Company: Canon  Entry submitted by: Patricia M. DiPasquale (pmdCanon) Sr. Manager, Digital Marketing Services Community: Canon Community (community.usa.canon.com/) LSW social channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram  Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Canon U.S.A., Inc., headquartered in Melville, New York, is a leading provider of consumer, business-to-business, and industrial digital imaging solutions to the United States and to Latin America and the Caribbean (excluding Mexico) markets.   With approximately $31 billion in global revenue, its parent company, Canon Inc. (NYSE:CAJ), ranks third overall in U.S. patents registered in 2014† and is one of Fortune Magazine’s World’s Most Admired Companies in 2015.   † Based on weekly patent counts issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office.   Our road to Lithium   The Canon approach to taking on new social platforms is that each has to meet objectives not already covered by other platforms, as well as being able to serve different audiences. There is crossover, of course, but there are unique characteristics as well.   Knowing that the conversation would go on with or without us, we decided to bring that conversation closer to home where we could be a part of it. We set out armed with a list of business objectives, criteria for success, and must-have requirements. After extensive research and comparing the features of available forum platforms, choosing the Lithium-powered Community was a no-brainer.   Of the seven business objectives set for our social platforms, the two main objectives we sought to fulfill with a forum were: Support our customers and build brand loyalty Gain customer insights & feedback   We don’t want to say that either of these are a problem, but the Forum was most certainly the solution. The Canon Community grew quickly, averaging well over 1,000 new members and over 200,000 unique visitors every month. Many answers come from the Community, but our Customer Support Center is there to fill in the gaps.   As one could imagine, having to moderate the Forum, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and Vimeo for the wide range of Canon products, takes a lot of eyeballs and a variety of skillsets. However, once Lithium Social Web announced the inclusion of images as part of the moderation platform, we knew it would be the closest thing to a magic bullet that we could get.   Benefits of a Total Community   As stated earlier, LSW has transformed how our Customer Support Center operates. Previously, the forum was moderated by manually refreshing the page to review the latest posts. And rather than having to figure out where the last moderator left off via sticky notes and email, the tool clearly indicates where the next moderator can start his or her shift.   In regards to digital strategy, LSW allows for a more controlled social environment, meaning that there isn’t as much of a fear factor as there once was when introducing additional social platforms. The ability to moderate the Forum, Facebook and Twitter from a single location, have an automated workflow, and metrics that would satisfy the most finicky of analysts, truly made a difference for our Customer Support Center.   Every post made on the Community, Twitter or Facebook comes into LSW so the team can moderate, escalate, and assist as needed, ensuring that no posts are missed, and that the team can quickly act on trends. The moderators are also able to provide feedback on product complaints and work with product managers at Canon headquarters to help resolve customer issues as soon as a post is made.    Total Community results   While we do not have specific numbers to share, implementing LSW has increased efficiency across the board. The only growth in Customer Support headcount has been when new social channels have been added to the mix. And not even in the quantity that was originally forecasted, which is a huge savings in what is possibly the most expensive cost factor: human resources.   The tool has also improved the moderation of specific hashtags and handles, making it easier to watch for tweets from specific individuals, as well as easily add new hashtags as we see something that needs to be monitored.   By using the filtering functionality, Customer Support is able to weed out tweets from spam-generating handles. This has ensured that the moderators are viewing relevant customer interactions rather than spending time closing out spam.   Lastly, the metrics coming out of LSW have allowed the Customer Support Center to get real insight into the productivity of moderators in a way that they haven't been able to before. This information has been useful for providing a good baseline to create future performance goals for the moderators as well as to schedule staff adequately in the present.   We have received positive feedback from our Customer Support Center, which gives us the affirmation that our solution is working, internally and externally. Here's an example of the feedback we recently received from our Customer Support Center:   We're really happy with LSW and the support team at Lithium.   I wish we had some way to compare pre-LSW to now.  Getting LSW is like going from filling out stacks of paper forms to getting a computer and doing everything electronically; it's such an improvement.  We previously had to record every fan interaction manually (name, date, comment, platform, etc.).  Now, everything is done in a few mouse clicks.  It's honestly made a huge difference in our productivity and has allowed us to concentrate on fan interaction instead of record keeping.        

Company: Foxtel   Entry submitted by: Skye Forrester (skoogle) Head of Digital Customer Contact – Social Media & Community Community: Foxtel Community (http://community.foxtel.com.au/)  LSW: https://www.facebook.com/FOXTEL, https://twitter.com/Foxtel, https://twitter.com/FOXTEL_Help Lithy category: Total Community All Star     Foxtel is one of Australia's most progressive and dynamic media companies, directly employing more than 2,500 people, and delivering a diverse subscription television service to both regional and metropolitan areas over cable, satellite and broadband distribution.   With our fast-growing customer base, almost 870k Facebook Likes and 100k Twitter Followers (as of 22 April 2015), the company required a robust and integrated solution to manage and service both customers and non-customers online – a fresh (but in-demand) approach to support and relieve the company’s traditional and heavily trafficked inbound/outbound call centre. Central to our needs was the ability to (1) respond to Social Media enquiries with accuracy, speed and ease and (2) create the online destination, Foxtel Community, to tap into the audience’s passion for our industry and product; increase customer advocacy and engagement; and achieve call deflection through peer-to-peer and self-servicing.   Enter Lithium.   Benefits of a Total Community     Foxtel Community and Lithium Social Web (LSW) are managed in-house by the Digital Customer Contact Team (DCCT). DCCT is responsible for helping existing and prospective customers with all Foxtel servicing enquiries received via digital channels:   With the team split across two sites at either end of the country, it was imperative to equip agents with the right tools, training and ongoing support to provide a seamless and cohesive customer experience. To this end, LSW enables and supports us to:   Respond to all enquiries directed to Foxtel in Facebook and Twitter Take account level enquiries ‘offline’ to manage via phone, email or chat Refer escalated enquiries to our dedicated Customer Resolutions Team Moderate and implement a ‘3 warnings and you’re out’ system for page rule breaches to create a friendly, productive environment for all customers Integrate reporting to the wider business for a full customer journey view Crucially, LSW also enables early detection, root cause analysis and communication of customer impacting issues. In addition to the above, Lithium’s Community enables and supports us to:   Communicate customer impacting issues and updates through to resolution Conduct pilot/beta trials (closed groups) Troubleshoot with customers, the leading driver of visits to Foxtel Community Host our dedicated blog, The Green Room, to educate customers on our core offering – our programming Promote campaigns and products to increase customer satisfaction and company revenue Share Foxtel brand announcements Offer peer-to-peer and self-servicing options for contact deflection Build rapport with customers and potential customers to grow customer advocacy Contribute ideas, feedback and innovations to Foxtel products and services Implement a gamification strategy to keep community members engaged and active, and create subject matter experts Provide 24/7 support to consumers on any mobile or fixed device Optimize our Community using built-in SEO tools   Our Total Community results   We aim to answer all social media enquiries (Facebook and Twitter) within two hours during business hours, seven days a week, while posts in Foxtel Community that haven’t had a peer response are actioned after 48 hours. In 2014, Lithium tools enabled us to action more than 480k servicing enquiries through social media, and play host to more than 920k unique visitors and 2.2 million page views. In 2015 (up until 19 April 2015), we have so far experienced 157k servicing enquiries through social media, 699k unique visitors, and 1.76 million page views.   Importantly, Lithium Community and LSW greatly assisted us to manage major customer events – including the launch of our new pricing and packaging structure and the launch of our latest Personal Video Recorder, iQ3 – that would have previously been challenging for the business to handle due to the increase in customer contacts.   Customer Advocacy across digital servicing continues to increase YoY as a result of structured workflow (LSW and Community) for digital servicing.    

Company: A1 Telekom Austria AG  Entry submitted by: Esther Groth (esther27) Market Development and Digital Business Community: A1 Support Community (www.a1community.net)  Lithy category: Total Community All Star   A1 Telekom Austria AG is Austria’s leading communications provider, encompassing more than 5.4 million mobile communications customers and almost 2.3 million fixed access lines. The offers by A1 include voice telephony, internet access, digital cable division, data and IT solutions, value added services, wholesale services and mobile business and payment solutions. With four strong and established brands (A1, bob, Red Bull Mobile and yesss!) A1 successfully targets various different markets, ranging from premium quality to low budget.   A1 is part of the Telekom Austria Group which holds eight international operations in eight CEE countries. Headquartered in Vienna, A1 employs approximately 8,600 employees.   In 2014, A1 started its largest infrastructure investment with the fiber optic broadband roll-out in cooperation with the Austrian government and the national broadband plan.   Placing the customer at the heart of A1’s business has been key for the company’s ambitions to continue leading the Austrian telecommunications industry. This has been emphasized in the core values “Close to the customers”, “Simple” and “Trendsetting”. Hence, the A1 support community aims to provide the best service for our customers, to efficiently distribute the A1 brand and to use the potential of our crowd to develop new products, services and authentic user-generated content.   Through the Lithium community platform and LSW we could successfully tackle our main challenge to understand our social customers in more depth (360° social customer profiles). By modeling the social history of all interactions in LSW and using the behavioral tools of the Lithium community we can generate quantifiable ROI in terms of increased sales and reduced service costs.   We could also improve the following points of our social customer care processes:   Technical feasibility – Adequate infrastructure for growing visitor flows looking for digital service   Workforce optimization. – Considerable volumes of community requests can be efficiently managed by social media agents via efficient routing and prioritizing measures   Linkage between public network and owned social properties via Facbook tab application –Facebook users can be directed to our own knowledge site and get a deeper level of engagement and experience among an articulated and curated crowd   Peer-to-peer engagement – In the A1 Support Community users help users and with LSW social media agents can effectively assess and steer the need of providing additional answers to the user-generated content   Trend intelligence – By engaging community members in idea exchange boards and through intelligent tagging we can identify trending topics and connect them with observations from our other social media channels   Premature crisis management – LSW enables qualitative sentiment analysis of community content and helps to raise awareness for customer dissatisfaction with our service   Benefits of having a Lithium Community and LSW for our digital strategy   With our Lithium-powered Community and LSW we are able to exercise full control over the digital service topics incurring within the service tools of the A1.net online portal or on the other A1 social media channels. A specific process has been established for fast improvement measures where service issues were reported by community users. This process entails the identification of service issues, e.g. with the disrupted transmission of A1 TV on customers’ TV screens, by the A1 social media team. With LSW the social media team was able to assign new tags to this kind of issue and to observe the sentiments resulting from this topic. The service disruption as well as the magnitude of concerned customers was reported to the A1 customer and field service to prepare and sensitize all customer touch points. In a second step the A1 TV product management was informed and presented with the LSW analysis. Consequently, reasons for the service disruptions were analyzed and the product management could take up the depth of the issue by receiving daily updates from the community. The A1 TV product management team was also able to actively listen to the community discussions of the TV issues and the proposed solutions by members. As the share of negative sentiments towards A1 TV began to rise the corporate communications department was integrated in order to create unified statements regarding criticism in other media. Subsequently, a broader project team responsible for fast corrections of the detected issues with A1 TV was built. By involving the A1 social media team into the project, informal feedback and solutions posted by the community crowd were taken into account and directly integrated into the product improvements. Within 12 days A1 managed to provide A1 TV customers with a new interface, improved connectivity and a reduction in switching time.   The A1 Support Community currently counts 25,000 logins per month and has acquired 175,000 registered members so far. With an average real service substitution rate of 25%, A1 was able to save about 50.000 service interaction in January 2015 (calls and e-mails per month) and could therefore strongly increase its agent efficiency gains. What is more, although the amount of total community visits dropped in summer 2014 because community posts were then also integrated into the A1.net portal search the traffic began to soar up again in the following months. In addition, the weighted average for the real service substitution rate also increased and refers to an even more purposeful visitor stream.     With 80% of user-generated content A1 is also able to draw detailed insights from the community posts and create more innovative and competitive services for its subscribers.  

Company: HSN  Entry submitted by: Matt See (MattHSN) Director, Social & Games Community: HSN Community (http://community.hsn.com, http://blogs.hsn.com) Lithy category: Total Community All Star   HSN is all about making shopping FUN! Great products and unique experiences that you can’t find anywhere else, plus exclusive access to celebrities and sweepstakes. The HSN Community makes that possible by connecting them with all their favorite HSN Hosts and Partners and introducing them to fellow shoppers just like themselves who share their passion for great deals & shopping!   Lithium Community & LSW provides a platform that empowers HSN to efficiently moderate, market, measure and scale conversation across owned and earned platforms including Facebook, Twitter and the HSN Community. It gives our customers a seamless experience across all devices to engage with HSN wherever they are and provides real business value back by driving quality conversation around HSN product, which in turn increases conversion through people looking for similar topics across natural search.   Benefits of a Total Community   Moderation work flows have become much easier to manage across multiple people on a team working 22-hours a day across multiple channels. Assigning moderation tasks and reviewing the analytics that LSW generates has provided more insight into the volume and sentiment of conversation happening, which has allowed us to be smarter as an organization and as a team when identifying new community guidelines, reacting to crises, and day-to-day community management. Lithium Community has allowed us to also remove redundant engagement platforms so that conversations are now ONLY happening on one platform, but integrated and optimized for all screens.   Our Total Community Results   +2,502.4% in Membership Y/Y +241.8% in Unique Visitors Y/Y +109.4% in Posts Y/Y +105.7% in Sessions Y/Y Stats are still growing this year. We’re seeing +40% in Sales Y/Y in Q1 this year.  

Company: Claro   Entry submitted by:  Iasmine Pereira (Iasmine) and Luciano Piva (Lpivap)   Community:  Comunidade Claro hdtv (http://comunidadeclarohdtv.claro.com.br/) Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Claro TV is a Brazilian satellite pay-TV operator, controlled by Mexican company America Movil, one of the largest groups of mobile telephony in the world that, from 2006, began to adopt Claro brand in 16 countries of America. With over 3 million subscribers, Claro TV is now the fourth largest pay-TV operator in Brazil.      We decided to implement the Community and LSW because we wanted a new user experience for our brand which would bring with it key business and marketing opportunities such as: Call deflection; Reduced customer attrition; ROI optimization; Become an innovative player in the Brazilian Market; Create a CRM channel with our members and customers; Reduced Support costs.     Benefits of a Total Community   Both LSW and Community have been decisive in helping us be more effective on social channels and establishing a closer brand relationship with our customers.   The Community is a source of valuable content both for customers looking for solutions to problems and to Claro TV fans searching for the latest Claro news. To help direct our customers to the community from our main domain and ensure they can quickly find the information they need, the Claro TV website was redeveloped to include several various touch points to the community and federated search, leading to a 45% increase in Community page views.   In addition to our own promotion efforts, the community has benefited from seeing its content shared on the social web by some of our fans, expanding the community’s reach and driving engagement.   The Community also increased registrations for Minha Claro, an exclusive online account management tool for Claro customers. This increase is very important because not only is Minha Claro useful for future CRM purposes, the tool offers a number of support features that generate further call deflection from Customer Support.   With LSW we are able to unify support across social channels, and the agents are able to answer more questions in less time.  This productivity increase meant we were able to reduce the team while maintaining our SLA’s and volume of response.  The integration of Community and LSW means that we are able to link to community topics in our social responses, potentially reducing agents’ time to response while providing an additional means of promoting the community.   Our results   In the first 8 months of the ClaroTV Community and Social support through LSW we have seen impressive results:   40% month on month growth of unique visitors 23% month on month growth of registrations 18% month on month growth of new topics 86% customer satisfaction score for social support through LSW 50% increase in agent responses per day compared to our previous tool   On top of that, solution views continue to grow 100% month on month, increasing the reach of peer-to-peer solved topics and potentially contributing to support deflection.