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  

Company: FOX SPORTS Australia Contact: Shae Marlow (Manager, Customer Experience & Community) Community:  The Crowd Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   FOX SPORTS is Australia’s leading producer of sports television coverage and is home to Australia's favourite subscription television sports channels as well as Australia's number one general sports website. FOX SPORTS operates the website www.foxsports.com.au which contains a wide range of video content and articles, including a citizen journalism community called, The Crowd. FOX SPORTS broadcasts over 10,000 hours of LIVE sports programming per year into 2.5 million homes around Australia.     Our unique promotion and the goal   In 2014, FOX SPORTS Australia launched The Crowd – a community forum created to be the home of sports conversations. Two years in, The Crowd has provided us with a strong foundation to expand our Community Strategy and launch a unique marketing content strategy, Citizen Journalism. In short, Citizen Journalism is the ultimate community engagement opportunity whereby community members submit articles to FOX SPORTS to be published on The Crowd. It has been marketed as ‘the training ground for aspiring journalists’. The initiative has allowed us to grow our community and promote our members, particularly superusers.   The goal has been to innovate the current marketing strategy for the community whilst supporting FOX SPORTS digital strategy, including: to increase digital viewership and audience lift the emotional connection to fans reach more Australians and a younger audience     Our strategy and tactics for  community   We identified the lack of opportunities for aspiring sports journalists and so developed our Citizen Journalism initiative, a place for journalists to sharpen their skills while gaining real life experience.   We introduced an integrated content marketing approach in three key phases.   PHASE ONE: TEST   The first phase was to test the initiative in a controlled environment, engaging just two universities and inviting their journalism students to participate as ‘Crowd Correspondents’.   Students utilised The Crowd forum, where articles were submitted for approval and moderation then published to a public board. The FOX SPORTS Editorial team would then review each article and select the best for publication on foxsports.com.au. Published Crowd Correspondent articles featured all the hallmarks of a professional journalist’s piece – including their very own byline plus a link back to their Crowd profile. Lastly, two of the contributing students were selected and offered a two week paid internship with the FOX SPORTS editorial team.     PHASE TWO: LEVERAGE & INTEGRATE   Our second phase involved formalising a program that built the credentials and profiles of our Crowd Correspondents. We updated their Profile Pages, creating a portfolio of each student’s contributions to FOX SPORTS. We then discovered they were adding their Crowd profile credentials to their LinkedIn pages and CVs. This established their profiles as writers within the community and also established their Crowd experience as a worthy qualification externally.     PHASE THREE: SCALE   The final stage was to scale and extend the program to 20+ universities across Australia. In order to market to these students, we interviewed our original Crowd Correspondent intern and created a promotional video, where we highlighted the benefits to other aspiring journalism students in becoming Crowd Correspondents themselves.   As the program matured, we ramped up promotion by integrating Crowd Correspondent articles into the FOX Sports App and established The Crowd’s Twitter account.   Our results   Within four months, phase one of The Crowd Correspondent marketing initiative nearly tripled its trial KPIs, with 14 Crowd Correspondents signing up (KPI was 5).   Now, in just over 7 months, the initiative has continued to exceed expectations, both from a business and community point of view, including: 14 active universities More than 80 Crowd Correspondents Articles/Content submitted to the community has doubled, with a total of 300 articles submitted to the community and 200 published onto foxsports.com.au Two internships successfully placed, with both interns now officially working for FOX SPORTS Australia Dramatic increase from 2.3 page views per unique visitor to 4.6 page views New community registrations have more than doubled from 120 to 300 per month In our most recent promotional phase, we’ve had the highest page views since launching in 2014.   The Crowd began as a small idea with big aspirations and it has since grown into a viable content engine. It’s surpassed all KPIs set yet most importantly, it has given university students a chance to experience the thrill of sports journalism and in doing so, give fans a unique perspective of sport through the lens of a younger pundit.        

Company: Zuora Contact: Lana Lee  (Support Community Manager) Community: Zuora Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   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.   How our community meets our customer care business goals   The Zuora Community is a one-stop destination for our customer and partners to discover “just-in-time” solutions through peer-to-peer collaboration and easy access to knowledge documentation, contribute and vote on product ideas, learn about new product releases and grow in their Zuora expertise. Using our Zendesk integration with our Community, any non-Zuora community 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. Our Community uses Lithium’s topic discussion boards, blog, ideas, forums and user group features to engage with our customers: Our Topic Discussion Boards provide a collaborative space for customers to ask questions from Zuora staff and other users, gain credibility via kudos and accepted answers and share best practices. Our Announcements area informs customers about release notifications and product updates and allows Zuora to interact with our customers when they have questions. The Ideas forum is our most popular area because it allows our customers to interact with our Product Managers to potentially impact our product roadmap. We use User Groups to help connect users before events, network with each other locally and grant access to limited availability programs where customers can provide feedback to product managers on our latest releases and new features.   In only 3 months, at at an average of 20k page views per month, we trust that the Zuora Community is a “home run”  for our company and we look forward to its bright future. Since our Community launched, the reduction of support tickets was seen immediately which gives us time to become more focused on strategic initiatives such as customer advocacy, SME training, and increasing product adoption through self-service.   Our results Within a week of our community’s launch, the Support Team saw a 9% reduction of support tickets.  Now, in our third month post-launch, we have reduced support tickets by 11% - proving that the Zuora Community is rich with content that helps our customers easily find the information they need to power their subscription business.  

Company:  Critical Mass/Gyro/HP Entry submitted by: Dominic Ladden-Powell (Platform Director) Community: HP BusinessNow Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   HP Inc. is one of the world’s leading technology companies. Their mission is to create technology that helps businesses reinvent their competitive edge.   BusinessNow  is a content marketing programme that delivers useful, relevant news and advice to small and medium business decision makers establishing HP as a trusted advisor across 5 markets: UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.   Beginning life as ‘BusinessReady’ in a minor subcategory in another HP Lithium Community in early-2014, we moved BusinessNow into its own Lithium Community in February 2015 and obtained almost 3 million visits in the first year.   We launched the third iteration in February 2016.   Our community goals   BusinessNow aims to provide small to medium business owners and IT decision makers with insight and advice on issues that are important to them and can help them do their jobs better.   HP has a long-standing reputation within the technology industry for its products and services. BusinessNow is helping to position HP as a thought leader by offering insight and conversation around the prevailing themes and issues.   Search and social analytics inform the content to ensure it addresses what is important to the audience. This drives a regular programme of ‘always on’ content planned to support the overall market activity and providing a connected story that encourages the community to return for ongoing and regular advice.   Key to the strategy is elevating HP’s position as not only being a technology vendor who develops quality products but an organization that understands business. Content is amplified through social channels to drive traffic to the BusinessNow community and encourage interaction and debate building a brand experience that engages the audience.   Why our community is unique   We utilize Lithium’s blogging functionality as the sole use for our community and as such have found a great new use for the platform.   An in-depth user experience study was completed to drive the development of the design. A series of designs were then created and tested to ensure the audience’s needs and behaviours online were reflected.   The design represents the best of the best from publisher sites. This was a deliberate move to avoid the site becoming like every other IT content hub and compete against the best sources of digital and business insight like Mashable.   The clean fresh design is easy to navigate and digest and competes against some of the best publisher sites. Clever features such as the time it takes to read or view each piece helps the reader and parallax scrolling has been used to keep the sharing buttons always present and encourage the community to share.   Focusing purely on the blogging functionality provides a unique experience when compared to other Lithium communities as well as a unique content hub when compared to other IT vendor sites.   How we executed our community design   After working directly with Lithium’s engineers to create our first customized instance, we employed both front and back end developers to work within the Studio.   This, combined with the experience of community management we had accumulated within our previous communities, enabled us to augment existing components and functionality as well as create new page templates and components.   We use the API extensively to create dynamic pages based on custom filters and different language versions within single templates. Relying on existing functionality allowed us to ensure our community is as lightweight, dynamic and reliable as possible.   Metrics   We have only recently relaunched our new design but have already received encouraging metrics in the early weeks of operation including the following:     In addition to the above metrics, we have received funding from new HP corporate departments to produce custom content for their own individual campaigns as well as several inquiries about producing individual categories and communities for entirely separate departments within HP.   We took inspiration from popular online publications to create a, user-centered design, which tested extremely positively with audiences. The simple and clean design allows the content to shine on both desktop and mobile:     Within articles, the design remains clean and easy on the eye:  

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

Company: Rogers (Fido)  Entry submitted by: Strickland Hines of Rogers and Caroline Lalonde of Fido (clalonde), Community and Social Media Support Manager Community: Rogers Community Forum and Fido Community LSW social channels:  Rogers: Facebook, Twitterand second Twitter Fido: Facebook, Twitter,  second Twitter  Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Rogers Communications Inc. is a diversified Canadian telecommunications and media company. We are Canada's largest wireless voice, data and cable services provider and are well known for our product innovations as well as for being first to market. The Fido brand is part of the Rogers family.   Rogers and Fido have outlined several areas of focus for 2015; improving the overall customer experience being at the forefront. Our customers are very important to us and putting them first is imperative to our success. The social media team at Rogers and Fido play an integral role in doing so. Both Rogers and Fido have their own unique Community/Social Support teams.   In 2010, we chose Lithium as our platform provider and launched the Rogers and Fido communities. 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.   With the successful launch of the Rogers and Fido Communities, we sought new opportunities to engage with our customers; Twitter and Facebook provided ideal social platforms and opportunities we were searching for.   In 2011, we launched our Social Care teams, offering our customers a new and convenient support option. As such, we began to support and engage with our customers on twitter and Facebook. As we earned their trust through the provision of reliable support and information, customers began to adopt this new means of social support and the number of followers grew.   In 2013, in order to increase engagement on our social platforms, the scope of support provided in the Forums was expanded to include discussions on all consumer products and services. We also launched Rogers Idea Box, giving customers a voice to help direct change. Idea Box also served as an additional data collection point for customer insights.   Recognizing the need for 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 settled on Lithium Social Web (LSW) and in 2014, the Social Care team was transitioned to the LSW platform. The transition proved valuable; giving us access to more insightful reporting and new capabilities.   Benefits of a Total Community   A Lithium community and LSW are important to our social strategy of providing customers with convenience through self-serve. LSW enables seamless engagement with our customers, allowing us to respond to their support requests on Facebook/twitter via PM/DM or in public, while the community serves as a lasting source of relevant and helpful content.   In 2015, we began to optimize the Rogers and Fido Communities by leveraging insights from Lithium Social Intelligence (LSI). Our focus was set on content optimization, customer support and redesigning the Communities. We hired a team of temporary employees to review all posts to ensure accuracy and relevance of information, accepted or provided solutions and then created new content via posts, videos and blogs which aligned to contact centre top call driver results. We also hired additional permanent staff to provide direct on channel support to customers in the forums when our Super Users didn’t have the tools to assist.   An important next step in our Social strategy is the integration of our digital properties with the Social platforms we use to support customers. With the capability of the Lithium platform to integrate with our websites, we’ll be able to create seamless buy flows from community to website and helpful peer reviews from the communities on products housed on our website. We began the integration effort with a redesign of both communities to better align each community with its respective website and brand strategy. With Lithium’s support, we were able to successfully launch the redesigned Rogers Community Forums on March 31 and the redesigned Fido Community Forums on April 7.   The redesign and optimization aim at achieving the following:      Deflect calls from our contact centers by increasing our resolution rate to best in class results of 40% Leap frog the competition, increase and maintain our CHI score to best in class results of 750 Improve responsiveness to 3 hours   Our Total Community results   Today, both the Rogers and Fido Communities are staffed to support customers, and content is created daily, with blogs, posts, videos and live Rogers Ask an Expert events. We have communicated the change within the organization and externally to our customers, leveraging customer facing material like bill messages as well as IVR messaging and transactional email notifications. At this point, if your forum peers cannot assist, there is a Rogers or Fido moderator waiting to help. Today, with post launch resolution rates results at 40%, we can proudly say that the Rogers and Fido Communities are reliable sources of customer information and support.   As we continue with our approach and roadmap into Q2 of 2015, we are well on our way to building a better customer experience.   Rogers Performance Results:     Fido Performance Results:  

Company: AT&T  Entry submitted by: Bridgette Butler (Lingoes) Sr. Community Manager Community: AT&T Community Forums (http://forums.att.com)  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   AT&T is bringing it all together - helping people mobilize their worlds - with advanced mobile services, next-generation TV and high-speed Internet services, and smart solutions for businesses. For more than a century, we have consistently provided innovative, reliable, high-quality products and services. Our mission is to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else. We're creating new solutions for consumers and businesses to help them mobilize their communications and entertainment.   How our Community meets our customer care business goals   AT&T Community Forums provide 24 x 7 peer-to-peer assistance as well as AT&T direct support during normal business hours to tens of thousands of users daily, supporting customers across AT&T’s diverse spectrum of products and services.  Recognizing areas underserved by more traditional support, in 2014 we launched a Third-Party Devices board and a Wearables board, together averaging approximately 75k page views by 45k unique visitors monthly. Additionally, we launched a public-facing board for Samsung representatives to interact publicly with our general community, and a Samsung  Ambassadors board for those skilled professionals to interact privately with our 34 recipients of the Award for Community Excellence (ACE) .  This innovation directly connected Samsung experts with AT&T experts, resulting in a superior customer experience that contributed to the rise in Customer Satisfaction we saw in 2014.  We’ve begun tweeting out our most valuable Accepted Solutions, and linking to them   from Facebook.   Example of AT&T Community Forums content in the Social Support Center of AT&T Facebook To better assist the wider base of customers searching for help on att.com, we increased the number of Accepted Solutions appearing with knowledge base articles by 40%.   Example of “Help from Community Discussions” modal on an att.com knowledge base article Additionally, the AT&T Community Forums redesign, launched during July 2014, provides in-context features, game mechanics and an unprecedented level of personalization that enables users to tailor their forums experience in new ways. Archiving activities prior to redesign also improved the relevancy of internal and external search results, fostering repeat traffic and increased viewership.   July, 2014 – from “Yawnnnnn”     …..to “Yowzers!”   How Community has changed our customer care organization   Sparked by the community’s success in producing call deflection, AT&T recently launched a team of crack Wireless specialists to assist customers with account and technical issues on the forums, much like the U-verse experts on-boarded in 2013.  In addition, AT&T Community Forums was added to the att.com “Contact Us” flow.  U-verse customer care agents now routinely refer customers to our Third-Party Devices board for support outside their traditional scope.  AT&T’s 200k+ employees – including care agents – learned about the value of our community and especially its star ACEs via recognition in the AT&T Employee Insider newsletter and the AT&T Consumer Blog.   Our customer care business results   Call Shed In 2014, AT&T Community Forums worked to implement a standardized call shed model through the extraction of Community key performance indicators and pairing visitor calling rates with quantitative sentiment survey data. This model enables us to identify opportunities within each LOB to serve up content that addresses top call drivers, effectively shifting contact volume from our Call Centers to the Community Forums while also growing online adoption. During 2014, AT&T Community Forums shed over 4 Million calls.   Cost Avoidance Cost avoidance in the AT&T Community Forums determines digital ROI and frequently spurs Officer-level conversation around Community impact to the overall business. During 2014, the AT&T Community Forums generated over $30 Million in savings for the Organization, driving further ideation for additional points of invocation and awareness-building campaigns.   New Threads - Accepted Solutions On a larger scale, our groundbreaking Community redesign with a faster, simplified user experience launched in July, 2014, yielded a 19% increase in call shed. Key drivers impacting Call Shed include a 54% lift in new thread creation and a 63% improvement in accepted solution development.  

  Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: VIP forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband.   In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers.   Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information’s.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.     THE STRUCTURE In August 2013 we launched the first telco brand community in Croatia.   It is a small step in the world but big in Croatia where customers  don’t forgive unfriendly functionalities & illogical designs, because community is here for the users, not for designers or employees!   Well established names from online community and IT/telco journalists were involved in Vip forum trial and helped to design final version of community platform.   During the 2 week trial, beta testers spent more than 200 hours online and generated more than 50 different ideas and improvements which were implemented in final Vip forum version.   We made it clear in structure, transparent at the glance, light to use and spend time, easy to find answers & support.   We are the first telco community which is open to non-Vip & Vip customers with the intention to get customers help themselves.   COVER PAGE CALL FOR ACTION   FRONT PAGE BIG VISUAL BUTTONS – we are offering a way for a customer to Registrate / Login in to our community with these BIG buttons, familiar colors and sentences that are describing the action.     After customer login, he can now use his visual designed User Panel:   On the right side MENU of the cover we have visual help icons (links) to support customer  if this is his first time on Forum:   After customer login, he can now use his personalized custom component which depends on his rank and role: Personalized links Greeting and user avatar Last user posts   MENU CUSTOM COMPONENT TAB beneath main category icons allows customers to have an overview of what's new in a few seconds!     And depending on if user is logged in or not, he can see the personalized posts he didn’t read from the last visit to the community:     CSS CUSTOMIZATION   We made lot of CSS customization in our community but the latest demands from our community members were this three for better functionality and visualization:   Provided better “SOLUTION PROVIDED” visualization:   Provided better “QUOTE” custom visibility and automatically @mention the user we quote:   MOBILE VERSION   Cover page easy to use! Very similar to desktop version which is also available for mobiles. Same icons, structure & features are now available to customers!                

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

Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac)Community (Forum) expert Community: Vip forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband. In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers.    Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.   REORGANIZATION AND PROJECT KICK-OFF   In just 4 months by reallocating right resources on Vip Forum project, together with support of Lithium partner, Vipnet managed to successfully launch the unique place (Vip forum) for online discussions about telecom technology, products and services in Croatia.   Reorganization was done by shifting a true gamer in the heart, from direct customer care phone/email support into responsibility of developing what was proved to become a self-maintaining and self-developing crowd source care center.   This was highly appreciated by forum members, because, one of their kind is managing the forum.   THE LAUNCH  (Video streaming conference)   In order to present Vip forum to a targeted audience, the launch of Vip forum was done via online press conference streamed directly on the Vip forum where journalists, as well as all new community members had a chance to ask questions (to our company MCO and Community Expert) directly on the forum and received answers in real-time.   With this innovative approach to launch presentation, Vipnet opened a new path for presenting all other new projects and products.   And of course, internally Vip Forum is supported by new line processes in company. We are especially proud of our process which is proving maturity of our organization and also is supported by our MCO – customers should test devices & services!   INVOLVING OFFICIAL MOBILE PHONE REPRESENTATIVES   Aside from customers, the significance and importance of Vip forum has also been recognized by several major players in telco manufacturing industry, such as HTC and Nokia, who have chosen to be present as active users on the forum, providing direct support to its customers.   With this move our customers gain additional benefit, not only from Vip as a telecom company, but also from official mobile phone representatives which they use:                                

Company: PayPal Entry submitted by: Carolynn Bae  (Head of APAC Customer Early Life) Community: PayPal Headstart Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile payments on behalf of consumers and merchants worldwide. We put our customers at the center of everything we do. We strive to increase our relevance for consumers, merchants, friends and family to access and move their money anywhere in the world, anytime, on any platform and through any device.   We provide safer and simpler ways for businesses of all sizes to accept payments from merchant websites, mobile devices and applications, and at offline retail locations through a wide range of payment solutions.   Our unique promotion   We launched the PayPal Headstart Community to increase engagement with small business owners in 6 countries to help them through to their first transaction after signing up for PayPal and for existing businesses to increase our share of checkout through PayPal. Rather than launch the new community in the usual way we gave business owners the opportunity to connect with experts through the community and ask a question that really mattered to them and their business simultaneously helping the community gain traction and also help the business owners. We called the campaign Ask an Expert and had 3x ecommerce experts and a $100 Google AdWords incentive to kickstart the conversation.     Our strategy and tactics for community promotion   We provided a small incentive to encourage businesses to open the invitation and to submit high quality questions. We leveraged the experts bio’s as an email and social media campaign utilizing Facebook custom audiences to capture the attention of our existing business and funnel them to the community. Our hypothesis was that business owners who are more engaged with us as they set up their business are more likely to successfully integrate PayPal into their businesses and receive their first transaction.     Our results   Within 3 months we had a 2.5% lift in number of businesses making their first successful PayPal transaction across all 6 markets. And unexpectedly we also had a significant 1.84x increase in number of transactions for business segment that had activated PayPal in the last 3 months. During the 2 week campaign period we had over 500 new posts and 100k views.   Value Analytics YTD Results as of 3/31/16: n = 266 75% of respondents indicated they were able to find the information they were looking for. 66% of those respondents indicated they would have phoned or emailed had they not found their answer.

Company: Hilton Worldwide Contact: Lee Diaz (Social Media Product Manager) Community: Hilton Suggests Twitter  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Hilton Worldwide is one of the largest hospitality companies in the world, with mre than 4,600 hotels, resorts and properties in 100 countries and territories, and we’re growing faster than ever. Our 96-year history as pioneers in the industry makes us the preferred venue for travelers, developers, partners, and team members alike.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives of 2015   Hospitality and customer satisfaction should be extended to all travelers, even before they are your customers. With this focus, in 2015 we continued the expansion of the Hilton Suggests program to be an even broader global community of Hilton Worldwide team members, at all positions, that serve as a proactive resource for travelers visiting around 100 global markets. Hilton Suggests members give their time to listen for travelers’ questions, point unfamiliar travelers in the right direction, and even assist fellow locals seeking the next hidden gem for their bucket list. Through this, we deliver tweet tailored reccommendations for where to eat, what to see and what to do in our cities, to any traveler that needs a little direction.   A 2014 Study by Google on the Traveler’s Road to Decision showed that 83% of users that go online to find travel inspiration use social networking, video or photo sites. The @HiltonSuggests team helps develop some of that inspiration and alleviates some local research by surprising and delighting Twitter users seeking out travel advice with unique, local recommendations. By reaching travelers where they are, and when they are asking questions, we were able to share over 30,400 responses in 2015.     The most important customer issue we  were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation?    Travelers, as resourceful as they are, often need direction as they get ready to explore. Our focus is to help answer travelers’ questions of where to go, what to see, and where to eat that we all have as travelers to a new city. Even when they are not looking to Hilton Worldwide to answer their questions, we want to surprise and delight them with our focus actively listening, taking the time to respond, and delivering a quality piece of information from a local perspective.   Each suggestion is an authentic, first-hand recommendation based on the experiences of one of our local team members. And while we are happy to help travelers find a hotel - our primary focus is always to enhance the overall travel experience during a new-nomad’s visit.   We understand that it’s easier to appreciate the quirks and cultural nuances, too, when you’ve had a chance to experience the culture at its originator. We live and breathe the vision that our founder, Conrad Hilton, understood to be so important:   It’s our mission to fill the earth with the light and warmth of hospitality - one tweet at a time.   Our metrics     Given our focus, to reach any traveler seeking local recommendations, our core satisfaction metric is based on our ability to connect to travelers: Response. In 2015, we had just over 90 Team Members Tweet over 30,400 responses to travelers’ questions.   We leverage Lithium’s Social Web to ensure that each Team Member is receiving traveler questions from their local city / region / market, and can quickly identify which questions they can answer based on their experiences in the city they live and work in.    

Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises. The Centrify Identity Platform protects against the leading point of attack used in data breaches ― compromised credentials — by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. Centrify delivers stronger security, continuous compliance and enhanced user productivity through single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring. Centrify is trusted by over 5000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50.   Our community goals   The Centrify Community’s mission is to provide our customers with a world class peer to peer collaboration space and technical resource center. By doing this, we aim to improve our customer journey by providing them with a positive support experience and deflect support costs. With Centrify’s website re-launch in 2015, we wanted to make sure that the community experience is an extension of our overall digital brand experience. SEO is one of our major go-to market strategies, and the rich technical content in our community is a great way to showcase Centrify’s identity solutions when prospects search for iDaaS solutions. When prospects and customers arrive at our community in search of solutions, we want to provide them with an excellent UX, allowing them to easily collaborate with Centrify Experts and other technical peers.   Our unique design elements    Centrify’s new community design is an excellent example of how to maximize screen real-estate utilization while improving aesthetics that’s consistent with the corporate brand. Our re-design mission was centered around two major themes: showcasing the rich community content with a new dynamic home page, and improving UX with a new skin that includes the most useful community elements laid out in a logical and visually pleasing manner.   From the top, the hero space of the community utilizes embedded videos to present useful rich media content to community members. In addition, a text announcement bar below the hero space points to the latest community news or notifications.   New global navigation lets users access the community from any page without taking up excessive space. We have simplified our community nodes to make it easier for user to get to the conversations they are looking for.     The user alias button acts as an options dropdown, with utility links for users and community dashboard for the community managers. This allows admins and regular users to access these frequently used links on every page.     “Ask the community” widget is a helpful new addition to help users quickly find community answers or post their questions. This widget dynamically display suggestions as the users type their questions. If answers are not found, the question can be quickly posted in the relevant forum.     To showcase our high quality community generated content, we placed 3 new widgets on the home page to show announcements, solutions and recent blogs from community. In addition, latest posts are also shown on the home page and category roots.     A right hand side scrolling marquee with a call to action enables us to promote company events.     How we executed our community design   We’ve started the re-design project by compiling community user feedback and creating a list of improvements and issues to resolve. The internal community team combined user feedback and industry best practice to create initial wireframes, requirements and node structures for our design and implementation partner Grazitti. With this initial sets of requirements, Grazitti provided us with mockups, feedback and additional recommendation to formulate the final design. Finally, Grazitti rapidly developed the new community design and structure on staging for UAT, and the entire project was done on time and on budget with an extremely aggressive deadline.   Our metrics Our new community design was launched on December 20 th , 2015. Following are some of the success metrics from 12/21/2015 to 3/7/2016 after launch: 78490 visits, 5.4% year to year increase (from 74,445 a year ago) Forums visit show a larger year-to-year increase at 9% (from 51163 to 55817) New forums topics increased by 38% yty (92 to 127) From 1/1/2015 to 2/29/2015: Registered user sessions (2435) saw an 64% year-to-year increase (up from 1483), showing a much stronger intent to interact. Completed registration also saw a year-to-year growth of 42% (546 from 385 a year ago)  

Company: MEO Contact: Vanessa Simão (Community Manager) Community: MEO FÓRUM Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   MEO is a fully owned subsidiary of Altice group, and a leading telecommunications and multimedia operator based in Portugal. The company’s activities extend across all telecommunications segments: fixed line, mobile, multimedia, data and business solutions. In the Portuguese market, MEO is the leader in all segments it operates, with over 8 million mobile subscribers, 2.5 million wireline voice customers, 1.4 million pay-tv customers and 1.4 million broadband customers. MEO is the pioneer and the market leader of convergent services, with a comprehensive offer of 3Play and 4Play bundles. In 2015, domestic business revenues amounted to Eur 2,533 million.   PT Portugal's focus on the customer   In the Portuguese market, PT Portugal is a customer-oriented company, focused on innovation and execution to meet the needs of the digital consumer. PT Portugal is organized by customer segments, promoting collaboration between functions and platforms to ensure the best customer experience. PT Portugal’s priority is to create sustainable value for all customer segments.   In order to answer ever-changing consumer habits, the company has directed its provision towards convergence, mobility and virtualization of content and services.   How the Forum meets our customer care business goals   Helping people find solutions to their problems in a simple, fast and virtually free way, is the main purpose of the Forum, available 24x7 in the PC or smartphone. Good and credible aid is given either by peers or by selected moderators and company’s employees.   Recognizing that Meo’s site is still the first online place where customers try to find a solution to their problems, we incorporated the Forum into the site’s search results in September 2015. This means that people searching within the Meo site will also see any Forum posts, which are relevant to their search.   This change brought a 40% increase in referral traffic coming from the Meo ecosystem, when compared to the previous year.   Example of Meo site search with community content results.   In addition, we noted that one of the categories with more page views - Mobile Phones - required reorganization. So, we created an index of mobile phones that gathers every phone model and any written posts about them.     We also noticed that many users used the Forum to get their mobile phone’s instructions manuals. Thus, proactively, we created a new board, within the category of mobile phones, which serves as a repository for all manuals. The content is provided by company’s employees who are responsible for mobile phones certification, hence bringing them into the community, and then published both by company staff and Forum moderators.   Another way for costumers to get these manuals was through the self-care portal. We were getting 120 requests a month that had to be answered by our front office employees. Since the creation of this new board, we started redirecting these customers to the Forum, instead of allowing them to create a request that had to be analyzed and answered manually. With this change, we were able to free front office agents, allowing them to perform functions that are more complex.     Keeping Meo Forum present along the customer journey, we spread Meo Forum’s image throughout meo.pt and our self-care portal, with banners, and promoted the community in every email sent by our online store, after a purchase. We also promoted it in some of our online store’s weekly newsletters.   How our community has changed our customer care organization   We felt the need to connect our customer care assisted help with our community. So we integrated information about Meo Forum in every email sent to our customers, either through our CRM system or our self-care portal.   Both when the contact involved a complaint or a simple information request, in the footer of the email the customer would see a reference to Meo Forum with a simple message stating its purpose and a link to the community.   Pergunte, responda, contribua. Aceda já ao MEO Fórum. Ask, reply, contribute. Access MEO Forum. Moreover, we highlighted Meo Forum on the Meo Login dashboard, putting the community inside the Meo services’ ecosystem.     Today, our help and support team and customer care teams are regularly updating their contents and processes based on insights from this community, which demonstrates how the Meo Forum helped transform the way we serve our customers, beyond the digital frontier.   Our customer care business results   Call deflection   Since we launched Meo Forum, we recorded a decrease in the percentage of customers who need to use another customer care channel after visiting the Forum, either for posting or just browsing for a solution. We call this “Leakage” – nowadays, less than 13% of Meo Forum visitors have to contact a traditional customer care channel in the next 7 days.   Since peer-to-peer help was the focus of Meo Forum, we started directing personal customer inquiries and requests that concerned access to private information (such as invoice’s analysis or contracts’ end dates) to their self-care portal, where they could get a more personalized assistance. We have the Moderators for this purpose. They moderate the community by controlling the behaviour of members and providing support in most community questions, besides generating new content.   The majority of post replies are now provided by community members and only 10% of replies require company’s staff intervention, making the information richer.   Technical tutorials created by our Moderators and other loyal and more active members, are appreciated by the community and contribute greatly to this decrease. They have a high number of page views and are also used by our technical staff.   Search Engine Optimization   Meo Forum’s contribution for total organic search traffic in Meo site increased considerably in 2015. The community was responsible for 10% of all traffic coming to meo.pt.   Problems Scanning   Meo Forum is increasingly sought after by customers as a channel to seek solutions and post questions, increasing customer feedback. This allows us to monitor the conversations in a better way, contributing to the rapid identification of problems.   ROI   Based on the outcomes of a 667 online survey we conducted on the community website, during the period from March to October 2015, we built a ROI model where we estimate savings in customer contact deflection of approximately €550.000 in 2015.   The online survey is showed to each user who logs in to Meo Forum, and tries to determine if the original questions they had were solved during that visit. If the answer is positive, we also ask them if they would have used an assisted channel if had not found the answer in Meo Forum. With this model we can measure the amount of customers that solve their issues in Meo Forum without requiring a telephone or in person contact.      

Company:  ScottishPower Entry submitted by: Chris Brennan (Senior Search and Social Strategy Manager - Digital Marketing) Community:  https://twitter.com/sp_energypeople https://twitter.com/ScottishPower https://www.facebook.com/ScottishPower Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   ScottishPower supplies energy to over 5 million homes and businesses in the UK, as part of the Iberdrola Group, a global energy company and world leader in wind energy.   As the number one European utility by market capitalisation we are helping to change the energy market for the better, driving innovation from the way we generate and supply energy to how we interact with our staff and customers.   Social Media is at the heart of our strategic growth and our constant drive to be an Energy company you would be happy to recommend to friends and family.   Our  customer satisfaction initiatives: 360 o Customer View   During 2015, we faced a challenge in managing the perception and reputation of our customer service after a sustained period of instability post implementation of a new Billing and CRM system. Prior to this, our Social Media landscape was a healthy and vibrant small community of engaged advocates. This community rapidly grew and became steadily more negative as customer service complaints and media focus increased. With only two full-time staff operating during business hours our situation quickly became unmanageable and added to the negative perception around ScottishPower at the time.   Faced with this challenge, we conceived, developed and began implementation of our Customer 360 O program focusing on re-engaging with customers and improving satisfaction and reputation scores. Central to this was bringing social media closer to our tradition customer touch points with a truly Omni-channel approach to service. In delivering this approach, we embarked on three key social initiatives utilising LSW to deliver a truly exceptional Social Customer Care experience.   Filter out the noise: Utilise LSW tags and routing to allow our small customer service team to focus on real customer engagements   Prioritise those who need help the most: Energy is an important part of our daily lives. Utilising priority rules in LSW we have refined key word routing to ensure when someone loses their electricity supply or are a vulnerable customer we are able to intervene quickly to help.   Reducing repeat contacts: From social listening, we identified a pool of repeat customers. Using LSW we have been able to revise and resolve issues through improved end-2-end case management to minimise the reputational damage from serial dissenters.   The most important customer issues we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation   Focusing on delivering excellent customer service on social We have always had a proud history in delivering exceptional service to our customer and that had been impacted somewhat by the migration to our new billing system. Through social it was important that we re-engaged with our customers and restored their confidence in ScottishPower as their energy provider.   By embarking on the Customer 360 0 project, we have been able to improve our customer service performance on social dramatically. LSW has been central to this strategy and has provided the platform to re-engage with our customers and restore confidence in our brand. Through the metrics that we track regularly we have seen a significant improvement and with a 13 point improvement in our social sentiment post LSW implementation it is clear that our customers are also seeing the benefits of our enhanced social service.     The robustness and confidence we have been able to install in our team since implementing LSW led us to re-open and cleanse over 2.5k pervious social service cases reducing our repeat contacts by 30% and restore faith in previously dissatisfied customers.   Due to our increased focus on measurement and performance management, we have now extended our coverage to 24/7 and our team has trebled in size. Internally Social First is our new approach with Monitor Wall visible in key departments such as THE Digital Innovations team, Customer Services and shared with all appropriate C-Suite leaders.   Making it easier to do business with us In-depth routing and reporting capabilities have allowed us to focus on the root cause issues to drive service improvement. As such, we are now able to embark on a pro-active engagement campaign to educate and help consumers and reduce the need for them to individually contact us.     Metrics  Positive and neutral sentiment improved from 77% pre Lithium to 90% post Lithium Repeat social complaints reduced by 30% Average response time for Priority 1 cases reduced from 1 hour to 20 minutes. 80% of mentions responded to in less than 1 hour with 98% within 2 hours. 200 repeat customer cases fully reworked and helped through re-engagement using Lithium Recent Independent Industry benchmarking by Social Bakers showed we had the 2nd highest number of service engagement in the industry (highest of the major suppliers by customer base) yet the fastest response rate of all suppliers Overall Customer Satisfaction scores are improving with the percentage of Very Satisfied increasing by 20 percentage points over the last 6 months    

Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Lois Townsend (loisT) Director, Social Media and Community Community: Autodesk Community (Forums.autodesk.com) Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch    Autodesk, Inc., is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries—including the last 19 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects—use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created. From blockbuster visual effects and buildings that create their own energy to electric cars and the batteries that power them, the work of our 3D software customers is everywhere you look.   Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art 3D software for global markets. Through our apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Android, we're also making design technology accessible to professional designers as well as amateur designers, homeowners, students, and casual creators. Whether it's a kid looking to build a new contraption, a seasoned pro sketching out a great new idea, or someone who just wants to amp up their creative output, we're taking technology originally built for movie studios, automakers, and architectural firms, and making it available to anyone who wants to create and share their ideas with the world.   Autodesk Drives Customer Loyalty with Collaborative and Proactive Community   How does a B2B software company build customer loyalty and increase the value of each customer with an ever-changing social landscape? Autodesk, one of the world leaders in 3D design, engineering, and entertainment software, has found the answer – delivering on customers’ needs before they ask. The company drives customer loyalty and product affinity through a Total Community strategy. The strategy includes activations on Facebook, nearly 200,000 followers on Twitter, more than 40 million views on YouTube, and a branded community, running on the Lithium platform, that has seen its unique visitors grow by 34% in the last year.     One of the pillars of the Autodesk social strategy is its branded community which is the main hub for directly connecting with customers. Dating back to 1986, with Compuserve, Autodesk has leveraged community to foster peer-to-peer to support, drive greater brand affinity, and solidify relationships with its customers. It has evolved to focus on collaborating with and anticipating the needs of customers.   Now its eight communities in multiple languages, offer customers unique experiences by industry, region, and expertise level. The company shares product use information, solves potential product issues, and promotes best practices to proactively supply customers with the tools and information needed for a successful product experience.     The company’s collaborative and proactive approach is supported by several key programs, including Expert Elite and Autodesk Help Webinars. The tactics have delivered the following success metrics: Autodeskcommunities received over 27 million unique visits in the last 12 months. Annually, the community successfully serves answers to millions of customers, yielding a multimillion dollar value to Autodeskand its customers. Customer success is tracked and measured via surveys to ensure that the community is providing actual solutions, and at an increasing rate. The community has more than 2 million registered members that have shared more than 135,000 kudos and over 20,000 newly accepted solutions in the last year.   Expert Elite:   Autodesk’s Expert Elite are the Super Fans and lifeblood of the Autodesk Community. The Autodesk Expert Elite program was created to recognize customers around the world who have contributed a significant amount of time, knowledge, and assistance to fellow customers. These people have demonstrated a strong sense of leadership and use an engaging style of collaboration that contributes to a healthy and valuable customer community. The program now has over 200 members representing 23 different countries. They have delivered 7,000 accepted solutions, received 17,000 kudos and posted 60,000 replies.   The unique aspect about the Expert Elite program is that it doesn’t stop at community; it is the concept of Total Community. The program not only values a user’s contribution within the community, but outside of it as well. Autodesk looks at the contributions people are making on personal blogs and other social channels, as well as at offline events such as training seminars, to really see the conversations happen full circle.   One Expert Elite, Paul Munford is a great example of Total Community. He wanted to spread the word to let people know about the terrific support options available to Autodesk customers. He interviewed various Autodesk Help team members and then posted his story on his personal blog.  He then amplified it on his other social channels for maximum reach.  Not only did Paul feel passionate enough to write about the Autodesk Help team, but he has posted 943 times, received 198 Kudos and contributed 53 solutions in the community. This example shows the loyalty Autodesk has created with their trusted fans. It is not only about providing customers immediate answers for questions, but building relationships with them and bringing them into the Autodesk family.   Autodesk further drives loyalty among the Expert Elites by offering monthly webinars to share company and product news, providing free software, and hosting an annual Summit where the Expert Elites and Autodesk representatives can meet in person.  At the last Summit held in December 2014, the EE’s had a chance to meet informally over a lunch with CEO Carl Bass, and also had informal presentations and Q&A sessions with the CTO and VP of Cloud.  All of the EE’s are under NDA and therefore Autodesk can share news and information normally restricted for employees only, allowing for early input and feedback from this elite group of customers that is incorporated into products and services.   Autodesk Help Webinars:   Autodesk recognized the importance of video content on the community, and last year piloted and launched a webinar program to proactively offer customers another way to learn about and experience Autodesk products. For instance, the Installation and Licensing Community hosted “Troubleshooting Desktop Subscription Licensing issues” webinar to give users the information they need to get the “software up and ready.”  The Autodesk Help webinar series is a virtual studio house, with regular, and in some cases weekly offerings.  Webinar attendance can be as high as 200 live attendees and videos posted online can reach over 5,000 views.   The webinars proactively target popular topic areas to address questions or in response to customer conversations surfaced elsewhere on the community. The webinars are purely for support and learning, providing customers with information that allows them to get products up and running quickly and provide a deep knowledge about functionality, with the ultimate goal of helping customers to optimize productivity and utility of their Autodesk software.  Over 50% of webinar attendees are repeat participants because they derive continued value from the webinar content.  Put into customer words, “The session was great, and I plan to attend as many as I can.  Although I am relatively proficient there is always something I can learn.”   Innovating with success measurement - The Gratitude Index:   Autodesk knew that having a better understanding of their customer sentiment, relative to competitors and known market leaders, was critical to a successful long-term social strategy. To achieve that goal, the company‘s global social media support team created the Gratitude Index, which is an algorithm based on keywords and the number of social mentions that contained specific words associated with gratitude, thanks, and appreciation. In other words, it was an actual measurement of customers expressing their gratitude for the support they received from the Autodesk Help team. The Gratitude Index is used to measure customer satisfaction and efficiency; a qualitative social ROI. The index has become a key metric for the team and is shared up to the highest leadership levels at Autodesk.  Currently, and consistently, Autodesk leads among other software companies and ranks among top brands from other industries.   Autodesk also uses key words to track customers that have expressed frustration and a negative sentiment. The @AutodeskHelp team works with these customers to solve issues and turn negative situations around, when possible, moving a frustrated customer to a delighted one. The challenging feedback is also used to inform how the team and Autodesk can better serve customers and surface potential problems on the horizon.   In fact, the negative feedback is embraced almost more tightly because there is rich insight that can be gleaned about how to improve the customer experience, from product purchase to usage, to renewal and repurchase.   It's Working:   Autodesk’s Total Community strategy is working, with a Klout Score of 85, they are in the top percentile of social influencers.  And, when customer detractors are engaged, Autodesk’s Help team converts at least twice as many as those who remain upset.   The strategy is embraced from the top down, as evidenced by a recent blog post by CEO Carl Bass who frequently participates in the Fusion 360 community as it is one of Autodesk’s strategic products.   Check out the Fusion 360 community and in particular, this recent blog from Carl that talks about building the product “hand-in-hand with the Fusion community,” along with a blog comment from one of the Expert Elites that states “I’ve seen so many examples where suggestions were heard, understood, refined, and implemented in an amazingly short time frame.”  This is exactly what Autodesk wants to achieve, to drive even greater levels of customer loyalty.     To celebrate these important milestones of Autodesk's Total Community success through our Expert Elite program and Help Webinars, we recently were nominated for a Forrester Groundswell award-- and we won!   Here's the video that accompanied this prestigious win:    

Company: Centrify Corporation Entry submitted by: Anton Chiang (Sr. Manager, Community & Support Program) Community: Centrify Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Centrify is the leader in securing enterprise identities against cyberthreats that target today’s hybrid IT environment of cloud, mobile and on-premises. The Centrify Identity Platform protects against the leading point of attack used in data breaches ― compromised credentials — by securing an enterprise’s internal and external users as well as its privileged accounts. Centrify delivers stronger security, continuous compliance and enhanced user productivity through single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, mobile and Mac management, privileged access security and session monitoring. Centrify is trusted by over 5000 customers, including more than half of the Fortune 50.   How we are implementing Community to meet our customer care business goals   Centrify provides unified identity management for end users and privileged users, with flagship products addressing needs for identity management across cloud, mobile and data centers. Our support team interacts with IT admins with diverse skills sets spanning across *NIX, Windows, Active Directory and SAML, just to name a few.   The Centrify Support team believes that building a Community of Centrify admins across the globe plays an important role in providing world class support to our customer base. With a vibrant community, we are able to increase customer satisfaction with an ever growing library of user generated solutions, tech blogs and videos. In addition, we’re able to reduce support contact cost across all regions yet meet SLA’s and responsiveness by leveraging the community.   Our community consists of product forums, tech blogs and Ideas Exchange. All users have read access across all product forums and tech blogs. With our newly implemented “Ask the Community” widget, customers can quickly find existing answers in a wealth of accepted solutions and tech articles. All registered users are welcomed to post in our free Centrify Express forum. This enables Centrify to provide a positive user experience for our free product users, potentially leading to paid upgrade when their organizations expand.   For our paid customers, they have the option to ask questions in the premium product forums. These questions are automatically escalated to an internal “A-Team” of superusers if the community does not answer within 24 hours. This ensures that our paid customers receive timely responses while Centrify reduces support contact volume.   Our paid customers can also to post product enhancement ideas and vote on them in the Ideas Exchange. Here, Centrify’s product team members regularly engage in discussions with customers, providing them with an exclusive channel to share valuable feedback to the Centrify product team.   Changes we implemented  because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community    At Centrify, we value support as a team that adds value to our customers and not a cost center. That being said, just like every successful and customer centric organization, we keep a close eye on our costs every year. The savings in headcount to support our customers are re-invested to make the Community and Support Portal more interactive and resourceful. With new products, new customers we are always innovating and ensuring that every type of customers who come to us for a help can easily find their answers. We have re-launched our community several months ago with an improved design and structure, focusing on making the community easier to use for new and returning members alike. In the future, we will be enhancing the UI further to provide a single pane of glass for all existing customers to address their technical and product needs. The success of Community for our customers has also encouraged our internal teams to increase participation. Technical teams across Centrify now regularly create useful tech blog articles, how-to’s and videos to increase the value of this every growing library of user generated content.   Our customer care and business results    Centrify Community started as a platform for our freemium product (Centrify Express) users to ask their questions. Since then, we have opened up additional product forums, tech blogs and customer Idea Exchange.   In spite of growing our customers base and revenues by 2x, our team has been able to successfully support 5000+ customers and continuously achieve a 92%+ customers satisfaction*. Without enabling peer-to-peer community help, we would not be able to sustain such rapid growth while maintaining a high score for customer satisfaction. Support Management at Centrify is always looking at metrics to drive more self-service, engineer efficiency and content creation (Knowledge articles and how-to videos).   *Customer Satisfaction is derived from 5 survey metrics that we collect from our customers. Every time a case that is opened with Technical Support team at Centrify, the customer will have an opportunity to provide their feedback on the products, people, and features / functionality of Centrify Solutions. Customer are asked to rate us on the 5 parameters (1) Case Owner Satisfaction (2) Overall Product Satisfaction (3) Product Quality (4)Features and Functionality and (5) Overall Support Satisfaction.     We’ve seen steady community growth in the past 4 years. Q1 2016 we saw a year over year increase of user sessions by 38%.   More than 30k visits per month in indirect contact deflection. 40+ technical topics are answered and turned into searchable community knowledge for future use. 15+ technical blogs / video blogs are created monthly for our community member’s consumption.   Rich Multimedia Content in the community tech blog:     Wealth of technical information and resource in the community. “Ask the Community” widget makes it easy for users to get started:     Idea Exchange:        

Company: Breast Cancer Care Contact: Anna Brown (Digital Community Officer) Community: Breast Cancer Care Forum Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   The Breast Cancer Care Forum is the largest single cancer forum in the UK.  It was the first peer support forum of its kind, originally launched in 1999/2000.  Our Lithium powered platform enables users to safely share their personal stories and receive emotional support from other people affected by breast cancer. Central to the success of the forum is an environment from which trust can develop, thereby encouraging empathy, human connections and interactions, albeit virtual; this in turn creates a safe space that lessens isolation and anxiety.  Real people-virtual connection:  Overcoming isolation using accessible technology. There are many ways to face breast cancer, we help people find theirs.   Our organization’s customer satisfaction initiatives in 2015   In 2015 we aimed to increase registrations, user engagement and widen our reach to be accessible to everyone affected by breast cancer. As a charity we looked at ways for delivering more for less and reduce our expenses whilst maintaining safety and integrity.   We are a user centric organisation and incorporate all user feedback, input or direct data from LSI to inform improvements to customer experience and user journey on the forum. By listening to our users in workshops and reading comments in posts, we know they want instant access to online support at the time they need it, for this reason we have removed first post moderation and implemented SSO so users only need one account for our Forum and breastcancercare.org.uk.   To support this reduced moderation we have customised the keyword and smut filter systems, as well as activating the abuse notifications and spam quarantine.  By doing this we have reduced our moderation team from 6 sessional moderators and 1 Coordinator to 1 Digital Community Officer and 1 Digital Community Assistant. Through this careful implementation we have not only preserved our outstanding reputation of being a safe and risk free environment, we have significantly built on it. We can safely rely on robust Lithium technology, and through all these changes we have simultaneously increased and expanded our customer engagement and service provision. To illustrate, below are our targets and achievements for the year.     User engagement and satisfaction We know that the ‘midnight terrors’ are real for many people, both newly diagnosed or further on in their treatment of breast cancer.  A popular thread used by many during the ‘witching hours’ is ‘The Night Birds’; where members of the community chat and reduce isolation when everyone else is asleep.   The community is an invaluable source of support and information regardless of the stage of breast cancer journey:  At the beginning when it is all new and frightening;   “i have been reading the forums since waiting for my results and found it a tower of strength. Thought it was time I joined in........”   Experiencing side effects of treatment;   “ I think the side effects affect us more than people realise and that is one reason why these forums help so much”   Coming out the other end of treatment and wanting to support others;   “EXTOLLING THE VIRTUES AND BENEFITS OF THIS WONDERFUL FORUM AND THE WONDERFUL PEOPLE ON IT. ALL OF WHOM, BASICALLY "SAVED MY LIFE". Our users regularly share their experiences both of online and offline services.  Increasing user engagement with the rest of Breast Cancer Care is important to us and our users are the best sources of referral:   “I’m part way through a course called Moving Forward run by Breast Cancer Care – it’s four morning sessions with other ladies who have recently finished treatment and we are covering topics such as diet, exercise, relationships, menopause symptoms, recurrence etc, and to be honest the most powerful thing is being in a room with ten other women who, just like you guys, absolutely get how I am feeling and thinking.  If this is your thing then I’d urge you to have a look and see if there is a course running near you.”   We recognise that for many users they receive the information and support they are looking for by reading posts rather than by actively contributing.  We wanted to encourage this group of forum users to still feel a member of the community and achieved this by introducing Hugs, customised from Kudos. Users are now able to connect with each other as well as show compassion and empathy by sending Hugs in response to a post.  This function has been very popular and from launch in December to the end of March a total of 3,948 Hugs have been given.     Another recent user focussed innovation has been the implementation of Community Champions.  We identified 21 possible users who naturally offer support and empathy as well as support new users and signpost to other areas of support.  100% of people contacted accepted the recognition:   “I’m knocked out ‘cos all i do is out of love and passion for my fellow womankind.  How wonderful.”     We have noticed a steady increase in engagement since this implementation and plan on building on this success.     Our plans for the very near future include a forum restructure. Using the data and analytics from LSI, we have identified areas of the forum which are underutilised.  The flexibility of the Lithium platform enables us to move categories and boards to reflect the needs of our users and to enhance the ease of user journey. Removing inactive areas allows us to introduce new areas which have been requested, such as a ‘Coffee Lounge’ where users can still connect in a safe online environment but in conversations which are cancer free.   Other new areas include a closed private group for our Community Champions and an innovative category, ‘Ask Our Nurses’. This is where users can directly ask questions to our highly regarded clinical specialists enhancing our Helpline and ‘Ask the nurse’ email service.       In the last 12 months our forum has grown by 40% and we have no intention of sitting back and settling for that.  With the ability to be reactive to our users’ needs and having the data, both quantitative and qualitative to support and underpin decisions, we will continue to grow from strength to strength.      

Company: Skype Contact: Claudius Henrichs (Community Manager) Community: Skype Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Skype is for doing things together, whenever you’re apart. Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.   With Skype, you can share a story, celebrate a birthday, learn a language, hold a meeting, work with colleagues – just about anything you need to do together every day. You can use Skype on whatever works best for you - on your phone or computer or a TV with Skype on it. It is free to start using Skype - to speak, see and instant message other people on Skype for example.   Our community goals   Since 2011 the Skype Community is the place for customers and employees to meet and exchange and learn about everything Skype. With topics ranging from technical support through ideation all the way to tips and tricks it’s the place to become a Skype expert.   Our product organization is using community insight to obtain customer lead steering for the next iterations of product and features. A vibrant global community covering 11 languages is crucial to ensure that we understand and prioritize what is driving customers, from the newly registered all the way to the 10+ year superfan. At the same time Skype Community gives customers the opportunity to learn about the people at Skype: What made us come up with a certain feature, how we built it and how we operate to deliver against our mission to be customer obsessed. Our goal for this year was to deliver all of this on an awesome mobile and more personal community experience.   Our unique design elements    Over the course of the last 12 months we have honed in on our strategy to everywhere put our community members and their content first. At the same time since our last redesign in 2014 we have been working closer with our design team to ensure the Skype Community reflects the Skype brand. Skype iconography and design elements You feel right at home at the Skype Community thanks to the familiar buttons, colors and layout elements. Particularly the orange dot as an indicator for unread conversations is what you will find across the community UI: From your personal notifications down to topic level:     Skype avatars and emoticons Everyone loves the Skype emoticons which is why we’ve replaced the Lithium profile avatar collections with a Skype one (which proved to be quite challenging with 3M+ registered accounts already having selected a Lithium avatar):     ...and we did the same for the editor emoticons:   Mobile optimized– Scroll to top & Browse menu   Our responsive design doesn’t only reshuffle widget placements on smaller screen sizes, but we have also put some thought on how you quickly browse within long topics and the community using a dynamic scroll to top and a browse menu: All conveniently placed in reach for your right thumb:       Skype Hovercards Hovercards are getting common at Lithium communities, but we’ve taken them a bit further with small tweaks that visually invite discovering them via subtle avatar zooms when moving the mouse over it. And of course they follow the Skype branding and give a nice showcase for the badge icons:     How we executed our community design   First phase: Inventory & spring cleaning We started with an inventory of all our components – stock and custom ones – per each page and applied a strict triaging following out “members and content first” rule to determine which of them were to be kept. According to that we built up the page layouts. Second phase: Airbrush & Spraypaint We started off from the plain white Lithium responsive base skin and had the developer team apply all the basic styling elements according to the Skype style guideline: Font families and sizes, buttons, boxes, colors. So we weren’t actually working off pixel perfect designs for each page, but invited our design team on to our stage server and have them identify the necessary detailed tweaks (“30px top margins above all panels!”). As an outcome to this within 2 weeks we had a solid basic styling across all primary page layouts. Third phase: Review, Optimize, Rinse & repeat We had then entered the phase of optimizing the interactions on actual devices, so we focused on model devices for each category – mobile, tablet, large screen – and gave the design the necessary fine tune in the following 3-4 weeks. We involved our super fans here to ensure that the new site worked for their everyday flow as much as for the casual visitor. And honestly: We never exited this phase and versioning wise have already reached “Responsive 1.6”    Our results   A few weeks in the new responsive design has shown the following impact: Mobile registration 23% up – across all device sizes up 12% 84% more images uploaded thanks to the new media experience 19% referrer traffic increase Subscriptions up 57% Expected 400-500K unique visitor increase monthly thanks to new responsive community unlocking option for in-client community links on mobile