Company: Fitbit, Inc.
Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community)
Community: Fitbit Community
Lithy category: Total Community All Star
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 road to Lithium
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 community connects millions of Fitbit users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.
In the past few years, Fitbit has had a number of exciting opportunities to connect with its customers. Following a successful Lithium Community launch in late 2013, we stepped up our social media game by bringing LSW into the mix and integrating the toolset with our forums and CRM system.
LSW’s polished visual interface, customizable workspaces, and flexible backend settings have increased our productivity and allow us to quickly support our customers. LSW has also been one of the most intuitive and enjoyable platforms for us to use! Community Specialists leverage the advanced tagging and routing capabilities to surface emerging support issues, which helps us more quickly get our customers back on track.
Email Advocates benefit from the CRM integration, which equips them to handle escalations that come through our social channels, and offers a more complete view of each customer’s journey. Our management and partner teams appreciate the Mobile Shared Dashboards and extensible Smart View-based Analytics, and our BI team has made an easy time of report building with the APIs.
Before embarking on this journey with Lithium, we recognized that true community support involves listening and engaging with customers on their platform and medium of choice. Providing responses solely within a 9-5 workday left some customers waiting most of a day to hear back from us, which is a veritable eternity on social media. By using LSW to coordinate multiple teams around the globe, we are now able to provide stellar 24-hour support across our customers’ preferred channels. Growing our teams globally has given us the flexibility and bandwidth to continuously add new regional pages and channels, expanding the footprint of Fitbit’s social support brand.
Fitbit now engages millions of customers each month across its global Community Forums and an ever-increasing variety of social media channels. We are better positioned than ever before to continue growing Fitbit’s support presence and championing the voice of our customers.
The benefits of having both a community and LSW
Fitbit’s customer support strategy has always centered around delivery of clear help instructions. Our Community and LSW platforms contribute significantly toward providing our customers the help they need, when they need it.
The most architecturally complex example of our Community and LSW platform integration is our handling of product retailer and mobile app reviews. We are able to get visibility into 16 unique review channels across a variety of retail websites, as well as the Apple, Google, and Microsoft mobile app stores. Reviews from these sites automatically route to a Community board, where they appear as new topics organized by review ranking. LSW monitors our Community, collecting this content into a queue where our team of trained advocates responds to customer concerns and support opportunities. Their replies in LSW are posted to Community threads, where content is relayed via API to the review sites. While this may (accurately) sound like an elaborate construction of workflows, the end result is a familiar and straightforward process for our team and attentive support for customers who aren’t yet fully enjoying their Fitbit tracker.
Perhaps the most high-profile benefit of integration is LSW’s ability to intelligently escalate conversations based on key topical phrases, profile attributes like follower count, or past interaction with our team. This escalation ensures our ability to identify and resolve the highest priority conversations within a target of 30 minutes (and often more quickly than that). Since every Community post is routed through LSW, we’re able to provide this vigilant prioritization to all conversations.
Integrations contribute to our powerful listening capabilities. We’re able to support Fitbit marketing initiatives by providing keyword analytics and extracting crucial content into triage queues, so that we can respond without slowing productivity on other channels. We watch other non-traditional channels like Reddit to remain aware of brand-related conversations across their communities and providing us with a holistic view of the customer experience.
Our results
Our social tools enabled the Fitbit team to listen, evaluate, and apply our business rules to prioritize engagement for over 21,000 community posts, 27,500 tweets, 8,000 Facebook posts, 1,300 Instagram posts, and 3,000 consumer reviews across eight languages every week. Since these tools were implemented in May of 2015, we’ve added social media channels to our support contact page and are successfully handling about 150x the contact volume that we saw three years ago.
The flexibility of the rules engine greatly increased our ability to maneuver media blitzes, giving us the ability to respond to the most critical social conversations while we deliver unique customer insights back to the business. In the exciting time surrounding major product releases, our content and sentiment analysis contribute to our launch-related health reports.
While case deflection is the showstopper, we have defined 25 Community KPIs around growth, engagement, membership, and content, as well as three KPIs for social, including TAR, in-channel resolutions, and response rates.
The graph below illustrates community case deflections based on the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) Support Deflection Value model and our own survey data. The inflection point in November 2015 is a result of removing the login requirement and opening our community forums up to the public and to search. Today, nearly 70% of our traffic is organic, and we’re better able to meet the needs of our fast growing community by delivering effective content faster.
In addition to the KPIs above, we also illustrate the diverse value of community through less traditional means. For example, members of the Community Team are involved in pulling together deep analysis on critical issues and themes for our product marketing, firmware, design, and other partner teams. We deliver uniquely tailored reports to make sense of customer input and raw support data, often unveiling insights unavailable before our integration with the LSW toolset . This ever-growing stack of virtual reports is one of our clearest value statements within the business.
We take pride in knowing that our unique vantage point, disciplined team structure, and versatility of subject matter make the Community Team a go-to resource for decision makers and leaders across the company as we continue to help them make informed decisions about our products.
