Company: Telstra Corp
Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager
Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au)
Lithy category: Best Community Design
________________________________________________
We have almost completed the process of redesigning our digital properties look and feel. This is a huge undertaking by the business and given the importance we place on our communities’ engagement, it was only right that we chose CrowdSupport to launch the new global header. By doing so we enabled our customers to easily navigate across the platform and main website resulting in an improved overall experience.
But this is only the first step, over time we will then align all of the community pages to the new Telstra online style guide so that customers have a consistent brand feel across the entire platform and with our other physical assets.
While we’ve begun work to align the brand design on the community, we’ve also introduced new homepage customization which includes features such as:
- Customized categories and sub category pages
- User options (turn on/off elements on homepage)
- Custom banners area
- Activity feeds
- Feature videos
These options allow customers/members to find answers quickly while connect our regular contributors to trending community questions. We recognised the need to make it easier for our customers to search through CrowdSupport answers so our simplified tab structure allows users to either find a solution quickly or view community in a default Lithium layout offering users the choice on how they want to contribute.
We also redesigned the search interface & results layout so that an accepted solution will float to top of page so our community members receive appropriate results without much effort. Telstra has a large customer base in both consumer and business markets, so we wanted to make sure that CrowdSupport would address both segment needs. This was important because our products and services differ significantly between the two groups. To address this we developed dual community layouts & dual Lithium blogs with content developed based on the needs of each group. This has resulted in significantly increased engagement particularly across the business segment. Using the Lithium REST API we have reviewed and reworked all of the high usage areas of the community so that optimum performance is delivered from these pages to our community. In addition we will also be implementing a full redesign of CrowdSupport for mobile & tablet so that layout is aligned to the desktop experience providing consistency, regardless of device.
