Company: Fido (Rogers Communications)
Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager)
Community: Fido Community
Lithy category: Community Design of the Year
Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).
Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.
The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the FidoTM wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.
Our Goals
Based on our target market, the Fido brand’s main focus is to enhance and grow servicing through self-serve. Our Community is a big part of this focus as it allows customers to help out other customers, and houses a lot of information/solutions, which in turn brings cost savings to the company. Our Community goals in 2015 were to:
- Redesign our Community in order to enhance the customer experience.
- Improve functionalities and navigation.
- Promote growth of the Community through various initiatives and promotional tactics.
- Optimize the content and increase the useful information for our members.
How We Stand Out
What makes our Community unique is our overall brand-aligned layout, our seamless navigation experience, our custom components, and our front and center search bar. Each of our boards have their own topic-specific banner with an embedded welcome message so our members feel at home. We also made sure that our website header appeared at the top of every page, so members would get the feeling that they are still on our website.
When we launched our front and center search bar, the focus was on improving the overall navigation experience. We figured “what’s the point of having all this useful information if you’re having trouble finding it?”. The search tool now displays results found throughout the Community, as opposed to results found within the specific board from which the search was initiated.
We also have a big focus on people! We promote our super users (aka MVPs, or Most Valuable Posters), our Community crew and we introduced hover cards to create more life and real people to the experience. We even have leader boards on the Community home page so everyone can see who’s ripping it! Fido is all about bringing people together.
In 2015, we completed a redesign of our Gamification strategy.
- Our ranking structure was redefined to replace outdated titles to cooler, more personal titles like ‘I’m a prodigy’.
- We launched badges with brand-aligned images, names and descriptions in order to give our Community members the recognition they deserve.
We also redesigned all of our notification emails to make sure they were aligned with our branding.
In Q1 of 2016, we introduced a responsive mobile experience.
All these amazing features combined allow us to provide best in class experience aligned with our brand objectives.
Designing an Awesome Community
In order to transform our Community into one that would most please our members, we opted to work with Lithium so as to capitalize on their expertise. We also created an internal working team, combined of the Community crew, Digital, Communications and Brand team.
Benchmarking best practices, we selected elements of our brand image, such as “we are a people company”, and incorporated them into our community image design. We brainstormed with the working team on what we would like to have encompassed in the Community, and Lithium took this information in order to present us with wireframes. Following an approval process to ensure that we were all aligned, Lithium provided us with mockups. Once the mockup approval process was complete, Lithium proceeded to redesign the Community in Stage, and then came the launch of our brilliant new Community followed by a short post launch UAT process.
All in all, the process was seamless and we’re very proud of the Community we have today. We couldn’t be happier!
In early 2016, we went through a similar yet smaller scale redesign and UAT process in order to enhance our mobile responsiveness. We collaborated with Lithium to complete this. This second process was less extensive and seamless.
We worked internally with our brand team to redesign our email notifications, and thanks to the efficiency of Stage and the helpful tips and instructions from the Lithium Community, we were able to launch our new email notifications on our own without any snags.
We also used Lithium’s professional services to redesign and launch our badges.
Our Success
Compared to 2014, 2015 was clearly a winning year for us. Our registered members increased by 44%. The number of posts increased by a whopping 105%. Our page views and unique visitors increased by 57% and 61% respectively. All these increases in traffic and liveliness, along with other factors such as the implementation of our MVP program, resulted in our CHI score going up by 159 points.