Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: PayPal Entry submitted by: Carolynn Bae  (Head of APAC Customer Early Life) Community: PayPal Headstart Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile pay... See more...
Company: PayPal Entry submitted by: Carolynn Bae  (Head of APAC Customer Early Life) Community: PayPal Headstart Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile payments on behalf of consumers and merchants worldwide. We put our customers at the center of everything we do. We strive to increase our relevance for consumers, merchants, friends and family to access and move their money anywhere in the world, anytime, on any platform and through any device.   We provide safer and simpler ways for businesses of all sizes to accept payments from merchant websites, mobile devices and applications, and at offline retail locations through a wide range of payment solutions.   Our unique promotion   We launched the PayPal Headstart Community to increase engagement with small business owners in 6 countries to help them through to their first transaction after signing up for PayPal and for existing businesses to increase our share of checkout through PayPal. Rather than launch the new community in the usual way we gave business owners the opportunity to connect with experts through the community and ask a question that really mattered to them and their business simultaneously helping the community gain traction and also help the business owners. We called the campaign Ask an Expert and had 3x ecommerce experts and a $100 Google AdWords incentive to kickstart the conversation.     Our strategy and tactics for community promotion   We provided a small incentive to encourage businesses to open the invitation and to submit high quality questions. We leveraged the experts bio’s as an email and social media campaign utilizing Facebook custom audiences to capture the attention of our existing business and funnel them to the community. Our hypothesis was that business owners who are more engaged with us as they set up their business are more likely to successfully integrate PayPal into their businesses and receive their first transaction.     Our results   Within 3 months we had a 2.5% lift in number of businesses making their first successful PayPal transaction across all 6 markets. And unexpectedly we also had a significant 1.84x increase in number of transactions for business segment that had activated PayPal in the last 3 months. During the 2 week campaign period we had over 500 new posts and 100k views.   Value Analytics YTD Results as of 3/31/16: n = 266 75% of respondents indicated they were able to find the information they were looking for. 66% of those respondents indicated they would have phoned or emailed had they not found their answer.
Company: Hilton Worldwide Contact: Lee Diaz (Social Media Product Manager) Community: Hilton Suggests Twitter  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Hilton Worldwide is one of the largest hospitality companies in the worl... See more...
Company: Hilton Worldwide Contact: Lee Diaz (Social Media Product Manager) Community: Hilton Suggests Twitter  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Hilton Worldwide is one of the largest hospitality companies in the world, with mre than 4,600 hotels, resorts and properties in 100 countries and territories, and we’re growing faster than ever. Our 96-year history as pioneers in the industry makes us the preferred venue for travelers, developers, partners, and team members alike.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives of 2015   Hospitality and customer satisfaction should be extended to all travelers, even before they are your customers. With this focus, in 2015 we continued the expansion of the Hilton Suggests program to be an even broader global community of Hilton Worldwide team members, at all positions, that serve as a proactive resource for travelers visiting around 100 global markets. Hilton Suggests members give their time to listen for travelers’ questions, point unfamiliar travelers in the right direction, and even assist fellow locals seeking the next hidden gem for their bucket list. Through this, we deliver tweet tailored reccommendations for where to eat, what to see and what to do in our cities, to any traveler that needs a little direction.   A 2014 Study by Google on the Traveler’s Road to Decision showed that 83% of users that go online to find travel inspiration use social networking, video or photo sites. The @HiltonSuggests team helps develop some of that inspiration and alleviates some local research by surprising and delighting Twitter users seeking out travel advice with unique, local recommendations. By reaching travelers where they are, and when they are asking questions, we were able to share over 30,400 responses in 2015.     The most important customer issue we  were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation?    Travelers, as resourceful as they are, often need direction as they get ready to explore. Our focus is to help answer travelers’ questions of where to go, what to see, and where to eat that we all have as travelers to a new city. Even when they are not looking to Hilton Worldwide to answer their questions, we want to surprise and delight them with our focus actively listening, taking the time to respond, and delivering a quality piece of information from a local perspective.   Each suggestion is an authentic, first-hand recommendation based on the experiences of one of our local team members. And while we are happy to help travelers find a hotel - our primary focus is always to enhance the overall travel experience during a new-nomad’s visit.   We understand that it’s easier to appreciate the quirks and cultural nuances, too, when you’ve had a chance to experience the culture at its originator. We live and breathe the vision that our founder, Conrad Hilton, understood to be so important:   It’s our mission to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality - one tweet at a time.   Our metrics     Given our focus, to reach any traveler seeking local recommendations, our core satisfaction metric is based on our ability to connect to travelers: Response. In 2015, we had just over 90 Team Members Tweet over 30,400 responses to travelers’ questions.   We leverage Lithium’s Social Web to ensure that each Team Member is receiving traveler questions from their local city / region / market, and can quickly identify which questions they can answer based on their experiences in the city they live and work in.    
Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise ident... See more...
Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises. The Centrify Identity Platform protects against the leading point of attack used in data breaches ― compromised credentials — by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. Centrify delivers stronger security, continuous compliance and enhanced user productivity through single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring. Centrify is trusted by over 5000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50.   Our community goals   The Centrify Community’s mission is to provide our customers with a world class peer to peer collaboration space and technical resource center. By doing this, we aim to improve our customer journey by providing them with a positive support experience and deflect support costs. With Centrify’s website re-launch in 2015, we wanted to make sure that the community experience is an extension of our overall digital brand experience. SEO is one of our major go-to market strategies, and the rich technical content in our community is a great way to showcase Centrify’s identity solutions when prospects search for iDaaS solutions. When prospects and customers arrive at our community in search of solutions, we want to provide them with an excellent UX, allowing them to easily collaborate with Centrify Experts and other technical peers.   Our unique design elements    Centrify’s new community design is an excellent example of how to maximize screen real-estate utilization while improving aesthetics that’s consistent with the corporate brand. Our re-design mission was centered around two major themes: showcasing the rich community content with a new dynamic home page, and improving UX with a new skin that includes the most useful community elements laid out in a logical and visually pleasing manner.   From the top, the hero space of the community utilizes embedded videos to present useful rich media content to community members. In addition, a text announcement bar below the hero space points to the latest community news or notifications.   New global navigation lets users access the community from any page without taking up excessive space. We have simplified our community nodes to make it easier for user to get to the conversations they are looking for.     The user alias button acts as an options dropdown, with utility links for users and community dashboard for the community managers. This allows admins and regular users to access these frequently used links on every page.     “Ask the community” widget is a helpful new addition to help users quickly find community answers or post their questions. This widget dynamically display suggestions as the users type their questions. If answers are not found, the question can be quickly posted in the relevant forum.     To showcase our high quality community generated content, we placed 3 new widgets on the home page to show announcements, solutions and recent blogs from community. In addition, latest posts are also shown on the home page and category roots.     A right hand side scrolling marquee with a call to action enables us to promote company events.     How we executed our community design   We’ve started the re-design project by compiling community user feedback and creating a list of improvements and issues to resolve. The internal community team combined user feedback and industry best practice to create initial wireframes, requirements and node structures for our design and implementation partner Grazitti. With this initial sets of requirements, Grazitti provided us with mockups, feedback and additional recommendation to formulate the final design. Finally, Grazitti rapidly developed the new community design and structure on staging for UAT, and the entire project was done on time and on budget with an extremely aggressive deadline.   Our metrics Our new community design was launched on December 20 th , 2015. Following are some of the success metrics from 12/21/2015 to 3/7/2016 after launch: 78490 visits, 5.4% year to year increase (from 74,445 a year ago) Forums visit show a larger year-to-year increase at 9% (from 51163 to 55817) New forums topics increased by 38% yty (92 to 127) From 1/1/2015 to 2/29/2015: Registered user sessions (2435) saw an 64% year-to-year increase (up from 1483), showing a much stronger intent to interact. Completed registration also saw a year-to-year growth of 42% (546 from 385 a year ago)  
Company: MEO Contact: Vanessa Simão (Community Manager) Community: MEO FÓRUM Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   MEO is a fully owned subsidiary of Altice group, and a leading telecommunications and multimedia operator based in Portug... See more...
Company: MEO Contact: Vanessa Simão (Community Manager) Community: MEO FÓRUM Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   MEO is a fully owned subsidiary of Altice group, and a leading telecommunications and multimedia operator based in Portugal. The company’s activities extend across all telecommunications segments: fixed line, mobile, multimedia, data and business solutions. In the Portuguese market, MEO is the leader in all segments it operates, with over 8 million mobile subscribers, 2.5 million wireline voice customers, 1.4 million pay-tv customers and 1.4 million broadband customers. MEO is the pioneer and the market leader of convergent services, with a comprehensive offer of 3Play and 4Play bundles. In 2015, domestic business revenues amounted to Eur 2,533 million.   PT Portugal's focus on the customer   In the Portuguese market, PT Portugal is a customer-oriented company, focused on innovation and execution to meet the needs of the digital consumer. PT Portugal is organized by customer segments, promoting collaboration between functions and platforms to ensure the best customer experience. PT Portugal’s priority is to create sustainable value for all customer segments.   In order to answer ever-changing consumer habits, the company has directed its provision towards convergence, mobility and virtualization of content and services.   How the Forum meets our customer care business goals   Helping people find solutions to their problems in a simple, fast and virtually free way, is the main purpose of the Forum, available 24x7 in the PC or smartphone. Good and credible aid is given either by peers or by selected moderators and company’s employees.   Recognizing that Meo’s site is still the first online place where customers try to find a solution to their problems, we incorporated the Forum into the site’s search results in September 2015. This means that people searching within the Meo site will also see any Forum posts, which are relevant to their search.   This change brought a 40% increase in referral traffic coming from the Meo ecosystem, when compared to the previous year.   Example of Meo site search with community content results.   In addition, we noted that one of the categories with more page views - Mobile Phones - required reorganization. So, we created an index of mobile phones that gathers every phone model and any written posts about them.     We also noticed that many users used the Forum to get their mobile phone’s instructions manuals. Thus, proactively, we created a new board, within the category of mobile phones, which serves as a repository for all manuals. The content is provided by company’s employees who are responsible for mobile phones certification, hence bringing them into the community, and then published both by company staff and Forum moderators.   Another way for costumers to get these manuals was through the self-care portal. We were getting 120 requests a month that had to be answered by our front office employees. Since the creation of this new board, we started redirecting these customers to the Forum, instead of allowing them to create a request that had to be analyzed and answered manually. With this change, we were able to free front office agents, allowing them to perform functions that are more complex.     Keeping Meo Forum present along the customer journey, we spread Meo Forum’s image throughout meo.pt and our self-care portal, with banners, and promoted the community in every email sent by our online store, after a purchase. We also promoted it in some of our online store’s weekly newsletters.   How our community has changed our customer care organization   We felt the need to connect our customer care assisted help with our community. So we integrated information about Meo Forum in every email sent to our customers, either through our CRM system or our self-care portal.   Both when the contact involved a complaint or a simple information request, in the footer of the email the customer would see a reference to Meo Forum with a simple message stating its purpose and a link to the community.   Pergunte, responda, contribua. Aceda já ao MEO Fórum. Ask, reply, contribute. Access MEO Forum. Moreover, we highlighted Meo Forum on the Meo Login dashboard, putting the community inside the Meo services’ ecosystem.     Today, our help and support team and customer care teams are regularly updating their contents and processes based on insights from this community, which demonstrates how the Meo Forum helped transform the way we serve our customers, beyond the digital frontier.   Our customer care business results   Call deflection   Since we launched Meo Forum, we recorded a decrease in the percentage of customers who need to use another customer care channel after visiting the Forum, either for posting or just browsing for a solution. We call this “Leakage” – nowadays, less than 13% of Meo Forum visitors have to contact a traditional customer care channel in the next 7 days.   Since peer-to-peer help was the focus of Meo Forum, we started directing personal customer inquiries and requests that concerned access to private information (such as invoice’s analysis or contracts’ end dates) to their self-care portal, where they could get a more personalized assistance. We have the Moderators for this purpose. They moderate the community by controlling the behaviour of members and providing support in most community questions, besides generating new content.   The majority of post replies are now provided by community members and only 10% of replies require company’s staff intervention, making the information richer.   Technical tutorials created by our Moderators and other loyal and more active members, are appreciated by the community and contribute greatly to this decrease. They have a high number of page views and are also used by our technical staff.   Search Engine Optimization   Meo Forum’s contribution for total organic search traffic in Meo site increased considerably in 2015. The community was responsible for 10% of all traffic coming to meo.pt.   Problems Scanning   Meo Forum is increasingly sought after by customers as a channel to seek solutions and post questions, increasing customer feedback. This allows us to monitor the conversations in a better way, contributing to the rapid identification of problems.   ROI   Based on the outcomes of a 667 online survey we conducted on the community website, during the period from March to October 2015, we built a ROI model where we estimate savings in customer contact deflection of approximately €550.000 in 2015.   The online survey is showed to each user who logs in to Meo Forum, and tries to determine if the original questions they had were solved during that visit. If the answer is positive, we also ask them if they would have used an assisted channel if had not found the answer in Meo Forum. With this model we can measure the amount of customers that solve their issues in Meo Forum without requiring a telephone or in person contact.      
Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities aga... See more...
Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises. The Centrify Identity Platform protects against the leading point of attack used in data breaches ― compromised credentials — by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. Centrify delivers stronger security, continuous compliance and enhanced user productivity through single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring. Centrify is trusted by over 5000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50.   How we are implementing Community to meet our customer care business goals   Centrify provides unified identity management for end users and privileged users, with flagship products addressing needs for identity management across cloud, mobile and data centers. Our support team interacts with IT admins with diverse skills sets spanning across *NIX, Windows, Active Directory and SAML, just to name a few.   The Centrify Support team believes that building a Community of Centrify admins across the globe plays an important role in providing world class support to our customer base. With a vibrant community, we are able to increase customer satisfaction with an ever growing library of user generated solutions, tech blogs and videos. In addition, we’re able to reduce support contact cost across all regions yet meet SLA’s and responsiveness by leveraging the community.   Our community consists of product forums, tech blogs and Ideas Exchange. All users have read access across all product forums and tech blogs. With our newly implemented “Ask the Community” widget, customers can quickly find existing answers in a wealth of accepted solutions and tech articles. All registered users are welcomed to post in our free Centrify Express forum. This enables Centrify to provide a positive user experience for our free product users, potentially leading to paid upgrade when their organizations expand.   For our paid customers, they have the option to ask questions in the premium product forums. These questions are automatically escalated to an internal “A-Team” of superusers if the community does not answer within 24 hours. This ensures that our paid customers receive timely responses while Centrify reduces support contact volume.   Our paid customers can also to post product enhancement ideas and vote on them in the Ideas Exchange. Here, Centrify’s product team members regularly engage in discussions with customers, providing them with an exclusive channel to share valuable feedback to the Centrify product team.   Changes we implemented  because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community    At Centrify, we value support as a team that adds value to our customers and not a cost center. That being said, just like every successful and customer centric organization, we keep a close eye on our costs every year. The savings in headcount to support our customers are re-invested to make the Community and Support Portal more interactive and resourceful. With new products, new customers we are always innovating and ensuring that every type of customers who come to us for a help can easily find their answers. We have re-launched our community several months ago with an improved design and structure, focusing on making the community easier to use for new and returning members alike. In the future, we will be enhancing the UI further to provide a single pane of glass for all existing customers to address their technical and product needs. The success of Community for our customers has also encouraged our internal teams to increase participation. Technical teams across Centrify now regularly create useful tech blog articles, how-to’s and videos to increase the value of this every growing library of user generated content.   Our customer care and business results    Centrify Community started as a platform for our freemium product (Centrify Express) users to ask their questions. Since then, we have opened up additional product forums, tech blogs and customer Idea Exchange.   In spite of growing our customers base and revenues by 2x, our team has been able to successfully support 5000+ customers and continuously achieve a 92%+ customers satisfaction*. Without enabling peer-to-peer community help, we would not be able to sustain such rapid growth while maintaining a high score for customer satisfaction. Support Management at Centrify is always looking at metrics to drive more self-service, engineer efficiency and content creation (Knowledge articles and how-to videos).   *Customer Satisfaction is derived from 5 survey metrics that we collect from our customers. Every time a case that is opened with Technical Support team at Centrify, the customer will have an opportunity to provide their feedback on the products, people, and features / functionality of Centrify Solutions. Customer are asked to rate us on the 5 parameters (1) Case Owner Satisfaction (2) Overall Product Satisfaction (3) Product Quality (4)Features and Functionality and (5) Overall Support Satisfaction.     We’ve seen steady community growth in the past 4 years. Q1 2016 we saw a year over year increase of user sessions by 38%.   More than 30k visits per month in indirect contact deflection. 40+ technical topics are answered and turned into searchable community knowledge for future use. 15+ technical blogs / video blogs are created monthly for our community member’s consumption.   Rich Multimedia Content in the community tech blog:     Wealth of technical information and resource in the community. “Ask the Community” widget makes it easy for users to get started:     Idea Exchange:        
Company: Breast Cancer Care Contact: Anna Brown (Digital Community Officer) Community: Breast Cancer Care Forum Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   The Breast Cancer Care Forum is the largest single cancer forum in the ... See more...
Company: Breast Cancer Care Contact: Anna Brown (Digital Community Officer) Community: Breast Cancer Care Forum Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   The Breast Cancer Care Forum is the largest single cancer forum in the UK.  It was the first peer support forum of its kind, originally launched in 1999/2000.  Our Lithium powered platform enables users to safely share their personal stories and receive emotional support from other people affected by breast cancer. Central to the success of the forum is an environment from which trust can develop, thereby encouraging empathy, human connections and interactions, albeit virtual; this in turn creates a safe space that lessens isolation and anxiety.  Real people-virtual connection:  Overcoming isolation using accessible technology. There are many ways to face breast cancer, we help people find theirs.   Our organization’s customer satisfaction initiatives in 2015   In 2015 we aimed to increase registrations, user engagement and widen our reach to be accessible to everyone affected by breast cancer. As a charity we looked at ways for delivering more for less and reduce our expenses whilst maintaining safety and integrity.   We are a user centric organisation and incorporate all user feedback, input or direct data from LSI to inform improvements to customer experience and user journey on the forum. By listening to our users in workshops and reading comments in posts, we know they want instant access to online support at the time they need it, for this reason we have removed first post moderation and implemented SSO so users only need one account for our Forum and breastcancercare.org.uk.   To support this reduced moderation we have customised the keyword and smut filter systems, as well as activating the abuse notifications and spam quarantine.  By doing this we have reduced our moderation team from 6 sessional moderators and 1 Coordinator to 1 Digital Community Officer and 1 Digital Community Assistant. Through this careful implementation we have not only preserved our outstanding reputation of being a safe and risk free environment, we have significantly built on it. We can safely rely on robust Lithium technology, and through all these changes we have simultaneously increased and expanded our customer engagement and service provision. To illustrate, below are our targets and achievements for the year.     User engagement and satisfaction We know that the ‘midnight terrors’ are real for many people, both newly diagnosed or further on in their treatment of breast cancer.  A popular thread used by many during the ‘witching hours’ is ‘The Night Birds’; where members of the community chat and reduce isolation when everyone else is asleep.   The community is an invaluable source of support and information regardless of the stage of breast cancer journey:  At the beginning when it is all new and frightening;   “i have been reading the forums since waiting for my results and found it a tower of strength. Thought it was time I joined in........”   Experiencing side effects of treatment;   “ I think the side effects affect us more than people realise and that is one reason why these forums help so much”   Coming out the other end of treatment and wanting to support others;   “EXTOLLING THE VIRTUES AND BENEFITS OF THIS WONDERFUL FORUM AND THE WONDERFUL PEOPLE ON IT. ALL OF WHOM, BASICALLY "SAVED MY LIFE". Our users regularly share their experiences both of online and offline services.  Increasing user engagement with the rest of Breast Cancer Care is important to us and our users are the best sources of referral:   “I’m part way through a course called Moving Forward run by Breast Cancer Care – it’s four morning sessions with other ladies who have recently finished treatment and we are covering topics such as diet, exercise, relationships, menopause symptoms, recurrence etc, and to be honest the most powerful thing is being in a room with ten other women who, just like you guys, absolutely get how I am feeling and thinking.  If this is your thing then I’d urge you to have a look and see if there is a course running near you.”   We recognise that for many users they receive the information and support they are looking for by reading posts rather than by actively contributing.  We wanted to encourage this group of forum users to still feel a member of the community and achieved this by introducing Hugs, customised from Kudos. Users are now able to connect with each other as well as show compassion and empathy by sending Hugs in response to a post.  This function has been very popular and from launch in December to the end of March a total of 3,948 Hugs have been given.     Another recent user focussed innovation has been the implementation of Community Champions.  We identified 21 possible users who naturally offer support and empathy as well as support new users and signpost to other areas of support.  100% of people contacted accepted the recognition:   “I’m knocked out ‘cos all i do is out of love and passion for my fellow womankind.  How wonderful.”     We have noticed a steady increase in engagement since this implementation and plan on building on this success.     Our plans for the very near future include a forum restructure. Using the data and analytics from LSI, we have identified areas of the forum which are underutilised.  The flexibility of the Lithium platform enables us to move categories and boards to reflect the needs of our users and to enhance the ease of user journey. Removing inactive areas allows us to introduce new areas which have been requested, such as a ‘Coffee Lounge’ where users can still connect in a safe online environment but in conversations which are cancer free.   Other new areas include a closed private group for our Community Champions and an innovative category, ‘Ask Our Nurses’. This is where users can directly ask questions to our highly regarded clinical specialists enhancing our Helpline and ‘Ask the nurse’ email service.       In the last 12 months our forum has grown by 40% and we have no intention of sitting back and settling for that.  With the ability to be reactive to our users’ needs and having the data, both quantitative and qualitative to support and underpin decisions, we will continue to grow from strength to strength.      
Company: Sky UK Contact: Graham Henderson (Community Manager) Community: Sky Community Lithy category:  Excellence in  Customer Satisfaction   Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company. The group serves 21 million customers across fi... See more...
Company: Sky UK Contact: Graham Henderson (Community Manager) Community: Sky Community Lithy category:  Excellence in  Customer Satisfaction   Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company. The group serves 21 million customers across five countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK and Ireland. We offer the best and broadest range of content, deliver market-leading customer service and use innovative new technology to give customers a better TV experience, whenever and wherever they choose.   Our 2015 customer satisfaction initiatives   Community Oracle Programme   At Sky our service message is a simple one; “We want to offer the best service in the country”. The Sky Community was founded in 2010. Since inception we’ve adopted and tested a number of engagement models. At the outset we had a handful of staff and then moved to full service model with over 50 fulltime agents responding to customer posts in the Community. The long-term aim was for the Community to move to a peer to peer model when the user base was high enough. We felt the time was right at the end of 2015 when we had a staggering 1.5 million Community members. We now operate with a peer to peer model with strategic engagement from a team of 5 Community Engagement Specialists and one Community Manager. How can you go from 50 staff to 5 staff overnight while growing a community and out performing business KPI’s like NPS and call deflection? For us, the answer was simple! We had to empower our members by opening our doors and letting them look inside- a real challenge with multiple sites and over 30,000 employees across the UK. We had been running a community Superuser program since 2011 with a relatively small number of members, typically ranging from 8 to 12 members. Despite this small number, these particular members were responsible for creating the best engagement, sharing the best knowledge and generating balanced discussions. We’ve never had a formal Superuser structure in place. No events, no incentives, limited communication and no additional tools. We literally gave them a Superuser badge and said “off you go”. We realized that this had to change!   The most important customer issue we  were looking to solve via our Lithium implementation   We wanted to increase NPS, increase the number of accepted solutions and ultimately deflect calls. We wanted the community to become our customers first port of call, regardless of their interests and levels of digital platform usage. We had already identified our Superusers as the solution, but had to find a way to increase their contribution, offer them more support and grow our Superuser numbers. So what did we do? The first thing we did was listen! We asked our Superusers for feedback and spoke Lithium about best practice. Some of the feedback was great, but much of it was tough to hear. Our conclusion was simple; “we’re letting these members down and need to do more. We’ll never increase NPS or call deflection with this current model”. It was then that the “Oracle” programme was born. We launched in January 2016.   Features of the Oracle Program: Annual event – We introduced an all expenses paid annual event to show them how much we care. For the first time we brought the whole business together using our community. They viewed our product labs, touched Sky Q for the first time, toured our news and sports studios, sat in a McLaren F1 car and met some of our TV presenters.   Our Sky News HQ presenters left the studio to meet our Oracles. (from left to right: Natalie Sawyer (Presenter), Robbie (Oracle), Adam Leventhal (Presenter)   Our Oracles toured Sky studios and many fulfilled a lifetime dream to see and touch a real McLaren Mercedes F1 car.   Annual program that recycles every year. This allows us to keep the program fresh and current. It also allows us the ability to take time out to reward our best members. Incentives – for the first time our best members are rewarded. The annual program allows us to modify and improve the incentives as we learn through data and qualitative feedback. We also invite Oracles to adhoc events, such as the Sky Q press launch. Two Oracles attended and subsequently answered over 90% of all questions related to the product up until launch.   Andrew Olson (Director of New Products) presents Sky Q to the world during our London launch event. Our Oracles were there along with the press and VIP’s.   Quarterly hangouts – We jump on a call every quarter and tell our Oracles about our jobs what we’re working on. We also invite guest speakers from across Sky to answer their questions. They love the techie stuff! Badging- we implemented Lithium gamification and incorporated an Oracle badge to recognise their community contribution. Access to ALL product BETA trials. Our Oracles are the first customers in the UK to use our new products and apps. VIP access to priority customer service line.   Our metrics   After months of work, many late nights and a trip to SKY HQ we had to ask our Oracles for feedback. This is what they said about our first ever Oracle event held at Sky Studios, London:   A few quotes from our Oracles after our first ever oracle event:   “Great day”   “Lovely to see you all there Thank you for a lovely day. “   “It was great meeting you all and sure was a busy day. I’d just like to say a big thank you to all the staff involved in making this day possible, and to those of you who were able to come along”.   “Thanks again to all those there today, thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish”.   The Results   Our NPS rose by 71 points following the introduction of our Oracle programme.   Our accepted solutions more than trebled following the launch of the programme. We asked our Lithium Strategy Consultant to run a short session to explain how to write and structure posts. This was delivered to our Oracles in a fun and interactive session- the results speak for themselves!   Post volumes of Oracles that we invited to the Sky Q VIP launch. Following the event, they became advocates for our new product offering. The red line signifies the Sky Q launch and Sky Q comparison shown in relation to existing TV product..   In summary, we increased our net promoter score (NPS) by 1800%. Increasing accepted solutions by 467% was key to our uplift in NPS. We made solutions easier to find by installing the “featured thread” component and highlighting solutions at the start of all discussion threads- both Lithium features. Inviting Community Oracles to take part in our new product launch resulted in them responding to over 90% of all customer questions within that new product area. In addition, we promoted community blogs via our Twitter help handle by utilizing publisher in LSW. We focused on promoting digital services and Sky Q. This increased blog views by 682%.      
Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer ... See more...
Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer that focuses on nurturing powerful relationships between people and pets. We do this by providing the products, services, advice and experiences that keep pets physically fit, mentally alert, socially engaged and emotionally happy.   Our road to Lithium   Having pets undoubtedly means having questions about pet care. As a leading pet care retailer, Petco understands that pet parents often turn to online search first when they have questions, but also that the internet is fraught with misinformation about proper animal care. The concept of a Petco owned community was born out a clear need for expertly crafted and reviewed content that is based on years of animal care experience and knowledge.   In 2012, after careful review and consideration, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the first iteration of the Petco Community, called “Pet Talk Place.” Our goal was to live our brand values and realize our vision of being the “trusted source” for pet parents. In order to realize this goal, we needed a best in class platform that would allow us to connect with our customers, and connect our customers with each other—ultimately driving down customer service costs by providing a space for self-serve resolutions.   Despite fantastic results in the first few months following the launch of Pet Talk Place, we realized that we had run out of things to talk about, and there was growing need for fresh and relevant content. At the same time, we noticed a shift in customer expectations in terms of responsiveness. People wanted more content, and they wanted it fast. To address both of these issues, we implemented LSW in 2013. With LSW, we now have access to questions that are top of mind for our customers, and can determine the priority in which those questions need to be addressed based on frequency and influence of the person posting the question. We create at least five unique pieces of content each week, spanning all pet categories.   The benefits of having both Community and LSW   In 2012, we decided that if we were to going to successfully fulfill our goal of being the “most trusted source” for pet parents, we needed a clear digital customer experience strategy to help us shift from talking at our customers, to actively participating in conversations our customers wanted to have. In order to do this, we set out to rethink our approach and start with the basics—discover pet parent needs, put a plan in place to address those needs, execute based on those needs and then continue to reassess and build on our successes. The Lithium community platform—in conjunction with LSW—is what allows us to execute against that strategy.   The Petco Community combines expert information with peer-to-peer advice for a comprehensive site that provides blog content, forums, lead-generation contests and a unique knowledge base, each serving the range of pet verticals. LSW allows us to share community content with members, associates and prospective customers quickly and consistently. Having both tools means we are able to serve our customers wherever they are in the social web, on their terms, and in a consistent manner.   The enhanced reporting functionality offered by LSW not only enables us to better share our customer care story with leadership, it provides a more sophisticated reporting structure that demonstrates our support of the KPIs our social teams were goaled to achieve.   Our results   In short, with a Total Community approach, we have managed to meet digital customer expectations tenfold. One of our finest accomplishments this year was earning the “Facebook Responsive Badge” before any of our competitors, and before any other retailer, making us best in class in terms of social customer support. This means we are responding to 90% of our customers within five minutes of contact. To put that into perspective, four years ago, our average response time was 16 hours. Needless to say, our gains in efficiency have allowed us to respond to three times the volume of comments and questions, in a shorter time and in a manner that allowed us to build on each learning in the form of meaningful content.   Strong content and participation in our community has resulted in tremendous improvements year over year in terms of community health and traffic.   Community Health:   Average CHI score 2013 Average CHI score 2014 Average CHI score 2015 441 464 523   Traffic Totals for FY15: 62% increase YOY Total Page Views: 3,942,000 (FY14: 2,430,000) 68% increase YOY Visits: 2,852,000 (FY14: 1,702,000) 65% increase YOY Unique visitors: 2,533,000 (FY14: 1,538,000) 28% increase YOY Total Registered Member: 15,008 (FY14: 11,726) 22% increase YOY Completed registrations: 3,282 (FY14: 2,685)   An unexpected benefit from all of the content we have created for the community came in the form of efficiency in our social and digital ad spend thanks to pixels that allow us to retarget users with relevant promotions and sales that are based on content consumption behaviors. Our overall Facebook spend per ad has decreased by 60%, thanks to these efficiencies.
Co mpany:  Volia Entry submitted by: Yulia Shevchenko (Head of social media customer care) Community: Volia Club Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Ukraine is the biggest territory in Europe.   VOLIA is a nationwide... See more...
Co mpany:  Volia Entry submitted by: Yulia Shevchenko (Head of social media customer care) Community: Volia Club Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Ukraine is the biggest territory in Europe.   VOLIA is a nationwide Ukrainian telecommunication provider that offers a set of modern telecommunication services: analog, digital, HD and interactive TV “VOLIA Smart HD” (OTT), broadband Internet and cloud services of the biggest Ukrainian Data-Centre.   VOLIA has a business across all biggest (by population) cities (except Odessa). And we are #1 Internet and TV provider across our footprint! In 2015 the Company created and continue developing  six own TV channels − «VOLIA CINE+», «VOLIA CINE+ HD», «VOLIA CINE+ MIX», «VOLIA CINE+ LEGEND», «VOLIA CINE+ Hit HD» and «VOLIA CINE+ KIDS».         VOLIA is recognized as the best provider of digital entertainments by International Festival-Contest Choice of the Year 2015.   One of our company's strategic directions is digital care. Since 2014 Volia created client oriented and innovative environment to serve our customers online. In a year, we grew share of digital customer care from 48% to 71%.   Two great instruments – new customer self-care portal “My Cabinet” (my.volia.com) and customer’s community Volia Club (club.volia.com), drove that growth.   In March 2016, the customer self-care portal “My Cabinet” was awarded as Best Customer Experience Project on International Conference of Customer Experience in Budapest.   In 2015, we focused on answering 2 questions:   How to increase digital care possibilities to our customers – that impact CES and NPS How to become closer to our customers and make them a real part of Volia   In 2014, our self-care included several IVR modules, a little of SMS informing, an ugly self-care portal that was designed as an old-school excel and old forum, that was driven just by moderators. All these instruments covered ~48% of interaction.   At the end of 2014, we delivered 2 great online instruments (a new self-care Portal and a Lithium-powered customer Community) in parallel with updating of IVR / SMS management. And in 2015, we made a leapfrog from 48% to 71%. They're incredible results, and we are proud of it!     The most important customer service issue we were looking to  solve via Lithium implementation   We love our customers and want to be their beloved provider with a long-term relationship! That's why it is necessary to by open-minded and a close-to-customer company.  It seems customers trust other customers the most. And people like to help other people and to be proud of it – especially if you offer them a proper environment for this exchange.   Knowing this, we set out to create Volia's online community. This high-tech platform gives great possibilities to manage a huge number of customer questions with little participation of Volia moderators. In addition, it has greatly increased customer brand engagement.   It’s really another attitude and principle of customer care It's integrated not just with self-care but with Volia facebook/twitter account It has an in-built, strong gamification that helps to involve customers into customer care and grow super users that become brand advocates     Community implementation both increased customer engagement, improved business process and impacted our Internet users' NPS and CES greatly!   Metrics   1. Customer satisfaction In May of 2015, we started to measure our Volia Club’s customer satisfaction among registered users (by Survey Monkey). The questionnaire was focused on ease of use, speed, and quality of answers inside the Community. And the key question was «What is your total satisfaction with the Volia Club».   The highest score was for quality of answers – 8.41 from 10. It’s really cool as 50% of all answers were given by community members!     2. The readiness to recommend Volia among the Internet-services users increased by 19 points (against 15 planned) all over the country and by +23 points among the audience in TOP-3 Internet cities (Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv).     3. The chain of complicated request solving became twice shorter! Average response time decreased to 2 hours from 24 hours in 2014.   The chain of reply to customers now has 4 steps instead of 8.     Before Community launch   After Community launch   4. It’s impact on CES is improving! This is due to both business process simplification and listening to direct complaints of customers and quick resolution!       5. In addition we improved efficiency! The job of moderators has shortened by 39.3% (against 30% planned).   All visits were served by 4 people (2 FTE). Nearly 50% of inquiries are served by customers.   The share of the e-mail service assignment has shortened by 30% (against 25% planned).     We were the first and only provider in Ukraine that launched a customer driven community! In 2015, we arranged Volia’s top-management and best customer expert meeting to discuss Volia’s strategy. Our clients became part of the Volia transformation team!   As a result, community is one of quickest channels for customer feedback. It is first in asking, replying and clarifying information about all issues - from city outages to price changes and new product launches! Often urgent escalation helps to solve the problem before it has a big impact on business, or to prepare proper communications to the entire customer base, or to test new products before going to market!     At the end of 2015, Lithium implemented a new survey built into the system that allow to track CSAT among non-registered users! And it's our next target to increase satisfaction and engaging among newcomers in 2016!       The customers are positive towards the changes in the Company! The search and innovations implementation process is ongoing. Volia is open to the changes for the better!   During the year, 5 super-users* were developed in our community. They become the brand experts – they don’t only help us with answers to less experienced users, but also take a large part in testing of new products and giving recommendations to their development. * in communities 5+ years – normally up to 10 super-users
Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retaile... See more...
Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer that focuses on nurturing powerful relationships between people and pets. We do this by providing the products, services, advice and experiences that keep pets physically fit, mentally alert, socially engaged and emotionally happy.   Our community goals   Our goal is to establish Petco digital properties as the “go-to” source for pet care news, customer support, social commerce, education, information and fun. The Petco Community delivers on “The Power of Together” by creating and showcasing high-value, Petco-branded content that resonates with the communities we serve. We aim to engage and empower pet parents to enrich their pets’ lives.   The design elements that make our community unique    The Petco Community is a branded content hub where pet parents and animal lovers can connect, share pet stories, find solutions to pet care issues and more. The Community platform, with a new look and feel and a dramatically improved user experience, enables us to more effectively and efficiently engage, support and market to current and prospective customers. The design elements that make our community unique are the rich content immersion from our home page and throughout the community, and dynamic content recommendation at the blog level.   To Petco, the community is more than just Q&A forum content. It’s about engaging with pet parents in rich, meaningful ways. Our goal was to strike an important balance between Petco-generated and user-generated content. For instance, on the home page, we developed large components that enabled Petco to feature beautiful, unique pet imagery to entice users to engage and to communicate our expertise, while at the same time balancing that against user-generated discussion content across all pet categories.   The Community offers a variety of content in every pet category—including dog, cat, fish, small animal, reptile and bird. You’ll also find: Hundreds of blog posts (co-created and collaborative content written by SMEs, influencers, Petco partners, veterinarians, community super users and pet industry journalists) More than 6,500 forum posts (where community members can ask questions and share their pet parent experiences) A tribal knowledge base (where we provide the best answers to common questions) Infographics, Petco videos, photos, contests and more   How we executed our community design   We leveraged Lithium’s strategy consulting and technical services groups to conceive, design and implement a customized experience. Strategy consulting worked with us from the ground up, identifying our core business needs and matching that with an achievable but differentiated community experience, one that propelled us from a standard forum design to a rich, compelling community we could be proud of. Next, they worked hand-in-hand with their development team to ensure that many of the customized experiences we wanted could be executed on-time and within budget. Lastly, they continued to engage with us after implementation to make tweaks and improvements to the experience. In fact, we continue to work with them to convert the community to a responsive experience in the coming months.   Our metrics   All 2015 goals for the community were exceeded post community redesign launch.   Traffic Totals for FY15: 62% increase YOY Total Page Views: 3,942,000 (FY14: 2,430,000) 68% increase YOY Visits: 2,852,000 (FY14: 1,702,000) 65% increase YOY Unique visitors: 2,533,000 (FY14: 1,538,000) 28% increase YOY Total Registered Member: 15,008 (FY14: 11,726) 22% increase YOY Completed registrations: 3,282 (FY14: 2,685)      
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 provider... See more...
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: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian Schärtl (Project Coordinator Digital Services ) Community:  Vodafone Forum  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Ger... See more...
Company: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian Schärtl (Project Coordinator Digital Services ) Community:  Vodafone Forum  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Germany, with more than 14,000 employees and it's headquarters in Duesseldorf. It is part of the Vodafone Group, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. Currently, more than 45 million people are making use of Vodafone services in Germany.   Since 2015, Vodafone Germany and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland have become one company. Vodafone Germany provides mobile service, fixed network, internet and TV from a single source. Thereby, Vodafone Germany offers the customer a unique converged service experience. Converged service has an impact on the service strategy as well.   A merger brand strategy   Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland decided to implement a common brand strategy. Following this approach we decided to merge our communities as well. Each community was based on different providers.   However, both communities had their own identities, topics, rules and working principles. For this reason – and to make them part of the story - service agents were deeply involved in the project to represent the agent’s perspective of the community.   Based on their platform expertise and operational experience, they provided the basis for a common community management and harmonized principles wherever necessary. Workshops revealed the key differences in moderation approaches between the Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities.   In addition, agents visited each other to understand their daily business. This encouraged agents to work together more closely and intensively. Community coffee cups and a team poster were created to promote the team spirit. Above all, agents appreciated the team building measures:     Vodafone Community used the header to update the users. A changing visualization highlighted the upcoming merger. Additionally, more details were communicated within the community itself. Both user groups should feel as one new common community.   Our Super-User Event   Of course the user involvement is crucial as an active user base is core to any community. Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities together accumulate more than 40 active Super-Users. Users appreciate posts from Super-Users, as they are considered authentic customer feedback. This year, one of the Super-users wrote his 23,000 th post. To continue the good cooperation, the Vodafone Community invited all Super-Users to a merger event in Düsseldorf. All participants received detailed merger information. During a brainstorming session, we, the core project team, agents and Super-Users, developed the major components of our Vodafone Community slogan “Know. Share. Help.”     Some users were skeptical, but Super-Users supported the community, to convince them of the advantages of the new converged community. In cooperation with the Super-Users, the Community also tidied up and moved posts. After having cleaned up, all content was migrated to the merged community, not to lose valuable user input. All users were migrated automatically as well, to make the move as simple as possible for the customers.   At the beginning of the common community, each Super-User got a personalized Community coffee cup and received welcome flyers.     Other events and contests   Related to the upcoming Christmas 2015, the Vodafone Community defined a strategy to get users engaged with the new community. During a competition, users learned more about the new community design structure and had the opportunity to win prizes. Users engaged with the Vodafone and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland product portfolio:     After the merger, all agents got an invitation to celebrate at the headquarters in Düsseldorf. Besides networking, the team analyzed the current collaboration, identified open issues and defined measures to get rid of them. Also the formerly separate Super-User events will be one common central happening in the future.   Now more than 200,000 users are on the platform to exchange, discuss and answer questions. The Vodafone Community is comprised of almost 1 Million posts. Wherever the community is not able to support, Vodafone service agents provide expert know-how.
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year     Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone pro... See more...
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year     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.    Who we are?   Comcast brings together the best in media and technology. We drive innovation to create the world’s best entertainment and online experiences. XFINITY TV offers customers the best viewing experience anytime, anywhere, with the most extensive collection of entertainment available on XFINITY On Demand, online at xfinity.com/tv, through the XFINITY TV App, XFINITY TV Go App, XFINITY My Account App and on XFINITY Streampix. The X1 Entertainment Operating System reflects the powerful innovation of bringing TV and Internet together to deliver a superior entertainment and communications experience for consumers. X1 delivers the simplest, fastest and most complete way for our customers to access all their entertainment from all of their screens. We provide the nation’s fastest most reliable Internet and in-home Wi-Fi speeds to more than 22 million high-speed Internet customers, even during peak use. Our millions of XFINITY Wi-Fi hotspots, allow customers to connect at the fastest Wi-Fi speeds around town. XFINITY Voice is an innovative and reliable IP-enabled home phone service that delivers digital-quality phone service with all of the functions of a traditional phone service, plus enhanced features that are integrated with other Comcast services. XFINITY Home is a growing collection of innovative security and smart home services that give customers added convenience and peace of mind.   Comcast Help & Support Forums:   Our Help & Support Forums are a great place for customers to find answers about their XFINITY products or to get help for service issues. Our forums get over two million unique visitors per month and if you search for a product or service question, links to our Forum pages are right at the top of the results.   Our forums are a place to learn from fellow customers. Nearly 98% of the searches conducted by visitors to the forums turn up related results that were generated by others posing similar questions. Our forums have been a great resource for years. In 2015 we strove to make the forums as easy as possible for our customers to use, so we rebuilt them from the ground up, with a completely new user interface and easier navigation. But we didn’t stop there, with over 40% of our customers accessing our community from smart phones and tablets, we partnered with Lithium to deliver a fully responsive design that launched in the beginning of 2016.   Improved Search   The most striking change in our new layout was bringing Search front and center for any customer to locate what they’re looking for. Additionally, our new search function now includes real-time suggestions for posts that match customer search terms. There’s also the option to create a new post right from the search bar if none of the results answer the customer’s question.     Improved Content Categorization    We’ve organized all the content to help our users find answers and solve problems faster. We were also able to move our most visited boards above the fold. Our layout helps customers save time and reduce effort to find what they’re looking for.     New Features   We’ve added improved visual cues to highlight trending alerts, recent solutions, and feature our most active users. We launched badging to encourage the right types of user behavior for new community members and recognize the efforts of super users—our Experts— to stand out for the expertise they’ve displayed in helping others.    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 you customers quickly see that the question in that thread has an approved solution.     Evolution of the Comcast Community:     Impact   We currently have more than 5.4M registered users. In 2015 we had 21.5M Unique Visitors to our community, nearly 10M from mobile and tablet devices. There were more than 45.5M Page Views in the Help & Support Community. Through our community redesigns and scaling up of a dedicated community-focused internal team, we set our focus on improving our Solution Views. We had our biggest year ever for Solution Views: more than 8.25 million (a 13% increase year over year). Our commitment to our customers is simple: respect their time, simplify their experience and make things right if we fall short. We understand many people will look online first before trying to contact us through our traditional support channels. Our forums are an invaluable tool for accomplishing all three parts of our commitment. We’re able to highlight existing answers to many common questions, promote a vibrant peer-to-peer community and allow customers to engage how they want. This saves time in quickly locating the information they’re looking for, or quickly ask their own question if they haven’t found what they need. With a diverse mix of products and tools our team continues to evangelize the voice of the customer with product teams and encourage expert engagement from our internal experts to share knowledge, tips and tricks, and deliver the best customer experience.        
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by ... See more...
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.   At Cisco, customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success.   Our 2015 goals for our  Lithium-powered community    Breaking Down Social Barriers   Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, today. At Cisco Systems, our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) of over 4,000 engineers has fully adopted our Social Knowledge Management platform (Tech Zone), behaviors and practices. The knowledge they create within the Tech Zone TKB is externalized as content our customers use to self-serve and self-solve, which allowed us to realize over $25M in case avoidance savings in 2014.     In 2015, we wanted to do much more. Yes, we wanted to continue finding ways to increase case avoidance savings, but we also looked beyond our TAC organization to understand the broader ecosystem engaged in resolving complex customer issues. This led us to the organization that is most often consulted in escalations – Engineering, the group that designs and develops our products. That’s when we realized we had an opportunity – our over 35,000-strong engineer community.   We set out to break down barriers by extending our social knowledge capabilities beyond our Services organization borders and into Engineering, providing capabilities and workflows to foster collaboration with the TAC, thus bringing people together in new ways to create a living, breathing, social organism. This is critical to our continued success because as our customers’ environments become more complex, borderless engagement channels are key in solving their biggest challenges. So we targeted over 35,000 Engineering employees.     Our focus areas and tactics to meet our  goals   Bring in your advocates!   Our engagement began at a summit last year in which the Engineering teams came together to discuss improving collaboration and escalation processes with the TAC. At the time, Engineering was using hundreds of email aliases to communicate with their TAC colleagues as part of their escalation procedures. Our Social Knowledge program manager attended to talk about how Tech Zone could improve the collaboration processes between Engineering and TAC.   As part of the summit objectives, the Engineering team had to agree to standardize on a single, escalation management system. We saw the opportunity to introduce Tech Zone as a means to collaborate early, thus avoiding potential escalations. We also highlighted the added benefit of capturing vital knowledge that could be externalized to help our customers – knowledge that would otherwise be lost in an email exchange. Or worse, asked over and over again.   We brought along our strongest and most influential TAC advocates who highlighted and endorsed the benefits of using Tech Zone, and who influenced Engineering to agree to use the site to collaborate.   At the end of the summit, Engineering agreed to include Tech Zone training and onboarding within the escalation management system training plan. We then identified Engineering advocates who agreed to be early adopters and who would help communicate the benefits of Tech Zone to their colleagues. TAC continues to encourage their engineering partners to use Tech Zone to collaborate today, helping to create the adoption “stickiness” needed for continued success.     Our results   To date, we have established an Engineering Adoption roadmap and have onboarded nearly 15,000 Engineering employees onto Tech Zone to engage and collaborate with TAC engineers. The results have been phenomenal: Engineering has become our fastest growing, knowledge-producing community within Tech Zone, and currently produces 12% of Tech Zone content.     This in turn translates to faster problem resolution and higher customer satisfaction scores as vital, actionable knowledge captured in TKBs is externalized on Cisco.com. Our results prove this as we have observed record-high support content satisfaction scores (4.46 out of 5.00), and consumption numbers for TAC-authored articles (4.7M views of ~2,000 articles) as customers increasingly opt to self-serve and self-solve whenever possible.   In addition, we have retired ~40 email aliases to date (with many more to come) as Engineering teams continue to migrate to Tech Zone.   The benefits for Cisco have been staggering! We’ve more than met our 2015 goal to increase case deflection savings – with an approximate $54.2M in savings for the year – more than double our $25.2M savings from 2014.  
Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digita... See more...
Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digital world. Our aim is to inspire our customers with the best network, superb offers and outstanding service. Swisscom is one of the most famous and popular brands in Switzerland.   Our service leadership is not only distinguished by the fact that we offer an outstanding level of service in our own service touchpoints, such as the hotline and shops, but also that we reach our customers where they are most active from day-to-day: online and especially on the social web.   Swisscom’s road to Lithium Total Community   The decision to use Lithium was made in 2009. As an early adopter, we were among the first ten European clients to launch a Lithium Community. Two years later, we were the second client in Europe to put LSW into operation. As soon as the partnership began, it became clear that Lithium would be able to help us assert our service leadership in the social web as well.     Fig. 1: Social Media Universe of Swisscom   LSW for service dialogue in four languages   For the digital avant-garde, we offer full-blown customer care on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Messenger. Simple service requests and complex issues alike are resolved on these channels. Our goal is to offer an end-to-end resolution of the customer’s request on the channel of his choice.   LSW allows not only for effective dialogue management, but also, and in particular, a smooth internal organisation. Service inquiries we receive in German, French, Italian, and English can be distributed easily among two teams in different locations. Since PR, Marketing, and Incident Management specialists also work with LSW, it is possible to provide qualified responses to such inquires as well.   Fig. 2: LSW Setup at Swisscom   Community forum for the “long tail” of service requests   With our quadrilingual customers-help-customers forum, we aim to bring together experts from the “crowd” with the niche requests of our customers. It is not our goal to treat every issue raised in the forum, but mainly those service inquiries:   whose problem must first be identified by way of dialogue/discussion, which largely depend on the customer context (e.g. technical setup) and for which no standard solutions exist, or which are not primarily related to our core products (fixed network, TV, web, mobile).   The majority of the service requests can be resolved by the customers themselves via our extensive online help pages. The community therefore plays a vital role in dealing with the “long tail” of customer requests.   Fig. 3: Positioning and Role of the Community within the Solution Space   The benefits of Total Community   With LSW and the community, we lay the foundation to fulfill the promises of our brand – being a trustworthy companion in the digital world and providing outstanding service – also on the social web. Furthermore, with the Total Community approach, we are able to address the fundamental points of our guiding principles in our social media strategy. As Swisscom, we particularly wish to stand by our customers, to make the first move toward meeting their needs by taking their requests seriously. Similarly, we are open to new ideas, which means we listen to and strive to understand our customers. We put these promises into action as follows:   LSW within our social media strategy   Thanks to LSW, we have a scalable solution to handle our ever-growing service requests in a quick and efficient manner and with high technical expertise by using also the extensive knowledge of our community. Our customers appreciate the simplicity of the interaction and the high level of problem-solving expertise in these channels. As a result, social media care has an excellent reputation.   Community within our social media strategy   In addition to customer insights which we gain by listening and engaging through LSW, the community also provides us with greater understanding of the thought processes of our customers. We are therefore better able to grasp what it is that motivates our customers, as well as recognize their needs and discover the issues they discuss with one another. Along with passive listening, we actively invite our customers to participate in product development. As an example, pilot users submitted over 900 posts with suggestions for improving our recently launched UHD TV receiver.   In order that the entire company may benefit from the knowledge derived from these activities, agents and community managers carry these insights on a regular basis to the relevant stakeholders within our company.   Fig. 4: Community and Forum Homepages   The results of Total Community   Since the community and LSW are mainly used in the area of customer care, the focus lies on reducing service costs while maintaining a high customer satisfaction.   Directly measurable savings   From an efficiency point of view, the community helps us deflecting a very substantial amount of calls (savings of about 6k hours/month). Customers who were able to resolve their issues with the help of the community would otherwise have phoned in 75% of the time. The workload savings excel the investments made to license and manage the community tenfold. Furthermore, interacting with customers through LSW has a strong effect on efficiency indicators as well. These overall positive effects are also a result of a community with a current Community Health Index of just over 700.   Fig. 5: Evolution of the Community Forum   Service recovery through social media dialogues   Along with the likewise high resolution rate of the LSW-administered dialogues, this service touchpoint is particularly impressive thanks to its high customer satisfaction index of 8.5 (on a scale of 10) and an above-average NPS compared to other service channels.   Indirectly measurable results within the company   In addition to directly measurable advantages, we clearly see also indirect business outcomes: Voice of the customer: Customer attitudes regarding our products and services are easily recognizable by all employees, which is especially advantageous for product managers. The monitoring of these online discussions helps us identify major problems promptly. Quick feedback loops: It is easy for community users to become involved in product development. This speeds up the development process and ensures customer needs get addressed. Easier troubleshooting: In the case of breakdown, forum discussions help to better understand the cause and thus repair the trouble faster. Thanks to the community’s link to our CRM, affected customers can be identified easily. The sharing of knowledge within the customer care department: Complex customer issues via traditional service touchpoints are often cleared up more quickly with the collective knowledge of the community    
Company:  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 par... See more...
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: Telenet NV Entry submitted by: Geoffrey Ramon (Social Media Lead) Community: Telenet Community Lithy Category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Telenet’s purpose is to help and inspire our customers to make the most of life... See more...
Company: Telenet NV Entry submitted by: Geoffrey Ramon (Social Media Lead) Community: Telenet Community Lithy Category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Telenet’s purpose is to help and inspire our customers to make the most of life and business in the digital world, and to do so wholeheartedly.   We brought superfast broadband to Flanders, we made phone calls via cable cheaper, and we made digital TV the standard. Telenet introduced its customers to a world of new possibilities.   Technologies which were in their infancy only yesterday are now accepted as standard. Customers don’t have to think about them;  they just want to get on with things.   If you are supported by exceptional services, you can let yourself go completely in what you want to do. Infinite possibilities help you focus on opportunities.   Families discover a completely new style of entertainment where they can watch what they really want to see, anytime, anywhere. Businesses are also discovering new opportunities as Telenet helps them to fully embrace the digital world.   Opportunities to make the most of life and do what we wish wholeheartedly and share it with others.   1 year of an amazing customer experience   Within Telenet, our mission is to make it our customers as effortless as possible. One our strategic pillars is to deliver an amazing experience, whether it is through our products or along the customer journey. To emphasize this, a separate department was founded 'Ace' = Amazing Customer Experience. Following from customer insights an intensive multi-year program was set in place, that allows us to visit all of our customers to fix inhouse connectivity issues, as this is the biggest grievance of customers.   Bearing the customer effortless and an amazing experience in mind. It brought us to being the N°1 Social Devoted Brand on Facebook in Belgium since June 2013 and belonging to the top 500 Socially Devoted companies in the world.   We’ve learned that there is a good appreciation in the market from our customers, prospects and opinion leaders on social media (acknowledged by www.socialbakers.com).   Resulting from, amongst others, these excellent results and keeping the effortless/ ACE in mind Telenet was ready to take on the next level in its social maturity by launching its own branded platform powered by Lithium in 2014.   As from the start it was made clear that the Telenet Community Forum needed to be an addition to the existing customer proposition and not a replacement. The main focus is out of boundaries support by a peer to peer community and being a home for internal and external beta tests.   Throughout the first year we achieved a great success in consumption, unique visitors and registrations.   But most of all, from the very start, we noticed an analytical but positive mindset from the community members towards each others and towards new members. Best illustrated during our latest price adjustment, we saw a neutral-objective tone of voice. A self- regulating base has been made for our future superuser program .      The issue that we are looking to solve with Lithium   Together with the growth of the approachable social media accounts, so grew the out of boundary questions towards Telenet.   A growing number of connected devices with specific settings and operating systems “Out of the ordinary” set-ups of connected audio and video devices together with our inhouse modems/routers and their specifics Numerous “internet of things” that are way out of our (company) league   All of these challenges needed a centralized, searchable and Telenet-branded approach, as an addition to our existing customer propositions.   From 2014, we were able to redirect customers towards the Telenet community. Both our spoken and our social media team had a specific solution towards our customers for all of their “out of boundaries” questions, resulting in linked traffic between social media and The Telenet 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 impa... See more...
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:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impa... See more...
Company:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   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 community goals   Our primary goal is call deflection. We believe that this can be done by enabling a vibrant environment where customers can come to seek help, a place they’ll come back to in the future for assistance, and where they’ll want to return to share knowledge with their peers.   We’re also committed to supporting the wider business in trialling new products and services. We wanted to help customers who are now just using Google for their answers. The role of the Community as a shop window in the path to purchase is a key consideration, as is our continued desire to drive adoption and advocacy.   Both the wider Virgin Group, and ourselves at Virgin Media have, as you’d expect, some incredible brand guidelines to work with in terms of design, web functionality and tone of voice. These customer usability and the customer experience considerations are all tied-together by our guiding company ethos at Virgin Media, which is to be open-minded, fun and generous.   As part of our ‘Community Transformation Project’ (CTP) which ran from April –November 2015 we were able to analyse and refine our objectives and target in greater detail, and identify what we wanted to achieve as a result of our redesign.   Our specific design goals were as defined as follows: 1: Boost Helpful Answer views (reducing call traffic into Care)      a. Increase visibility (internally) and differentiate (compare and contrast to other posts)      b. Promote (external) 2: Increase traffic to the forums      a. Across the website estate      b. Across channels 3: Increase forum participation through to contribution:      a. Increase registered users and prioritise content      b. Improve repeat visits      c. Blog integration 4: Position the Virgin Media Community as a differentiator      a. Consideration phase of the consumer lifecycle – consideration-assimilation phase      b. For existing customers   What makes our community unique   We’re fully responsive. Our CTP has delivered a community that isn’t restricted by device, and is seamlessly accessible – regardless of where you are or how you use it.   We’re not just on brand – we’re shaping it. Brand guidelines were being re-written during the project, which meant we were the first implementation of ideas, palettes, and usability rules.   Community Hub page We’ve focused on creating a Community Hub page that is dynamic and welcoming. It incorporates all the key features of the community in bite-size chunks, and the principle behind this page is used throughout the site - surfacing content where and when it is needed. Our ‘Trending now’ function typifies this approach.   Personalised Each visitor is greeted with a role-specific message, with a call-to-action that fits their standing in the community. The ‘forum’ page can be adapted to hide boards that the customer isn’t interested in. There’s a different experience for non-members than members – they are directed to find help, and guided to our enhanced ‘Getting Started’ and on-brand ‘Community FAQ’ section.   Truly Social We’ve added a social-proofing community reach, which highlights the scope and reach of the site. YouTube help videos within the community – while using YouTube API to show the overall video views. This module allows us to quickly showcase topical information. The enhanced ‘Your conversations’ panel, as well as more conventional pop-up notifications and customer journey emails, means that it’s easier to know what’s been happening while you were looking elsewhere.   SEO Working with a top digital agency we assessed SEO across the site, and have introduced a number of both SEO enhancement and automated blocking features. This means that fresh relevant information will be found, and outdated or inaccurate postings can be removed from search with a click of a button.\       Navigation We’re really proud of our plectrum nav button – which we think should win an award on its own. Give it a try!   Swoosh!   How we executed our community design   We worked AGILE – which ultimately proved to be the right choice as it delivered efficient collaborative working. Following careful consideration and preparations, a small core team worked in a series of sprints to deliver a fully-responsive transformative design in six months from the Discovery Phase to Launch and Completion in November 2015.     The initial decision was whether to make a light version – a refreshed community look and feel, or for the transformative, fully responsive option, with a real emphasis on delivering results. There was really only one option: Go big, or go home.   This was the motto adopted by our project team, as they focused on a Mobile-first development. With the smallest device as the starting point, we were able to make sure that the same fully-featured functionality could upscale and prove accessible across all devices – and in doing so, we think made a big difference to the approach.    Co-location at Lithium / Virgin Media meant the team worked really closely in 10 day-long ‘sprints’, working with a Product Backlog, defined roles and responsibilities and shared project tools quickly identified across the two companies. Our core team of ten combined Lithium technical developers and a front-end / user interface designer, with Virgin Media User Experience, copy writing, design and UAT, under leadership and ownership from both parties.   Our community team populated the stage site with content, before along with our Superusers they were able to put it through its paces. In the staging environment, the community began to come together over the course of the sprints, and ideas could be tested, scrapped or implemented on the fly. One of our most successful features – ‘Trending now’ came about in such a manner at the tail end of the project.   Results (Comparing10/11/14 - 09/03/2015 and 09/11/2015 – 11/3/2015, unless otherwise stated.)     Comparing year-on-year results we can demonstrate that the CTP fulfilled it’s goal to Boost Helpful Answer views. We’ve used the functionality available within Lithium to surface Helpful Answers quicker, highlighted and authoritative with an assured bright-green border.   Our helpful content now surfaces across the wider Virgin Media help sites too in the same branded manner. We’ve seen a 54% increase in visitor referrals from other parts of VirginMedia.com since the cross-site promotion initiatives we launched along with CTP, and a steady rise in time online from those joining from Twitter.   In terms of “increasing forum participation through to contribution” we’re seeing marginal growth – this is an established mature community with over 300k registered members. However we have seen a 16% increase in Member Entrances. As a result of being responsive, we’ve taken a good look at the traffic from mobile. While the amount of visits from mobile is similar, the amount of posts has increased significantly as we’ve made it a much easier experience to participate from a device.     As a customer hub, for seeking support and sharing with their fellow customers we’ve seen so much more engagement – a 48% increase in posts, for example, and community health has rocketed – Kudos is up 80% year-on-year. Fantastic work everyone – the new community looks truly transformed, brilliant! Barbara Hall, Head of Channel Delivery, Virgin Media   Absolutely speechless, incredible team effort, you and the team should be very proud of what you have achieved. Shaun Hewitt, Senior Manager, eService – Liberty Global
Company: upc cablecom GmbH Entry submitted by: Oliver Lutz (Project Manager Social) Community: upc cablecom Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   upc cablecom is a leading provider of communication and entertainment in Switz... See more...
Company: upc cablecom GmbH Entry submitted by: Oliver Lutz (Project Manager Social) Community: upc cablecom Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   upc cablecom is a leading provider of communication and entertainment in Switzerland. Almost 1.4 million customers place their trust in the company’s various products for television, Internet, telephony and mobile.   The regional organisation for Austria/Switzerland generated revenue of CHF 1.7 billion in 2015 with more than 2,500 employees. upc cablecom has a strong parent company behind it in Liberty Global, which is headquartered in the UK.   Our unique promotion   upc cablecom had been running a community on an outdated platform for about 4 years. This platform was extremely limited in terms of moderation capabilities, gamification and features. Community moderators were faced with highly negative sentiment which could not be dealt with properly.   Lithium community was launched in June 2015 for upc. Target was to provide a scalable technology layer which could be used to further develop social activities. Expected benefit for the business was to provide an integrated state-of-the-art social and community technology for ease of use and effectiveness.   Specific goals we wanted to achieve (business case):   Quantitative: Increase NPS Decrease support cost   Qualitative: Improve sentiment drastically Go personal, human connection, adapt tonality, show the faces behind the company. Solidify the connections with our customers Increase internal awareness for social / community   Our strategy and tactics for community promotion   Based on our overall social strategy we defined tactics to gain the objectives listed above.   Tactics: Go personal and become truly social Surprise your customer – build human connections for the brand. Show presence onsite and offsite Try as much as you can, take up what works, abandon what does not work!   Since launch in June 2015 we worked on the following areas: Sweepstakes Videos Blog Community Live Talks Live Events Super Hero Programme Newsletters, personal letters   1) SWEEPSTAKES:    Push registration sweepstake   Target: Push registrations   Newsletter campaign for our customers in order to increase registration rate of the support community. Customer activity: Register and tell us why you deserve the new iphone 6s. Prize: iphone 6s     Halloween sweepstake   Target: Increase awareness and usage, create fun-factors   For Halloween we organized a sweepstake on tickets for the most exclusive Halloween party in Switzerland.   Customer activity: Tell us what your favorite horror movie is….   Sweepstake article in the blog       We produced a self-ironic YouTube Video (see chapter “Videos”) where we created a context between Halloween and a buggy product feature.   New avatars created for Halloween Especially for the occasion of Halloween we extended the avatar offering with a range of “spooky avatars”.     2) VIDEOS   We produced a number of homemade low-budget videos on different topics.   Examples:   Community promotional video Promoting the community. Video was used as TrueView campaign during 3 weeks and was published on YouTube. Main actor of the video clip is a community moderator. One of our community super users acted within this clip as well.     The „making-of” this video was published in one of our blog articles.   Halloween Video Self-ironic spooky Halloween video with reference to a buggy feature of one of our products.    Connect Box unboxing Video Production of an unboxing video for a newly launched modem. The product manager presented the new product. Users could ask questions online.     3) BLOG   Target: Content Marketing; drive traffic! We kicked off a blog in parallel with the community launch. Blog articles are produced on a regular basis and drive traffic to the community and to our website.     4) LIVE TALKS   Target: Increase engagement, drive traffic   To become even more personal we introduced a Community Live Talk on a bi-monthly basis. We are discussing specific topics with internal or external experts live. We got engaged on senior management level and brought senior management into our live talks. Users can ask questions upfront or during the live-session.   WLAN Live Talk       5) LIVE EVENTS   Target: Increase engagement For this year’s big company event we raffled tickets within the community. This generated a lot of interest and we had many community members on-site during the event. They got special treatment before, during and after the event and were really enthusiastic about it.   Live Ticker In parallel, community guys organized a live ticker during the event which was broadcasted via our community blog.     6) SUPERUSER PROGRAMME   Target: Strengthen peer-to-peer support We launched a new superuser programme this spring. Superusers are the fuel of our community and we rely highly on them in terms of peer to peer support. The relationship has been intensified over the past months. Our superusers love the programme and the appreciation which comes with it.     7) NEWSLETTERS/ PERSONAL LETTERS   Newsletters Target: Drive engagement A community newsletter is being sent out on a monthly basis to all registered users. We promote relevant topics and make sure that customers perceive us as number 1 source for relevant support information.     Personal letters Towards the end of the year we sent personal letters to the most active users of the community and said „Thank you“ for their engagement and their contributions..   Moreover, we produced a small video explaining with what we had been busy with during 2015.       Our results   Sweepstakes Videos Blog Community Live Talks Live Events Superuser Programme Newsletters, personal letters     1. Sweepstakes Push registration sweepstake 290 new registrations over 350 participants   Halloween avatars & sweepstake More than 100 users changed their avatar to one out of the Halloween range. Very positive feedback on the self-ironic video    2. Videos Community Promoclip Over 36’000 views on YouTube. Very positive feedback on YouTube & within the Community The YouTube Trueview-campaign performed clearly over the Google Benchmarks.     Connect Box unboxing: Top position in the (Google) SERPs for the product name 70 comments/questions on the new modem within the blog 8000 views on YouTube (without further promotion) 230 participants in the competition Very positive feedback on the personal style of the announcement     3. Blog 130 articles, 760 comments, 80’000 page views, 430 kudos since launch   4. Community Live Talks Over 40 questions raised by Community members upfront and during the talk High senior management attention Based on the results of our community live talks senior management decided to use the live talk format for internal communications as well.   5. Live Event & Liveticker High interest in the 20 seats Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the event Very positive feedback (external & internal) High interest in the 20 seats Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the Event Very positive feedback (external & internal) 6. Superuser programme - Programme was kicked off with 4 superheroes - Continuous exchange via Superhero board and Skype - Personal meetings on a regular basis   7.Newsletters and personal letters   Newsletters Open Rate ca. 35%, Click Rate ca. 20%, Resulting in a regular increase of contributions (Boards & Blogs)    Personal letters Intensified relationship with the top users