Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: Vip forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband. In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers. Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.   Vip forum represents a new crowdsourcing platform intended for gadget and online discussion enthusiasts seeking fast, simple, precise and competent answers to all their questions concerning telecommunication technologies, products and services.   Vip forum was launched at the end of August 2013 as Vipnet’s first crowdsourcing platform. In just six months, Vip forum has become a unique place for online discussions about telecom technology, products and services in Croatia.   In its first 6 months of existence, Vip forum has generated 600,000 visits and a pool of 1600 registered users, which have proven to be very active with more than 12,000 posts.    Out of 1600 registered users, approximately 10% are active* continuously on a monthly basis. (*active members are those which have one or more posts per month – counted as one; not included are members who only login and read)     The idea to have an engaged community that is self-sustained has been achieved, since crowd ratio is constantly above 90% (ratio of user posts over moderator posts).   High scores of satisfaction were given by forum users in recent surveys conducted: 96% found or got an answer for their question 90% do not have a need for any other contact towards Vipnet (through customer services or shops) Vip forum NPS is 51%    BUILDING USER ENGAGEMENT   Vipnet’s vision from the very beginning was to create a place where everyone is welcome, not just Vipnet customers, and to create a non-censored playground where users can show their personal knowledge and expertise by providing valuable content.   To embrace this crowdsourcing concept and to start building user engagement, well established names from online community and IT/telco journalists were involved in Vip forum trial and helped to design final version of community platform.      During the 2 week trial, beta testers spent more than 200 hours online and generated more than 50 different ideas and improvements which were implemented in final Vip forum version.   Whole usability testing was done directly on the forum, enabling participants to be recognized as co-creators of new community.   During this trial, the forum received an excellent SUS* score from users which participated in SUS survey questionnaires => 87,5   (SUS* - the System Usability Scale ISO standard ISO 9241 Part 11, Measures Usability &  Learnability)   Beta testing purpose, besides functionality test, was also to gather pre-SuperUsers which will actively participate in forum after the public launch.   The purpose is fully accomplished, all beta testers are still active on Vip forum, and they alone provide a high percentage of answers to community questions.   Also, they are now a pool of usability testers for other Vipnet products and services, as independent and respected telco enthusiasts.    

Company: AT&T  Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww) Social Media- Sr. Strategy Manager Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://att.com/forums) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) is a premier communications holding company and one of the most honored companies in the world. Its subsidiaries and affiliates – AT&T operating companies – are the providers of AT&T services in the United States and internationally.   The AT&T Community was founded in 2002 as a place for AT&T wireless customers to engage in online peer-to-peer support. Initially, the community continued to grow with minimal investment from AT&T. However, in 2010, two main factors stagnated community growth:   1.         Fragmented engagement that resulted from additional product lines being added to the community.  (A U-verse community was added in July, 2007, and a DSL/Internet community in August, 2009.) 2.         Consumers were turning to social channels such as Facebook, Twitter and other unbranded communities.   At the same time, the proliferation of connected consumers led to a drastic increase in customers which expected to get support from and engage directly with brands on digital channels.   From 2002 until 2012, the AT&T Community was home to a group of grassroots community leaders, a combination of citizen and advocate influencers participating in the forum and providing support. The community leaders engaged in discussions and answered questions in their areas of expertise with little interaction with each other. The solutions provided on the forums - a key metric for a support community - stalled with no signs of growth, despite community leader participation.   In 2011, AT&T leadership made the strategic decision to increase investment in the community to help customers get support 24/7 on social channels. We knew an appealing program would drive success by spurring our influencers to engage in more dialogs, create more solutions, and give us feedback. We needed their participation to improve the quality of our content and get valuable feedback on multiple initiatives.   We created an influencer program – the “Award for Community Excellence” (ACE)” - to formally identify and engage both citizen and advocate influencers. In preparation for a late 2012 launch, we engaged experienced outside vendors – including Lithium - to ensure we created a scalable, sustainable program. They analyzed the opportunity, performed a competitive analysis and aligned our team on influencer business objectives.  We concluded that we needed to improve the reach and connectivity of the influencer network, the ability of individuals to influence both content and their own presence, and the degree of enthusiasm towards the AT&T Community.   AT&T delivered the ACE program which identified and nominated outstanding community achievement. Selection methodology has two steps: First, a quantitative analysis determines users who demonstrate top participation in the community based on key metrics, and second, we perform a qualitative analysis to evaluate whether or not those top users embody the influencer attributes we wish to recognize. The quantitative analysis is performed by pulling the metrics for the community members and applying an algorithm that ranks them based on the number of posts they made, solutions they provided and kudos they received. (Kudos are a feature that allows one community member to say “thanks!” to another community member.) We then narrow the list of members under consideration to those who scored above the standard deviation of the dataset. Our community managers then use a qualitative scorecard to grade each member’s performance against key influencer attributes. We use a three-point scale to grade each member on:   •           Exhibiting a neutral to positive degree of enthusiasm towards AT&T •           Having visited the community recently •           Frequency of posts •           Quality of their replies •           Two-way engagement with community members and AT&T •           Authority, credibility and expertise   We established a cutoff score from the resulting scorecard to identify potential recipients (nominees) of the Award for Community Excellence (ACE.)    Program components include:   a. “ACE of the Month” recognition in the public community and “with photo” in the private ACE category  On our home and on our category pages:      In the private ACE blog:     b. Monthly newsletter (in our first-ever use of the blog style) c. Custom signature green-ribbon badge d. Unique ACE role (ranks include Professor, Guru, Expert, etc.) e. Occasional, infrequent AT&T-branded small gifts f. Personal assistance with any AT&T-related service issue g. Additional moderation privileges   In 2013, we improved the program with: a. Selection and induction of new ACEs b. Creation of a video promoting the ACES linked to from our ACE Page   c. Development of an AT&T Philanthropy program specific to ACEs.  ACEs nominated dozens and ultimately selected five local 501C3 charities to each receive $5,000 gifts from AT&T.   ACEs accompanied AT&T External Affairs managers in delivering checks. ACE dcookie (second from right) and her son with AT&T External Affairs presenting a $5,000 check to the local 501C3 charity she nominated – The Arc of Luzerne County   d. Offering ACEs the opportunity to attend a quarterly conference with AT&T SME’s to cover topics of mutual interest – including community enhancements e. Opportunities for ACEs to trial AT&T online tools   Today the AT&T Community Forums boasts 59 ACEs representing 23 U.S. states and two Canadian provinces.  The ACEs represent a cross-section of our Community and our customer base with professions including a chemist, NASA engineer, butter co-op manager, orthodontic assistant, film producer, seamstress, retiree, etc.     Lithium – as our long-time platform partner – worked with us to create:   a. A rotating carrousel of ACE avatars and stats on our home page  b. A dedicated ACE information page to which every ACE signature links c. A private ACE category in which AT&T and the ACEs can communicate freely and within that private space – our first-ever blog usage d. Right-rail recognition of “ACE of the Month” e. A trial of @mentions in the private ACE category In addition, we consult with our Lithium Success Manager frequently to share ideas and Lithium moderators routinely advise of threads of interest involving ACEs.   One of the greatest outcomes of the program is the change in perception of AT&T and the community that has occurred since the program began. Our survey showed that 30 percent of ACEs said that the program improved their opinion of AT&T.  The kudos use has increased by 36 percent since the program launch. This tells us that our members are more engaged and that they find the AT&T Community to be a helpful and supportive environment.    The last and perhaps greatest outcome of the program has been the increase in customer solutions provided on the community. The monthly average solutions have increased by 58 percent since the launch. This increase provides huge benefit back to AT&T by allowing us to focus on assisting customers with other important service needs, since many questions are answered on the AT&T Community. The solutions are high-quality content that can be reused throughout att.com and found in search results.    The ACE program has greatly benefitted AT&T by building stronger relationships with top influencers, who in turn increase their participation on the community and assist customers with answers to support questions.   The program is popular with the ACEs themselves. The ACEs rated their satisfaction with the program as 8.8 out of 10 on our inaugural survey designed to measure ACE experience and gather feedback. ACE achiever Dcookie expressed her appreciation of the program in the ACE Community in February, writing: “… maybe some of us would have never met or chatted if it hadn’t been for us becoming ACEs. I found that there are really good people here that I’m happy to have met. So I thought I’d say, THANKS, to whoever thought of this idea, it was a good decision…”     We are building strong relationships with the ACEs. Before the launch of the ACE program and its improvements, we did not feel that we could engage the top influencers for feedback because we lacked a connection with them. They were on our community helping our customers, but we had no way to formally and consistently thank them. Now we continually learn about them through the ACE of the month posts, collect their feedback and ideas in conference calls and the private ACE Community, connect with them about support issues and keep up an ongoing conversation. In fact, 90 percent of the ACEs cited the connection with AT&T staff (specifically, our full-time ACE program manager) as being a favorite program component in the survey.   Before the launch of the ACE program, top users did not communicate with each other across product lines (e.g. a Wireless top user never crossed paths with a U-verse ® top user). Now the ACEs have great relationships with one another, sharing information and ideas amongst themselves in the private ACE Community. Our survey found that 74 percent of ACEs cited the connection with other ACEs as being another favorite component of the program.  The ACEs regularly congratulate one another for being named ACE of the month or for having one of their solutions highlighted within a support article on att.com.  Recently, a U-verse ACE and a Wireless ACE shared knowledge in the ACE Lounge to solve a product problem. A third ACE chimed in and authored an easily-understood history of telephony that we subsequently published in the larger, public community.  Another ACE has authored his own technical guide.   We are grateful to Lithium for helping build our ACE program.  We’re proud of our ACEs and delighted with the success we’ve seen with the program. We’ve designed the program to be sustainable and enduring and we will continue to recognize and thank exceptional community contributions in the years to come.    

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone(http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Vodafone Spain's aim is to provide best in class service to our customers with innovative and great value added offers and products.Vodafone Spain eForum Community serves the needs for those customers after product acquisition in order to provide a great experience and exploitation of their devices & acquired services.    Lithium provides Vodafone Spain the channel to enable direct communication with customers in order to satisfy their queries and incident resolution. At the same time, we provide customers with a Knowledge Center with loads of Tutorials and tips to engage and improve their mobile devices and DSL connection.     Vodafone Spain Heroes was created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while helping each other to solve their queries. This gamification programme not only encourages greater customers/users participation but also promotes new useful content creation. The new interactions and content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. This enables great Community growth for Vodafone Spain eForum users as a support channel to get helpful and resolute answers providing internal KPIs a real boost.   Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain and over 25 contestants actively help out other users. A great amount of kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends. In addition to this programme, Heros have created 134 helpful and resolute new posts. With these new posts, Heros have provided an increase of the Vodafone Spain forum visits volume by over 67K (an average of 500 visits per new Hero post). In addition, Heros helped to get an incremental 20% SEO in comparison with the previous year.   More about the Vodafone Heroes Programme   Our Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is focused on acquisition of new Community Members and Moderators outside the company employees to enable a real 2.0. approach.  Vodafone Spain Heroes is created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers whilst they help each other to solve their queries.   This gamification programme not only encourages greater customer/users participation but also promotes new useful content creation. Those new interactions and contents also engage user self-management and product knowledge. This enables great Community growth for Vodafone Spain eForum users as a support channel to get helpful and resolutive answers providing internal KPIs a real boost.   Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is closely monitored on a weekly basis by the Spain Community Managers who provide Heroes with guidance and one-to-one follow up on their adventure. The Programme includes 3 role categories (Vodafone Hero Apprentice,  VodfoneHero and Vodafone SuperHero) and 4 power badges (speed, wisdom, aim and creation) that allow users to possess different strengths.   Programme is based on nomination of weekly winners for each power badge providing users with exclusive benefits and privileges as they get Points of power along with their nominations. Benefits are also related with fame and pride such as allowing users to moderate or ban other users as well as collaborating on official content creation published within Vodafone sites. There is a Points of Power catalogue accessible to the users once they enter the programme where users can redeem and select their desired prizes. Offer range is very wide not only offering goods but also “benefits” and events participation or pride recognition.   Any Vodafone Spain eForum registered user is eligible to participate on the Heroes Programme. Users need to pass the initial challenge to get their first “hero Apprentice” badge and from then, new badges unlocked will move users up in the scale of roles. Once a user reaches to unlock the 4 badges, they are appointed Vodafone  Superheroes.   At Vodafone, we truly think we deserve to become Lithys winners as this Programme has evolved and demonstrated the value of the Vodafone eForum community. Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain and over 25 contestants actively help out other users. A great amount of Kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends. In addition to this programme, Heros have created 134 helpful and resolutive new posts; with these new post Heros have provided an increase of the Vodafone Spain forum visits volume by over 67K (an average of 500 visits per new Hero post). On the other hand, Heros helped to get an increment of 20% SEO in comparison with the previous year.  

Company: Spotify  Entry submitted by: Meredith Humphrey (Meredith) Community Manager Community: The Spotify Community (Community.spotify.com)  Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Spotify is a music streaming service based in Stockholm, Sweden that is currently available in over 55 markets. With over 24 million active users and over 6 million paying subscribers, our customers use Spotify to discover, share, listen, and organize their music.   This growing customer base has also meant a need for various customer support channels since Spotify’s launch in 2008. In February 2012 we launched our Spotify Community with Lithium and now have over  200,000 registered users. Our Community is now top source for customers with queries on everything from their account to device troubleshooting, maintenance, product feedback, and music discussion.   Since the launch of the Community in 2012 up until mid-2013 we also had a core group of around 20 Super Users. These included users that were newly, currently and formerly active across the boards.   Our main focus for the past year was encouraging the growth of our Super Users across the Community so that self-help was promoted across the forums as we continue to look toward Spotify’s future growth.      We’ve always taken great effort to reward the Super Users that make their way to the Spotify Community.   Using Lithium’s metrics, we determine the Top 10 Super Users each month and recognize them in our Community Blog. These Top Contributors are rewarded with anything from Spotify merchandise, a month of free Premium, a blog post on our official news site, and branded playlists.    Those Super Users are also invited for other perks including Skype calls with team leaders for Q&A sessions, access to early version of updates, and direct emails to some Spotify.   However, we knew in 2013 that there was still a large untapped group of users that would make great additions to our Spotify’s Super User team. With close to over 200,000 registered users there was clearly room for improvement and retention with interested users.   We also knew that our Lithium Community was the place to find these brand advocates and Super Users that are vital the future of Spotify’s support channels.     In an effort to not only encourage new Super Users to become active, but also to raise awareness of Spotify’s Community and praise the efforts of our current Super Users in 2014, we established the Rock Stars Program in November 2013.      "The Rock Stars Program is really an extension of what we were already doing organically over the years. Since we've made it something more concrete, we've seen a massive increase in the funnel of new Super Users in our community. We're grateful to have so many new fans who are passionate about our brand and helping people." – Rorey Jones, Spotify Global Community Manager   Previously, when Moderators reached out to welcome users that stood out in their accepted solutions, kudos and post count it became clear the benefits of being of a Super User were intangible and difficult to grasp.    Thanks to the Rock Stars Program (RSP), all the benefits of being a Super User are now visible to everyone—not just the Super Users already getting perks.   The Rock Stars Program is a three-tier system: Registered Users, Rising Stars, and Rock Stars.   The first step in the program invites all registered users to simply start posting. They can then rank up 26 different music-themed positions as they start participating in the Community. Our ranks were adjusted to go from “Newbie” and “Casual Listener” up another 26 musical ranks, including “Gig Goer”, “Festival VIP”, “Garage Band”, Radio Producer”, “Singer” and at the top “Senior Producer”.   Users that are gaining kudos, writing accepted solutions, getting to know staff and bringing a great disposition to the forums are then invited to be Rising Stars. For three months these users are given access to a few private boards, meet the staff, and start learning more about Spotify.   At the end of three-month period they can be invited to be Rock Stars—the rank given to top group of Super Users.   Rock Stars are defined as users that are actively helping other customers, gaining kudos, posting accepted solutions, and establishing relationships with Moderators. In the RSP, Rock Stars have a rank structure as well—they can rank from “Label Star” up another 14 ranks to “Musical Legend”. Finally, Rock Stars that slowed in participation and left the community are retired as “Veterans”.   Once a Rock Star, there are different roles users can take as a member of “the band”: The Fun Master, The Protector of Newbs, Community Yoda, The Ideas Guardian, The Blog Maverick.   When we launched the RSP we invited our established Super Users to join as Rock Stars right away. We then invited some new users to join as Rising Stars so they could learn a bit more before gaining all the Rock Star perks.   The public, tiered structure the RSP provides has given users an incentive to start participating, getting to know staff and increasing their overall presence in the forums.    When comparing the month after the launch (November) and the second month after the launch (December), our Accepted Solutions were up by 19% to 611 while Completed Registrations were up 18% to 12,264 from Dec 7, 2013 to Jan 7, 2014.   Our Overall Topics also increased by 11% while Logins and Overall Posts increased by 5% and 6% respectively.   Since the launch of the RSP not only have we seen not only a jump in the User Sessions per month by 4% to 3,869,869 and Searches by Users up 27% to 60,303--but we’ve seen an increase in the post frequency and quality from best top Rock Stars.   At the end of the first three months we nominated four of our Rising Stars to become Rock Stars. We then initiated another six Rising Stars to the program.   Our top Rock Star Peter has increased his post count by 20%--now averaging 85 posts a day. Marco has been a consistent top 10 Super User for years and has increased his post count by 169%.    With these results just four months after the launch, our team is eager to see what a full year of the program will bring.  Our ever-expanding Spotify user base means the need for knowledgeable, supportive Super Users is become more vital to our Customer Service future and we want the Rock Star Program to be at the center of the Community.   To give you a proper tour of our Rock Star Program, let us introduce the Spotify Community Moderator Greg.  He’ll take you through the register user’s journey through our Community and into the Rock Star Program. See you backstage.    Watch video here:  https://www.dropbox.com/s/4cwsu93abq3by8i/LithyProgramLaunchSpotify.mp4      

Company: Best Buy  Entry submitted by: Gina Debogovich (Gina) Senior Manager Community: Best Buy Unboxed (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Best Buy is the world’s largest multi-channel consumer electronics retailer with stores in the United States, Canada, China, and Mexico. BestBuy.com is among the top ten retail websites in the United States and we have the number one customer loyalty program of its kind. There are more than 1 billion visitors to our website and 600 million visits to our U.S. stores each year. Our Blue Shirts sales associates and Geek Squad Agents are committed to delivering on our Customer Promise:   1. The latest devices and services — all in one place 2. Knowledgeable, impartial advice 3. Competitive prices 4. The ability to shop when and where you want 5. To support you for the life of your products   Our online community brings our customer promises to life.  It is an online destination that connects our customers, Community Super Users, Blue Shirts and Geek Squad Agents together.  The Community provides impartial and knowledgeable advice that is crowdsourced through these peer-to-peer interactions.     In 2013, we re-designed our Best Buy U.S. online community (http://bestbuyunboxed.com) making searching for content even easier. We recognized that it was cumbersome for customers to locate helpful information embedded within earlier threads and that topics would sometimes repeat because the content was not easy to locate. Visitors are now served a large "ask a question" box which searches published content and peer-to-peer support.   The re-design resulted in a 500 percent increase in searches since November 2013. As a result, customers found the information they were looking for and we saw a twelve percent decrease in the number of posts. Through identifying hot topics and trends, we publish knowledge articles for customers to understand policies, procedures, buying guides and troubleshooting.      

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops Community: Forums.comcast.com Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Comcast, a fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media communications company in the world by revenue.  Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states.  Comcast strives to provide superior customer service though all channels-traditional and atypical.  In recent years Comcast spent considerable energy and resources developing its digital strategy.  Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer.  Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and enhancing product knowledge.  While social care is still new to most organizations, including Comcast, we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program.  This includes ramping up a strong operational and technological infrastructure capable of integrating social into our broad operations model.  This allows social to feed into all organizations providing for both rapid customer engagement and collaboration and message synchronization across all channels.   Comcast’s Digital Media Outreach (DMO) team has set and continues to drive an ambitious social media agenda encompassing technology, operations, broad functional alignment and support from all levels of the organization. Comcast has deployed Lithium products to help meet our goals to make significant improvements in our customers experience using social media. Through the use of these tools we have been able to create broad partnerships across the organization. This includes our communications and PR teams, marketing, operations and quality teams. DMO information is being used to augment business processes ranging from customer satisfaction to retention and sales to outage detection and prevention. The winter Olympics provided an opportunity for Comcast to showcase the social media platform in preventing incidents, resolving customer issues quickly and directly, and engage customers in entirely new and innovative ways.   Lithium’s products and services have supplied Comcast with the ability to track measure and engage with our customers in real-time on preferred customer platforms. This includes:   LSW: In order for Comcast to provide superior social media customer service while maintaining a single message, it was necessary for the company to develop a singular, seamless workflow.  The LSW product has been integrated at the corporate and divisional levels for care, marketing, communications and sales to allow customers to have a top-quality in-channel experience.  LSW has also helped us understand inbound volumes as we work to develop a true operational social care model which includes forecasting, service level management and staffing requirements.  Within five months of launching LSW, we were able to justify a 30% increase in staffing through the use of clear and concise operational reporting.  In a most recent case study, Comcast brought on 10 additional agents to support customers during the winter Olympics as social volume was expected to increase as much as 40% in a short three week period.  Comcast has a complex organizational structure with Care resources deployed geographically by division. Each division assigned several resources to assist the corporate Digital Media Outreach (DMO) team by handling geographically specific questions and concerns.  LSW allowed DMO to seamlessly re-queue work to our additional support teams. As a result we eliminated thousands of out-of-channel escalations by enabling the front line employee’s best equipped to handle these contacts to do so immediately.  Our marketing team also used the publisher feature to provide great Olympic content through the duration of the event. Community: Comcast has built a 2 million monthly peer-to-peer participation community, using Lithium’s platform.  Our community is different from third party social networking sites in that we are finding more brand advocates and loyalty within the community.  Comcast utilizes this audience to provide customers the opportunity to become beta testers with certain product releases.  This is also the only channel that has over 100 internal employees from throughout the company participating from a product, care, marketing, communications, engineers and user experience standpoint.  Through Lithium we control the content and knowledge base within the community’s approved solutions. Community posts and engagement can also be fully integrated into LSW, allowing us to engage with customers on multiple social platforms simultaneously while inviting third party platform customers into the community through sharing of publically available and approved solutions within our help and support site and communities. This helps the agents to both engage properly with the customers and provide an efficient way to enable future self-service. Social Operations Center: Comcast and Lithium teamed up to create a monitor wall or better known within Comcast as the Social Operations Center (SOC) to provide real-time volume, operations and social feeds. The SOC was designed specifically to act as an early warning mechanism for Comcast’s National Customer Operations team as we headed into the winter Olympics.  The Olympics is a significant event for Comcast and we needed to deploy a sophisticated way to monitor all social volume for any possible network feed issues and proactively alert the right internal fix group.  The SOC’s launch demonstrates our continued efforts to push the limits on what social media is capable of providing to the operational infrastructure of a complex organization such as Comcast.  The social operations center was active within the Olympic war room and is still currently active in our national workforce management center.  The SOC allows us to find groups of customers in real time who are reporting service concerns and the opportunity to escalate to the appropriate fix groups more rapidly than possible via traditional care channels.  Through this system proactive customer messaging become possible - potentially preventing significant call, chat and social media volume while providing a better overall customer experience with consistent messaging created and make available in all channels.  Lithium social Web was launched as a cross functional solution for organizations to engage properly with customers.  Currently we have four organizations using LSW for proper customer engagement and seamless customer interaction.         The Comcast Community forum gives our internal experts (from all over the company) an opportunity to engage with customers who may have concerns with a specific product.  The community allows customers to speak with the appropriate internal expert for proper assistance.  The community also allows our internal experts to help many with one response.  Superusers also play a large part in the community life cycle, assisting with peer-to-peer engagement.    The Social Operations Center delivers social real-time brand content company wide.  As mentioned above this is used for multiple purposes to analyze data, catch real time trends about the brand and show team productivity.  LSW: The DMO team is challenged to provide at least a 25% in-channel resolution rate and no greater then a 10% ticket escalation.     Community: The increase of community page views and participation is a key driver of our community growth.      SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand.  Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.      

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops Community: Forums.comcast.com Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast, a Fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media and communications company in the world by revenue.  Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states.  Comcast strives to provide superior customer service through all channels – traditional and atypical.  An early adopter in using social media in the Care space, Comcast spends considerable energy and resources developing and implementing its digital strategy. Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer Operations.  Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and expanding product knowledge. While social care is still new to most organizations we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program. Being able to effectively measure our efforts and to tell our story to the broader organization is key to determining our impact on our business goals.    Comcast recognized the value of engaging with customers through social media early on and became an industry leader in the social environment. However, Comcast had no scalable, efficient solution that enabled employees to connect with customers.  It was difficult to understand how many resources were needed to support customer demand for social engagement.  Lithium’s solution has provided the scalable and seamless agent to agent and agent to customer workflow we required.  Comcast has been using Lithium for all social care engagement for a year and, through our robust social care scorecard, are now using social data to drive change in the organization. Among our core social care metrics are In Channel Resolution rate – resolving the customer’s issue immediately in the initial social channel – and Escalation Rate – forwarding the customer to another team for resolution.  Effective management of these business objectives requires clean, easily accessible data. With this specific, reliable data we made effective changes in our team management to consistently meet those objectives and have begun to develop scaled forecasting models. This means more in-channel solutions for richer content and increased peer-peer and self-service opportunities.  Comcast also utilizes the voice of the customer feature within LSW, achieving 100% customer satisfaction month after month. While a relatively small portion of overall Comcast customer contacts, the DMO team has also contributed to year over year increases in overall self-service, Voice of the Customer and JD Power & Associates scores. Specifically:   Since 2010, Comcast has improved J.D. Powers Overall Satisfaction +92pts (Video) and +77pts (HSD) This improvement is more than any other provider in the industry during the same period Comcast’s recent improvements (’12 v ’13) in High Speed Data have improved our ranking by +3 places Phone: All-time high rating with largest gains in Communications & Cost of Service HSD: All-time high rating with significant gains in Cost of Service & Communication TV: All-time high rating  with largest gains in Cost of Service, Communications & Billing Since 2010, we have reduced our performance gap to Top Provider by: 80pts (Video), 77pts (HSD), 58pts (Voice) Gained more than any other provider during the same period in HSD & Video The Digital Media Outreach team has been recognized for being at the forefront of social care by numerous high profile blogs, public news articles, published in numerous books and known as an industry leader within the social environment.   The Lithium tool enabled us to quickly identify opportunities to create a better customer experience.  Within three months the changes were made and scores increased significantly.  The top two KPI’s are in-channel resolution and tickets being escalated as you see color coded below. As you can see, our in channel resolution rates doubled since we began using LSW while our escalation rates have continued to decline:     SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand.  Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.       Below are some examples of DMO recognition in customer satisfaction.   1) http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/exceptional-customer-service-on-twitter/?utm_content=buffereee2f&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer       2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/the-top-100-most-social-c_b_3652508.html?utm_hp_ref=tw&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer4617c&utm_medium=twitter      

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone Spain's aim is to provide best in class service to our customers with innovative and great value added offers and products. Vodafone Spain eForum Community serves the needs for those customers after product acquisition in order to provide a great experience and exploitation of their devices & acquired services.    Lithium provides Vodafone Spain the channel to enable direct communication with customers in order to satisfy their queries and incident resolution. At the same time, we provide customers with a Knowledge Center with loads of Tutorials and tips to engage and improve their mobile devices and DSL connection.   Our Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is focused on acquisition of new Community Members and Moderators outside the company employees to enable a real 2.0. approach.  Vodafone Spain Heroes is created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while they help each other solve their queries.   Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain and over 25 contestants actively help out other users. A great amount of kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends.   More about the Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme    Our Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is focused on acquisition of new Community Members and Moderators outside the company employees to enable a real 2.0. approach.  Vodafone Spain Heroes is created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while they help each other solve their queries.   This gamification programme not only encourages greater customer/users participation but also promotes new useful content creation. Those new interactinos and contents also engage user self-management and product knowledge. This enables great Community growth for Vodafone Spain eForum users as a support channel to get helpful and resolutive answers providing internal KPIs a real boost.   Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is closely monitored on a weekly basis by the Spain Community Managers who provide Heroes with guidance and one-to-one follow up on their adventure. The Programme includes 3 role categories (Vodafone Hero Apprentice, Vodafone Hero and Vodafone SuperHero) and 4 power badges (speed, wisdom, aim and creation) that allow users to possess different strengths.   Programme is based on nomination of weekly winners for each power badge providing users with exclusive benefits and privileges as they get Points of power along with their nominations. Benefits are also related with fame and pride such as allowing users to moderate or ban other users as well as collaborating on official content creation published within Vodafone sites. There is a Points of Power catalogue accessible to the users once they enter the programme where users can redeem and select their desired prizes. Offer range is very wide not only offering goods but also “benefits” and events participation or pride recognition.   Any Vodafone Spain eForum registered user is eligible to participate on the Heroes Programme. Users need to pass the initial challenge to get their first “hero Apprentice” badge and from then, new badges unlocked will move users up in the scale of roles. Once a user reaches to unlock the 4 badges, they are appointed Vodafone Superheroes.   At Vodafone, we truly think we deserve to become Lithys winners as this Programme has evolved and demonstrated the value of the Vodafone eForum community. Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain and over 25 contestants actively help out other users. A great amount of Kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends.   Vodafone video:    Video script summary: Access now to the Community and solve any doubt about Vodafone services. Discover the news and experience the feeling of becoming a hero. Help other users to build the eForum Vodafone Community. Take part in the day-to-day new VR (virtual Reality) of the Vodafone Spain Community! Earn new Power points and become stranger competing against other heroes to get the power badges first! Do not forget to review the gift catalogue and redeem your earned power points. Sign up in Foro Vodafone, get in contact with a community administrator and start to enjoy the new Vodafone Spain VR.        

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP     Vodafone Spain's aim is to provide best in class service to our customers with innovative and great value added offers and products. Vodafone Spain eForum Community serves the needs for those customers after product acquisition in order to provide a great experience and exploitation of their devices & acquired services.    Lithium provides Vodafone Spain the channel to enable direct communication with customers in order to satisfy their queries and incident resolution. At the same time, we provide customers with a Knowledge Center with loads of Tutorials and tips to engage and improve their mobile devices and DSL connection.   Vodafone Spain Heroes promotes both users as a support channel and new useful content creation. Those interactions and new content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. Furthermore, this Programme enables users to feel they are in a comfortable community where they may ask their questions and uncertainties, because many of the questions are either addressed or fully resolved by users on an equal level.     Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain. In addition, over 25 contestants actively help out other users.  A great amount of kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends. As a result of the Vodafone Heroes Programme, we managed to deflect call volume by over 1.6m total calls. In addition, we enhanced our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by an average of 5 NPS points YoY and unassisted resolution rate increased by 10.2%.   More about Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme   Our Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is focused on acquisition of new Community Members and Moderators outside the company employees to enable a real 2.0. approach.  Vodafone Spain Heroes is created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while helping each other solve their queries.   This gamification programme not only encourages greater customer/user participation but also promotes new useful content creation. Those new interactions and content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. This enables great Community growth for Vodafone Spain eForum users as a support channel to get helpful and resolute answers providing internal KPIs a real boost.   Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is closely monitored on a weekly basis by the Spain Community Managers who provide Heroes with guidance and one-to-one follow up on their adventure. The Programme includes 3 role categories (Vodafone Hero Apprentice, Vodafone Hero and Vodafone SuperHero) and 4 power badges (speed, wisdom, aim and creation) that allow users to possess different strengths.     Programme is based on nomination of weekly winners for each power badge providing users with exclusive benefits and privileges as they get Points of Power along with their nominations. Benefits are also related with fame and pride such as allowing users to moderate or ban other users as well as collaborating on official content creation published within Vodafone sites. There is a Points of Power catalogue accessible to the users once they enter the programme where users can redeem and select their desired prizes. Offer range is very wide not only offering goods but also “benefits” and events participation or pride recognition.   Any Vodafone Spain eForum registered user is eligible to participate in the Heroes Programme. Users need to pass the initial challenge to get their first “hero Apprentice” badge and from then, new badges unlocked will move users up in the scale of roles. Once a user reaches to unlock the 4 badges, they are appointed Vodafone Superheroes.   At Vodafone, we truly think we deserve to become Lithys winners as this Programme has evolved and demonstrated the value of the Vodafone eForum community, resulting in support savings through call deflection.   

Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Brief Company Info: Sony is one of the world’s leading companies in consumer electronics and entertainment offering state-of-the-art and innovative products, movies, music and much more. With our products and services we provide an incredible entertainment experience for our customers.   In June 2013, we successfully migrated our 12 year-old existing European Sony Electronics forum to Lithium, which is active in 9 languages in 34 different countries.   Goals: When we decided to pursue migration to Lithium, our main goal was to create a community, where people do not only talk about their technical problems, but also engage with the rest of the community in their passions by reviewing user-generated content, company generated blogs as well as tutorials and workshops to help them get more out of their products and our services.   We aspired to provide a platform where our huge fan base of photo enthusiasts could share their content in galleries participating in monthly photo competitions. In doing so, we could help them increase their photography skills by providing workshops and tutorials as well as our excellent master classes moderated by Sony World Photography Awards winners. We wanted to keep the community simple and clear, while being easy to navigate. In this context, we radically reduced the number of different boards, and provided an overview on our homepage to help users navigate.   Lithium has provided a robust platform with flexibility to adapt and measure our strategic goals via different content types, developer tools and metrics. Thanks to this flexibility, we were able to create a compelling photo gallery, full integration with other Sony websites and a simple design that follows Sony brand DNA.   The biggest innovation we brought was to re-purpose the whole contest module and use it as a photo/ wallpaper gallery. We really forced the limits of the module to have the most compelling look while following brand DNA. The same module is also used to run monthly Sony World Photography Award competitions which add around 2000-4000 photo submissions per month from users in 15 countries.   Gallery integration on homepage, achieved by REST API calls to retrieve recent contest entries:   The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily be managed on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated. Finally, small customizations have been added to improve user experience, like adapting “new entry” buttons based on what users want to submit: a photo, wallpaper or a board post.   Slideshow:   Data display of image detail:     Gallery entries:     Photo detail view:     We create a single competition each month that is referenced from multiple language communities. We adapt the page language of this competition page depending on the country user’s are accessing it from.   Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( English version):     Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( German version):     In addition to the photo gallery, Lithium is now fully integrated into our web presence, by sharing the same navigation, authentication and search functionality. This way, we can display the same header/footer navigation in different sites, which also has an integrated central authentication system. When a user is logged in in our marketing site, we also authenticate him in community, and retrieve its user details to welcome her in community header.      Search on our global website shows results from our community as well and customers can directly access our community to discuss with other customers. This is achieved by REST API calls to the related language community, incorporating the search term. As a result, we retrieve number of results in community and the first 3 results to display in an overview page to our users. Also support website is linked to our community by targeted REST APIs to give customers the best experience when looking for solutions. Here, we adapt the REST APIs based on product model and product category, to ensure users get the most relevant data as result.   Search on Global site with links to community search results:     Support Webpage, giving link to community results in each product support page:   We have simplified the navigation, pages and community structure, hence helping users to find their topics of interest much faster. The big and present search bar helps users to find related content as easy as on Google. By removing the right hand elements and moving them to the bottom of the page we focus clearly on the main message of the page such as banners, galleries and boards.   The new community is a big success! With 7,126,596 searches per month and 6,745 posts for 1,441 new topics, the community is thriving.           Additional product features   Simplified navigation:     Search bar:  

Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Brief Company Info: Sony is one of the world’s leading companies in consumer electronics and entertainment offering state-of-the-art and innovative products, movies, music and much more. With our products and services we provide an incredible entertainment experience for our customers.   In June 2013, we successfully migrated our 12 year-old existing European Sony Electronics forum to Lithium, which is active in 9 languages in 34 different countries.   Goals: When we decided to pursue migration to Lithium, our main goal was to create a community where people do not only talk about their technical problems, but also engage with the rest of the community in their passions by reviewing user-generated content, company generated blogs as well as tutorials and workshops to help them get more out of their products and our services.   We aspired to provide a platform where our huge fan base of photo enthusiasts could share their content in galleries participating in monthly photo competitions. In doing so, we could help them increase their photography skills by providing workshops and tutorials as well as our excellent master classes moderated by Sony World Photography Awards winners. We wanted to keep the community simple and clear, while being easy to navigate. In this context, we radically reduced the number of different boards, and provided an overview on our homepage to help users navigate.   Lithium has provided a robust platform with flexibility to adapt and measure our strategic goals via different content types, developer tools and metrics. Thanks to this flexibility, we were able to create a compelling photo gallery, full integration with other Sony websites and a simple design that follows Sony brand DNA.   After the initial launch of our community with Lithium, we continuously added new functionalities to the platform based on the feedback we received from our volunteer super users. In this context, we initiated a complete redesign of the community to have a cleaner & well-designed look.   The homepage serves as a vitrine to give an initial idea on what type of content can be found. The new design allows visitors to see the whole community structure directly from the homepage in the cleanest way, so that users can directly access their areas of interest.   New homepage design:   This also allowed us to remove “sub-category” pages to reduce the number of steps to access the target destination. Photo gallery preview brings photo gallery submissions based on most recent, while the recent posts module is adapted to bring topics uniquely and display the most basic information in a neat design.   We have simplified the navigation, pages and community structure, hence helping users to find their topics of interest much faster. The big and present search bar helps users to find related content as easy as on Google. By removing the right hand elements and moving them to the bottom of the page we focus clearly on the main message of the page such as banners, galleries and boards.   New navigation structure on homepage:   We re-purposed the whole contest module and use it as a photo/ wallpaper gallery. We really forced the limits of the module to have the most compelling look while following brand DNA. The same module is also used to run monthly Sony World Photography Award competitions which add around 2000-4000 photo submissions per month from users in 15 countries. The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily manage on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated.     Lithium platform has been seamlessly integrated into our web presence and has been skinned accordingly to match our global look and feel to offer our customers the best social experience. Most elements have been simplified to provide an excellent customer journey without hassle. In addition big graphics, modern large fonts as well as the light layout give a fresh and innovative look and feel – even if you watch our community on a smartphone or tablet. Thanks to the clear design, customers can easily share their content and discuss products with each other.   The new community design is a big success! With 7,126,596 searches per month and 6,745 posts for 1,441 new topics, the community is thriving.           Additional design elements from our community   New board design:     New thread design:     New blog design:      

Company: McDonald's  Entry submitted by: Julie Fuerst (juliefuerst) Social Media Supervisor LSW: McDonald's LSW (https://mcdonalds.response.lithium.com/console/agent) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   On a daily basis, McDonald’s has thousands of customers that contact the company via phone, email or letters; or through social media channels. Through innovative processes and systems, McDonald’s Customer Experience & Insights (CEI) team strives to engage with customers in the channel that they prefer, and provide insights that help protect the brand and customer loyalty. More specifically, the goals of the CEI Social Media team are to protect the brand by helping our customers in social media with issues or questions. The CEI Social Media team works to respond to as many customer service opportunities as possible in hopes that the customer will be “recovered.”   The CEI Social Media Team at McDonald’s has partnered with Lithium to help drive customer recovery on Twitter. McDonald’s began using the LSW platform in January 2014 after a successful demo of LSW at the end of 2013 showed that the platform could help drastically increase the number of customer service Tweets the team was responding to on Twitter.   Prior to Lithium, McDonald’s CEI Social Team was only able to have one “queue” where all of McDonald’s customer service related Tweets would filter into. Having only one queue caused the Social Team to spend a large amount of time filtering through the Tweets, and assigning Tweets to the appropriate teams within McDonald’s. Additionally, the Social Team was fairly limited with searching, filtering, and routing capabilities, which ultimately affected the number of Tweets the Team could respond to.   Lithium has drastically helped the CEI Social Team bring in AND respond to more customer service related Tweets while maintaining reasonable response times. The CEI Social Team’s ability to respond to more customers on Twitter has led to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, as displayed in customer Tweets below.              The CEI Social Team has been able to use Lithium’s functionality to automatically route Tweets to the appropriate team/queue (for example, international Tweets automatically get routed to Global Team, etc.). The CEI Social Team has also been able to use Lithium’s functionality to setup a “Proactive” queue where we’re capturing Tweets outside of @mcdonalds and @reachout_mcd. For example, if a customer Tweets a customer service issue without using one of our Twitter handles, we’re now bringing in and responding to these Tweets when we previously hadn’t- hence increasing the number of customers recovered.   Lithium has allowed the McDonald’s team to bring in 60 times more incoming messages than what the team was bringing in with the previous engagement tool.   The team has also been able to reply to around 135% more customer service related Tweets with Lithium compared to the previous engagement tool and increase customer recovery by about 4%.     Screenshot from previous engagement reporting tool:   Screenshot from LSW Export during comparable time period for queues CEI Social Team monitors:      

Company: MoneyGram  Entry submitted by: Lindsay Conant (LCMG) Digital Marketing Manager, Social Care LSW: www.facebook.com/moneygram and www.twitter.com/moneygramme Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   It’s a big world out there. People now move across continents, through time zones, and around the globe with staggering speed, frequency, and efficiency. And when they do move, they need a way to move their money as well. While banks usually facilitate this need, there is a surprising population of individuals and countries that are either underserved by – or unable to fully use – traditional banking services.    For those individuals, MoneyGram, offers worldwide money transfer services through a network of 336,000 agent locations – including retailers, international post offices, and financial institutions – in more than 200 countries and territories. That’s more locations than McDonald’s, Starbucks, and Wal-Mart combined!   In the money transfer industry, sales are traditionally driven by word of mouth and methods of doing business and internal corporate structure are slow to evolve. Therefore a decision to become a more consumer-centric, socially-devoted company was a significant challenge for MoneyGram.   As MoneyGram’s Digital Marketing department began to nurture a stronger relationship with our customers via communication on preferred social media channels, and witnessed impressive growth of our online community, customers immediately started engaging with us to resolve service questions and concerns.   The ability to provide reliable money transfer services for our consumers is critically important to our business. Meeting the needs of consumers who use money transfer services is far from a simple Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 endeavor. Customers rely on MoneyGram services to enable them to complete financial transactions, quickly and securely, to send money to family members and loved ones across different time zones – often money that is intended to help with family emergencies and other important events.   And because our business consistently deals with fraud and privacy risk, we deemed it essential that our customers have a fast connection to our top-tier customer care team to address these concerns – 24/7/365. Timeliness and effectiveness are key. We also wanted to significantly decrease response time and streamline a fragmented customer support process by enabling our customer support team to directly engage with customers on their preferred social media channel.   To address these goals, we resolved to change and refocus the way we approached our customer relationships on social media by strategically combining our marketing channel customer support with our global contact center to respond to and resolve issues more efficiently. This would require a significant cross-functional collaboration and a shift in established social media procedures and customer service methodology within the organization.   Previously, Digital Marketing and Customer Care functioned in distinctively separate “silos.” The Customer Care department focused on issues received from the call center. The Digital team was dedicated to addressing communication with the online community to develop relationships and brand loyalty with customers. That’s where Lithium came in.   Lithium enabled our social care program to grow from one person to a team of eight, quickly and effectively, by providing an easy-to-use, single-engagement tool that: Met the unique needs of both marketing and customer care  Ensured one source of metrics and one message internally Provided a customer profile and conversation history that protected against duplication of conversations and requests Offered scalable workflow management and agent specific metrics which was essential for staffing, training, and performance evaluation purposes   Enabled us to share the voice of the customer back into the business to drive actionable results  Our business partnership with Lithium commenced in October when social care was still being monitored and responded to solely by the Digital team.  Both Digital Marketing and Contact Center leadership then worked together diligently to establish an alliance where both sides trusted the value of social media as a communication channel, and understood the needs of our global customers online.    With limited resources, we did not have the luxury of appointing a team solely dedicated to social care. To solve this issue, we addressed social care as a ‘rotating task’ to be carried out by current customer care representatives. Digital Marketing collaborated closely with Contact Center decision makers to agree upon an agent profile and identify the skill sets required for successful social media engagement. With this blueprint, Customer Care was able to select an effective Social Care team made up of senior representatives who fully understood our products, compliance, and legal guidelines.   Along with meeting the initial challenges, Lithium gives us the opportunity to expand our social care initiative and continue to address our customers evolving needs.   The impact on the organization was significant, highly successful, and received company-wide recognition and acknowledgement. Now, with the help of Lithium, MoneyGram enjoys the benefits of a cooperative relationship where two previously exclusive business channels can combine their respective expertise to serve the needs of our social media community, quickly & effectively, provide in-channel resolution of issues, and realize the potential to convert dissatisfaction into solid brand advocacy. Customer Care now looks at themselves as more than simply a “call center” and has repositioned the department as a “contact center” that can communicate with customers on a variety of different channels. And most importantly, they are now creating customer service roles that will be primarily focused on social media.   Our compliance, fraud, and security departments also gained more visibility into our customer’s online conversations and were, therefore, able to identify and respond to the most current and relevant customer concerns.   Additionally, our customers benefit in the ability to communicate directly with customer service representatives via our social media channels to resolve service issues and, at the same time, continue interacting with MoneyGram as a social media community member.   Here’s an example of how MoneyGram’s 24/7/365 Social Care program is directly impacting and improving the customer experience.   As well as improved customer experience, the new social care focus has enhanced our ability to protect our customers from fraud activity that involves money transfers. The interaction below shows an actual scenario wherein we were able to alert a customer to a possible scam before they became a victim.     Our Business Results: Since implementing Lithium in October 2013 MoneyGram has: Increased the number of customers assisted per month by 46% Increased social care outbound volumes per month by 95% Decreased conversations requiring off-line resolution per month by 17% Reduced response time by 93% – to just over an hour – in February   “It would be difficult to overstate how game-changing MoneyGram’s efforts to improve our customer experience has been for our organization, both globally and locally,” according to Christina Martin, Vice President of Digital Marketing.  “In an industry that is rooted in established business procedures, even minor changes require careful planning and thoughtful internal coordination.  Changing the way we looked at social media and its contribution to our customer care efforts was, in essence, a remarkable evolution. It gave birth to new business opportunities, increased service efficiencies, and unprecedented cooperation between departments.   And through this shift in thinking, Lithium was instrumental in providing us with the exact tool we needed to make the transition smooth and highly successful.”    

Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Google recognizes the opportunity to help SMBs improve their businesses through adding features which improve their advertising campaigns. AdWords is one of Google’s main products with customers from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses and provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers. Advertisers can use the wide range of features available in AdWords to create campaigns to accomplish their business goals while staying within their budgets, helping to improve their return on investment and acquire additional customers.   Providing customers with targeted content related to their advertising goals enables a fast-track learning experience, ultimately helping AdWords users make the most of their experience with Google’s advertising products.   According to Nielsen (http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/which-forms-of-advertising-do-consumers-trust-and-act-on-the-most-36767/attachment/nielsen-trust-in-advertising-sept2013/), 68% of customers are more likely to adopt a product or feature if it is endorsed by other users. In 2013, the AdWords Community team explored the link between active usage of communities and impact on the depth of product adoption. The key goal for the team was to shorten the gap between “Learn” and “Try it out”.   Adwords Community homepage   The first step for the Google team working on this project was to connect the activity on the community to activity in an advertiser’s AdWords account. This was achieved by improving the integration between Lithium platform and the Google infrastructure. Second, the AdWords Community team took a list of key product features they felt would be most helpful for their customers’ AdWords success and mapped discussions, threads and articles to this list via custom tags. Additionally, AdWords community managers created and curated content on the most important product features. On the backend, the team connected the customized tags with the AdWords accounts, and noted activity in the accounts after views of the tagged content.   When a thread has a solution, a Community Manager or one of the Top Contributors can select from a list of custom tags to trigger the reporting.   The custom tags allow to attribute the content piece to a specific product feature.   Measuring ROI of support forums is a step-level change. Google is a numbers-driven company, and it was important for us to unlock a way to measure impact of the content from support forums on the bottom line.    In around 1 out of 4 cases the users would take action in their advertising account within 48 hours of viewing content that had a specific recommendation for a feature. This result is 50% higher than in other online help resources with non-user created content. Additionally, with the community’s lower cost and scalability a single recommendation can contribute to hundreds or thousands times more feature uptakes that in the case of a single 1:1 support interaction.

Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Agata Krzysztofik (Agata) Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   AdWords is one of Google’s main products, used by millions of businesses worldwide, from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses.   With such a vast group of users, we wanted to create an online space where we could address any product related questions and provide strategic guidance to users in a scalable way.   We launched our AdWords Community on Lithium (in 6 languages) in 2011. The initial design was pretty “simple” reflecting the UI of broadly-known Google products such as Gmail.     Towards the end of 2012 we decide to redesign our Communities (in 8 languages at the time).     Our vision for the new design was “to provide members with a beautiful, engaging and wow! experience, and to make information easy to find”, while focusing on the following business goals:   Users are able to resolve their issues faster Users are more engaged with the Community Our Top Contributors are more satisfied with the Community Users have an improved perception of experts presence on the Community Users have increased satisfaction with ease of navigation The redesign wasn’t purely limited to a refreshed look, but also incorporated a launch of several brand new Community features that we defined and implemented together with Lithium developers.    The new Community features launched as part of the redesign spanned across 3 main themes:   1) Cleaner interface and easier, more intuitive navigation for user to get engaged   Custom Promo Carousel (With a banner builder incorporated into the admin)     More visibility into accepted solutions Stream of the most recent discussions and articles Recommended reading Quick access to follow discussions Ability to reply within thread At a glance view of discussions by categories Quick view of discussion stats   2) Better integration with social   Users able to add social networks to profile Easier social sharing of content across platforms   3) More recognition for engagement   Achievement badges Progress bar of your membership level Articles’ author box with integrated Google authorship tag The redesign has resulted in a 23% increase in the average daily accepted solutions, +28% in daily average kudos clicks and 19% increase in the overall satisfaction with the website (English Community results). The survey conducted among our Top Contributors also indicated overall positive feedback about the new UI combined with the newly added features. The main satisfaction driver among our top-engaged members were the achievement badges (86%).    

Company: TELUS  Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (deturbulence) Sr Strategy Manager Community: TELUS Neighbourhood (forum.telus.com)  Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer     In 2010, we started listening and responding to customer mentions of “telus” on Twitter. This was done using our enterprise platform (formerly Radian6) with a very small team of contact centre agents, looking at only our Mobility line of business. As we gained more and more experience, the channel became more active, and we found we could not only serve customers, but also exceed their expectations by listening to discussions and engaging.   We learned that we could have a legitimate service channel that not only displaced contacts from our live contact centre, but also deliver risk management by ensuring that negative comments from influencers or media did not go unanswered. To this end, in 2012, we added additional agents to support Home Services, and started creating more robust processes to enable communication and hand-offs between operations, public relations/corporate communications, and marketing. These processes have evolved into meaningful partnerships, with the business aligning behind common goals of putting out customers first, and having teams that historically did not inter-operate collaborate on a daily basis.     As we were getting more and more involved from a social service standpoint in delivering customer experience and support through engagement, we found that we needed tools and technologies focused on engagement to suit the needs of this growing channel. To that end, in the back half of 2012, we undertook an evaluation of a multitude of social tools to not only underpin our engagement and customer experience needs, but also to grow our social capabilities. We selected Lithium Social Web as the best tool for our needs based on routing, case management, tagging, and reporting. These capabilities not only empowered the operational teams to really own social engagement, but also gave them credibility internally.   In early 2013, LSW was implemented, enabling our operational team with clear lines of accountability and responsibility on a case by case basis, also giving us insight to volumes, times, and topics of conversation. Supported by this capability, we opened our historically closed Facebook wall to customer posts, allowing customers another communication channel with TELUS, and in to a sustainable workflow process.     To further our strategy of putting customers first and our goals of delivering strong social experiences, we began work on the TELUS Neighbourhood, a Lithium community, in March of 2013. Launching in June, our community serves as an opportunity to ensure support content does not expire/evaporate as it does on Twitter (due to Twitter’s velocity), as well as to enable the growth of superusers and brand advocates. Further, we can leverage it as a draw to bring social experiences on-domain, closer to self serve capabilities and to shopping.     What's next for us   Our efforts in the social space have taught us the need to develop people and skillsets directly related to social service. To that end, we are developing a formalized team (outside of the typical contact centre agent pool) with a distinct mandate, learning and development track, and set of success metrics to properly grow and sustain our social service efforts. This team will own all operational activity, and will continue the active collaboration with PR and marketing teams.   As we move in to 2014, we are finding new ways to leverage social insights internally. We are partnered with web teams, as our community activities demonstrate content customers are most hungry for, based on authorship and views, which inform web development and content authoring/promotion. Operational enablement teams are also receiving our feedback and insights to better tune our processes.   Additionally, we are able to springboard off of our community design and internal partnerships to launch TELUS Ideas, providing us yet another stream of insights in to the customer experience, directly from customers. This, coupled with our work to introduce a gamification strategy, continues to unite the organization internally to better hear and serve our customers.   Our business results in 2013   Twitter 56k+ engagements Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 25 minutes in Q4 Quality survey results say: If a colleague, friend or family member were looking for services such as home phone, Internet, TV or Wireless, what is the likelihood that you would recommend TELUS to them? 77% Top 2 Box How would you rate the performance of the TELUS social media support agent for the level of service you received? 88% Top 2 Box After your experience with TELUS’ social media support team, how likely are you to share your experience with others? 86% Top 2 Box Facebook 6.3k+ engagements Ended year by reaching an average total response time of 118 minutes in Q4 TELUS Neighbourhood (Lithium Community) June launch 5.6k+ forum posts 1.3k+ Accepted Solutions Estimated 28.7k+ live contacts displaced 11k+ completed registrations, 254k+ logins  

Company: Rogers  Entry submitted by: Margaret Tsuji (MargaretT) Community Manager Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader     Rogers is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada’s largest provider of wireless voice and data communications services and one of Canada’s leading providers of cable television, high speed internet and telephony services. Through Rogers Media, we are engaged in radio and television broadcasting, televised shopping, magazines and trade publications, sports entertainment, and digital media.   Our goal is to be first to easily connect Canadians with what matters next and we offer better ways of living and working to Canadians who embrace technology.     Creating a better customer experience is one of our corporate strategies. As such, in August 2013, we launched Rogers Idea Box which is a co-creation platform based on Lithium's idea exchange technology. Idea Box lives within the Rogers Community Forums and is a place where users can submit/comment/vote on ideas to improve customer service and support, Rogers.com, the MyAccount App, and Rogers Stores.                We are the only major Canadian telcommunications company to host a co-creation platform/idea exchange.    Idea Box was so successful that we were also able to leverage it to collect ideas about the community forums itself (and we were able to archive the "Community Feedback" board).  And we are now looking at expanding Idea Box to include categories such as products, services, and pricing. Furthermore, we are now being approached by other areas of the business who want to leverage Idea Box.   When customers provide feedback to us via Twitter or Facebook, we now have a place to point them to; Idea Box is a place where they feel their ideas will be heard and not just a virtual suggestion box.   Idea Box's impact to our business: - We have received over 170 ideas in six months; 11 ideas have been launched, 9 are being reviewed and 8 are in progress. - Without doing a splashy PR campaign, news of Idea Box's launch was picked up by sites like Mobile Syrup and Eye on Mobility with comments like “It’s one more way that Rogers is trying to improve the dialogue with its customers.” and “This could be a step forward for customer service.” - Launching Idea Box drove traffic to our community in a normally quiet time of the year; the week Idea Box launched, we saw a 22% increase in page views and a 10% increase in unique visitors.  Traffic during Idea Box launch week was actually higher than our usual peak time around the iPhone launch! - We’ve even seen users going to other forums to ‘share’ their idea and encourage votes!  http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28993963-Rogers-Standalone-Modem-Ideabox        

Company: Telefonica  Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez (UT04546) Community Manager Community: Comunidad Movistar (comunidad.movistar.es) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader     Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 24 countries. As of September 2013, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 320.3 million.   Telefonica Spain’s 2014 goals focused on the following: Reduce customer support telephone calls Increase CSI in social environments Increase commercial leads to homepage Improve SEO positioning (especially for FTTH and 4G) Improve the tone of the Internet buzz towards Movistar Improve customer self-servicing  Through our Lithium-powered community in 2013, we made significant improvements in SEO, traffic, and acquisition. We also achieved big wins in support savings (see our Support Savings MVP entry), in addition to CSI and CHI.   Community has positioned us as the SEO authority versus our competitors and local tech forums. (source: Opensite.org)      We also rank highest amongst our competitors in metrics like best traffic and lowest bounce rate. (source: similarweb.com)        18% of our homepage visits are generated by the community (source: alexa rank)        Some additional quantifiable results: -       Due to our community, our SEO traffic reached over 80% (top SEO positions in key words such as FTTH and 4G) -       Community is responsible for an increase in commercial leads: 20,000 click-throughs from community to homepage (movistar.es) in 2013 -      Telefonica has added 2.2 million subscribers as of June 2013 with more than 3 million homes in Spain now equipped with Fusion, an integrated product offering that brings together broadband, mobile, landline, and television services all in 1 simple package. Not only did they see existing customers switch over to Fusion, but 56% of Fusion subscribers are newly acquired customers who took advantage of the wealth of information and peer advice on the community about the new product to help make their purchase decision. Web traffic referrals from the community to the purchase funnel increased by 20% during the 1 st month of launch.      

Company: Telefonica                   Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez (UT04546) Community Manager Community: Comunidad Movistar (comunidad.movistar.es) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 24 countries. As of September 2013, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 320.3 million.   Telefonica Spain’s 2014 goals focused on the following: Reduce customer support telephone calls  Increase CSI in social environments Increase commercial leads to homepage Improve SEO positioning (especially for FTTH and 4G) Improve the tone of the Internet buzz towards Movistar Improve customer self-servicing  Through our Lithium-powered community, we were primarily able to support our call reduction goal with significant cost savings in 2013. In addition, community has increased our CSI, CHI, and NPS, as well as acquisition and traffic. Here are some of our results in those areas (also see our Digital Strategy Leader entry for additional results):   -       Customers are thrilled with engaging with the service provider and peers in a thriving engagement hub. Our community boasts a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 76% in response to the question “would you recommend us to your friends and family?” -       Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) of customers attended in the Community: 9.1 -       Community Health Index (CHI): stable over 700 during the last year (Top 5 in Telco Sector ) -       Telefonica’s landmark product, Movistar Fusion, an integrated offering that brings together broadband, mobile, landline, and television services all in 1 simple package, has achieved successful results since the launch in October 2012. Before the official commercial launch, Fusion was introduced to the community for a few weeks prior as the central communication hub, where customers generated hundreds of posts ranging from billing questions to general excitement and feedback from members who were eager to either sign up or switch their existing plan to Fusion. To this day, the Fusion FAQ on the community is still one of our most visited posts—approximately 85,000 unique visits with over 700 posts since the FAQ was posted in September 2012. This helpful FAQ has contributed to Telefonica’s increase in call deflection.   The thriving Movistar community has provided tremendous cost savings for Telefonica: -       56% of surveyed community members indicated that they were able to get a resolution through the community without needing to call customer service. -       Of those 56%, 65% of them declared that they may have called our call center if they hadn’t found the answer they were looking for through community. -       As a result, we received 15.2M visits to our community and avoided 5M calls, which amounted to €10 million in savings in 2013.   Here is an example of a hot topic that community was able to resolve: How to change the Wifi router password (385,000 visits):      Another example of a popular issue that community was able to resolve: How to switch the voice mailbox off (300,000 visits):