Company: TomTom
Entry Submitted by: Kenneth Refsgaard Community Manager (kendoji)
Community: TomTom Discussions (discussions.tomtom.com)
Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight
When we launched TomTom Discussions on 1st March 2011 we knew that superfans would be important to the success of the community. And it didn’t take long before a few very actively engaged users emerged.
A few months after launch we created a private area for our top users, which marked the beginning of our superuser program. Since then we’ve been consistently awed by the knowledge and passion shown by these customers. We’d like to introduce a few of them.
Great Content:
In the early days of our community, one of our superusers was single-handledly responsible for 10% of the posts on the forums. The truly remarkable thing, though, is his encyclopedic knowle
dge of our products. It’s safe to say that he knows our products better than just about any of us! And we often - only half-jokingly -explain to colleagues that everything he posts should be assumed to be 100% correct.
In the year since we have been live he has authored 250 solutions and posted almost 4,000 times!
Creating that Community Spirit:
Two of our superusers have been instrumental in helping us manage the community.
One thorny topic had become quite challenging to manage, when one of our superfans went on a mission to turn things around. He posted in the thread but also made great efforts reaching out in private to the most vocal troublemakers, urging them to be constructive. Most of them changed their behaviour immediately! These noble superfans have helped to maintain a friendly atmosphere on the community for everyone.
Above and Beyond:
Several of our other superfans spend countless hours providing direct support to customers who are having problems.
This even goes to the extent of offering to provide help over the phone, or using Google Translate to help customers in languages that they don’t speak!
And in our private area we receive a constant flow of valuable feedback from all of our superfans. This can be about product issues, website errors and much more. In fact, some of our colleagues from the product teams have learned that our private area is one of the best places to get timely and accurate product feedback, and have started monitoring it on a daily basis!
We all pay a lot of attention to the private area, and make sure that our superfans have a fast and direct line of communication to us.
There are many more examples we could mention, but possibly the greatest thing we’ve seen happen with our superfans is the warm and friendly relationship they’ve built with each other, and with us.
The private area is a board that’s full of laughter, honesty and mutual support. The bonds that our superfans have built with each other, and their relentlessly helpful and constructive discussions on the community, are infectious – they are really the ‘leaders’ of the community, and we often see new users starting to emulate their behavior (even if they started out as detractors!).
Our community is a great success, but we owe it all to our loyal superfans.