social history (past posts/tweets). The customer conversion history and internal notes make both internal coordination and customer responses easier and better. Agents can tag customers (VIP, problem customer, Upwork employee/associate, etc.), store customer information (UIDs, contact info) and make internal notes to build a collective knowledge base. This allows us to readily handle inquiries, giving each agent a full perspective of who that customer is.