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:  SANE Australia Entry submitted by: Nicole Thomas (Community Manager) Community: SANE Forums Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   SANE’s mission is to help all Australians affected by mental illness lead a better life. SANE does this through three key areas of activity to promote a better life for all Australians affected by mental illness: Support, Training, and Education.   As part of the activity of Support, SANE runs an online peer support community for people affected by mental illness. This is done through two communities – one for carers of people affected by mental illness and one for those with a lived experience.   Our  customer satisfaction initiatives   Help those with affected by mental illness feel less alone: ‘Friday Feast’ (see discussion here) started in 2015, as an opportunity for members to come together on a Friday night, bring a virtual ‘plate of food’ and have dinner together. Friday Feast is one of our most visited discussions, and received Australia wide media attention during Christmas, when members who were alone for Christmas Dinner logged on to be less alone.   Service integration: Giving people a seamless experience between sane.org and saneforums.org through Lithium discussion tagging ability.   Strengthening and growth of the community: To increase the sense of community, a new Role/Rank was created for members who have demonstrated loyalty and commitment to the community. The new role/rank of ‘Community Guide’ was given to members who have now taken on extra responsibilities to nurture and grow the community through one on one interactions with new members or members who need extra support.   Live community events: Hosting “live sessions” for members to connect with experts conducted through the Lithium platform, to increase knowledge, skills and encourage help seeking. Topics of live sessions have included: Caring for someone with Bipolar Managing and changing your thoughts Myths of Borderline Personality Disorder   The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation   Member safety and those at risk of harm are identified and managed quickly, through 24/7 moderation: In 2015, SANE Australia built their moderation team to 77. The team is made up of SANE Australia’s Help Centre team and staff from our partner organisations, who are geographically spread across Australia. Through the Lithium Platform and specifically Moderator Manager, we have been able to create a strong team of moderators, who are consistent in monitoring guidelines and the safety of members. Alongside Moderator Manager, the Lithium platform has given us the ability to house training videos and to communicate with each other, in a ‘moderator only’ space. This communication has been vital to the consistency and quality of the team.   Increased access to people geographically or socially isolated, to connection, support and a community to belong to: Through our partnership syndicated model, more people have had the opportunity to access the Forums. We have continued to grow our partnership pool from 15 partners in 2014, to 35 partners by December 2015. (example of syndication)   Live Community Events: These sessions have given people access to information, advice and skill building opportunities to improve their mental health, which they may not have otherwise, due to their geographic or social isolation. In these two hour live session we see, on average, between 60 – 110 posts and thousands of views.       ‘Friday Feast’ has been particularly successful in reducing the sense of isolation, giving members a place to connect, sharing a virtual ‘plate of food’ and forget about their mental health difficulties. Over the Christmas period, Friday Feast gained extensive media coverage, as a place people who were alone on Christmas night could connect.     Website and community integration: We have provided people with a seamless transition between the SANE Australia website and SANE Forums. We have utilized Lithium’s integration ability by tagging forum discussions to be visible on SANE Australia’s website in specific and relevant locations (Example: below and SANE website factsheet).   Our metrics   Feedback: "I am a SANE community member for the long haul ..its in my home town ... not just a virtual reality existence."   “I cannot express how much hope you have given me. Thank you so much for sharing your experience because before I read that tonight I thought there was no hope.”   “Reading posts and sharing on this forum has been very important to me .. like the first time I feel fully accepted among a group of people .. like finding my tribe.”   “The forums have also helped me find motivation to do some important things I'd been putting off in my depression. This was with encouragement from other members and moderators. “I enjoy the 'Topic Tuesdays' (aka Live Forum Events), these are worth watching out for. They are like workshops where members and moderators are online participating at the same time. It's fine to be quiet or to add comments. The last one which happened about a week ago felt therapeutic. Thanks for running it”   2015 Evaluation: 82% reported feeling safe in the Forums 71% reported experiencing the support from peers in the Forums 77% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed they felt comfortable sharing their experiences   Metrics CHI average increased throughout the year and didn’t dip below 600 between August 2015 – December 2015, with 709 being our highest score in October.   Overall in 2015, 86% of posts were generated by members, demonstrating the peer to peer connection between members.   Since launch (5 May 2014) to 20 March 2016 Posts: 42,537 New discussions: 2316 Total members: 2816 Page Views - Total: 1,065,203 Page Views - Mobile: 260,860 Page Views - Tablet 59,964 Unique visitors: 110,746

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   Our Story We moved to the Lithium community at the beginning of 2015. One of the first tasks was to move all of our old product forums to one community engine - Lithium. We had products in different software areas with different customers. We had to take into account their specifics and habits.   What we did We started working from two directions – from the community members’ side (externally) and from staff’s side (internally).   We had many community members by the time we moved to Lithium. In addition, each month, plenty of new members joined us. We decided to help all of them get used to our new community and help them get as many benefits from us as possible. For this, we launched two main community programs: The first one was meant to boost activity of current community members; The second one was supposed to help new community members get started in the Community easier.   Moreover, we had been working with our highly-skilled users and nurturing community experts. They were ready to share their knowledge and help other users resolve their issues. Sometimes, getting help from other customers is much more effective than getting help from, for example, the Support Team. Customers know all cons and pros of a product, and they are not shy to share them.   To increase the quality of our Community, we tried to involve our company teams in the Community. We have been working with R&D, QA, Support and Documentation to make them participate more actively in the Community.   What issue were we trying to solve? One of the main issues we had was related to customer satisfaction. Our customers were completely unsatisfied by our Community, and they preferred submitting questions to our Support Team. That increased the load on the team, which was unacceptable.   Moving to Lithium helped us increase customer satisfaction. We saw that more and more people preferred asking the Community as they knew that they would get answers either from other customers or someone from the company.   Our results We are seeing awesome growth in all community metrics: Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% %Topics replied < 24hrs +12% #Solutions +240%     Our CSAT in January 2016 was 60%. We help new community members get involved in the community life faster. Our current community members understand the value of the Community, and they are ready to share their knowledge with other community members.  

Company: British Gas   Entry submitted by: Louisa Martin (louisamartin) Social Media Manager- Communities Social channels: https://www.facebook.com/britishgas, https://twitter.com/britishgas Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   British Gas is the UK’s leading energy supplier, serving around 11 million homes, as well as providing energy to nearly one million UK business supply points. Affordability is a key concern for both residential and business customers and our extensive coverage is both a strength and a responsibility. Our challenge in 2014, as an energy industry, is to innovate to drive growth and service excellence while continuing to work hard to win our customers’ trust. We are working with our customers to change British Gas for the better.     Genuinely Helpful customer care and Meaningful Conversations   British Gas ventured into the social media world, with  no clear direction, guidance or understanding of how to operate in this area. 18 months ago we had 4 people skilled to deal with contacts on Twitter and Facebook however, we only had 1 person responding to contacts for c6 hrs per day and this was only if calls were not busy or they weren’t needed on webchat.   Today we have a team of 16FTE responding from 8am to 10pm 7 days.   We have an always on approach and interact with commentators not only coming to our channels for customer care, but people talking about life events and situations, where we feel we can be genuinely helpful to them through personalised conversations and content. This is how we see Social Media for us moving forward:   ‘To lead British Gas to Smooth Running, by having millions of meaningful & helpful conversations...   Building trust in a brand where little exists today   Our customers are at the heart of everything we do, every time we speak with them   We asked all our followers across Twitter, Facebook and Google+ for their opinions, to make sure we could meet their expectations.   Response Times 17% of customers expect to be responded to in under 1 hour 34% want a response within a few hours 36% are happy with the end of the day 13% are happy to wait a couple of days   This points to the fact customer don’t want an immediate response, they just want the right response   What are they interested in? 62% come for customer service 61% for Energy saving tips 61% want money saving tips   This shows us our followers don’t want us to sell to them through our content but they want us to help them reduce their bills through helpful advice and information.   So how did we change and try to rebuild trust?   LSW This allowed our social care team to spend time dealing with the customer instead of filling our excel spreadsheets, whilst all our MI was taken care of by the platform.   Response Times Our customers said they didn’t need an immediate response, this allows us to take the time to make sure we do everything for the customer and as a result have set our General response time to 2.5hrs. However, we believe response times do matter, when they matter. We therefore differentiate between different situations: Vulnerable customers 30mins – Having heating or not can be a life or death situation for our most vulnerable customers. LSW allows us to recognise these and prioritise, so they are dealt with immediately. Time sensitive (appointments) 45mins – Tweeting asking us where an engineer is, when you need to go on the school run, is a priority, in that moment.   Multi-Skilled agents 74% of customers contacting us have already contact BG through another channel and have been failed by that channel, we had to make sure when they came through to us, we were the final contact. Against standard procedure in British Gas, we have upskilled the social care team across all business areas, with a target of less than 10% of contacts being transferred out of the team.   Responsive and no flushing We believe everyone who mentions British Gas has the right to have their comment read. Our care team then make the decision on whether to respond or not. We respond to 93% of comments across Facebook and Twitter and choose not to respond to continual trollers or commentators who we are in Legal dispute with.   What did our customers think about the changes?   NPS All customer care conversations are issued with our NPS survey with our key questions representing the increases below, after changing the way we work and putting the customer first:   On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being not at all likely and 10 being extremely likely, how likely are you to recommend British Gas to a friend, family member or colleague? -9 Mar 2014 +18 Mar 2015   What is your overall opinion of British Gas on Social Media? (Top 3 box – customers who rated us Good, Very good or Excellent) 85% Mar 2014 100% Mar 2015   How would you rate the social media team who deal with your enquiry (Top 3 box – customers who rated us Good, Very good or Excellent) and Top box (Excellent) Mar 2014 Top 3 box 80% and Top box 70% Mar 2015 Top 3 box 100% and Top box 82%   These results represent significant changes to the way our customers see British Gas and interact with us on our social channels. Agent scores and channel opinion are significantly higher than voice, email and webchat and over the next 12 months we will work with these channels to feedback how the social media way of working, can be integrated into their areas. Ownership and full resolution in one contact is of paramount importance to social media care and this is now coming through in our results.   We’re doing something with Lithium no-one else is...   Proactive conversations – We’re doing something with Lithium no-one else is...   This year we have been reaching out to social media commentators who are in situations where they need help, but not mentioning British Gas. We’re having 800+ meaningful conversations per month with people to rebuild trust in our brand. We’ve worked closely with Neerav, Luke and the LSW team to manipulate the platform so these conversations can be identified, brought in and served to the appropriate team. This activity is about rebuilding trust in a brand, where it doesn’t exist anymore. If a commentator is talking about having a cold shower due to a broken boiler, we’re intercepting the conversation with a link to a self diagnosis tool on our website. This isn’t about selling our Home Service products, this is simply about showing the commentator we can be helpful. We step away from the customer once we have sent the helpful content and don't re-engage, unless the customer asks for it. Behavioural economics show, by being helpful in these types of situation, if presented with your brand in the future, you will be perceived in a more favourable light.   LSW allows us to have these conversations with influential commentators by delivering conversations from commentators over preset Klout.   This strategy is helping us build relationships with key influencers and stakeholders and has had a +5 impact on our brand sentiment score.   Proactive Conversations These conversations are having a +7pt impact on our brand sentiment, helping us combat comments similar to:     

Company: Vodafone Turkey Entry submitted by:  Fahrünnisa Bilgin (FahrunnisaB)  Online Product Specialist - CMS & Social Media     Community:  Vodafone Forum (forum.vodafone.com.tr) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Vodafone revolutionized digital transformation in the Turkish telecommunication market. With a market share of %33,9 (Feb'15) Vodafone Turkey is in use of innovative online technologies and social media to service the special needs of Turkish mobile customers. Vodafone Forum launched in March 2012, as Turkey's first open discussion platform among competition is representing Vodafone Turkey with customer care on social media. Today Vodafone Forum is used as a marketing and support platform, increasing engagement of users through super user cultivation and brand advocacy.        Our 2014 customer satisfaction initiatives   At Vodafone Turkey, we take customer care to heart   Vodafone Turkey has a proactive approach in social media to collect customer insight. We have improved our success model, based on one-to-one customer care; where people receive answers from their personal moderators and super users. With these initiatives customers are getting a unique online experience since launch of Forum in 2012.      In 2014 we have listened to our super users and established new areas in Forum. We have created new discusission opportunities inside of boards for Vodafone Turkey's youth segment named "Vodafone Freezone" and "Vodafone Arena", which came through a partnership of Vodafone with the turkish soccer team Beşiktaş JK.   Our moderators are engaging users continuously, we have contests to drive user activities, where we awarded winners with high-tech devices such as tablets and 3g modems.   We have established a buddy programme in Vodafone Forum where we continue to guide people after problem resolution and provide feedback. In this way, Vodafone enables people to get in touch with each other and Vodafone Forum  has excellent reputation with 80 K + registered users, 500 K + unique visitors and 1.2 M + pageviews monthly.       The issue that we were looking to solve with Lithium   We respect our customers and listen to their wishes   It was the most interesting case when one of our Forum users contacted us about a tariff change, which could be done only in one of our Vodafone Shops. The problem was that the user was disabled, our moderators tried to help online, but we came to know that the user was not able to get out of his house. It was clear for us, that we needed take one step more for getting this issue resolved. That's why our community admin has got in contact with the members of our sales & support team and we managed a meeting with the user and took a trip to his flat in the asian side of Istanbul. The tariff change was recorded in our documents and the case was resolved onsite. It was an amazing success story, which has been celebrated by our customer operation manager. Social media team is still chatting with this user from time to time.     Our results   We believe that everybody has the right to use the latest technology   The VF Forum team has come up with a new concept: reserving a special device stock and sending the device and desired accesories to the Vodafone Shop for customer pick-up. This method of delivery has great appeal to customers in rural areas who typically are not able to choose from a wide variety of devices. With Lithium's community platform,we communicated the complete device delivery process. This contributed to an increase in Vodafone Forum's eNPS score in a year with 29 points from -6 to +22.    

Company: Ooredoo Qatar  Entry submitted by: Muna Barakat (monabarakat) Community Manager Community: Ooredoo Community (http://community.ooredoo.qa/)  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction    Ooredoo Qatar is a telecomm company based in Qatar. It is the first telecom company in the country. Ooredoo is a provider of mobile services, wireless and wire-line services, entertainment services, and content services, with varying market share in the domestic and international telecom markets and in the business (corporations and individuals) and residential markets.   Ooredoo went international few years back to include eight other telecom companies in countries such as, Kuwait, Oman, Maldives, Myanmar, Tunisia, and Algeria. Today, Ooredoo serve more than 90 million people internationally.   However, our Ooredoo Community is cozy when it comes to size. We focus on Qatar’s market that has around 2 million people. We launched Community on May 2014, so we are barely one year old.   Our 2014 customer satisfaction intiatives   Every person in Qatar has at least one device or service from Ooredoo. Due to our verity of services, we have high pressure on our customer service. Although we support our customers on many online and offline channels such as our website, Facebook, twitter, snapechat, instagram, call center, and shops, but we wanted to do the extra mile and offer our customers a unique experience where they can get help from their peers. This is where Lithium role comes!   We launched our forum around a year ago, but we are already seeing it grow nicely with members, quality content, and getting picked up by Google Although we haven’t done aggressive paid campaign, so this growth is mostly organic.   Ooredoo’s initiative to always offer what is new and different is what attracts customers to it. Peer to peer, social support forum, such as the solution that Lithium offers isn’t a common trend in Qatar or even the region. Being the first of its kind has pros and cons because it is harder to educate the public about these forums. The choice of having a young female community manager is also an indication of unorthodox practice, because Ooredoo is all about the end result and not following what is common or average.   Being keen on customer satisfaction, we wanted to hit three main areas: Humanize our brand Weather you are an Ooredoo staff or regular customer on Community, we encourage the user to show his character. Our style of writing is more casual. The result? Customers started to change the image of a faceless corporate, and having names associated with Ooredoo such as the team working on Community like me, and other Ooredoo staff members. Own our content You saw a solution of how to restart your Wi-Fi device of Facebook five months ago. Today, your Wi-Fi started to act up and you need this valuable post, could you find it? With many social media channels like Facebook, twitter, and instagram, it is very tiring and sometimes impossible to find old content. Owing our content meant hassle free to our customers. And it was a win/win solution for our product team that could monitor feedback and gain market research info in a way, AND our customers who don’t have to wait on the phone for many cases. A hub for customers to share, chill, and be heard Increasing enthusiasm level toward our brand get personal with our customers, know who they are, what changes they need, and what they like to watch as a movie so we can include it on our Mozaic service, and many other scenarios.   Our results   There is a causality effect between Community and decrease in customer complaints, but we don’t think it is a direct causality.   However, we have many posts from our super-users, and active users who expressed their satisfaction, or promoted our Ooredoo services on Community countless times, such as this topic that gave a review to our most common services:     This is an example of a user (who’s not a super user) who gave review on Mozaic service. In return, one of our senior experts on Mozaic replied to every points the user gave, provided future plans, and offered beta trail chances for the user to test. Here are some of the reactions:    

Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Lois Townsend (loisT) Director, Social Media and Community Community: Autodesk Community (Forums.autodesk.com) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Autodesk, Inc., is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries—including the last 19 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects—use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created. From blockbuster visual effects and buildings that create their own energy to electric cars and the batteries that power them, the work of our 3D software customers is everywhere you look.   Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art 3D software for global markets. Through our apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Android, we're also making design technology accessible to professional designers as well as amateur designers, homeowners, students, and casual creators. Whether it's a kid looking to build a new contraption, a seasoned pro sketching out a great new idea, or someone who just wants to amp up their creative output, we're taking technology originally built for movie studios, automakers, and architectural firms, and making it available to anyone who wants to create and share their ideas with the world.   Our 2014 customer satisfaction initiatives   Deliver Autodesk Help: rapid, relevant and networked service, support and learning for every customer while creating a culture of “customer first” engagement and curiosity within the Global Customer Service Organization   The most important customer issue we were looking to solve with our Lithium implementation   Scalability.  With a very large portfolio of products (150+), constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our transformational business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.   Lithium has provided us with an avenue to meet these challenges by providing a true peer-to-peer community space that scales, where customers ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions all in real time. The forums reduce the need for direct one-on-one support and IdeaStations allow for open and transparent customer feedback mechanisms for customer-driven product enhancements.   The Autodesk community is growing at an accelerated pace. In 2014: The community redesign completed in late 2013 greatly impacted our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerated collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enabled easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole. Accepted solutions increased 37% The accepted solution to topic ratio increased 13%. Community membership increased by 30% to surpass 2 million registered members Community Visits increased 34% to 27.3 million annually We launched close to 50 new forums, blogs and IdeaStations 3,924 new ideas generated represent a 67% increase 80,345 new forum conversations were started We implemented a training module and highlighted community best practices, driving home a “customer first” principle and saw employee engagement increase 47% over the last 6 months   With the continued growth and clear objectives for creating a customer first experience, a revamped community CSAT survey was launched in August of 2014 with the goal to measure the success and satisfaction of our visitors, dive into the types of problems members are trying to solve, and identify opportunities to provide a better experience. Since then:   3,500+ recipients have completed the survey. Key customer pain points have been identified, e.g. timeliness to get answers. Resulting Action: an employee outreach pilot program was launched where various community SFDC escalation times have been reduced by 80% to increase our response time for subscription customers. CSAT for participants who identified a successful visit averaged 79%. Our CHI score has seen a steady increase, and is currently at 775.     In a recent study of AutoCAD users centered on support and learning resources, the ease of finding and relevancy of information for the Autodesk Community exceeded all other resources including direct 1-1 support and in product help.  

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Jared Schultheis (jschultheis) Executive Director, Digital Care Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums (Forums.comcast.com)  LSW: @comcastcares, facebook.com/xfinity Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast Corporation is a global media and technology company with two primary businesses, Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal. Comcast Cable is the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Transforming the customer experience is Comcast’s number one goal. Our customers deserve the best experience every time they interact with us. We have made significant changes and investments in our infrastructure, systems, processes, technology, and tools to improve the customer experience, including the ability to reach our customers quickly and easily through social media.   A key strategy in our multi-year roadmap to improving customer experience is using technology and innovation to delight customers. Expanding and continuing to evolve our Digital Care is an essential tactic in giving customers more choice in how they connect with us and solve problems.   The Digital Care team’s mission is simple: provide care and support to anyone who needs help, whenever and wherever he or she wants it. In 2014, the Digital Care team was challenged with these goals:   Increase the percentage of customers served through social media (by 100%), Improve our ability to resolve customer inquiries directly within social care (to 90%+)   Through the application of technology, operational rigor and a determination to provide world-class service, the team more than exceeded our goals.   Our 2014 objectives were to achieve greater scale, resolve customer inquiries directly within our channel and drive positive change within the organization through actionable insights.   Scale: The number of customers supported by the Digital Care team since forming in 2008 has increased by 2,000% and continues to expand exponentially.  Satisfying our customers’ needs begins with organizing the team in a way that is scalable, flexible and fully supported by the larger organization. We created distinct roles within Digital Care that include three teams: Triage Generalists Tenured experts capable of addressing complex inquiries.   Creating this team and new processes was made possible by the advanced routing, tagging and tracking within LSW.   In Channel Resolution: When customers call, chat or tweet about their service, they expect a resolution to happen through that channel. Our ability to resolve customer inquiries directly within social media depends on the team having access to all appropriate tools, the training to use those tools and direct lines of contact to other internal teams. Even when we call in other teams to help work through the customer’s inquiry, we remain the single point of contact for a customer. Through this approach, we have garnered credibility and demonstrated the long-term viability of social as a strong and effective service channel that requires much less effort from the customer.     Insights:  Through LSW, we have created a Social Operations Center and Alerting System that provides real time trending specific to our product lines. This gives us an unfiltered stream of customer input and the ability to alert the appropriate teams when issues begin trending. This technology allows us to sort through the noise and provide meaningful information to the organization on a real time basis to consistently seeking out opportunities to transform the customer experience.     Because social and community support are ‘one-to-many’ interactions, a solution for one customer can often help out dozens or even hundreds of others, helping to avoid unnecessary customer questions and contacts. Based on a number of factors, including the ability to reach us through digital and social channels and tools like the My Account app that allow customers to more easily troubleshoot issues, Comcast has reduced the volume of customer contacts in traditional channels. Since 2010, we have seen nearly a 25% reduction in calls coming in and a 35% reduction in the need for service visits to customers’ homes in part by providing solutions through social and community channels. Through detailed analysis and application of data garnered through our LSW Analytics and LSI for our communities, we have seen that this amplification benefit has helped the Digital Care team handle nearly double the volume of more traditional channels.   There are several key areas where the Digital Care team is driving improvements that directly and indirectly impact customer satisfaction including:    Efficiency Gains: making it easier and faster for customers to find resolution to their issue Channel Shift: meeting customers where they live online or in social media Reducing Need To Call: solving customer issues through shared resolutions

Company: Telefonica Movistar  Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez (UT04546) Community Manager Community: Comunidad Movistar (comunidad.movistar.es)  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 21 countries. As of December 2014, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 341 million.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives in 2014 were CSI, NPS, Recommendations/Referrals, Noise, Average Response Time and CHI.   As such, our overall objectives have been to increase the CSI, visits, call deflection and commercial leads. See our Social ROI Titan entry for more results on visits and call deflection. In terms of our customer satisfaction initiatives, we focused on CSI, NPS, Recommendations/Referrals, Noise, Average Response Time, and CHI. All areas of our company have their own objectives that are aligned with the overarching company goals.   Improving online customer service was the most critical customer issue that we looked to solve with our Lithium Total Community implementation.   Here are the results of our top customer satisfaction initiatives: CSI: Every time a user/customer receives attention from one of our moderators, we send him/her a link to our online survey asking to evaluate the help received (this applies to cases that need to be solved by official Movistar staff in terms of needing to check the customer information in our systems). We received a stable 9 throughout 2014 and this year. We assisted 120,000 customers in 2014, and in 2015 our moderators have already helped more than 24,000 customers. NPS: In that same survey, we ask the user if he would recommend our help/attention to his friends and family. We are pleased to receive 99% positive answers. Recommendations: As a result of the excellent help that we provide our community, we receive a lot of posts praising our work. And most importantly, we have many examples of users in external forums, referring other users/customers to our community when asking for help and acknowledging us as the best channel to get help from Movistar.   http://www.gsmspain.com/foros/h967593_Operadores-Movistar_CONSEJO-Comunidad-Movistar-1004-609.html   http://www.adslzone.net/postt324695.html   http://bandaancha.eu/foros/velozinter-1709626#r2336025 http://bandaancha.eu/foros/desactivar-casilla-mensajes-1689431#r2132517 Noise: As a part of our strategy, we receive reports from our market research team in which they evaluate the noise about Movistar on the Internet. In this report, we evaluate the amount of noise and the tonality of the noise (positive, negative, neutral). Since the Community was launched, we are still the leading Telco company that receives the most mentions. Furthermore, we are the one in the telco sector that receives the most positive tonality in part due of the influence of the community (1.3M monthly visits).   Average Response Time: 6 hours, which is a significant reduction from our 2013 average response time of 14 hours. LSW: We have recently started using Lithium Social Web (LSW) as a part of our strategy to improve our customer satisfaction and achieve even better results with response time. CHI 785: We have achieved a stable 780-785 CHI.   In addition to the above achievements, we have relocated our call centers in Spain (instead of outsourcing). We are also focusing on increasing the servicing to 70% in online channels in order to avoid expenses to our call center.  

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Gustavo Casado (Piquio) Social Media Specialist Community: Foro.Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es/) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Vodafone Group is a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in London and with its registered office in Newbury, Berkshire. It is the world's 2nd-largest mobile telecommunications company measured by both subscribers and 2013 revenues (behind China Mobile), and had 434 million subscribers as of March 31, 2014.   Our most important customer satisfaction initiatives are: 1) NPS 2) Resolution rate 3) Customer experience program   Our challenge that we were looking to solve via our Lithium implementation was to reduce calls through social media support. 6,000 interactions on our Lithium eForum per month reduced 50,000 customer service calls on Vodafone's customer service platform!   Additional results: 2% savings in customer service calls 20 points of increase in NPS 30 points of increase in resolution rate 100 points of increase in CHI score  

Company: Symantec  Entry submitted by: Tim Lopez (Tim) Project Manager, Social Customer Care LSW: Norton Social Support (http://www.twitter.com/NortonSupport) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Symantec was founded in 1982 by visionary computer scientists. The company has evolved to become one of the world’s largest software companies with more than 18,500 employees in more than 50 countries. We provide security, storage and systems management solutions to help our customers – from consumers and small businesses to the largest global organizations – secure and manage their information-driven world against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently than any other company.   Our 2014 customer satisfaction goals were to decrease response times from 9 minutes to 6 minutes, move our team from a shared resource “hybrid” model to a dedicated team for Social Response, extend our hours of coverage from 12 hours a day to 24x7, increase our reach by expanding to areas outside of our branded properties, and develop a metric for gauging customer sentiment conversion trends. Through strategic planning, including continued use of Lithium Social Web, we were able to: Reduce response time to just about 5 minutes. Launch 24x7 coverage with our newly formed full-time dedicated response team. Expand support response coverage to Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Reviews, and many popular forums and blogs across the internet. Develop an innovative scoring system that averages the score of sentiment conversions allowing us to track the trend of our ability to delight customers and to ensure that as we grow we continue to focus on maintaining or improving customer satisfaction. Move from English only support to now include Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian – on both Twitter and Facebook. Generate reports that get distributed on a regular basis to the entire Norton Business Unit.   Sentiment Conversions and Time to Response have always been our driving factor. We want our customers to be thrilled with our engagement so we ensure that all of our metrics and KPIs reflect what we can do that benefits the customers. We want our customers to know that we care for them even after we have won over their business.      Using Sentiment Conversion tagging that we developed for use with LSW over the last year, we were able to show visual representations on our monthly reports. Using a system that translated the type of sentiment conversion in to a tangible score, we were able to create an average score that represents our success in delighting customers, further allowing us to track the trend. We were able to streamline our response time by moving to a full time team (in February) and balancing our scheduling around hourly volume trends.   Last year we had an 80% increase in individual cases and responses, at the same time we slightly decreased in ‘noise’, 50% increase in Positive Sentiment conversion, on over 14,000 cases handled in over 160,000 conversations monitored.    

Company: SANE Australia  Entry submitted by: Faruk Avdi (faruchidor) Director – Digital, Service Design & Technology Community: SANE Forums (www.saneforums.org) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction     SANE Australia is a leading mental health charity. It is devoted to helping all Australians affected by mental illness lead a better life -- through support, training, and education. SANE began its operations almost thirty years ago, and its award-winning information services and Helpline are highly regarded.   In 2014, our customer satisfaction initiatives were as follows: The release of anonymous, moderated online peer-to-peer support services for people affected by mental illness, in the form of two online communities: one for people living with mental illness, and one for family, friends and other carers An innovative Partner-and-syndicate model (the first to our knowledge in the health sector) involving syndication of the communities to 15 other not-for-profit service providers (See: https://saneforums.org and then http://saneforums-access.org/t5/custom/page/page-id/Forum-Access for partner versions. By ‘syndication’ we mean the communities are ‘embedded’ in partner websites, taking on their branding, and seamlessly available via primary navigation. Partner organisations are also enabled to publish their own content via custom components within the communities, see: http://mindaustralia.saneforums.org/t5/Our-experience-stories/bd-p/le-forum-0001 for an example) A mobile customisation of the services mentioned above (Lithium mobile version 1), integrated into SANE’s website menu and adopting branding elements for partner versions.   The most important customer issues SANE Australia was looking to solve via its Lithium implementation were: Providing a moderated and anonymous online peer-to-peer service to all people affected by mental illness, in all locations of Australia, including those isolated by distance or other factors A service covering the full spectrum of mental illness, but focused on the person, not the diagnosis Creation of strong and welcoming communities Enabling members and non-members alike to safely obtain and discover quality peer support and information, which empowers them to deal with mental health issues Contribute to the improved mental health of Forums users Enable discovery of the service via trusted relationships formed within pre-existing (offline) communities   SANE Forums has been designed as a service, end-to-end, utilising user-centred design. User-centred service design helped SANE identify potential difficulties in discoverability of the service (with only a small budget for marketing).   This led to the design and eventual delivery of the partner-and-syndicate model referred to in Q1. This model allows individuals in the community to discover and participate in SANE Forums via a trusted context of an organisation they are already familiar with. This has extended the reach of SANE Forums to tens of thousands more individuals.   This partner-and-syndicate model has had many collateral benefits. Taken together they demonstrate a ‘gold-standard’ approach in the mental health sector: Between 60% and 75% of users are obtaining the intended benefits of the service THE Community Health Index (CHI) of SANE Forums sits around 500-550 since the launch of the forums in August Nearly 30% of service traffic has come in through partner websites The service is free-of-charge to partner-organisations in return for a contribution of hours and/or expertise into the pool of moderators, thus increasing the specialist advice available via the forums Organisations in an underfunded sector are able to leverage expensive world-class technology, pooling efforts and expertise    SANE Forums is unique in Australia, providing the first non-diagnosis-specific, online peer-to-peer support service for people living with mental illness, and the first truly national and viable online peer-to-peer support service for families, friends and other carers.   ‘I so truly love that I can honestly share a little of me here and be privileged to read and know of others stories. Thank you Sane and all the people here sharing. I feel a glimmer of understanding and connection in this forum that I have not felt before.’ -  Member, Lived Experience Forum    ‘ Hi Everyone, Just wanted to let you know how helpful I have found the information posted here. My husband has major depression and has been receiving treatment in a clinic. This process was a stressful one for us both, including the time leading up to the hospital stay.   As a result of your input, I have found myself being far more assertive and proactive … and I have made contact with carer support organisations and have a couple of referrals in for programs for both myself and my husband.   Thankyou for helping me navigate a way through/ into the system!’   - Member, Carers Forum   SANE Forums was funded by the Australian Government, Department of Health and launched in August 2014. The service has exceeded all expectations and metrics set by the Department for visitation and usage. Within seven months of the launch and as at 21 March 2015, SANE Forums have had: 32,141 unique visitors 8,700 visitors from rural, regional and remote areas (estimate) 1,002 members 265 members (27%) from rural, regional and remote areas 10,795 comments posted 339,366 pages of comments and information viewed 101,334 pages of comments and information viewed via smart phone Almost one third of users (28%) have accessed the service through our partner organisations.   Registrations for the service have very steadily increased since launch. An initial seeding and testing pool of 300+ members helped launch a warm and welcoming service, vibrant with helpful discussion, from day one.   Member registrations per month   The service remains non-diagnostic in focus, and uniquely available to people experiences health issues across the full spectrum of mental health issues.   Content analysis in an Evaluation conducted on the service found a great diversity among members, with 29 different diagnoses discussed across the Carers and Lived Experience Forums.   Common non-diagnosis specific discussion themes include the following: Issues Carers Forum % Coping with mental illness and symptoms of loved ones 60% Navigating mental health systems 45% Refusing treatment 40% Relation breakdown/conflict 40% Stress/worry/anxiety 30% Lived Experience Forum % Symptoms 63% Assessment/treatment 40% Medication 47% Relationships 41% Stress/worry/anxiety 26%   Both communities are showing various signs of good and growing health, including a CHI score hovering between 500 and 550, and the vast majority of comments being posted by and in response to community members:   Member and moderator generated posts % In terms of the primary purpose of the service, early indications look very promising. The highest-rated themes reported by respondents to the recent Evaluation survey were: Safety Connection Less stigma Feeling supported by peers   The fostering of these elements will assist in continual growth and participation of members and the overall sense of community. Evaluation findings also show that mental health benefits are emerging. Increased mental health literacy and empowerment were highly rated across both communities.   Repeat visitors to the service average 25-30% per week. Average session durations on the forums averages above 10 minutes per session. The Evaluation referred to above has many positive statistics indicating the service is becoming an important resource for people living with mental illness, and for families, friends and other carers in Australia.   To share some statistics from just one category, concerning ‘access to reliable information, advice and referral drawing on the vast experience and expertise of peers as well as that of experts in the field’, the Evaluation found: 88.9% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 64.4% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they can find advice and support that is suitable and/or relevant for their needs 81.5% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 80% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they have gained new insights through hearing about other people’s experiences 51.9% of respondents from the Carers Forum and 48.9% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they have used information resources (links, phone numbers and other) provided in discussion threads 55.6% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 48.9% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they’ve learned new practical strategies 37.0% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 31.1% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they have accessed services recommended by members and/or moderators   These statistics show that the service is making a real difference in people’s lives.   This marks a turning point for online, peer-to-peer support services in Australia.   All of this has been made possible via the efforts of talented and caring people from Snaffle Web, Isobar, Persistent Systems and Lithium, and with Lithium's platform and ongoing generous support.  

Company: StarHub  Entry submitted by: Darren Choo (darren) AVP of Social CRM Community: StarHub Community (http://community.starhub.com/) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   StarHub Community, together with our social media agency Vocanic has worked to build a platform which is managed by consumers, contains info relevant to consumers and is moderated by StarHub. Visitors post their questions and topic experts from among our members step in to respond, thereby setting the scene for peer-to-peer support. Understanding that advocacy is the highest order in social media marketing, we have also built a team of super users – the Sparklers Club – who spend countless hours on the site for the sole purpose of helping others through troubleshooting, moderating conversation threads, and even defending the brand when “bashing” arises. Our initiatives have been recognized and we have won industry accolades in Singapore: Best use of Brand Advocacy (Gold) at the Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2013 and Excellence in Loyalty Marketing (Silver) at the Marketing Excellence Awards 2013. Read the details below.   Customer sentiments have changed, leading to a growing preference for peer-to-peer over topdown customer-service assistance. With social media usage on the rise, it became easier for consumers to engage with their favourite brands, and in so doing sought to be a part of the brand’s activities – to have their voice heard.   Advocacy is the highest order in social media marketing but the brand had yet to explore the maximum potential of these advocates with the proper social media tools and platforms. We want to position StarHub as a company that listens, understands, and cares for our customers and the Singapore community. At the same time, we acknowledge that endorsements are often regarded to be more credible and objective when they come from third parties that do not have a stake in the business. In creating a new platform, it was crucial that it be instrumental in cultivating brand advocates, where in times of need, users could step in to defend the brand on our behalf from the “bashing” conducted by others. It was to also be a sanctuary for frank opinions, transparency and a hotbed for equipment testing by our loyal customers. Hence, the aim was to create a community managed by consumers, for the consumers and moderated by StarHub – functioning as a lifestyle hub for the masses. We required a platform that harnessed advocacy through positive customer support experience – thus, converting detractors to advocates.   StarHub’s social media strategy has always focused on engaging customers across all social media channels, hence establishing a dynamic social brand presence on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, and occupies spaces on LinkedIn and YouTube. However, we found that a more intimate approach was needed to complement StarHub’s social efforts and amplify engagement with present and potential customers — to handle their issues individually and to foster communication between customers. While social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were excellent tools that encouraged brand to fan conversations, StarHub wanted a platform that specifically enabled consumers to talk to each other, and found that a forum-styled platform was the way to go.   StarHub Community was rolled out over a series of phases. The first phase from concept to integration took two months, including design, development, testing and debugging. It was also important that before launch, to ensure that the tone of the site was right: a strategy was mapped out to define the right tone, and approach, ensuring that this was a friendly place for consumers to raise their questions and/or offer their own solutions to others. As consumers today are heavily reliant on info-communications, StarHub and its counterparts in Singapore receive the most flak on social media, so StarHub's customer service team was roped in to manage customer complaints and guide complainants towards an understanding that the site was not a forum for complaints, but a place for a community to grow and learn together with a strong support from the brand itself. We then moved to identify and select topics that were frequently discussed on StarHub's social media platforms. This pre-populated the Community as a searchable FAQ bank. StarHub Community was launched with these initial content pieces. Once the site was launched, various marketing activities were carried out to create awareness, educate and drive registrations on the site. Every week, we created and managed wall posts on StarHub's two Facebook pages and two Twitter accounts to create awareness about the site among our existing fan base. To boost visibility and reach, Facebook ads were created from these wall posts to get more eyeballs amongst Facebook fans as well as interactions on our Wall posts that included comments, likes and shares. With our member base, we kicked off the influencer identification and activation phase. The objective was to get as many influential online personalities as possible to spread the word about StarHub Community and invite their fans and followers to visit the site. For this phase, we employed the theory of the 1-9-90 rule. 90% of the people on the site are consumers of content but did not participate much in discussions. 9% are people who consume content and also interact with it, for example sharing the content with their own networks and contributing their opinions. 1% of the people are very active on the site, contributing articles, blog write-ups, helping others solve their problems. We worked to identify and activate the 9%, to drive them into the 1% bracket. We invited these people first to contribute on the site and later created events so we could personally meet them, show our appreciation for them and invite them to help StarHub further strengthen the Community with their recommendations. One of these events was graced by StarHub's Heads of Customer Service and Marketing. Their presence further solidified the influencers' convictions that StarHub is indeed committed to listening to the public. The launch strategy was executed in a straightforward, two-phase process. Phase 1 – Establishing content: We began by populating the forums with existing articles like phone reviews, tech trends, general FAQs as well as information on all StarHub products and services.   Phase 2 – Creating awareness and recruitment: To drive visitors to the site to sample the content, we ideated and executed a contest hosted on a Facebook application, where participants had to register as a member of the community first before taking part. The mechanics were such that they had to search for an answer to a question that could only be found on StarHub Community. Prizes included a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 and movie tickets. We also leveraged on existing fans on the StarHub Facebook to grow the user base on StarHub Community. One example of how this was carried out was to post a summarized review about a particular mobile handset on Facebook, and then encourage the reader to proceed to the Community for the full article. In addition, we tapped on existing databases collated from sales of products, for example, the iPhone. From there, we encouraged customers to log onto the Community to provide reviews on their handset. We also conducted a recruitment drive among our staff, inviting them to act as conversation starters and subject matter experts to address customer enquiries. StarHub Community boasts multiple access touch-points, which means that we were able to garner traffic across a multitude of channels that ranged from YouTube to monthly newsletters, over and above Facebook and Twitter. An application on Facebook was created to allow fans to have a taste of StarHub Community, by providing a “lite” version where they could have their account- or product/service-related questions answered. If they were keen to find out more, all they had to do was crossover to our brand new community. This encouraged users to find answers to their StarHub-related questions themselves instead of approaching our call centres or Shops. To continue the drive for awareness as well as recruitment, we staged regular contests during popular occasions such as Valentine’s Day and Lunar New Year. The contests required submission of entries on StarHub Community. We also reached out to our senior and less technologically proficient customers via the Golden Gurus campaign. The aim was to get them involved in conversations that would answer questions they may have had about technology in general. We appointed eight tech-savvy senior citizens aged between 58 and 77, who stood as information technology (IT) champions for their peers. Acting as StarHub’s ambassadors, they were committed to giving back to society by imparting IT knowledge to other seniors using the Community portal. Our Active Ageing Hackathon showcased a contest to develop mobile apps that can and will enrich the lives of the elderly. For this, StarHub Community acts as the main platform for the call to action as well as idea submissions. In addition we have invited our Golden Gurus to mentor at workshops to educate contestants on what types of services and apps an older person might benefit. Active Ageing Hackathon Phase 1 : The StarHub Golden Gurus initiative saw campaigns rolled-out on the Community targeted at including senior citizens in the online conversation. The brand appreciated that seniors often felt left behind and clueless when it came to IT, new media, the internet and the likes. Golden Gurus sought out seniors who were well versed in the intricacies of technology to coerce and train their peers. The Active Ageing Hackathon paired StarHub Community members with UP Singapore members to bring together experts, researchers, marketers, designers and developers over one weekend from 16 - 18 Aug 2013 to develop prototypes of solutions to improve the lives of our Seniors in Singapore. 2 best ideas clinched a Samsung GALAXY Tab 2 7.0 Tab each. Results: - 988 unique visitors - 97 entries - 2,305 votes   View the entries here: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Closed-Active-Ageing-Hackathon/idb-p/activeageinghackathon   Elderly segment – Active Ageing Hackathon Phase 2 : In a follow-up to the submissions from phase 1, we displayed the submitted prototypes on the Community and asked people to vote for their favourite ones on the forum, giving them the power of influence in helping the prototypes become a reality. Ten $50 StarHub vouchers were given away to lucky voters. Results: - 106 unique visitors - 381 votes Community post: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Closed-Active-Ageing-Hackathon/idb-p/activeageinghackathonphase2   To engage our female audience, we leveraged on the popular lifestyle magazine show Lady First Singapore, which was localised from a Taiwan format and produced by StarHub. We engaged a targeted group of our influencers and advocates to begin seeding beauty-related content on topics such as skincare, fashion and make-up on StarHub Community. This, along with discussion generated about each episode of the programme, effectively sparked an influx of female chatter on the community. This successfully integrated online and offline engagement activities, thereby extending the “Lady First Singapore” experience beyond the traditional TV screen for its customers.   We sent out emails that led customers to perform a simple survey in order to ascertain interests.   We targeted females whose interests included beauty, makeup, fashion, hairstyling and write their own blogs. The survey acted as a filtering process to find legitimate female bloggers. 20 bloggers were then invited to attend a briefing where they received topics and social tasks to share with their followers that in turn led to activities, conversations and buzz on the Community.   Visit this link for a video of the event: http://community.starhub.com/t5/What-s-New/StarHub-Community-s-first-offline-event-Meeting-up-with-the/m-p/26076#U26076   Lady First Campaign Results: - 7,143 unique visitors to StarHub Community’s Lady First board - 470 Topics written - 1,274 replies to topics - Out of 20 original bloggers, 5 remain active to this day, close to 1 year after the activation. 2 of them are members of our Sparklers super user group. The success of the drive to include the female target audience in the conversation prompted the brand to plan for and launch a sequel activation set to take place mid-2014. Link to Winners Announcement post: http://community.starhub.com/t5/StarHub-Community-Announcements/Lady-First-Bloggers-Challenge-Winners-Announcement/m-p/36223#M10   Screenshot of winning bloggers:   We organised an event to strengthen ties between users, and more importantly between StarHub and our advocates. Among the thousands on StarHub Community, there lies a select few who shine. A select few who spend countless hours on the Community for the sole purpose of helping others – through troubleshooting, moderating conversation threads, and even defending the brand when “bashing” arises. These heroes – influencers and brand advocates - are recognized by the brand and invited to the Sparklers Club.   We put in place a gamification framework identify Community members and advocates and invite them into the Club in order to be groomed as brand guardians. To encourage this behavior, a value-exchange was set up. As a Sparkler, one would be able to attend get-togethers to meet, greet and share ideas for improving the Community. Sparklers are also regularly engaged for co-creation, ideation and market research, giving them the opportunity to feel like a part of the brand, making the Community a fun and meaningful place to be and contributing to its ultimate growth and success.     Watch this video introducing the Sparklers Club! http://youtu.be/luUmeumI5YQ Visit this link for a video and recap of the 2014 event: http://community.starhub.com/t5/What-s-New/Sparklers-Club-Gathering-2014/m-p/72923#M83   In 2013, we won these local marketing awards: • Loyalty & Engagement Awards 2013 – Best Use of Brand Advocacy (Gold) • Marketing Excellence Awards 2013 – Excellence in Loyalty Marketing (Silver)   In January 2014, we hit our one millionth unique visitor. We recognized and acknowledged our top super users:   Members of our community have commended our Community managers:   Our members were surveyed for feedback on the Community and this is what they had to say:   Visit this link for the infographic and full story: http://community.starhub.com/t5/StarHub-Community-Blog/StarHub-Community-welcomes-its-1-000-000th-unique-visitor/ba-p/58529 We also work with the Customer Service team to create articles for The Knowledge Base (TKB) on StarHub Community. We also feature How-To videos available on StarHub's YouTube channel. The CS team then direct people with queries to these resources for answers and discussions on solutions. This reduces reliance on call-centre personnel. TKB: 100,000 views over 55 articles How-To Videos: 29,360 views   One of our articles on TKB:   Categories on our Knowledge Base:       Screenshot & Link of one of our How-To videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhlUa3zn034      

Company: DenizBank   Entry submitted by: Ebru Urunga, Manager at Customer Satisfaction LSW: https://twitter.com/DenizBank and https://tr-tr.facebook.com/DenizBank Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   DenizBank was founded in 1938 as a state-owned bank in order to provide funding for the developing Turkish maritime sector. Acquired by Zorlu Holding from the Privatization Administration as a banking license in early 1997, DenizBank was further acquired in October 2006 by Dexia, a leading financial group in Europe. Continuing its activities under Dexia umbrella for 6 years, DenizBank operates as from 28 September 2012 under the roof of Sberbank, the biggest and deepest-rooted bank in Russia. As of July 1st, 2013; consumer banking portfolio of Citi Turkey with more than 600 thousand customers and nearly 1400 employees were transferred to DenizBank.   The innovative and reformist strategy is our dominant qualification in the market. We are happy to rank the 5th largest private bank in Turkey according to consolidated asset size from a bank without branches, employees or customers, in only 17 years which is considered very short for our sector. We place our customers at the heart of all activities and work towards offering highest benefit to their lives in the quickest way under a single roof with the most advanced banking products in line with our financial supermarket understanding.   Integrating digital and mobile technologies to our products and services is among our priorities. We work towards creating, rather than following trends and place digital & mobile technologies at the very heart of our operations in order both to ease our business practices and render people’s lives more beautiful at Deniz. As a reflection of this vision, we brought in such an innovative project as Facebook Banking to the banking industry not only in Turkey, but throughout the world; realized a breakthrough by accepting credit applications through “Direct Message” at Twitter, one of the most widely used social network websites in the world. We actualized our unique “mobile wallet” application FastPay that enables everyone to make money transfer whether they are DenizBank clients or not. In short, we shaped our whole road map for our customers to benefit more conveniently from the gifts of the mobile and digital world.   In addition, we have been placed among the top 3 most praised banks in the sector by Capital Magazine, the prestigious publication of business world in Turkey. Alongside our innovative approach in Digital Banking; we have been placed among the top 3 most praised banks in the sector by Capital Magazine, the prestigious publication of business world in Turkey.   The rise of DenizBank having undersigned many success stories with its fast and accessible solutions, excellent service quality and unconditional customer satisfaction philosophy will continue under Sberbank roof from now on… Dozens of achievements that we have realized so far give us an indescribable excitement as the guarantee of the triumphs we shall accomplish in the future. In the new era, we will continue to move towards our target to be among the top players of Turkey. As our motto “Life is beautiful at Deniz” explains, we will carry on working to become the “bank at the hearts of people”.   Lithium helps companies unlock the passion of their customers. Lithium software powers amazing Social Customer Experiences for more than 400 iconic brands and supports companies grow brand advocacy, drive sales, reduce costs and accelerate innovation to create social communities that redefine the customer experience.   The new Lithium brings together trusted people and trusted content to create an exchange of shared value and a more complete measure of reputation. Most importantly – and what really fires us up – is that this acquisition helps Lithium put the power back into consumers’ hands in a real way that delivers real benefits to consumers as well as brands.   We know that corporations that tap into their socially empowered customers stand to gain advantage on their socially reluctant competitors in ways beyond just reducing customer support costs. They’ve realized that customer engagement means real, topline growth and that customers who actively engage with brands, products and services are not only loyal advocates, they also spend more. If a business wants to continue to succeed, she needs to innovate and grow and to do that you need to get serious about social.   There’s a growing realization that people don’t want to engage with website marketing copy. They’re seeking to engage their peers and learn from their real experiences. Because that’s what they trust—shared human stories relevant to their personal experiences.  And that is the ultimate moment of truth for brands seeking success with the new customer everyone needs to understand today: Generation C.   Social networking will carry us one step forward in Turkey as we have many social media users in our country. We as a bank knows that when we gain the trust of the customers and when we understand them, we will be the bank at the hearts of the people.   We care about our customers’  thoughts and ideas.  Our focus is excellence in client service and as a result of this we are the first Bank in Turkey who makes surveys thru Social Media. We listen the customers in every area and provide them solutions proactively. We are aware of the value of experienced staff and we built up a dedicated team for Social media service. They have also separate trainings by professional agencies about social media trends and way of behaving. With the help of Lithium features, they are more aware and flexible with the priorities.     Denizbank knows that, we should be more integrated with social media and provide the best service in that area, to be strong in the digitilization and mobilization age. With this awareness , we recognized the power and privileges of Lithium. We can manage what we can measure and Lithium provides this in very basic and feasible way. We can follow the real time queue backlogs and take necessary actions immediately. If the conversation is not related with us or is not in our scope, we can classify all of these and delete them in one shot by saving time of supervisor. So we can focus with the real claim or complaint of the customers.   Word of mouth is a very effective power and social media area holds this by impressing very huge crowds with no cost. This channel becomes a very important candidate which run rings around the other channels by delivering fast and best service wherever our customer or whenever he/she wants to reach us in a very easy way. We improved our quality by the support of Lithium and increased our satisfied customers’ numbers.   In our point of view, customer satisfaction is far beyond resolving complaints and we have increased our customer satisfaction by 22%.   As we are the 1st  ranking country in Twitter and 2nd ranking country in social media usage in the World, we have a significant number of customers who actively use social media. With the help of Lithium’s flexibility we can process 19% more conversations than before.   We started to manage all accounts in one program which provided a 24% increase in agent productivity.   Frequent templates have been defined into the system and supply a 30 second savings for each notice by making easier knowledge contribution. Decreasing unrelated conversations provides agents the ability to deal with the real customer claims and complaints, and this feature resulted in a 25% improvement in agent response time.   Previously one staff member was checking all conversations and then measuring and reporting the metrics manually. But with Lithium’s privileges, the monitoring became easier and we had a 53% FTE savings.   Supervision management and reporting has the ability of online monitoring and being alert in any capacity issues or crisis environment. Real time queue backlogs can be followed up easily. This provides us the ability to take the necessary action where and when necessary.

Company: TELUS  Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (deturbulence) Sr Strategy Manager Community: TELUS Neighbourhood (forum.telus.com)  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction    At TELUS, we put customers first – This is underlined by our Customer Declaration.   We're not perfect, but our employees are deeply motivated to consistently delight our customers. We know that getting better means making sure we're listening to you.   That’s why we’re embracing new ideas that will make your TELUS experience better, everyday. We’re on a journey to build on your trust by being clear, helpful and dependable.   In other words, at TELUS, we put you first.   Within TELUS, our social media team plays an important role in bringing our Customer Declaration to life.   In 2010, we started listening and responding to customer mentions of “telus” on Twitter. This was done using our enterprise platform (Radian6) with a very small team of contact centre agents, looking at only our Mobility line of business. As we gained experience and the channel became more active, we found we could not only serve customers, but also exceed their expectations by listening to discussions and engaging.   In 2012, we added additional agents to support Home Services and created more robust processes to enable communication and hand-offs between operations, public relations/corporate communications, and marketing. These processes have evolved into meaningful partnerships, with the business aligning behind common goals of putting our customers first, and having teams that historically did not inter-operate collaborate on a daily basis.   Having established a uniquely agile and cross functional team, we have been able to consistently exceed our client’s expectations. By building relationships through Twitter, Facebook, and our online community, we have increased customer loyalty which is reflected in our 77% Top 2 Box Likelihood to Recommend and 88% Top 2 Box customer satisfaction client survey results.   Screenshot from http://twitter.com/telussupport   As we, from a social service standpoint, were getting more and more involved in delivering customer experience and support through engagement, we found that we needed tools and technologies focused on engagement to suit the needs of this growing channel.   To that end, in the back half of 2012, we undertook an evaluation of a multitude of social tools to not only underpin our engagement and customer experience needs, but also to grow our social capabilities. We selected Lithium Social Web as the best tool for our needs based on routing, case management, tagging, and reporting. These capabilities not only empowered the operational teams to really own social engagement, but also gave them credibility internally.   In early 2013, LSW was implemented, enabling our operational team with clear lines of accountability and responsibility on a case by case basis, also giving us insight to volumes, times, and topics of conversation. Supported by this capability, we opened our historically closed Facebook wall to customer posts, allowing customers another communication channel with TELUS, and in to a sustainable workflow process.   To further our strategy of putting customers first and our goals of delivering strong social experiences, we began work on the TELUS Neighbourhood, a Lithium community, in March of 2013. Launching in June, our community serves as an opportunity to ensure support content does not expire/evaporate as it does on Twitter (due to Twitter’s velocity), as well as to enable the growth of superusers and brand advocates. Further, we can leverage it as a draw to bring social experiences on-domain, closer to self serve capabilities and to shopping.   Screenshot from http://forum.telus.com   Our efforts in the social space have taught us the need to develop people and skillsets directly related to social service. To that end, we are developing a formalized team (outside of the typical contact centre agent pool) with a distinct mandate, learning and development track, and set of success metrics to properly grow and sustain our social service efforts. This team will own all operational activity, and will continue the active collaboration with PR and marketing teams.   As we move in to 2014, we are finding new ways to leverage social insights internally. We are partnered with web teams, as our community activities demonstrate content customers are most hungry for, based on authorship and views, which inform web development and content authoring/promotion. Operational enablement teams are also receiving our feedback and insights to better tune our processes.   Additionally, we are able to springboard off of our community design and internal partnerships to launch TELUS Ideas, providing us yet another stream of insights in to the customer experience, directly from customers. This, coupled with our work to introduce a gamification strategy, continues to unite the organization internally to better hear and serve our customers.   In 2013: Twitter 56k+ engagements Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 25 minutes in Q4 Quality survey results say: If a colleague, friend or family member were looking for services such as home phone, Internet, TV or Wireless, what is the likelihood that you would recommend TELUS to them? 77% Top 2 Box How would you rate the performance of the TELUS social media support agent for the level of service you received? 88% Top 2 Box After your experience with TELUS’ social media support team, how likely are you to share your experience with others? 86% Top 2 Box Facebook 6.3k+ engagements Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 118 minutes in Q4 TELUS Neighbourhood (Lithium Community) June launch 5.6k+ forum posts 1.3k+ Accepted Solutions Estimated 28.7k+ live contacts displaced 11k+ completed registrations, 254k+ logins  

Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: Vip forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband. In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers. Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.   Vip forum represents a new crowdsourcing platform intended for gadget and online discussion enthusiasts seeking fast, simple, precise and competent answers to all their questions concerning telecommunication technologies, products and services.   Vip forum was launched at the end of August 2013 as Vipnet’s first crowdsourcing platform. In just six months, Vip forum has become a unique place for online discussions about telecom technology, products and services in Croatia.   In its first 6 months of existence, Vip forum has generated 600,000 visits and a pool of 1600 registered users, which have proven to be very active with more than 12,000 posts.    Out of 1600 registered users, approximately 10% are active* continuously on a monthly basis. (*active members are those which have one or more posts per month – counted as one; not included are members who only login and read)     The idea to have an engaged community that is self-sustained has been achieved, since crowd ratio is constantly above 90% (ratio of user posts over moderator posts).   High scores of satisfaction were given by forum users in recent surveys conducted: 96% found or got an answer for their question 90% do not have a need for any other contact towards Vipnet (through customer services or shops) Vip forum NPS is 51%    BUILDING USER ENGAGEMENT   Vipnet’s vision from the very beginning was to create a place where everyone is welcome, not just Vipnet customers, and to create a non-censored playground where users can show their personal knowledge and expertise by providing valuable content.   To embrace this crowdsourcing concept and to start building user engagement, well established names from online community and IT/telco journalists were involved in Vip forum trial and helped to design final version of community platform.      During the 2 week trial, beta testers spent more than 200 hours online and generated more than 50 different ideas and improvements which were implemented in final Vip forum version.   Whole usability testing was done directly on the forum, enabling participants to be recognized as co-creators of new community.   During this trial, the forum received an excellent SUS* score from users which participated in SUS survey questionnaires => 87,5   (SUS* - the System Usability Scale ISO standard ISO 9241 Part 11, Measures Usability &  Learnability)   Beta testing purpose, besides functionality test, was also to gather pre-SuperUsers which will actively participate in forum after the public launch.   The purpose is fully accomplished, all beta testers are still active on Vip forum, and they alone provide a high percentage of answers to community questions.   Also, they are now a pool of usability testers for other Vipnet products and services, as independent and respected telco enthusiasts.    

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops Community: Forums.comcast.com Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast, a Fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media and communications company in the world by revenue.  Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states.  Comcast strives to provide superior customer service through all channels – traditional and atypical.  An early adopter in using social media in the Care space, Comcast spends considerable energy and resources developing and implementing its digital strategy. Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer Operations.  Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and expanding product knowledge. While social care is still new to most organizations we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program. Being able to effectively measure our efforts and to tell our story to the broader organization is key to determining our impact on our business goals.    Comcast recognized the value of engaging with customers through social media early on and became an industry leader in the social environment. However, Comcast had no scalable, efficient solution that enabled employees to connect with customers.  It was difficult to understand how many resources were needed to support customer demand for social engagement.  Lithium’s solution has provided the scalable and seamless agent to agent and agent to customer workflow we required.  Comcast has been using Lithium for all social care engagement for a year and, through our robust social care scorecard, are now using social data to drive change in the organization. Among our core social care metrics are In Channel Resolution rate – resolving the customer’s issue immediately in the initial social channel – and Escalation Rate – forwarding the customer to another team for resolution.  Effective management of these business objectives requires clean, easily accessible data. With this specific, reliable data we made effective changes in our team management to consistently meet those objectives and have begun to develop scaled forecasting models. This means more in-channel solutions for richer content and increased peer-peer and self-service opportunities.  Comcast also utilizes the voice of the customer feature within LSW, achieving 100% customer satisfaction month after month. While a relatively small portion of overall Comcast customer contacts, the DMO team has also contributed to year over year increases in overall self-service, Voice of the Customer and JD Power & Associates scores. Specifically:   Since 2010, Comcast has improved J.D. Powers Overall Satisfaction +92pts (Video) and +77pts (HSD) This improvement is more than any other provider in the industry during the same period Comcast’s recent improvements (’12 v ’13) in High Speed Data have improved our ranking by +3 places Phone: All-time high rating with largest gains in Communications & Cost of Service HSD: All-time high rating with significant gains in Cost of Service & Communication TV: All-time high rating  with largest gains in Cost of Service, Communications & Billing Since 2010, we have reduced our performance gap to Top Provider by: 80pts (Video), 77pts (HSD), 58pts (Voice) Gained more than any other provider during the same period in HSD & Video The Digital Media Outreach team has been recognized for being at the forefront of social care by numerous high profile blogs, public news articles, published in numerous books and known as an industry leader within the social environment.   The Lithium tool enabled us to quickly identify opportunities to create a better customer experience.  Within three months the changes were made and scores increased significantly.  The top two KPI’s are in-channel resolution and tickets being escalated as you see color coded below. As you can see, our in channel resolution rates doubled since we began using LSW while our escalation rates have continued to decline:     SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand.  Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.       Below are some examples of DMO recognition in customer satisfaction.   1) http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/exceptional-customer-service-on-twitter/?utm_content=buffereee2f&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer       2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/the-top-100-most-social-c_b_3652508.html?utm_hp_ref=tw&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer4617c&utm_medium=twitter