Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, Smart... See more...
Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   Our Story We moved to the Lithium community at the beginning of 2015. One of the first tasks was to move all of our old product forums to one community engine - Lithium. We had products in different software areas with different customers. We had to take into account their specifics and habits.   What we did We started working from two directions – from the community members’ side (externally) and from staff’s side (internally).   We had many community members by the time we moved to Lithium. In addition, each month, plenty of new members joined us. We decided to help all of them get used to our new community and help them get as many benefits from us as possible. For this, we launched two main community programs: The first one was meant to boost activity of current community members; The second one was supposed to help new community members get started in the Community easier.   Moreover, we had been working with our highly-skilled users and nurturing community experts. They were ready to share their knowledge and help other users resolve their issues. Sometimes, getting help from other customers is much more effective than getting help from, for example, the Support Team. Customers know all cons and pros of a product, and they are not shy to share them.   To increase the quality of our Community, we tried to involve our company teams in the Community. We have been working with R&D, QA, Support and Documentation to make them participate more actively in the Community.   What issue were we trying to solve? One of the main issues we had was related to customer satisfaction. Our customers were completely unsatisfied by our Community, and they preferred submitting questions to our Support Team. That increased the load on the team, which was unacceptable.   Moving to Lithium helped us increase customer satisfaction. We saw that more and more people preferred asking the Community as they knew that they would get answers either from other customers or someone from the company.   Our results We are seeing awesome growth in all community metrics: Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% %Topics replied < 24hrs +12% #Solutions +240%     Our CSAT in January 2016 was 60%. We help new community members get involved in the community life faster. Our current community members understand the value of the Community, and they are ready to share their knowledge with other community members.  
Company: Google Entry submitted by: Yuri Kleban (Program Manager) Community: Google Advertiser Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year    Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally acces... See more...
Company: Google Entry submitted by: Yuri Kleban (Program Manager) Community: Google Advertiser Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year    Our mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Our team supports many products such as AdWords, Google My Business and Google Analytics that help fund our company's moonshots.   Our Community Goals   The Google Advertiser Community exists to support our customers at scale by providing a platform to have their questions answered and to give them an opportunity to learn more about our product/s. This is done in a friendly and Googley way by our Community Members, Community Managers, Moderators and wide network of Google Top Contributors. We redesigned our community interface with three goals in mind. First, we had evolved from a product-focused community to a customer-focused community, and thus needed one place that provided a complete journey for an SMB, from getting their business online through GMB, then understanding their online performance through Google Analytics, to leveraging the marketing power of AdWords to increase the success of their businesses.   Second, through customer feedback we understood that there were issues with content findability and we needed a UI that supported easier content discovery in multiple formats (articles, videos, events). Finally, our customers are increasingly mobile; our community had to look good on smartphones and reflect Google’s Material Design standards.   The Advertiser Community's goals of education and supporting our customers at scale is done through three unique sections:   "Product Categories", where users can ask questions or discuss any area of our supported products and have open conversations with Google Employees, Community Managers, our Top Contributors, and each other; "Learn" , where customers can read in-depth articles about various themes, features and products, and "Events", where users can find upcoming (and watch past) live events broadcasted via Google Hangouts on Air and embedded in the Community. Google aims to provide a first class customer support experience regardless of channel, and the Advertiser Community aligns with our brand of delighting customers. Now, our Community allows us to do it at scale.   Our unique community design   Throughout the redesign process we ensured that Lithium's responsive design was in line with Google's Material Design standards (think mobile first). Additionally, we created various features that our users have been asking for. A few examples:   Guide Me’s- The Guide Me buttons are a unique way of helping users decide what to do next, and to drive further engagement on the Community. Notifications- Our users are active social network users too, and as any social network users have developed a strong need to stay up-to-date with what's happening on the platforms they engage on. We're now keeping them updated real-time by providing in-platform notifications when someone engages with their content or shares something of interest to them Experts- For our Top Contributors and Rising Stars, we dedicated a page to showcase all the hard work they do. We also ensured users know when an Expert is engaging with them on the Community by labelling them with distinct badges, and calling out the experts involved in all threads clearly next to the conversation. Users can also look for conversations where an expert has participated in through unique icons on each board. My Favorites- Our users love what they see, and when they see what they love they need a way to easily find it again. We've made it very easy for our users to mark content they want to get back to by adding "My Favorites"   How we executed our community design   The Google Advertiser Community redesign took place over the course of 10 months, with hard work from many individuals; the Google team is a Global team with members in 6 Google offices globally who worked closely with Kate and Kaela, as well as the rest of the the Lithium team. This process went through the following stages:   User data analysis from previous user studies Stakeholder interviews within the company and top contributors Design workshop 3 rounds of mocks and wireframes Numerous feedback iterations Internal marketing, policy, legal, trademark sign offs User Acceptance Testing (UAT) Implementation Days    Our  design excellence results   Doubled the traffic (as we brought more products into our communities), 2x our pages viewed per person & doubled our mobile traffic for most communities. Interesting fact: traffic took an initial hit because of the migration to a new URL (SEO), but we recovered as visitors were more engaged (more sessions per user)         Homepage    Before    After    Mobile   Before   After    Profile Page   Before   After
  Company: Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe / PlayStation Europe Entry submitted by: Javier Tenes (Community & Support Manager) Community: PlayStation Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Sony Interactive En... See more...
  Company: Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe / PlayStation Europe Entry submitted by: Javier Tenes (Community & Support Manager) Community: PlayStation Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe (SIEE) is the central support organization for over 100 countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Australasia, marketing the world’s most popular computer games platforms – PS one®, PlayStation®2, PlayStation®Portable (PSP), PlayStation®Vita, PlayStation®3 (PS3), PlayStation®4 (PS4) and the ever-growing online PlayStation®Network (PSN) platform. SIEE main challenge for nest years is to consolidate the world of virtual reality through PlayStation VR.   Our community goals   Our main goal is to create brand advocacy and loyalty through community by connecting like-minded people and immerse them in a unique world of gaming. We give users the sense of be part of the brand. We have proved with data that a well-engaged community member is synonym of a high spender player and therefore leveraging community to generate engagement is one of our main goals.   Our community active members appear always within the exclusive segment of very high spenders of our PlayStation Store and therefore increasing that group of active and well-engaged members is key for us to generate revenue through community.   In addition, our community is the creation engine of the most extensive database of solutions and recommendations for PlayStation. A community self-support scheme that boosts our CSAT score.   “The Gamer” is at the center of our brand strategy and therefore our six community pillars (discovering, connecting, cooperating, competing, sharing, and recognition) converge with our brand needs.   PlayStation is #4theplayers and therefore PlayStation is for the community of players.   Our unique community design   Our design is unique and can’t be compared to any other Lithium community or any other community in general.   Over the past years, several internals teams including community managers, designers, data analyst, developers and project managers, have worked side by side to change the “out of the box” face of Lithium’s community platform and create completely customized UI, which follows an irreverent and funny style that fits perfectly into the culture of our main audience: the gamer.     Because we are a community of gamers, gamification breathes at the core of our design concepts.     In addition, we have aligned our platform’s look and feel with rest of official PlayStation sites such as our main website PlayStation.com, in order to provide our users with a unified UX across all PlayStation online entities.     We have tried to move away from overpopulated pages with several widgets and CTAs and move into a more minimalist design that clearly defines the function of each page within the overall user journey across the platform.      SIEE / PlayStation is a big retailer company with several key products & services our community is interested in. Thousands of messages are posted each month about these products & services and therefore our designs always aimed to facilitate a dynamic navigation between different topics  within the community. Provide our users with at a glance view of our latest and most popular topics  is a must.   We have introduce an additional navigation bar which help users to navigate across their personal community areas (profile, notifications, Private messages and settings) with just 1 click.     Finally, as our community is divided between supports and not support areas, we have introduced clever design concepts to help us routing visitors to the right place of the community depending on their necessities. Those designs always maintain a gaming style to maintain the platform in harmony .     All these concepts are extrapolated to our new responsive designs:     How we executed our community design   Our design approach is one of the key elements for achieving our community goals focused on supporting our overall marketing strategy.   A Community Steering Committee, a group of people with different expertise such us community managers, data analysts, UX designers, developers…, manage the different phases of executions for those objectives.   A group of Community Managers and other Marketing peers work together to define the list of key community priorities for next year. These objectives need to be validated by Senior Management and once that happens, the Steering Committee start working on them.   As kick off point, our Analytics and Reporting team put together a list of reports and analysis suggesting different tactics to approach our objectives. The Community Steering Committee have then different brainstorming sessions supported with those analysis and suggestions, including users surveys results, which will finally crystalized in a well-defined community strategy.   Once the community strategy is established, the designing team lead conversations around what design changes are needed to support the strategy, and they put together different mock-ups to illustrate that. Those design concepts / mock ups are reviewed and signed off by the Community Steering Committee. A report focused on technical feasibility of the new designs is created by the Technical Development team as this stage too.   We always have assigned a Project Manager who creates the project’s specs and scope, and keeps stakeholders updated with the project status all the time. The Analytics and Reporting team suggest KPIs to measure the new designs’ success once they go live and which are included within the project’s specs. .                                                                                  The Project is signed off by The Community Steering Committee and ultimately by the Director of Consumer Experience in SIEE which gives the green light for the development works to start on Lithium Stage.   Once a design change(s) is/are implemented on Stage, they are fully tested in house as well as by a group of selected community members, before we push it live to our community.   After going live we measure on a monthly basis how the new designs help to achieve our objectives.   Our design excellence results   Number of pages views per visit after introduce new navigation design elements Visits to boards from homepage before and after the implementation of the popular topics module Visits to support boards form homepage after introducing our CHI progression after  
Company: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian Schärtl (Project Coordinator Digital Services ) Community:  Vodafone Forum  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Ger... See more...
Company: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian Schärtl (Project Coordinator Digital Services ) Community:  Vodafone Forum  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Germany, with more than 14,000 employees and it's headquarters in Duesseldorf. It is part of the Vodafone Group, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. Currently, more than 45 million people are making use of Vodafone services in Germany.   Since 2015, Vodafone Germany and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland have become one company. Vodafone Germany provides mobile service, fixed network, internet and TV from a single source. Thereby, Vodafone Germany offers the customer a unique converged service experience. Converged service has an impact on the service strategy as well.   A merger brand strategy   Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland decided to implement a common brand strategy. Following this approach we decided to merge our communities as well. Each community was based on different providers.   However, both communities had their own identities, topics, rules and working principles. For this reason – and to make them part of the story - service agents were deeply involved in the project to represent the agent’s perspective of the community.   Based on their platform expertise and operational experience, they provided the basis for a common community management and harmonized principles wherever necessary. Workshops revealed the key differences in moderation approaches between the Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities.   In addition, agents visited each other to understand their daily business. This encouraged agents to work together more closely and intensively. Community coffee cups and a team poster were created to promote the team spirit. Above all, agents appreciated the team building measures:     Vodafone Community used the header to update the users. A changing visualization highlighted the upcoming merger. Additionally, more details were communicated within the community itself. Both user groups should feel as one new common community.   Our Super-User Event   Of course the user involvement is crucial as an active user base is core to any community. Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities together accumulate more than 40 active Super-Users. Users appreciate posts from Super-Users, as they are considered authentic customer feedback. This year, one of the Super-users wrote his 23,000 th post. To continue the good cooperation, the Vodafone Community invited all Super-Users to a merger event in Düsseldorf. All participants received detailed merger information. During a brainstorming session, we, the core project team, agents and Super-Users, developed the major components of our Vodafone Community slogan “Know. Share. Help.”     Some users were skeptical, but Super-Users supported the community, to convince them of the advantages of the new converged community. In cooperation with the Super-Users, the Community also tidied up and moved posts. After having cleaned up, all content was migrated to the merged community, not to lose valuable user input. All users were migrated automatically as well, to make the move as simple as possible for the customers.   At the beginning of the common community, each Super-User got a personalized Community coffee cup and received welcome flyers.     Other events and contests   Related to the upcoming Christmas 2015, the Vodafone Community defined a strategy to get users engaged with the new community. During a competition, users learned more about the new community design structure and had the opportunity to win prizes. Users engaged with the Vodafone and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland product portfolio:     After the merger, all agents got an invitation to celebrate at the headquarters in Düsseldorf. Besides networking, the team analyzed the current collaboration, identified open issues and defined measures to get rid of them. Also the formerly separate Super-User events will be one common central happening in the future.   Now more than 200,000 users are on the platform to exchange, discuss and answer questions. The Vodafone Community is comprised of almost 1 Million posts. Wherever the community is not able to support, Vodafone service agents provide expert know-how.