Company: Xerox
Categories: Best New Community (Launched after June 1, 2010)
Entered by: Sandy Puglisi (spuglisi)
Community Name: Xerox Customer Support Community
Launched: September 16, 2010
Entering the world of social support is challenging regardless of who you are, but understanding and meeting your customers’ needs in a B2B environment can add some complexities that require expert advice. Although we’ve delivered solutions to other businesses for over 100 years, Xerox is relatively new to social media, so we needed help… and we knew it.
The Community Management Planning Workshop was incredibly helpful. First, it brought our virtual team together, and second, it brought the expertise of the Lithium team to our project. We had done our homework, but learned some valuable lessons during the workshop.
For example, we were headed down the path to create a product-based forum structure to match the Xerox product offerings, and learned that when starting a new community, the broader the topic, the better. So we went with only five distinct support forums, a far cry from one per product family!
Our planning process was completed in short order, but the road to a launch date got a bit bumpy at times.
We had challenges with Single Sign On and multiple sign on (we wanted to make sure customers could easily transition from the community to other areas of Xerox.com and vice-versa). We struggled between branding guidelines and the lack of branding guidelines (we are the first community presence at Xerox so some guidelines and policies just didn’t exist). But we made it.
The “Best New Community” was launched in September 2010 on www.xerox.com, and in six months time, we’ve come a long way.
We have had over 53,000 unique visitors and roughly 750,000 page views. There are over 500 topics with 1,500 posts.
We have also launched new capabilities. We gave customers the ability to add images to their postings. We recently integrated our corporate Twitter feed within the site and have already seen evidence of the benefit of cross-channel integration of support content. And next month we are going mobile!
But we aren’t stopping there.. we have lots more on our roadmap. Unchartered territory has become a charter for success as we forge ahead in our new endeavor. We are excited about our growing community and the many opportunities that lie ahead.
Our partnership with Lithium and the support of our community have been, and will surely continue to be, a recipe for success. We look forward to seeing where this adventure takes us.