Company: Fitbit, Inc.
Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community)
Community: Fitbit Community
Lithy category: Social ROI Titan
Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness.
Our 2015 goals for our Lithium-powered community and LSW
Fitbit helps people lead healthy and active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration, and guidance to reach their goals. Our community connects millions of users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.
Keeping focus on our brand commitment to excellent experiences, our 2015 goals centered around establishing better connections between customers and product support. We sought to increase our presence on social media, bring even more visitors to our established forum content, and ensure quick, consistent responses through all our channels.
We recognized that achieving these primary goals would also result in equally substantial secondary benefits. By providing excellent support via social platforms, we would deflect contacts from other support channels, which offer a more traditional one-to-one communication model. By surfacing relevant Community discussions and Accepted Solutions, we would have the opportunity to resolve customer inquiries before their question was even asked.
In addition, we were excited to begin routing all content through LSW, from social engagements and forum posts to marketing responses and app reviews. Through tagging, volume metrics, and social listening tools, we aimed to improve our understanding of what users are seeking when they reach out to us. This data is a vital part of improving our internal analytics and reporting to the business around milestone events.
Our focus areas and tactics
We set out to meet - and even surpass - these goals with an ambitious multi-pronged strategy.
The largest single move to unite customers with content involved transitioning our Community from private to full public accessibility. The ensuing SEO visibility resulted in 3x visits and page views.
In anticipation of this new traffic, we launched a major project to maximize the value of Accepted Solutions, which appear prominently in search results. Our team worked to ensure that every Community topic included a satisfactory response, which is an effort we continue with new threads today.
Another significant step toward this goal was promoting our Community and Twitter support channels on both the help site and contact page. As this is the most common avenue used to reach Fitbit via email, phone, and chat, we hoped the prospect of a more rapid response on our platforms would appeal to customers.
We recognized that this effort would only be worthwhile if we could indeed deliver on that promise of excellent and rapid resolutions. To this end, we developed a capacity plan and staffing model to accommodate the growing popularity of our social support channels, aiming for the 4 hour maximum response time featured on our contact page, 24 hours a day. Through collaboration with our social marketing teams, we aggressively added support for newly-established regional brand pages and new channels including Instagram and app store reviews. We also put LSW’s tagging logic to work by applying product, platform, and feature-based tags to content, allowing us to get deep insights into social and community commentary.
In addition to bolstering our social coverage, we began acknowledging emerging issues in real-time through proactive tweets, floated community threads, and help site banners (which often linked straight to community threads). We’ve also engaged our Community Council superuser group to escalate concerning posts for quick attention. With this infrastructure in place, we were on the right track to make Fitbit a leader in the social support realm!
Our results
As we compare our current state to where we began at the start of 2015, it’s clear that the aforementioned efforts have been wildly successful.
Social media interactions increased rapidly as we strengthened our support presence and featured these channels on our contact page. Per the above graph, we saw a 616% increase in contacts to our dedicated support handle on Twitter between January 2015 and January 2016 (compared to a 393% increase the year prior). We also noted a substantial gain in channel subscriptions as we passed 100,000 followers on Twitter. Our growing audience brings increased amplification and adds value to proactive tweets, aiding us us in our mission to further reduce support contacts. As depicted below, we've calculated that by providing Twitter support alone, we've saved approximately 29,000 agent hours in Q3 and Q4 of the past year, by resolving customer issues without the involvement of email, phone, or chat.
Our shift to a public Community was impossible to overlook, as forum content quickly occupied the top spots for relevant search results. We saw daily traffic more than double in the month following this change, and noted the balance shift to more than 60% mobile visitors. As we ramp down from the last Holiday season, we now find ourselves at about 500% traffic compared to the closed community of 6 months ago.
To better visualize the full value of this growth, we ran a series of Community surveys to gauge the likelihood for Community visitors to open support cases after their visit. Prior to the open community, we saw potential for about 500,000 annual case deflections. Following the public relaunch, we were able to greatly increase this ROI potential, even considering increased staffing costs. Per the results of these surveys, we estimate about 225% ROI for our Community last year.
The 2015 year was one of lofty goals and great strides for both our team and our platforms. These numbers give us confidence that our hard work has resulted in better support experiences for Fitbit customers around the world, and also that we continue to significantly contribute to an efficient, versatile, and economical Customer Support department.
