Best New Community: Aflac, Duck Pond

Best New Community: Aflac, Duck Pond

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!

 

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Category: Best New Community

 

Community: Aflac

Launch Date: October 24, 2009

Submitted by: Aflac Community Manager NateKlein

 

 

duckpond.pngThe Aflac Duck has been so many places that we thought, why not send him on a swim?  That's when the Duck Pond was formed.  The Duck Pond is a closed community forum where Aflac's online billing accounts can connect, share and learn from other Aflac account administrators by asking questions, providing answers and submitting ideas online.

 

In less than four months, more than 18,000 account administrators have joined the conversation ... that's 10.2 percent of our eligible accounts out there quacking about Aflac!  They have given us some great ideas - three of which are now on our strategic roadmap for implementation during the 2Q 2010. These suggestions will reduce call volume, enhance the customer experience and improve account retention. 

 

We have posted blogs to help Aflac accounts improve the customer experience and blogs that include tips on using social media. Soon, we'll start the conversation on how to make corporate sponsorships work for our accounts.  In addition to our featured blogs, the many threads have allowed our accounts to solve issues, raise concerns and sing the praises of Aflac's various services.

 

Overall, there have been more than 117,000 page views, over 32,000 message views and over 200 message posts -amazing considering Aflac accounts usually visit the site once a month to pay their bills.

 

Lastly, Aflac has to put some dollar figures to this analysis to make it worthwhile: 

 

Along with our web redesign and the ability to showcase how secure online payment transactions are via the Duck Pond, there has been a three percentage point increase in the number of customers that pay online.

 

Although this increase may be small, its effect is large, because moving that figure in a positive direction provides Aflac with additional annual cost avoidance for processing and materials of more than $95,000 - and that number continues to climb!

 

1 Comment

Nate,

 

Thanks for sharing your solid business results - ROI attributable to your community. 

 

I think one of the challenges for many of us, is that while there are discernible changes in many aspects of our businesses which seem to correlate  well with the growth in membership, views, content contribution and other aspects of a thriving community, it is often a challenge to prove an absolute cause and effect, especially when there may be other initiatives within the business which could have been contributing factors.

 

It's great to hear that you have a handle on this, and hope  that you will continue to share more of your story here as it evolves.

 

Mark