Company:  TELUS Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager) Community: TELUS Neighbourhood Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, with $12.5 billion of annual revenue and 12.5 million customer connections, including 8.5 million wireless subscribers, 1.5 million residential network access lines, 1.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers and 1.0 million TELUS TV customers. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video, and is Canada's largest healthcare IT provider.   Our Road to Lithium   In 2010, we began engaging and supporting customers through Twitter, leveraging the opportunity of conversations that customers were already having. We followed their lead going to where they were, wanting to join in the conversation. As this sustained and grew, our organization’s listening/marketing tools no longer sufficed; we needed a toolset focused on conversation and case management. Through 2012 we explored tools across the market, and at the end of 2012, after a very successful pilot, we signed with Lithium for LSW.   In 2013, we opened our Facebook wall and established it as an additional customer engagement channel beyond its previous focus of marketing and brand conversation. Additionally, seeing the opportunity to crowdsource knowledge and bring social conversation closer to our own domain, we embarked on a journey to build an on-domain community. After the comparison of several solutions, we selected Lithium, and were able to launch our community forum platform, the TELUS Neighbourhood, eight weeks later. It was augmented with Ideas in 2014 to capture and create conversation around customer concepts and suggestions, as well as with a Blog and Articles (Tribal Knowledge Base) in 2015 to broaden our customer engagement.   Everyone Wins with a Total Community   Our team strives to create a meaningful social experience for every customer and each interaction. In 2015, we reimagined our social strategy, developing a new operations team focused on not just customer service and engagement, but on content development and deep communication skills. Pairing this team investment with existing LSW capability, the launch of the Tribal Knowledge Base inside our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood, and LSW campaign and publishing capability, we have developed and implemented a virtuous cycle of customer listening, engagement, and needs fulfillment (see supporting visual).     Identifying and listening to customers needs, both through active participation (LSW analytics of Twitter, Facebook, and the TELUS Neighbourhood posting across interaction styles) and passive participation (LSI analytics of most popular on-domain forum content), we gain a deep insight into customer experience needs. With this insight, and leveraging the robust skillset of our social media operations team, we can polish and curate the most desired content in to Articles (our community Tribal Knowledge Base implementation). Then, leveraging the LSW Publishing Beta and other tools, we market and promote that community-inspired/authored content through our established social channels as well as contextually in the course of related support conversations.   A key example of this strategy in action was our development and maintenance of a software update schedule. Upon hearing social conversation and having customer concerns expressed, we were made aware of an opportunity to more transparently share the process for and schedule around delivering software updates to mobile devices. We created a Blog post and Article that addressed these needs, and have leveraged them to great success in fielding inquiries and concerns.   A second example was the StageFright campaign. When Android customers were vulnerable to the StageFright exploit and it started gaining media attention and driving social conversations, we wanted to get in front of the questions. As such, we rapidly developed an Article about the StageFright vulnerability, leveraging content from users already posting. Customers could then be referred to this not only in social, but via our IVR when phoning in and through a mass text campaign where we promoted the Article and community to all Android device users.   This all happens while engaging and supporting customers in near real-time response on Twitter and Facebook. In 2016, we have already supported over 11,000 off-domain social conversations, with over 80% of Twitter responses done in under 35 minutes. This is springboarding off of the over 48,000 conversations we supported in the whole of 2015, and a sign of ongoing engagement.   Using Total Community practices internally, we developed a wholly cross-functional working team, combining the strengths and perspectives of the new operations team, our Marketing Communications Team, and Media Relations teams to deliver an entirely aligned experience for key brand initiatives, namely our #ExpectMore campaign, where we drove and contributed to conversation about customer experience. This enabled rapid development of content and responses, both written and in video.   To support and grow the on-domain portion of our Total Community, we completed the work on migrating our on-domain custom community in to Lithium responsive, launching it in January 2016. This more reliable, better performing, and more feature-rich implementation of the community has spurred on over 1,600 community posts YTD, a sign of strong growth compared to the 5,889 posts seen in 2015. It should be noted that over 90% of that content is customer-generated (i.e. not moderator or community admin). More exciting than that is that we have already welcomed over 330,000 unique visits so far this year, a more than 28% growth over this same period last year and a strong start as we plan to improve over the 1.33 million total unique visits we enjoyed in 2015.   Lastly, we quietly launched our Community Power User (CPU) Program, which more formally enlists and engages our most influential and active community users. Each was presented with a formal welcome package, and has regular live conversations with our community management team, as well as participation with one another in a private CPU community board. While we work to expand and develop a public plan for the program, this launch helps sustain the contributions of three key individuals who contributed 26% of community content in Q1 2016.   This integrative total community strategy resonates well with our users. When surveyed in Q1 of 2016, they shared a 98%+ satisfaction rate with their social experience with TELUS and, based on that experience, 90% are likely to to recommend TELUS to friends and family, and 89% are likely to share their social experience. These results are all improved substantially over historical, reflective of the value of our new operational model and integrative total community approach.   Quantitatively, this total community approach also serves the business. By serving in social and cultivating content of need to our customers, we are targeting, and are well on track to meet, $3.6M in operational support cost savings through 2016, which continues to grow the value we have realized each year.   Our Q1 2016 Total Community Results   Harnessing the power of social and our total community strategy, we meet the needs of our customers, we delight them, and we save organizational cost. Win, win, win. A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:   > 11,000 Twitter and Facebook conversations and over 30,000 responses sent 80% of Twitter conversations responded to in 35 minutes or less > 1,600 community posts, 90%+ community-created > 330,000 unique community visits 98% customer satisfaction 90% likelihood to recommend TELUS (NPS) 89% likelihood to share experience Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit) $3.6M in annualized operational savings

Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.   The Fido Community turns 5   To celebrate the Fido Community’s 5 th year anniversary, we held a month-long contest throughout September 2015. In order to enter the draw for a chance to win one of 10 prizes (total of $4000 in prizes), participants were invited to post their best cellular tip and/or trick into the Tips & Tricks board. This new board was created for the contest.   The goals were to: Increase Community registrations; Increase overall Community traffic and liveliness (posts, likes, page views, unique visitors); Raise Community awareness, both externally and internally; Increase useful content in the Community; And, of course, to celebrate the Community’s 5 th   We received a total of 371 entries, and some of the best Tips & Tricks were shared on our Social Media properties to promote the Community and give our Community members some exposure and recognition.   Our promotional tactic consisted of a Community blog post to announce and describe the contest, along with the rules & regulations. We then promoted this blog post using the following methods: Our social media properties (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram post)Banner on the homepage of our website Special blurb in emails to customers Text message (to targeted customers)   Facebook Post     On Twitter     Banner on Fido.ca     On September 15 th , the actual anniversary date of the Community, we wrote a second Community blog post to remind everyone of the contest and to keep the hype going. We took this opportunity to thank our Community members who have been with us since the start. This blog post was also shared on our Social Media properties, but this time with curiosity sparking infographics to recap the 5 years:     Community Tip Shared on Social Media     Our Results   The results were outstanding! We met each and every one of our goals. The contest increased the Community liveliness, traffic, and overall interaction to a level we hadn’t seen before. Multiple records were broken during the month of September 2015 (percentages are in comparison to the previous month):     The contest was also very well received by the Community, who took joy in sharing their feedback. Our first blog post generated many comments, which mostly consisted of happy birthday wishes and expressions of excitement towards the prizes. Many members voiced their happiness, including top contributors:     The birthday contest not only served as a means to break traffic and registration records, but also as a means of promotion. Even after the contest ended, our traffic continued to increase, justifying our promotional efforts.            

Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.   Our Road to Lithium   In 2010, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the Fido Community. We wanted a best in class platform and a means for customers to self-serve, thereby deflecting calls from our contact centres. The support provided at that time was predominantly peer-to-peer technical support.   Around the same time, we launched our Social Support team, offering our customers a new and convenient support option. As such, we began to support and engage our customers on Twitter and Facebook. As our customers grew comfortable with these channels, they began to adopt this new means of social support and the number of followers grew.   In 2013, in order to further increase engagement on our social platforms, the scope of support provided in the Community expanded to include discussions on all consumer products and services.   Recognizing the need for optimizing responses and better reporting capabilities for our social support, we began searching for a social tool that would enable better customer engagement and provide valuable insights through data collection and reporting. After researching a number of social engagement tools, we found Lithium Social Web (LSW) to be the best option to meet our objectives and in 2014, the Social Support team was transitioned to the LSW platform. The transition proved valuable; giving us access to new functionalities and more insightful reporting.   In 2015, the company placed a huge emphasis on the Community and Social Media support, so we went ahead and included multiple enhancements and redesigns, which have proven to have a positive impact on our results. Thanks to the support and insights available through LSW and LSI, our Social Support team was able to consistently offer best-in-class service and deliver a NPS score amongst the highest throughout the company’s customer service channels.   When customers activate their Fido service, they receive this email:      Benefits of Having a Community and LSW   Having a Community is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Consumers have grown accustom to reading reviews and researching products online. “What do you recommend?” is a question anyone who’s worked in the servicing industry has heard. One of the greatest advantages of having a Community is that all this information is centralized, tabulated, searchable and kept up to date. Another great advantage is that some traffic directed to the Community is traffic deflected from our contact centres, resulting in the reduction in operational costs.   In most communities, questions are answered publicly, but our Lithium community allows us to answer our customers in private as well. This is very useful when customers have questions concerning their services or account, requiring us to discuss and exchange sensitive information. Our customers also love that we can treat their requests directly from the Community, as opposed to referring them to our other contact channels.   We also use the Community as a means of communication with our customers. For example, we inform our customers of upcoming software updates, Fido sponsored events, known issues, etc. This transparent approach is truly appreciated by our community members. But why stop there? Our contact centres also send our customers links to useful articles found in the Community, such as ways to pay your bill, ways to activate services, etc. The Community is used to support our customers even when they call in. Talk about versatility.   How do we keep track of all this information and manage all this traffic? That’s where LSW comes in.   LSW proved to be the perfect tool for our Community moderators, as it helped improve our response time by keeping on top of all Community posts, as opposed to sorting through them individually. To do this, we created a Community queue in LSW to receive all incoming Community posts. LSW allows us to “snooze” Community posts to allow time for our members to respond, based on our response strategy. We also created a common “FidoSolutions” Community profile, which we use for all of our Community PMs only, to make the process seamless from a customer perspective. In turn, this helped us be more efficient, improve our CHI score, response time, call deflection rates and resulted in cost savings.     LSW also proved efficient to help our Social Media Specialists to manage our incoming social media posts, improve on our response time and promote the Community thanks to the knowledge base feature. A single click allows us to answer our customers by sharing articles found within the Community and our website. It’s an incredible time saver and our Specialists and customers love it!   Here are some of the LSW features that help us deliver best in class service: Community response time: Moderators can “snooze” posts for a certain amount of time, based on our response strategy. The snooze functionality is essential to our Community moderation process. We snooze non-account specific inquiries, to give other Community members a chance to respond. If no one responds, we step in and assist. This incredibly useful functionality ensures no one is ever left unanswered. CommunityPMs: Moderators can take over the PM conversations from other moderators once their work shift has ended, greatly increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction. Information centralization: All customer information is now centralized, including contact info, and even notes for internal purposes. Profile merging: LSW allows us to merge customers various social profiles, so we always know who we are speaking with. Analytics and tags: This LSW feature helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…. Thanks to Analytics, we can clearly see what our customers are talking about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner. Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage with people who aren’t specifically reaching out to us. Klout: Allows us to prioritize influencers within our Queues and offer support accordingly.   Let’s not forget that we also utilize shared dashboards for real time reporting to specific people in the company and our launching a pilot for LSW experts in 2016 to hopefully improve our response time.   Our Results   LSW has helped us decrease our Community response time to 120 min in 2016 (93% improvement over 2014 and 34% over last year) while increasing our CHI score by 159 points. Our cost savings and call deflection rates continue to increase. In 2015, our customer survey results indicated over $385K in cost savings by deflecting calls from our contact centre. In the first quarter of 2016 alone, our customer surveys have shown we have already surpassed $625K in cost savings, and that is only for the Community.       For our Social Media Support, the implementation of LSW allowed us to maintain a response time of 15 minutes throughout 2015. The results from our customer surveys state that we recorded $329K in cost savings and ended 2015 with an NPS of over +60. We also ended the year with a Resolution rate of 90%, ascertaining our Social Support channels as a customer favourite.   Additionally, LSW allowed us to keep watch over our volumes and response time when we launched Facebook Messenger as a support channel through our website, and consequently, helped us to earn and keep the “very responsive” badge on Facebook.    

Company:  TELUS Entry submitted by:Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager) Community: TELUS Neighbourhood Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, with $12.5 billion of annual revenue and 12.5 million customer connections, including 8.5 million wireless subscribers, 1.5 million residential network access lines, 1.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers and 1.0 million TELUS TV customers. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video, and is Canada's largest healthcare IT provider.   Our Community Goals   Since its launch in 2013, the TELUS Neighbourhood has been focused on providing support content and conversations to users with the goal of offsetting live contact, expanding scope of support through crowdsourced content, and connecting customers more deeply with each other and with TELUS.   A Standout Responsive Design   The TELUS Neighbourhood employs a very deep digital standards guide developed by TELUS to guide all of our online experiences. In this way, our brand becomes a platform from which all experiences emerge, making our community immediately visually familiar to users.   We have employed the use of Lithium responsive (and our own customized approach to responsive before that) to extend that familiar experience across all devices, making an optimized mobile experience and bringing consistency of experience across screen sizes.   We leverage digital assets and design to make for a delightful and outcome-oriented community. Our standards make for a very clean presentation with no clutter, the focus being to provide users with what would satisfy their real needs. Some examples are the different navigational elements in place, designed to let our users get to the information they want as quickly as possible, with current and relevant content easily surfaced for the user.   How We Built our Custom Redesign   In late 2014, to employ brand standards and to match with a newly redesigned telus.com, we built a custom redesign of the Neighbourhood, using the Lithium API to push and pull content with a responsive frontend. While this achieved the use of our digital standards, it came at the cost of a wide number of features and performance. To address this, we became active in the Lithium responsive beta program in mid-2015.   In concert with the Lithium team, we undertook a deep inventory of components both operationally in place or desired. Comparing that inventory to the Lithium component set, we developed a plan to marry initial intent to existing components, striking a strong balance between standards, customization, and best practices.   We then embarked on a wireframing exercise to lock down the relative position of elements, leveraging the digital standards guide to direct look and feel. Through this, we further identified opportunities to optimize for experience and sustainability while still keeping the spirit of our digital standards adhered to.   We released for the first time in January 2016, and have since done a number of subsequent publishes to continue to refine the experience to significantly positive response and engagement from our users.         Our Q1 2016 Design Excellence Results   A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:   28% YoY growth in traffic (comparing Q1 2016 to Q1 2015) > 330,000 unique community visits Over 47% of traffic from mobile/tablet (vs. ~34% mobile traffic in late 2014) 286% growth in kudos given (comparing Q1 2016 to Q1 2015) Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit) $3.6M in annual operational savings

Company:  TELUS Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager) Community: TELUS Neighbourhood Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, with $12.5 billion of annual revenue and 12.5 million customer connections, including 8.5 million wireless subscribers, 1.5 million residential network access lines, 1.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers and 1.0 million TELUS TV customers. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video, and is Canada's largest healthcare IT provider.   Putting our Customers First   Our top priority since 2010 is putting our customers first. We do this by consistently delivering exceptional client experiences and winning the hearts and minds of Canadians on our journey to become a world leader when it comes to the likelihood that our customers recommend our products, services and people.   We know that listening to our customers is an integral part of our Customers First journey and that taking action based on what they say is just as important. Over the years, we’ve worked harder to identify what our customers are looking for and delivered products, services and experiences that met their expectations.   Every team member, regardless of their role, has a responsibility to put customers first, which is why we have continued to integrate a Customers First culture across the organization.   How We Executed Our Customers First Initiative   In 2015, we reimagined our social strategy, developing a new operations team focused on not just customer service and engagement, but on content development and deep communication skills. Pairing this team investment with existing LSW capability, the launch of the Tribal Knowledge Base inside our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood, and publishing capability, we have developed and implemented a virtuous cycle of customer listening, engagement, and needs fulfillment (see supporting visual).   This meant redefining and redesigning the role of social operations, its job description, and its day to day functions. We diligently tested and recruited for this newly redefined role, and have worked with the successful team members to provide them with increased levels of access to and capabilities within both LSW and our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood.   Our goal was to create a team rooted in both service and content creation excellence who could look at customer questions as unmet demand for support content, then work to meet that demand with social and crowdsourced content. In doing so, we engage and satisfy our users while saving organizational cost. Through our revamped operational team, their access to content creation, adoption of LSW publishing and campaign capability, and their access to management of and response to Ideas, Blog, and Articles (TKB) conversations, we have effectively realized that goal.   A key example of this strategy in action was our development and maintenance of a software update schedule. Upon hearing social conversation and having customer concerns expressed, we were made aware of an opportunity to more transparently share the process for and schedule around delivering software updates to mobile devices. We created a Blog post and Article that addressed these needs, and have leveraged them to great success in fielding inquiries and concerns.   A second example was the StageFright campaign. When Android customers were vulnerable to the StageFright exploit and it started gaining media attention and driving social conversations, we wanted to get in front of the questions. As such, we rapidly developed an Article about the StageFright vulnerability, leveraging content from users already posting. Customers could then be referred to this not only in social, but via our IVR when phoning in and through a mass text campaign where we promoted the Article and community to all Android device users.     Our Q1 2016 Success Results   A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:   98% customer satisfaction 90% likelihood to recommend TELUS (NPS) 89% likelihood to share experience > 11,000 Twitter and Facebook conversations and over 30,000 responses sent 80% of Twitter conversations responded to in 35 minutes or less > 1,600 community posts, 90%+ community-created > 330,000 unique community visits Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit) $3.6M in annualized operational savings

Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.   Our Goals   Based on our target market, the Fido brand’s main focus is to enhance and grow servicing through self-serve. Our Community is a big part of this focus as it allows customers to help out other customers, and houses a lot of information/solutions, which in turn brings cost savings to the company. Our Community goals in 2015 were to:   Redesign our Community in order to enhance the customer experience. Improve functionalities and navigation. Promote growth of the Community through various initiatives and promotional tactics. Optimize the content and increase the useful information for our members.   How We Stand Out   What makes our Community unique is our overall brand-aligned layout, our seamless navigation experience, our custom components, and our front and center search bar. Each of our boards have their own topic-specific banner with an embedded welcome message so our members feel at home. We also made sure that our website header appeared at the top of every page, so members would get the feeling that they are still on our website.   When we launched our front and center search bar, the focus was on improving the overall navigation experience. We figured “what’s the point of having all this useful information if you’re having trouble finding it?”. The search tool now displays results found throughout the Community, as opposed to results found within the specific board from which the search was initiated.       We also have a big focus on people! We promote our super users (aka MVPs, or Most Valuable Posters), our Community crew and we introduced hover cards to create more life and real people to the experience. We even have leader boards on the Community home page so everyone can see who’s ripping it! Fido is all about bringing people together.     In 2015, we completed a redesign of our Gamification strategy.   Our ranking structure was redefined to replace outdated titles to cooler, more personal titles like ‘I’m a prodigy’. We launched badges with brand-aligned images, names and descriptions in order to give our Community members the recognition they deserve.     We also redesigned all of our notification emails to make sure they were aligned with our branding.     In Q1 of 2016, we introduced a responsive mobile experience.     All these amazing features combined allow us to provide best in class experience aligned with our brand objectives.   Designing an Awesome Community   In order to transform our Community into one that would most please our members, we opted to work with Lithium so as to capitalize on their expertise. We also created an internal working team, combined of the Community crew, Digital, Communications and Brand team.     Benchmarking best practices, we selected elements of our brand image, such as “we are a people company”, and incorporated them into our community image design. We brainstormed with the working team on what we would like to have encompassed in the Community, and Lithium took this information in order to present us with wireframes. Following an approval process to ensure that we were all aligned, Lithium provided us with mockups. Once the mockup approval process was complete, Lithium proceeded to redesign the Community in Stage, and then came the launch of our brilliant new Community followed by a short post launch UAT process.   All in all, the process was seamless and we’re very proud of the Community we have today. We couldn’t be happier!   In early 2016, we went through a similar yet smaller scale redesign and UAT process in order to enhance our mobile responsiveness. We collaborated with Lithium to complete this. This second process was less extensive and seamless.   We worked internally with our brand team to redesign our email notifications, and thanks to the efficiency of Stage and the helpful tips and instructions from the Lithium Community, we were able to launch our new email notifications on our own without any snags.   We also used Lithium’s professional services to redesign and launch our badges.   Our Success   Compared to 2014, 2015 was clearly a winning year for us. Our registered members increased by 44%. The number of posts increased by a whopping 105%. Our page views and unique visitors increased by 57% and 61% respectively. All these increases in traffic and liveliness, along with other factors such as the implementation of our MVP program, resulted in our CHI score going up by 159 points.  

Company: du Contact: Samya Chahin (Director Digital Self Service) Community: du Community Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   About our team: Digital Business Our goal is to drive the digital revolution for our customers and our business. We will do this by offering a seamless, excellent experience across all our digital channels, as well as finding smarter digital solutions that offer the greatest value.   About du du started operating in 2007, offering mobile and fixed telephony, broadband connectivity and IPTV services. Today, we serve more than 7.5 million individual customers and over 80,000 businesses in the UAE. We also provide carrier services for businesses and satellite up/downlink services for TV broadcasters.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives  We see all of our digital channels, including du Community, as an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. Our aim is to set the standard for service providers in the UAE by giving customers the best experience online. 2015 was a period of intense investment in our digital channels to improve customer satisfaction, take away pain points and reduce the need to queue in stores or at our call centres: Revamping our online self-service channel ‘My Account’ – to offer 50+ online self-service features – resulting in 25% increase in users in just six months: Added flexibility – quick and easy way to change plans Greater transparency – view payment and usage history Trouble shooting – allowing customers better manage spending and resolve queries Only UAE telecom to allow customers to renew personal ID online – previously customers had to queue in store to renew ID in person to comply with the country’s strict ‘My Number My Identity’ requirements.   Offered queue jumping service on du App We’ve reduced their waiting time in du stores by allowing customers to forward book appointments on du App. Customers can book appointments up to two hours before visiting a du store and ensure they’re next to be seen on arrival – minimizing their wait time. Nearly 12K customers saved time using the service in the first 3 months.   du App revamp A major revamp of du App added new functionalities and a vastly improved user experience as it moved from hybrid to native. This resulted in a 37% increase in downloads of the du App – encouraging customers to switch to a more convenient way of paying for and managing their services.   Positive customer satisfaction indicators from our digital initiatives in 2015     The most  important customer issue we  were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation     We want our customers to spend time on the things that matter most to them, not queueing in our stores or on the phone to our call centers. Like any major service provider we experience an unnecessarily high volume of customers visiting, these channels which is a good spend neither of their time, or efficient operationally for our business. Our Community allows us to remedy this problem by solving basic problems for customers.   We also believe communities build trust between brands and people. Engage in two-way conversations with our customers is essential to building relationships with them. Our Community allows us to be more open as an organization, listen to our customers, help them and act on their advice to improve service and drive innovation.     In 2015 the main focus for us was to understand community’s member need and to encourage community to help each other and make it easier for them to find solutions. We believe word of mouth is key to spread trust with du and the Community is the ideal place for this.     Results: Community is giving the opportunity to du employees to interact with customers directly, in a less formal way, which facilitates better discussion and shows we are more open as a brand. This gives us a deeper understanding of their needs and accordingly improve our services as per customer expectation. We are now starting an ‘ask the experts programme’ with leaders in our organization facing live questions on the community.   Compared to 2014, we observed an increase of completed registrations by 84% and an increase of unique visits by 207% by end of 2015 – indicating value to our customers.   The idea section in the Community proved very successful. This gave customers an opportunity to share ideas, observations and suggestions for improvements. A dedicated team have been assigned to look into over 100 ideas shared, with 35% likely to be taken forward to fulfill the customers needs.   These ideas also contribute to the Ruler of Dubai’s vision for the city to be the happiest in the world. The team assigned to Community team also share the responsibility of working with the eGovernment smart initiative to collect from the public ideas and comments to participate in building the future of Dubai. This helps maximize the value of each idea shared.     Our metrics Since we launched du Community, our customer contact base measure, which presents the number of customer complaints received through shops and contact centers versus subscriber base has decreased from December 2014 to December 2015 by 5%.     NPS scores for online channels:     The first Community value analytics report resulted in an impressive satisfaction result compared to similar telcos:   83% come to the community to search for information 59% found the information they are looking for on the Community 33% would call support, 14% would go to the store & 13% would post on Community their question if they can’t find an answer 53% would recommend Community to friends   du Community stands at the top when benchmarked with communities of top 4 global communication service providers (CSP) for on customer satisfaction.   Source of top 4 CSP: Lithium December 2015      

Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.   Meeting Our Business Goals                      Consumers have grown accustom to reading reviews and researching products online. “What do you recommend?” is a question anyone who’s worked in the servicing industry has heard. One of the greatest advantages of having a Community is that all this information is centralized, tabulated, searchable and kept up to date. Another great advantage is that a lot of traffic directed to the Community is traffic deflected from our contact centres, resulting in the reduction in operational costs.   In most communities, questions are answered publicly, but on our Community we answer our customers in private as well. This is very useful for when customers have questions concerning their services or account, requiring us to discuss and exchange confidential information. Our customers also love that we can treat their requests directly from the Community, as opposed to referring them to our other contact channels.   We also use the Community as a means of communication with our customers. For example, we inform our customers of upcoming software updates, Fido sponsored events, known issues, etc. This transparent approach is truly appreciated by our community members. But why stop there? Our contact centres also send our customers links to useful articles found in the Community, such as ways to pay your bill, ways to activate services, etc. The Community is used to support our customers even when they call in. Talk about versatility.   How do we keep track of all this information and manage all this traffic? That’s where LSW comes in.   LSW proved to be the perfect tool for our Community moderators, as it helped improve our response time by keeping on top of all Community posts, as opposed to sorting through them individually. To do this, we created a Community queue in LSW to receive all incoming Community posts. LSW allows us to “snooze” Community posts to allow time for our members to respond, based on our response strategy. We also created a common “FidoSolutions” Community profile, which we use for all of our Community PMs only, to make the process seamless from a customer perspective. In turn, this helped us be more efficient, improve our CHI score, response time, call deflection rates and resulted in cost savings. LSW also proved efficient to help our Social Media Specialists to manage our incoming social media posts, improve on our response time and promote the Community thanks to the knowledge base feature. A single click allows us to answer our customers by sharing articles found within the Community and our website. It’s an incredible time saver and our Specialists and customers love it! Here are some of the LSW features that help us deliver best in class service:   Community response time: Moderators can “snooze” posts for a certain amount of time, based on our response strategy. The snooze functionality is essential to our Community moderation process. We snooze non-account specific inquiries, to give other Community members a chance to respond. If no one responds, we step in and assist. This incredibly useful functionality ensures no one is ever left unanswered. CommunityPMs: Moderators can take over the PM conversations from other moderators once their work shift has ended, greatly increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction. Information centralization: All customer information is now centralized, including contact info, and even notes for internal purposes. Profile merging: LSW allows us to merge customers various social profiles, so we always know who we are speaking with. Analytics and tags: This LSW feature helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…. Thanks to Analytics, we can clearly see what our customers are talking about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner. Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage with people who aren’t specifically reaching out to us. This shows our customers that we’re always willing to help and we’re not afraid to be proactive.   Klout: Allows us to prioritize influencers within our Queues and offer support accordingly.     Changing How We Operate   Based on our target market, the Fido brand's main focus is to enhance and grow servicing through self-serve. Our Community is a big part of this focus as it allows customers to help out other customers, and houses a lot of searchable information/solutions.   We are changing how we use the Community as a means of communication with our customers. We now use the community to inform customers about useful information which can reduce contacts to our other channels. We now inform our customers of upcoming software updates, known issues, etc. directly on the Community, and proactively refer them to the Community to increase our support savings. Amongst other initiatives our contact centres send our customers links to useful articles found in the Community, as opposed to spending considerable amounts of time over the phone discussing what a simple short and visual article can explain. Talk about versatility.   In the past, people would call, chat, and message us for updates and questions, but now all they need to do is visit the Community. If we know something’s up, we’ll post about it in the Community and let everyone know that we’ll update it as soon as we receive any news. So no need to contact us.    Our Results   The integration of LSW as our primary Social Media and Community customer response tool proved to be seamless, stable and incredibly effective.   Community   In 2015 alone, we successfully reduced our Community response time by 93% compared to 2014, and based on the information from our customer surveys we registered over $385K worth in call deflection savings from our contact centres. For our first quarter in 2016, our surveys are already indicating over $645K in cost savings.     Social Media Support   For our Social Media Support channels, we recorded over $325K in cost savings based on the information from our customer surveys. We also reduced our response time by 87%. For our first quarter in 2016, we’ve already registered over $110K in call savings.  

Company: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.   Our Community and LSW goals for 2015   Our goals were to:   Redesign the customer experience Grow our channels, while improving our response time Increase cost savings by deflecting contacts from our customer service channels Optimize how we treat customer service requests on our Social Media channels   Areas of focus   We placed emphasis on the optimization of the Community as both a self-serve peer to peer support tool, and as a channel for Customer Service. The redesign of the Community was necessary in order to increase the traffic flow by attracting more customers to the Community, consequently reducing contacts to our customer service channels and reducing the associated costs.   We also revised our Social Media practices and built on our 2014 implementation of LSW, which allowed us to better control our response time by improving how we manage our incoming customer requests, in both volume and priority.   Once our Social Media support process was optimized and the Community redesigned, we turned our efforts towards promotion.   Our promotional tactics for the Community included advertisements: On our Social Media channels (2.8M people reached in 2015 on FB alone), On our website, Through emails to customers, Through other customer service channels (phone, chat, IVR), Via internal promotion (newsletters, presentations…).   For the promotion of our Social Media support channels, we included a mention: On our website’s Contact us page, On our Social channels, Through emails to customers Through other customer service channels (phone, chat, IVR)   We worked hand in hand with Lithium, as well as with other internal departments, in order to redesign the Community, enhance our use of LSW, and maximize the outcomes of our promotional efforts.   Here’s an example of the Community/Social Media email that is sent to new customers:   LSW, the Super Tool   LSW has proven to be the ideal tool to help us achieve our cost-saving goals. Not only is it essential to our internal support process, it has changed the way we work with our customers, both on Social channels and on the Community. Here are just a few examples to demonstrate how LSW has reshaped our operations:   Community response time: Moderators can “snooze” posts for a certain amount of time, based on our response strategy. The snooze functionality is essential to our Community moderation process. We snooze non-account specific inquiries, to give other Community members a chance to respond. If no one responds, we step in and assist. This incredibly useful functionality ensures no one is ever left unanswered. Community moderation and PM: Moderators can take over the PM conversations from other moderators once their work shift has ended, greatly increasing efficiency and customer satisfaction. Information centralization: All customer information is now centralized, including contact info, and even notes for internal purposes. Profile merging: LSW allows us to merge customers various social profiles, so we always know who we are speaking with. Knowledge Base: Another incredible LSW feature. We use it to promote the Community on Social Media, as well as for useful links on our website. Analytics: Analytics helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…Thanks to Analytics, we can clearly see what our customers are chatting about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner. Tags: Tagging conversations gives us better business insights, which in turn allow us to better serve our customers by identifying potential trends and proactively reacting to them, improving overall customer satisfaction. Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage and offer help to people who talking about us but aren’t specifically reaching out to us. This shows our customers that we’re always willing to help and we’re not afraid to be proactive.   Support: LSW helped us support the launch of FB Messenger and Twitter DM enhancement and in turn provide a better customer experience. Klout: Allows us to prioritize influencers within our Queues and offer support accordingly.   Our Results   The integration of LSW as our primary Social Media and Community customer response tool proved to be seamless and incredibly effective.   Community   In 2015 alone, we successfully reduced our Community response time by 93% compared to 2014, and recorded a 44% increase in Community member registrations. We ended the year with a CHI 159 points higher than in 2014, and based on the information from our customer surveys, we registered over $385K worth in call deflections from our contact centres. Our Solution views increased by a massive 323%. For our first quarter in 2016, the information derived from our customer surveys indicate over $645K in call savings.     Social Media Support   For our Social Media Support channels, we recorded over $325K in cost savings, again based on the information from our customer surveys. We also reduced our response time by 87%, and merited an NPS score of over +60 at year’s end. For our first quarter in 2016, we’ve already registered over $110K in cost savings.      

Company: Leroy Merlin Espana  Entry submitted by: Francisco Campos Dominguez (PacoCampos) Social Media Manager Community: Comunidad Leroy Merlin  (https://comunidad.leroymerlin.es/)  LSW social channels:  https://es-la.facebook.com/leroymerlines https://twitter.com/leroymerlin_es https://www.youtube.com/user/leroymerlines https://instagram.com/leroymerlines/ https://es.pinterest.com/leroymerlines/ Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch   Leroy Merlin Background   Leroy Merlin is the home improvement leader with 58 stores and has been in Spain for the last 25 years. Part of the ADEO Group, Leroy Merlin is the European home improvement retail leader. Leroy Merlin is an innovative company in which the term "employee" is not used, because 94% of the 8,000 people who work there are shareholders, and for that reason they are called "collaborators.”   The company’s values are: Share the will Share the knowledge Share the power Share the ownership   The company culture of sharing, co-constructing and co-directing, is in the DNA of each "collaborator" and therefore Leroy Merlin Spain is a “community” in itself.   The Community: The heart of social evolution   The company’s culture of "sharing" among consumers is growing every year. The new consumer wants to know the experiences of other customers before they buy. Leroy Merlin understands that  willingness to "share" is important, but not as important as the brands that are willing to listen and act accordingly.    There are many threats and opportunities that this new culture generates, but there are many strategies to overcome them. Leroy Merlin is aware that the "culture of sharing" is part of the company DNA so it decided that social evolution must be a priority.    The goal was to increase the productivity of each "collaborator" of each department, including: central purchasing, human resources, brick and mortar store teams, etc... In short, the entire company adapted the mission and started executing the new rules for the “new consumer.”    The strategy was to "truly be social and not just seem social.” This means that each "partner" should know the opportunities and concerns that the new environment poses in the company’s "mission" and every individual in the company is responsible to seize it. The option of trying to “seem social” in all the social activity in the marketing department was discarded.   The tactics focused on creating three major points between customers, employees and partners in order to be successful. The three points of contact are: 1.    Official social media channels in the most important and relevant social networks: a.    It is the meeting point between acquaintances and friends 2.    Physical stores (58 stores throughout Spain): a.    Physical meeting points between customers and employees 3.    Web + Sites related: a.    A digital meeting point between people who are passionate about home improvement in Spain was the heart of the social strategy   The operation kicked off in in 2012 with the launch and continued development of Leroy Merlin’s social profiles on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest with three objectives: 1.    Investigate and test: there were several thousands of activation strategies and touch-points with customers and collaborators that Leroy Merlin considered an "internal and external social laboratory" of the future community 2.    Recruiting: engaging users with social content to facilitate the subsequent launch of the Leroy Merlin community 3.    Define and optimize processes: internally listen to feedback to ensure the company is prepared to enable customers to propose improvements in the community.   After nearly two years of actively listening, the Leroy Merlin community launched in December 2014. It became the heart of Leroy Merlin and the online destination for professional opinion leaders, "home improvement" customers, DIY lovers, partners, collaborators, installers, etc. It became the place where people can learn and share their concerns, experiences and projects to do more and improve their home.   Social networks are formed by groups of friends who may or may not have common interests, and Communities are for groups of people unknown to each other but who share interests. The objective between 2011-2014 was to achieve a high volume of relationships with groups of friends in social networks (500,000+ followers and 26,000,000+ video views) and the end of 2015 was to use these relationships to enhance the discussions generated in the new Community. Four months later, the traffic from social networking accounts was 46.25 % of the total traffic to the Community. Leroy Merlin has a "Total Community."   Why participate in the Leroy Merlin Community and not another? This was the point from which Leroy Merlin started defining the Community, and the three reasons they determined were: 1.    Not only to assist other users, but the Community has hundreds of experts who can help solve consumer’s doubts 2.    Not only can consumers interact and learn in the online space, but physically too by attending weekly in-person events organized in Leroy Merlin stores 3.    Not only can consumers read recommendations of other consumers’ solutions, but they can also buy products needed to improve their homes.   In order to realize these objectives, in 2014 Leroy Merlin selected and trained over 80 store volunteers – called animators  - who carried out the company’s mission in each of the 58 stores. The goal for 2015 is to bring 200 new animators to ensure internal and external buzz, and to continue listening and learning from customers.   To measure the success of the Community, Leroy Merlin focused on four main KPIs:  1.    Number of visits: Whenever a client resolves a question by visiting the Community, the company saves hours of customer service in stores, improves brand image and increases commercial potential 2.    Number of content generated: Whenever members of the Community generate content for free, the company saves the cost of producing marketing/corporate materials 3.    Number of visits to the store: Every time the Community drives a customer to visit the online store a sales opportunity is generated 4.    Number of business opportunities enabled: Each time the stores detected an opportunity to improve service to customers and activate the company in the community that improves its profitability and brand image   The best promotion is to use it   The company is committed to "truly being social, and not just seeming social”. The launch of the Community made it very clear that participating and sharing in the Community and other social networks is part of the larger goal of having each client and collaborator meet their individual goals with social. The Community does that by providing peer-support, product reviews, questions answered by experts, etc. to help enrich their shopping experience.     The communication strategy of the Community launch went through the organic integration of it as a new feature that facilitates and improves all points of contact between the brand and its customers; all while fostering a new dimension of engagement.    Every collaborator, every store and every department of the company is responsible for using this new tool – the Community - and the ease of use to customers allows the company to create a much more continuous and close relationship with customers.    Leroy Merlin took an omni-channel, organic approach that improved over-time and which integrated into the daily lives of customers, employees and partners. By using the Community, all they key stakeholders were able to achieve their goals.     The model has involved a more gradual release, but identified by four major phases:   Focus on the integration of employees.  Milestone: Achieving critical mass of content and animators. Leroy Merlin focused on the 8,000 company employees understanding and living the evolution of this mission. They created monthly streaming, physical training as well as distributed 26 mobile terminals to “Super-animators,” meaning they created private groups in the Community to address their doubts and questions.  The next steps are the selection, training and integration of 150 new animators from all departments to ensure the best customer experience and better guidance to 8,000 employees.   How: https://youtu.be/VysNZtAysMQ Results (first three months): +85 Animators (employees in the stores) active in the community. +4,300 pieces of content 2. Focus on the integration of customers.     Milestone: Achieving critical mass of customers    Leroy Merlin focused on publicizing the Community to all customers in a personalized way with different points of contact with the brand, on and offline.Communication and promotional messages of the Community were led by customers.   How to: Posters in shops formed by the actual client projects, event flyers in checkout lines, workshops and demos in stores to help customers improve their homes, web banners, presence guides brochures, related magazines, websites to sharpen the content strategy.    In order to emphasize collaboration with TV, Bricomanía which airs weekly on Antena 3, has incorporated a 2-minute video in which one of the Leroy Merlin community members has a project and is interviewed in the program and commissioned to introduce the Community to the rest of lovers in the world of DIY, decoration, garden, etc.   Results (first three months): + 2,000 registrations completed + 15,000 members + 363.737 minutes online (24.2 minutes per member) + 50 community members have been contacted to meet them and become ambassadors and leaders of our communication campaign.   3. Focus on the integration of partners.   Milestone: Achieve critical mass of partners    Leroy Merlin focused on B2B, to publicize and integrate strategic partners such as the group of bloggers, installers and architects, to launch a personalized relationship model for each group.    How:    First steps:  Leroy Merlin has an internal platform with over 50 bloggers with whom they have begun to work together to co-create. They also have a group of 10 installers who are working together on integration.   4. Focus on the integration of suppliers.   Milestone: Activation of Social Commerce    Leroy Merlin focused on linking the Community with the range of products, launching the ability for users to test and evaluate products.    How: First steps: In a phase called a "Club of Testers," was accessed by the "Super-users" of the Community once they reached that level.  It allowed them to test products and helped define and co-create social commerce with the client.   Our video    

Company: Demandforce by Intuit Entry submitted by: Becca Piastrelli (twitchee27) Community Manager Community: Generation Demandforce (community.demandforced3.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   Generation Demandforce is a private B2B community that, in its first 100 days of life, exceeded all our expectations for growth and customer engagement. The Demandforce community was designed for scale. Upon launch of our community, Demandforce had experienced its 26th consecutive quarter of over 80% growth and had just been acquired by Intuit. We had a rapidly scaling customer base that needed to be supported and empowered despite our potential growing pains. Our customers are hard-working small business owners, who tend to operate within the silos of their own industry verticals (think auto shops, dentists, and veterinarians).     By providing a private community for Demandforce customers, we have been able to foster cross-industry relationships between our thousands of customers that hadn't previously existed. These are small business marketers doing what it takes every day to succeed in an internet economy. Small business owners typically don't have the time to get support or share best practice ideas during business hours. The majority of our posts come in overnight between 5pm and 7am PST. The 24/7 Generation Demandforce Community provides that added support and network during those key off-business hours.   We've encouraged adoption by introducing customers to the community as soon as they are deployed with the Demandforce product. We host over 100 training videos and webinar recordings in Generation Demandforce and are about to launch a real-time (industry-segmented) community widget in the Demandforce product to promote awareness for our customer base. We also host a monthly video blog series called "Generation Demandforce TV" hosted by our two community managers to provide quick tips for using the community as well as giving a face to the people behind the community, letting our customers know the community is a trusted place for them to stop by and find answers.   And all of this has worked. 102 days after launching, 50% of our customers had registered in the community and, in January 2013, Generation Demandforce was featured at one of Intuit's Top 20 Innovations at their annual Innovation Gallery Walk.

Company: Telekom Deutschland GmbH Contact: Eva Heinrichs (Platform Owner Telekom hilft Community) Community: Telekom hilft Community Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Following our slogan “life is for sharing” Telekom Deutschland GmbH offers innovative products and services connecting people all over the word. Customers should be given easy access to the world of telephone, Internet, Internet TV and cloud services. As a telecommunications provider, it is Telekom's goal to enable this by providing the best possible communications and IT services. Meaning Telekom customers can enjoy the "life is for sharing" experience anytime, any place.   Telekom hilft Community, Europe’s largest telco community, is a pillar of Deutsche Telekom’s customer care -for both consumer and business customers. The focus is on support, but also leveraging product feedback and co-creation.   Our three pillars to leverage the community for support excellence   Established in 2014 we bundled three legacy forums to Telekom hilft Community to foster the peer-to-peer “customers help customers” concept. Steadily growing, the community has >550.000 registered users (growth of 50% since 2014). To enhance the involvement of our most active super users producing >50% of all content, we are using gamification elements. Furthermore the closed user group “Community Guides” with advanced editing rights enables us to gain customer insights for the platform development. Additionally, we also launched the closed user group “Telekom hilft Lab” connecting product managers with customers to develop and evaluate current as well as future products and services.   Title: Participants of the Community Manager Guides event with the superusers of Telekom hilft Community   Title: Example of promotion on Facebook for our CUG “Telekom hilft Lab”   Telekom hilft Community enables us to increase our permeability and customer proximity by facilitating involvement in closed user groups. Participation of super users and active listeners helps Deutsche Telekom to gain valuable customer insights. The project PM@ThC (product manager at Telekom hilft Community) helps for example product managers to receive precious feedback and also users to get profound answers from experts. The close relationship between customers and Deutsche Telekom’s employees has even effect on 3 rd party support, such as shorter on-site technical support time. These insights are communicated to the management board and are part of our early-warning system.   Recognizing the changing user behavior, a relaunch in 2015 included a responsive design to increase traffic of mobile phones and tablets, which now accounts for up to 30% of our overall traffic. Additionally, we integrated Telekom hilft Community in other DT websites such as Telekom eShop and help portal. They include a search widget, a service tab and customized landing pages informing about the Telekom hilft Community. Auto suggestions help customers to find relevant content and enrich the problem solving or buying process at all stages. Relevant discussion feeds were posted on Deutsche Telekom’s social media channels, enabling the community team to enrich their content and link to Telekom hilft Community by using synergies between the different platforms.   Title: Example of integration within geschaeftskunden.telekom.de via service tab   Title: Example of seamless integration of community posts within search results of other portals   Title: Example of a posting at Deutsche Telekom’s social media channels from the Telekom hilft Community: Why do my incoming calls always end directly on my mailbox?   The community’s impact on our customer care organization   Community Management is the new Service: By linking Community solutions on other social media channels, we are constantly promoting Telekom hilft Community. By doing so, we are increasing the relevance of our “user to user” centric platform. Adapting to the new business environment, customer service focuses now more on community management instead of just answering questions. Due to the community focused activities, we improved the solution rate within the community from 25% to 35% year to date.   Facilitating the permeability and customer proximity, the success of Telekom hilft Community is influencing the online strategy of Deutsche Telekom i.e. user generated content cements the reputation of Deutsche Telekom as a customer-centric company. Furthermore, providing a strong external reputation affects the employees who have learnt about the value of Telekom hilft Community and strengthen it through blog entries on blog.telekom.de.   Introducing new use cases steadily, we start social commerce with ratings and reviews at the business customers’ eShop to foster product recommendations and to assist in the buying process by giving additional information. By doing so, gamification elements motivate users to rate products while other users award those ratings with kudos. This encourages the overall community building of Telekom hilft Community. Title: Example of integration of ratings & reviews in business customers shop on geschaeftskunden.telekom.de   How we became leader in service through customer satisfaction and operational efficiency   Deutsche Telekom pursues a quality leadership strategy in the German market. Therefore customer satisfaction is an important part of the overall strategy. We believe that happy customers share their experiences just as troubled customers ask for help. 80% of the questions in the community are answered by other community members, mostly happy customers. Telekom support colleagues answer only 20% of the questions.   A recent survey by a big German business magazine, Focus Money, confirmed the leading role of Deutsche Telekom: The best online service across industries in Germany is provided by Deutsche Telekom. As Focus Money also says, “Telekom hilft” is rated as a most likeable service brand in Germany.   Title: Gero Niemayer, managing director customer service Telekom Deutschland, proudly presents Focus Money survey results on Twitter   Telekom hilft Community attracts on average approximately 1.6m unique visitors each month – trending up 22% on year to year comparison. Based on a 35% solution rate, we assume that >350,000 calls can be avoided per month. In addition to the value of deflected calls, we take advantage of priceless value from customer insights and increased reputation for Deutsche Telekom.   Before Telekom hilft Community started, Deutsche Telekom offered three different online platforms. Migrated and consolidated to one platform, Lithium helps us to streamline customer service and the IT landscape as well as to enhance usability and the user journey for our customers.  

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: Fido (Rogers Communications) Contact: Caroline Lalonde (Social Media Support and Community Manager) Community: Fido Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Fido connects Canadians to the things they love through its ultrafast LTE network, as well as services such as Fido Pulse Plans and Fido Home Internet (Fido Home Internet currently only available in parts of Ontario).   Fido was originally launched by Microcell Solutions Inc. in 1996 and went on to revolutionize the wireless industry in Canada with a unique approach to pricing, a money-back satisfaction guarantee and more. Today, we continue to move ahead with new voice and data technologies as well as the latest in wireless Internet services to keep you connected to what matters most in your life.   The Fido network consists of three network technologies GSM, 4G HSPA+ and now LTE – the new global gold standard of wireless technology. Fido wireless compatible devices fall back onto each network, assuring you have a network to fall back onto. Fido also offers its customers access to the Fido TM  wireless network coast-to-coast and with over 300 roaming partners in over 200 countries your device will be compatible wherever you travel.     Customer Satisfaction Initiatives   Our Community initiatives included: The optimization of our Community content, A complete redesign, and increase in customer support, Deliverance of a seamless self-serve flow for our customers.   The primary motivation behind our redesign was to increase customer satisfaction by making them feel welcome and comfortable to participate in the Community. Our optimization project in early 2015 served to clean up the content on the Community to ensure accuracy and relevancy, enriching the self-serve experience for our customers. In total, 6600 threads were reviewed and labelled and over 3000 posts were marked as the Accepted Solution. 2015 was also the year we increased the number of Community Moderators, for the purpose of offering better and timelier support. Furthermore, we’ve taken measures to be more transparent with our customers by keeping the Community up to date with information such as software and network updates, website changes, really anything that would be useful for customers to know.   For Social Media, our goal was to: Differentiate ourselves by delivering best in class service Improve and maintaining an excellent response time and resolution rate.   We created a team of multi-skilled specialists to service our customers on our Social channels and act as Fido brand ambassadors. Offering the best customer service while maintaining a great response time means having the best tools at your disposal. This is where LSW comes in as a game changer. Not only does LSW help our Specialists offer the best customer service thanks to features like Knowledge base and queue assignment, it also proved to be the perfect tool to keep on top of our response time. Our resolution rate and NPS score are testimony to how LSW has reshaped how we help our customers on Social Media.     Our Approach   For the Community, we wanted to improve our CHI score and response time while offering full customer support. As a company who takes pride in the quality of our customer service, we understand that answering customers in a consistent and timely manner is key to their satisfaction. The implementation of LSW and the redesign of our Community were crucial elements in achieving these objectives. The redesign and promotion of the Community attracted more members to participate, which in turn generated more traffic and liveliness overall. Over time, these steady increases resulted in a healthier and more active Community (significant increase in CHI score).   The implementation of LSW was essential in managing these new volumes of activity. Thanks to LSW, we were able to reduce, control and maintain our response time strategy for public and private messages, while ensuring no one ever remains unanswered.   With the help of Lithium, we have developed a world-class peer to peer support Community. The outcome of using LSW to process our customers’ requests in Community and Social Media channels was outstanding and resulted in our customers being incredibly satisfied.     For Social Media Support, we wanted to improve and maintain a best in class response time while increasing our NPS. LSW proved to be the best tool for us to achieve our goals, primarily thanks to the following features:   Analytics: Analytics helps us with reports and the analysis, such as our volumes (incoming posts, responses), response time, top topics…we can clearly see what our customers are chatting about, which allows us to address potential issues in a more efficient manner. Tags: Tagging conversations gives us greater business insights, which in turn allow us to better serve our customers by identifying potential trends and proactively reacting to them, improving overall customer satisfaction. Coaching: LSW is also a useful tool for coaching our specialists as it provides access to the conversation history, which in turn helps us deliver a better service to our customers. Support: LSW helped us support the launch of FB Messenger and Twitter DM enhancement and in turn provided a better customer experience. Pending: Having pending conversations sent back to our queue after 48 hours allows us to follow up with customers who stopped replying to us and therefore improves the customer experience and making us look on top of everything. Rules and Routing: Through key words, we can proactively engage and offer help to people who are talking about us but aren’t actually reaching out to us. This shows our customers that we’re always willing to help and we’re not afraid to be proactive.   Traffic control: The prioritization (Klout), snooze feature and ability to assign posts to different queues helps us better manage our responses, and keep a close eye on our response time.   Our results   Our CHI increased by 159 points (30% increase) and we successfully reduced our Community response time by 93%. For Social Support, we registered an NPS of over +60 by the end of 2015, and reduced our response time by 87%, meriting and keeping the Very Responsive Facebook badge on March 1 , 2016.    

Company: Total Access Communication PLC Entry submitted by: Manida Thiensiripipat (AVP Online Strategy & Analytics) Community: dtac Online Community Lithy Category: Social ROI Titan   Total Access Communication Public Company Limited, commonly known as dtac, was established in 1989. It is the second largest mobile operator in Thailand. Telenor became a shareholder of dtac in 2001. dtac was listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (the SET) on 22 June 2007 and became the only Thai company listed on both the Singapore Stock Exchange and the SET.   Our 2015 goals for Lithium-powered community implementation   We launched dtac online community in December 2014, so in 2015 our goals were to prove that having dtac online community can long-term gains and cost savings on service as documented in dtac business case (for budget approval for Lithium platform).   Our focus areas and tactics to meet our goals   Our primary focus were to ensure best user-journey and to increase members, super fans, engagement, useful content & solutions, and everything should be measureable.   Session comparison between C (community users) VS Not C who convert on online store.   Average Order Value comparison between C (Community Users) VS Not Community Users   One important tactics was analytics. We tracked user journey across platforms from online community to online store and vice versa. Moreover we created three segments between community users who convert, non-community users who convert, and all users who convert. We were able to prove conversation and content in community influenced purchase decisions of our customers resulting in transactions.   Moreover, we tracked average order value of community users and we found that they had an average order value (AOV) that was 60% higher than average.   (Translation: User “balke” asked “I just used internet for 15 days but now internet speed is throttled – can you help me solve this problem? I have to use internet for my work” User “book2001” a soon-to-be-super-users replied: “I’d like to suggest you to use Super Non Stop package –you’ll get 10GB at only 499 baht here is the link (url) I’m sure you won’t be disappointed. Moreover, if you don’t use it all up, you can save it for your next month usage)   Another tactic was when we cultivated super users and “dtac buddy” (volunteer employee) to build initial hype, solutions, and content. We educated and motivated them to embed links from dtac website and/or TKB when reply to posts. Some of these links led into online conversions (as shown in above screenshot).   Last tactic was convincing internal organization to utilize community on R&D before or during or after the products/service launch. So in the long run, we will get a more complete 360-degree view of customer database. Moreover these members became user and product promoter because they were involved in the product.   For example, we invited 10 super fans to beta test an internal application before launch in a private room in the community. We received many suggestions.     Our metrics   Community influenced online purchase conversion worth = 47,705,323 baht ($1,357,009 USD) Average Order Value (AOV) of community users = 60% higher than average Cost savings on Service Calls = 14,262,800 baht ($405,719 USD). Through intense focus on increasing TKB and accepted solutions, we were able to save costs on service calls in 2015 (exceeding savings in business case). Our measurement was based on 30% of TKB views plus 100% of accepted solution plus 30% of accepted solutions views/cost per call. Feedback & suggestions from customers = more than 6,000 piece of feedback  

Company: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian (VF_Sebastian) Social Media Project Coordinator Community: Vodafone Community (https://forum.vodafone.de/) Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Germany, with more than 10,000 employees and its headquarters in Dusseldorf. It is a part of the Vodafone Group, amongst the largest telecommunication companies in the world. Currently more than 34 million people are making use of Vodafone services in Germany.   Regarding our service promise, we are providing an individual service support, anytime and anywhere, to our customers. In case of concerns the customer is able to get in touch with Vodafone channels 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Due to different, individual customer requirements Vodafone pursues a multichannel strategy. Customers have the choice between different service channels such as email, chat etc. With the increasing relevance of Internet-based communication new channels are gaining a growing importance. Besides the other well-known social media networks, communities offer significant opportunities in terms of service quality, brand reputation and cost reduction. Customers have the opportunity to reveal and exchange experiences and often find an answer to their question in the community. Accordingly the portion of self-service is increased.   Since 2012 the community is an established Vodafone service channel. Vodafone Group awarded all Community Agents with our global internal employee “Hero Award” for effective work performance. The award was ceremonially passed in London.     Marketing campaign   An important factor for a community is an active user base. To encourage our users we developed a community model allowing active users to jump to various new user levels depending on the number of posts submitted, Kudos collected and their solution comments. After the registration users climb up to a Super-User role in six steps. This strategy creates an intensive relationship between community and users. In addition Super-Users appreciate a special reputation within the community. In consequence of performance Super-Users stand out from the community. Currently our Vodafone community has more than 30 active Super-Users. Above all, Users consider their nomination as a pleasant experience. A Super-User profile reflects Vodafone’s goals of customer satisfaction.   To also bring this appreciation to the real world we invite our Super-Users to a yearly event to celebrate the cooperation between agents and Super-Users, where they get to know each other. A Super-User event is a solid part of the community loyalty strategy. For this purpose, Vodafone implemented an extra wild card, which allows one user to participate without a Super-User status. Within 6 months one of the Wild-Card-Participant has achieved Super-User status, because the person was so excited of this elaborate event.     Super-Users are also involved in internal events and represent the customer's perspective beyond the community.  Super-Users are often product experts with deeply knowledge. Vodafone Product Managers value neutral customer feedback.  In terms of strategic development we can improve our service continuously.   Users appreciate posts from Super-Users as it is considered as authentic customer feedback. This year one of the Super-User wrote his 20.000 posts. A lot of users congratulate  this Super-User for his impressive performance.   Furthermore Super-Users support Vodafone Social Media Team to administrate the eforum (e.g. close/move threads, mark answers as accepted). It is also common that they support us maintaining the e forum rules beyond moderator’s (VF employees) online presence.   As a part of the Kabel Deutschland merger, Vodafone also invited Kabel Deutschland agents to get to know the new team as well as Vodafone Super-Users. Each individual is essential and is part of the whole.    To sum up Vodafone Super-Users are helping us to keep our service promise “Your personal service. We are only happy if you are.“   

Company: TELUS  Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (deturbulence) Sr. Strategy Manager Community: TELUS Neighbourhood (forum.telus.com)  Social channels: http://facebook.com/telus and http://twitter.com/telussupport Lithy category: Total Community All Star   TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, with $12 billion of annual revenue and 13.7 million customer connections, including 8.1 million wireless subscribers, 3.2 million wireline network access lines, 1.5 million Internet subscribers and 916,000 TELUS TV customers. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video, and is Canada's largest healthcare IT provider.   Initially, as an LSW customer, we looked to sustain and add measurability to our Twitter operations in brand risk management and customer service. We were then able to leverage Facebook integration to offer customer support there. While our support off-domain has proven effective (in 2014, 82% of customers surveyed are likely to recommend TELUS/NPS, and 84% are likely to share their social support experience), the velocity of Twitter and limited reach of Facebook impeded the reusability, searchability, and discoverability of good support content and answers. As such, we expanded our social presence through the TELUS Neighbourhood as a community platform, allowing us to both moderate crowdsourced help content and get direct insight to voice of the customer feedback, lovingly organized into threads, boards and categories for consumption across our business units.   Benefits of a Total Community   Springboarding off of the LSW and communities platforms, our social operations are equipped with measurable insights and qualitative feedback directly from our customers. Reporting on and championing these insights, we have been able to inform process and policy changes, product development, and overall customer experience across our organization. In addition, we are well-positioned to manage brand risk across a variety of social media platforms, deliver excellent customer experiences in their mediums of choice, and provide a #secondchanceatawesome to customers who haven’t been able to have their concerns sorted through traditional channels.   Our Total Community results   In 2014, through traffic (over 1.18M unique visitors) and participation (2,131 forum topics, 9,424 forum posts, 151 Ideas, 343 Ideas comments), we estimate a $3.35M OPEX savings to our contact centres in 2014 from our community. Moreover, 2014 saw us support over 54K interactions across Twitter and Facebook, with over 80% of our Twitter responses being sent within 35 minutes and driving an 82% Likelihood to Recommend (NPS) based on the interaction.        

Company: Zuora Contact: Lana Lee  (Support Community Manager) Community: Zuora Community Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Zuora’s Relationship Business Management (RBM) solution helps businesses launch or shift products to subscription, implement pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain insights into subscriber behavior, open revenue streams, and disrupt market segments to gain competitive advantage. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, London, Paris, Munich, Beijing, Sydney, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Vienna, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Clients come from a wide range of industries: media, travel services, consumer packaged goods, cloud services, and telecommunications. Clients include Financial Times, Schneider Electric, Box, Honeywell, NCR, RTL, lynda.com, The Guardian, YP.com, BlueJeans, Shutterfly, TripAdvisor, Vivint and Trulia.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives   Customer Satisfaction Initiatives in 2015 was to establish more visibility on use cases, implementation and enhancement requests. Seeing how our customers, partners and internal Zuora staff interacts, opens a new world for us to give us better positioning on how to help our customers with a different level of approach (Voice of Customer, Customer Advocacy Program, etc.)   Focusing on customer support excellence Nothing stands in the way of excellence for Zuora’s multi-Stevie® Award winning Global Support Team. Our support team spans the world, giving our customers just-in-time solutions to help power their subscription business and grow in their Zuora expertise. With over 30 global support agents, Zuora support provides quick response, resolution times and received an average customer service rating of 95% for the entire team. By implementing Lithium for our Zuora Community, we’re continuing to focus on delivering the best customer service possible to aggregate content by bringing togther sources of knowledge and information, deflect support tickets to save costs and give customers an integrated visual experience with corporate branding. We believe that we’ve solved these customer issues and more with our cutting-edge Zuora Community that moves Zuora Support to a higher level with its innovative platform that enables peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and gives customers a voice in shaping Zuora’s product roadmap. Our Community User Groups give customers and partners a space where they can network, provide feedback and receive updates on the latest Zuora releases and features.   Our results   30% of our Community’s traffic is in our Ideas forum, which proves to be a popular Community destination since our product managers frequently interact with customers who give suggestions on improving Zuora. Time spent in the community is approximately 9 minutes per member and we see an average of 20k page views per month which shows us that our users are browsing ideas and forums for solutions. Using our Zendesk integration with our Community, any customer post that has no intial response within 48 hours will automatically create a Zendesk ticket. Once a Support agent answers the Zendesk ticket, the answer goes back to the Community as a response and is auto-selected as an accepted answer.  With over 30 support agents in our global Customer Support Services and Community team, we ensure that no issue is left unattended.    

Company: TalkTalk Group  Entry submitted by: Stephen Fell (Fellsteruk) Senior Online Engagement & Content Manager Community: TalkTalk Community (http://community.talktalk.co.uk) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   With more than 4 million customers TalkTalk Group is one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the UK, providing the best value home phone, broadband, TV and mobile packages to residential and business customers under the TalkTalk and TalkTalk Business brands. We pride ourselves on being innovative, and bringing disruptive new products such as TalkTalk TV, Britain’s fastest growing TV service, to market.   TalkTalk grew rapidly through a combination of acquisition and organic growth, and has spent the last year integrating its businesses to build a leaner, more efficient company offering competitive pricing backed up by good service.   Improving customer service has been key to realizing the company’s ambitions for growth.   This is being achieved by:       Getting things right the first time so customers don’t need to contact TalkTalk       Offering online solutions so that customers can fix problems themselves or seek help without calling   We promised customers that during the coming year we will deliver the best online self-service experience possible and created digital assets that provided a better experience than calling.    The Lithium-powered TalkTalk Community is at the centre of this work. It replaced the original forums, which launched in 2008, and were adequate for the time. As traffic on the old forums increased, cracks began to show in the infrastructure, and customers complained they were struggling to use the platform to self-help.   This made it hard to scale the forums as the company’s rapid expansion continued. Despite receiving no marketing or promotion from the wider business, the TalkTalk Community continued to quietly grow and evolve over time.    During 2013, the TalkTalk Community was re-launched, powered by Lithium, and with a new strategy. The idea was to slowly transition from being a traditional customer service channel, where Online Community Executives offered advice and support to customers, to a peer-to-peer network where customers could support each other.    We made our most helpful and prolific posters ‘Super Users’, who offered solutions to common problems. The mood of the boards improved dramatically, as members realized they could find answers to their questions about TalkTalk’s products and services quickly and with help from other customers.   TalkTalk set up an in-house Digital Care Team, made up of 12 support experts from across the business, along with a Community Manager to drive more customers to the Community.     Our new team and ownership of the community was placed under our Director of Digital, where it would be a part of our wider digital vision and supported by teams across creative, legal, PR, marketing and brand to name a few allowing us to give almost real-time feedback to the business of trending issues or to our customers with products suggestions and development.    In addition to helping us to leverage the power of our crowd sourced support platform to help shape our other online venues and future customer experience.   The team’s remit was to seek out customers from across all social media, forums, blogs and news sites, and drive them to the Community. Once signed up, new members would facilitate peer-to-peer discussions and help other members to find answers. The benefit to our customers has been clear:     TalkTalk Group has embraced the Community and placed it at the centre of our online support, communication and product development strategies, which has assisted with the creation of a marketing strategy to drive people towards the community.    Customers are encouraged to join the Community when they first join TalkTalk, in the Welcome Packs sent out with routers and other equipment, and in marketing emails sent to customers.   Email marketing activity alone has so far delivered an 18% increase in traffic to the Community.   In addition to measuring call deflection from community activity and to further our vision for the community, our strategic telephony teams have made efforts to reduce calls directly from the call center. Recently, we've added community messaging to our call center voice system- if a customer has a question that our Super Users have already answered on the Community, our IVR system lets them know where they can find the content online. Our initial tests have resulted in a 5% call drop off after this message is played, which shows great promise for directly correlating call reduction due from community content.       Customer Support Site Integration Using Lithium’s  REST api’s we integrated the best content and solutions from our members into our customer support site and help content. We did this by promoting the top accepted solutions for each product on our landing page and pushing relevant content to customers as they navigate through our site in addition to this we are surfacing targeted content from the community within our help articles, as customers are consuming our business answer they are encourage to view content from the community along with a federated search of community content in our global site search.   These changes alone have accounted for a 43% uplift in community traffic.         Collaborative Beta Testing Groups TalkTalk Labs is our beta testing team, who run trials on all the latest products and services before they go to market. The Community has been a valuable recruitment tool for new trials, and provides a secure, scalable discussion platform with private boards where they can discuss and share their opinions of new products.   Our Trials Managers who are easily identifiable within the Community have built the community into all their trial activities, leveraging our active base of advocates to test new services. During 2014/15 we plan to support the TalkTalk Labs team with more than 100 consumer trials being ran from the community. Our users’ voices will be heard within the business, and will help shape and define our innovations of the future.   The results so far Almost everyone across the business played a part in launching and continuing to develop the Community and although we are yet to celebrate the first birthday, we are truly proud of what we have achieved in just six months.       174% increase in traffic to the community       65% increase in registered users       Over 20% of our topics have an accepted solution       Over 58% Member Engagement with on average 6.5 replies/topic       £107k Call reduction cost saving   “Loyal customers and staff are a company’s strongest assets, and it has been fantastic to see the TalkTalk Community grow into a busy, useful forum that thousands of people log onto every day. We're looking forward to seeing it continue to develop in the coming months and years as we push ahead with our work to deliver a brilliant online self-service experience for our customers.” Dido Harding, Chief Executive Officer