Company: Vodafone Australia  Entry submitted by: Timothy Hanslow (Tim_h) Community Care Manager Community: Vodafone Community (http://community.vodafone.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Vodafone Australia is the third biggest mobile network provider in Australia and has a 20-year history of providing excellent value to its customers. In 2010, network issues driven by the sharp uptake in smartphone use created problems for our customers, that saw our customer sentiment and NPS drop rapidly. The launch of Vodafone Community came at a time when our customers needed support, a place to share, talk to one another and to get information to us, and for us to talk to them directly.    Vodafone launched the Community almost three years ago as a way for customers to communicate with us. It gave customers a voice to talk to us openly and publicly. We loved the Community for the customer interactions, their honesty in saying “me too” with other’s issues, and their support and information in solving one another’s issues. Lithium provided the platform we wanted to get the incredible expertise our customer base and let them work together. We named the Community because of its goals. Our customers were going to be having these conversations anyway so we wanted to ensure we were part of them.    We’ve built something genuinely exciting and different on top of the platform.   Our community is modified a lot from a default Lithium Community with major changes already made to the layout and functionality available. We’ve taken the amazing functionality of the platform and rearranged it to fit our needs and used REST to build whole new functionality on top of it.   New options We’ve repurposed labels in the forums as a new type of content tag and tied it into our other custom work to tie in with data stored per user. We’re displaying content in colour coded groups across the top of threads. Users are using labels without even realising it. New custom content stored on user profiles allows us to store “devices” for a user to identify which mobile/s they are using and which they’ve had in the past. We display this information on their user profile and in their avatar hover. We tie this data together with the repurposed labels (two different data sets) and indicate on a thread where the conversation is about the device a user has. It adds a quick visual flag that this conversation would have something of value, or that they can add value too.   Forum navigation has been replaced with a custom component that displays the forum navigation structure above the fold. We’re letting people get to content quickly and see the options available to them without scrolling or hiding it behind multiple tabs.   “My devices”  is a custom built set of pages displaying content matching labels. We custom built product pages to house related conversations and piece them together with labels. We’ve designed it to use 1 or multiple labels in a single page and a label can exist in multiple pages. This allows us to drive customers to a single point of interaction for a topic of interest, even when those posts fall into multiple boards and categories.    Avatars across the site now feature a hover card that displays username, posts, kudos, custom device data, etc. It provides a great deal of information on demand but keeps it out of the way when not in use. The other major driver was to get information about our members visible in multiple places. You can quickly see a users details from whatever page you see their avatar. Leaderboards, contributors, post histories, recent posts, etc.   Page stats are now featured on each page at the top right. This varies from page types but shows details like total view count, contributors and their avatars, post count, etc. We use this across the boards, forums, categories, user profiles and REST keeps it updated in real time. It provides a common visual anchor to the top right page.   User logon and profile details are moved into an interactive dropdown at the top right. We’ve minimised the text at the top of the forums but left the options accessible by creating a widget that expands on mouse click. Users can quickly get to their profile, community help or sign out without taking up screen real estate.     “My Posts” is a new sidebar widget showing the last posts a user made. To keep engagement high and let people return to conversations in progress we show them the last posts they were in on every page. It’s one click from wherever you are to get back into a thread you recently posted in. It keeps users on site and moving in conversations they want to take part in.   Redesign of existing options Forum threads now run a 3 column layout with a tiny left column containing the avatar. We’ve recreated the avatar=>post relationship from other social channels to let users quickly visually scan for posts from known entities. We’ve then pulled all the non post specific data and moved into the avatar hover cards. The result is a clean simple interface without a left column of data to get in the way. As users read left to right we’ve minimised clutter to the left to keep people engaged in the conversation.   The sidebar has been moved into forum threads and contains similar content across the Community. We dynamically adjust widgets and deliver the same type, but different specific content on all pages.   “Post a message” lives at the top right column across the entire community. From boards, forums, topics and even the front page users are one click away from jumping into the conversation. We’ve removed the barriers and prevented people from searching for the right place to post and just made it as simple as possible for them to contribute.   Our TKB has two significant design changes, authors are out and contributors are in. We’ve  reshuffled the fields and only show the contributors to a post and not the author. This lets our internal team publish, edit and work with content from our members but keeps the contributors as the public face.  It’s another big way to reward our users for the content they produce without needing them to do extra work to see their name in lights.   We’ve also built custom javascript to hide elements of a TKB article from a query string passed via the URL. We’re using this to personalise articles for users as we need to, but leaving the full article content ready for others to find. We’re taking a full set of troubleshooting steps and showing people just what they need to see. The best of both worlds.   Our NPS continues to climb, and month on month customer sentiment improves. The Community page views and unique visitors continue to climb quarter on quarter.   Our new features are providing tangible benefit to customers with a direct uplift in resolution rates, and a decrease in time to resolution. Both staff and super users are engaging in a higher % of posts and delivering consistently better results because of customer profile data.

Company: Petco Contact: Melanie Morrill (Mgr, Social Media and Content) Community: Petco Community Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   With more than 50 years of service to pet parents, Petco is a leading pet specialty retailer that focuses on nurturing powerful relationships between people and pets. We do this by providing the products, services, advice and experiences that keep pets physically fit, mentally alert, socially engaged and emotionally happy.   Our community goals   Our goal is to establish Petco digital properties as the “go-to” source for pet care news, customer support, social commerce, education, information and fun. The Petco Community delivers on “The Power of Together” by creating and showcasing high-value, Petco-branded content that resonates with the communities we serve. We aim to engage and empower pet parents to enrich their pets’ lives.   The design elements that make our community unique    The Petco Community is a branded content hub where pet parents and animal lovers can connect, share pet stories, find solutions to pet care issues and more. The Community platform, with a new look and feel and a dramatically improved user experience, enables us to more effectively and efficiently engage, support and market to current and prospective customers. The design elements that make our community unique are the rich content immersion from our home page and throughout the community, and dynamic content recommendation at the blog level.   To Petco, the community is more than just Q&A forum content. It’s about engaging with pet parents in rich, meaningful ways. Our goal was to strike an important balance between Petco-generated and user-generated content. For instance, on the home page, we developed large components that enabled Petco to feature beautiful, unique pet imagery to entice users to engage and to communicate our expertise, while at the same time balancing that against user-generated discussion content across all pet categories.   The Community offers a variety of content in every pet category—including dog, cat, fish, small animal, reptile and bird. You’ll also find: Hundreds of blog posts (co-created and collaborative content written by SMEs, influencers, Petco partners, veterinarians, community super users and pet industry journalists) More than 6,500 forum posts (where community members can ask questions and share their pet parent experiences) A tribal knowledge base (where we provide the best answers to common questions) Infographics, Petco videos, photos, contests and more   How we executed our community design   We leveraged Lithium’s strategy consulting and technical services groups to conceive, design and implement a customized experience. Strategy consulting worked with us from the ground up, identifying our core business needs and matching that with an achievable but differentiated community experience, one that propelled us from a standard forum design to a rich, compelling community we could be proud of. Next, they worked hand-in-hand with their development team to ensure that many of the customized experiences we wanted could be executed on-time and within budget. Lastly, they continued to engage with us after implementation to make tweaks and improvements to the experience. In fact, we continue to work with them to convert the community to a responsive experience in the coming months.   Our metrics   All 2015 goals for the community were exceeded post community redesign launch.   Traffic Totals for FY15: 62% increase YOY Total Page Views: 3,942,000 (FY14: 2,430,000) 68% increase YOY Visits: 2,852,000 (FY14: 1,702,000) 65% increase YOY Unique visitors: 2,533,000 (FY14: 1,538,000) 28% increase YOY Total Registered Member: 15,008 (FY14: 11,726) 22% increase YOY Completed registrations: 3,282 (FY14: 2,685)      

Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness.   Our 2015 goals for our Lithium-powered community and LSW   Fitbit helps people lead healthy and active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration, and guidance to reach their goals. Our community connects millions of users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.   Keeping focus on our brand commitment to excellent experiences, our 2015 goals centered around establishing better connections between customers and product support. We sought to increase our presence on social media, bring even more visitors to our established forum content, and ensure quick, consistent responses through all our channels.   We recognized that achieving these primary goals would also result in equally substantial secondary benefits. By providing excellent support via social platforms, we would deflect contacts from other support channels, which offer a more traditional one-to-one communication model. By surfacing relevant Community discussions and Accepted Solutions, we would have the opportunity to resolve customer inquiries before their question was even asked.   In addition, we were excited to begin routing all content through LSW, from social engagements and forum posts to marketing responses and app reviews. Through tagging, volume metrics, and social listening tools, we aimed to improve our understanding of what users are seeking when they reach out to us. This data is a vital part of improving our internal analytics and reporting to the business around milestone events.   Our focus areas and tactics    We set out to meet - and even surpass - these goals with an ambitious multi-pronged strategy.   The largest single move to unite customers with content involved transitioning our Community from private to full public accessibility. The ensuing SEO visibility resulted in 3x visits and page views.     In anticipation of this new traffic, we launched a major project to maximize the value of Accepted Solutions, which appear prominently in search results. Our team worked to ensure that every Community topic included a satisfactory response, which is an effort we continue with new threads today.   Another significant step toward this goal was promoting our Community and Twitter support channels on both the help site and contact page. As this is the most common avenue used to reach Fitbit via email, phone, and chat, we hoped the prospect of a more rapid response on our platforms would appeal to customers.   We recognized that this effort would only be worthwhile if we could indeed deliver on that promise of excellent and rapid resolutions. To this end, we developed a capacity plan and staffing model to accommodate the growing popularity of our social support channels, aiming for the 4 hour maximum response time featured on our contact page, 24 hours a day. Through collaboration with our social marketing teams, we aggressively added support for newly-established regional brand pages and new channels including Instagram and app store reviews. We also put LSW’s tagging logic to work by applying product, platform, and feature-based tags to content, allowing us to get deep insights into social and community commentary.   In addition to bolstering our social coverage, we began acknowledging emerging issues in real-time through proactive tweets, floated community threads, and help site banners (which often linked straight to community threads). We’ve also engaged our Community Council superuser group to escalate concerning posts for quick attention. With this infrastructure in place, we were on the right track to make Fitbit a leader in the social support realm!   Our results   As we compare our current state to where we began at the start of 2015, it’s clear that the aforementioned efforts have been wildly successful.     Social media interactions increased rapidly as we strengthened our support presence and featured these channels on our contact page. Per the above graph, we saw a 616% increase in contacts to our dedicated support handle on Twitter between January 2015 and January 2016 (compared to a 393% increase the year prior). We also noted a substantial gain in channel subscriptions as we passed 100,000 followers on Twitter. Our growing audience brings increased amplification and adds value to proactive tweets, aiding us us in our mission to further reduce support contacts. As depicted below, we've calculated that by providing Twitter support alone, we've saved approximately 29,000 agent hours in Q3 and Q4 of the past year, by resolving customer issues without the involvement of email, phone, or chat.     Our shift to a public Community was impossible to overlook, as forum content quickly occupied the top spots for relevant search results. We saw daily traffic more than double in the month following this change, and noted the balance shift to more than 60% mobile visitors. As we ramp down from the last Holiday season, we now find ourselves at about 500% traffic compared to the closed community of 6 months ago.   To better visualize the full value of this growth, we ran a series of Community surveys to gauge the likelihood for Community visitors to open support cases after their visit. Prior to the open community, we saw potential for about 500,000 annual case deflections. Following the public relaunch, we were able to greatly increase this ROI potential, even considering increased staffing costs. Per the results of these surveys, we estimate about 225% ROI for our Community last year.     The 2015 year was one of lofty goals and great strides for both our team and our platforms. These numbers give us confidence that our hard work has resulted in better support experiences for Fitbit customers around the world, and also that we continue to significantly contribute to an efficient, versatile, and economical Customer Support department.

Company: K2  Entry submitted by: Todd Lilienthal (toddlilienthal) Director of Digital Strategy Community: K2 Community (Community.k2.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design     K2 software allows people to build and run business process applications, including forms, workflow, data and reports. Across enterprises and within departments, K2 customers are rapidly transforming their companies with applications that allocate work to the right people, with all the information they need to make great decisions.   With K2's visual tools, creating, launching and using the first K2 application is a snap. Reusable components ensure the next application delivers faster than the one before, and when the business needs change, it's easy to update your K2 apps to fit. More than a million users in 80-plus countries rely on K2 to streamline operations, save money and reduce risk.    In March 2014, we launched community.K2.com. Our philosophy was to create a highly functional site with great user experience and a really clean design. We wanted to provide access to a large amount of information, while keeping it simple for the user. One of the core components to this philosophy is our prominent search bar. A large amount of information is only valuable if a user can easily find what they are looking for. With that in mind, we implemented Lithium’s predictive search and made it a stand-out feature on every page. In addition to the search being predictive, the search results page allows filtering by content type so that the user can further specify what they are looking for.   Our requirements started with the basic idea that it needed to be more than just a discussion forum. Our Lithium community includes forums, the K2 blog, a code sharing section (K2 Market), events calendar, and a resources section. We took design cues from our other digital properties, but wanted to make the community site stand out on its own as a great looking and very usable information hub.   We are very happy with the outcome and believe that we accomplished what we set out to do.     Here is the homepage of Community.K2.com:     Our business goals are to boost user engagement and satisfaction, reduce support costs, and provide prospective customers with a resource that they can use when evaluating K2.   Within a week of our March 2014 launch, we experienced a huge increase in forum activity and resolved issues. The community has already become an amazing asset for our support team, allowing the community to assist each other.   We’ve seen increased engagement in our community as well as increased downloads inside of our “Market” section which allows user to share code and plugins that they’ve developed on the K2 platform.    K2 led the strategy and implementation of this community in conjunction with Lithium and CloudSquads. We worked together to launch a best in class community site that is drastically different than any other community on the platform.   We looked at how the Lithium platform could be utilized and extended in order to provide our users with a bunch of functionality not normally found on a standard forum. We also made sure to only include features that we knew would be of value to our K2 audience. This resulted in a highly customized experience with a beautiful layout that gives our users everything they need and nothing that they don’t.   Every element of the K2 Community site was thought about individually as well as a part of the whole. The Forum, Blog, Market, Events Calendar, and Resources area all contribute to the experience by offering unique and valuable content while adhering to strict design and UI/UX standards.   Our metrics are already starting to prove the success of the new community.   Our first week on the new platform, we were seeing an average of 17 posts per day (88 posts for the week). All of our traffic was redirected from our old forum and was starting to pick up speed. Our old forum suffered from poor design, outdated functionality and user experience and our users were not motivated to use it to resolve their issues.   A month and a half later, the week of April 7 th tallied an average of 41 posts per day (209 posts for the week). Many of the threads are leading to resolved issues and are helping to divert support tickets.   This is a 137% increase in weekly posts! We expect to see this trend continuing as we gain even more engagement from new and active users.   

Company: Vodafone Australia  Entry submitted by: Timothy Hanslow (Tim_h) Community Care Manager Community: Vodafone Community (http://community.vodafone.com.au) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Vodafone Australia is the third biggest mobile network provider in Australia and has a 20-year history of providing excellent value to its customers. In 2010, network issues driven by the sharp uptake in smartphone use created problems for our customers, that saw our customer sentiment and NPS drop rapidly. The launch of Vodafone Community came at a time when our customers needed support, a place to share, talk to one another and to get information to us, and for us to talk to them directly.    Vodafone launched the Community almost three years ago as a way for customers to communicate with us. It gave customers a voice to talk to us openly and publicly. We loved the Community for the customer interactions, their honesty in saying “me too” with other’s issues, and their support and information in solving one another’s issues. Lithium provided the platform we wanted to get the incredible expertise our customer base and let them work together. We named the Community because of its goals. Our customers were going to be having these conversations anyway so we wanted to ensure we were part of them.    We set out to redesign the Community last year to deliver a better user experience and to freshen our design to keep up with our other web properties. The core goals were to get users to contribute more, remove the barriers for new users, to focus on our members and to get information to people as quickly as possible.   We began by first tackling the core page design and sliding the right-hand sidebar into all of our pages from the homepage to threads. We use the space to create consistent, usable elements for our members. The top right of every page is the customer’s voice. Every page has a comment, reply or post topic button. We’ve added a dropdown selector to choose a board when posting from the front page. We’re taking away the need to hunt or dig for joining in and letting customers engage in the conversation as soon as they are ready.   Right alongside the “voice” is the stats. Our numbers dive into every conversation showing the total posts, kudos, contributors and views. The stats help people to see how conversations are moving and how active things are. They update in real time and give users a quick visual view of what’s popular.     The last addition to the sidebar is our two post widgets to keep users abreast of the Community from within a topic view. We’ve used a ‘recent posts’ widget to show a user their most recent contributions. Keeping this visible in the sidebar on all pages lets super users keep track of updates to recent conversations without needing to navigate through boards or the homepage. A user receives a visual reminder of updates to recent conversations by the bolded thread titles and can easily continue in multiple conversations at once.   User avatars have been rebranded into hubs of information. We use smaller square avatars across the design to show who is taking part. Avatars are easier to recall than a long list of usernames and they provide a constantly moving parade of people to interact with. The visual anchor of the avatars responds on mouseover to a hover card with the user’s core stats and details. From the sidebar, to the frontpage or in a thread, a user’s avatar is a moving card of their real time stats.   Into the thread view, We’ve split things into three columns, and then reduced the left column to only the avatar. Like other social networks the avatar provides a visual cue to the author but the post stands on its own. Unessential information from a post is moved into the avatar card leaving the conversation in the spotlight. The footer of each post contains an “action bar” at the bottom right allowing users to reply, quick reply, share on social and kudos. Just like the “voice” button at the top of the pages, users have a single location to interaction with a post – We’re removing meaningless mouse movement across the page as they navigate.     Threads also received a makeover in the form of labels. We’ve designed them as physical tags like a filing cabinet and placed them across the top of each thread. These bright, colourful labels show users the mobile device being discussed in the thread with a different colour for each manufacturer for easy recognition. And if a thread is about a device the user says they own, we mark that for them too. It’s fast and simple for our users to know if they can contribute to the conversation at hand.     The front page received an enormous overhaul to fit with our goals. We’ve replaced the tall vertical category list with a three-quarter width navigation menu without tabs or options. Users can quickly see the list of available boards and categories without needing to scroll around or dig through a list. It was a core part of the redesign to let users move around the Community quickly. Narrowing the navigation down to a shorter vertical element freed up space on the page to introduce a feed of recent posts and solutions, ensuring a dynamic looking page with fresh content whenever a user visits. We chose recent posts over topics because of the sticky nature of many of our conversations. Keeping users up to date on the full conversations continuing and not just those recently started lets hot topics rise to the top and stay there.     We’ve rounded out our user focus by shuffling of the profile page. The avatar has been doubled in size and is followed by a new custom component showing the mobile device a user is currently using. These bold visuals keep user profiles looking fresh and colourful with lots of white space to let your eyes flow across it. We fill the rest of the page with recent topics contributed to, and an activity feed showing the users actions step by step.    Since our redesign we’re seeing an up lift in super user engagement and resolution rates. As well as the average posts per thread has increased. Conversations are stickier and people are spending more time on site. The overall post volumes have increased slightly because we’re getting more quality content in front of people more often, so casual users have less need to post, but still actively participate.

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

  Company:  Alteryx  Entry submitted by: Julie Hamel (Senior Community Manager) Community: Alteryx Community Lithy Category:  Marketing Champion   Alteryx is the leader in self-service data analytics. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts with the unique ability to easily prep, blend and analyze all of their data using a repeatable workflow, then deploy and share analytics at scale for deeper insights in hours, not weeks.   Our unique promotion    When we began conceptualizing the future of community at Alteryx in early 2015, we made bold investments to begin a transformation of the way that our customers and employees connect with each other, discover new solutions to complex analytical challenges, and contribute fresh ideas to the broad industry discussion. If we were going to successfully launch our new community and scale alongside our rapidly-growing business, creating an equally-bold awareness and adoption campaign was critical.   The Alteryx Community team dedicated significant resources in a short timeframe to design an aesthetic that translates well across the boundaries of digital and physical promotional efforts. The team did a fantastic job of creating a natural feel to long-time users of our products and appealing to the forthcoming generation of business analysts. This led to three major themes that define the core our campaigns: - Be part of something bigger than yourself - Take pride in sharing your knowledge - Keep exploring Below are examples of how we’ve applied that strategy to execute tactically in a number of areas. The resulting lifts in awareness, engagement, and satisfaction around community have been amazing.    Our strategy and tactics   Video - To introduce the Alteryx Community and pique interest around launch, the team employed little Dot with the blue hair in a fun and light welcome video, which later made 2015’s Top Videos from Video Brewery. It was an instant hit with Alteryx Associates, who previewed the video at a pre-launch Community 101 All-Hands meeting. Externally, the video was shared via social channels a few days prior to the launch to tease our followers and promote our launch date.     Swag – People love free stuff. To raise awareness internally, all employees were provided with community superhero mugs and notebooks, where they were encouraged to help spread the words with our partners and customers. We continue to hand these out during the new hire boot camp alongside a Community 101 session to help employees get familiarized with the community and their roles in it. We occasionally send these out to customers to thank them for their participation as well.     Gamification – We’ve made great use of Gamification through an extensive collection of badges used to welcome members on their first visit, introduce them to new features, and to recognize their affiliations & status within the global community. Community Members who were migrated from the original community received the community founders badge at launch, which triggered email notifications to let them know the new community was live and thank them for their support. The competition to collect them all is fierce!   Contests - To help generate user content and create a fun & positive atmosphere we launched the 10 Things I love About Alteryx contest where we encouraged users to share reasons they enjoy the product and share tips with other community members. The 10 best quotes were gathered to create the first ever Alteryx Community t-shirt and the winner took away a GoPro!   Hangouts - Our community launch coincided with the release of version 10.0 of Alteryx Designer, so we hosted a live event using Google Hangouts allowing the community to get up close and personal with Product Management, executives, and our Alteryx ACEs (our superusers who beta’d the product) to hear about new features.  Hangouts have become a regular part of our repertoire. Our customers love tuning in to hear the latest and interact directly with Alteryx staff and each other!     Our results   After our re-launch in September 2015, post count increased by 2000%, going from an average of 30 posts a month to 1,000+! The community received 10,000+ unique visitors who generated nearly 100,000 pageviews. Active members increased by 2,300%. Metrics continued to trend up in October, with traffic peaking on the day of our first live event as 4,000+ unique visitors stopped by the community. Since then, we have hosted live Alteryx | Hangouts on a monthly basis, which have provided a great way for us to preview what we are working on, share tips & tricks, and connect with our members to recognize them for their efforts.   All of our efforts have had a major impact internally as well. Employees have embraced the community to support customers and collaborate internally. Having hundreds of champions to support our cause is a big key to our success. Employees make up only 1.5% of our visitors, but generate nearly 44% of posts and 38% of solutions (much of that in the internal employee-only area of the site). The community as a whole has generated 14,000+ posts and 1,000+ solutions in just 6 short months. Its passion and rapid growth continue to amaze us.

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

Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build a sophisticated network that delivers the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Comcast’s number one goal is to transform our customers’ experience with us. Social media has become a strong and effective service channel for our customers. In 2015 we expanded the use of Lithium Social Web and completely redesigned Comcast’s community. The Digital Care team works to resolve all customer inquiries in a timely matter with a heavy focus on quality interactions. Lithium’s LSW and Community solutions both provide significant support in our goal to provide excellent service 24x7x365. With these solutions, we are able to measure success and track volume and engagement from each social platform.   Key 2015 Milestones: Created and deployed NPS survey program Achieved higher than industry average NPS score based on nearly 60% survey response rate Increase in channel (social) resolution rates to 99%+ Deployed a Quality program for our team which focused on the customer experience and the behaviors necessary to change customer perceptions & sentiments from negative to positive Deployed Spanish Language support for Xfinity Latino Twitter and Facebook Reduced non-social channel escalations per month from 4000 to 400 5M Page Views in the Help & Support Community 5M Unique Visitors to our community - nearly 10M from mobile and tablet devices More than 8.25M Solution Views - a 13% increase year over year More than 5.4M registered community users   My Account App integration with @comcastcares The XFINITY My Account app is a self help tool for the customer. Customers are guided through interactive troubleshooting guides. If the issue persists after completion of basic troubleshooting, customers are given the option to tweet @comcastcares. Utilizing LSW’s Routing features we are able to seamlessly support customer inquiries received via this channel.     Expert Help Lithium’s Expert help feature has been a game changing addition for the Digital Care team. From any platform we support we are able to escalate the conversation to key stakeholders within the company. This helps the Digital Care team provide the best customer experience by getting to the right solutions as quickly as possible. This also helps alert key stakeholders within the company about potential issues with the products and services under their direction.     Smart View Smart Views have allowed us to significantly enhance our approach to queue management. This has given us the ability, based on event, topic or outage, to capture the volume and help shift resources to the specific event or topic. As most issues found on social media are time sensitive, we have the ability to provide reactive statements and provide real-time communication to internal stakeholders.     Approvals The Digital Care team has had significant growth over the past few years. Due to this growth we have found that LSW’s Approval feature has helped our team with training new hires and our quality program. The Approval feature gives our team’s SMEs (subject matter experts) the ability to approve new hire posts to ensure they meet the Digital Care quality standards. This also helps with developing the necessary confidence to engage on social and provides a cleaner method of learning the brand’s social voice. This allows us to focus on providing the best overall customer experience.     Dashboards/Alerts The Digital Care Team utilizes dashboards to provide micro level operational insights to our Digital Care leaders and broader information to key stakeholders from throughout the company. This feature has changed the way Digital Care Team communicates with our colleagues. We no longer have to capture the volume and send an email alerting the stakeholders. We currently have 165 users with dashboard access. Many are also set up for alerts pertaining to what product or service they support. This provides real time alerts and insight to what is happening on social media.     Forums Links to Related Content When viewing a discussion thread, the bottom of the page now has links to related content that may help answer questions and green check marks to let customers quickly see that the question in that thread has an approved solution.     KB integration With the Knowledge Base integration, we are able to respond to customers on Twitter or Facebook with self-help or approved solutions from our community. This allows us to not only provide accurate information, but also helps us introduce potential new users to our growing Community. In addition to driving new users to our community, we are also able to introduce the new community user to our solution, thus furthering our reach from one-to-one to one-to-many solutions.  

Company: ING Direct  Entry submitted by: Nicolas Hun (nicolashun) Brand Content and Social Media Manager Community: Le Web Café ING Direct (https://communaute.ingdirect.fr/)         Lithy category: Best Community Design     ING Direct has launched its Lithium community to give visibility and highlight the good relationship it has with its customers, but also to reduce the costs of customer relations mainly services by call.   In December 2013, ING Direct France, the leader of online banking in France, launched its Lithium community, "Le Web Café".     This community, 100% integrated in ingdirect.fr website enriches the existing ecosystem "Web Café" of the brand composed from a Facebook Page, a Twitter account and 2 physical coffees in Paris and Lyon.   It was really important for the brand to use the name of "Web Café" as "Web Café" is the link for all the places where clients and prospects can discuss and share each other and with ING Direct, but also to give a possibility for the clients to tell and share their satisfaction and good relation with the bank.   The Lithium community is composed of three bricks:   1) A forum where clients and prospects can directly and freely discuss with the bank's customers, allowing customers to share their experiences and expertise with the community.     2) A lab where members can test and share their ideas to improve and build the bank of tomorrow.     3) A blog to decrypt, give tips, and share all useful informations to members to complete their projects.     A global coherence has been respected in term of graphical guidelines with flat design and limited range of colors (white, blue and orange), but also in term of the tonality in line with ING Direct philosophy.   "A clear, simple and transparent bank."   The architecture and the design were thought to offer the best user experience. The tab navigation has been chosen to offer a quick and easy navigation on desktop but also on tablets. To stay in line with the positioning of ING Direct, the name of the categories and subcategories has been built around usages and not around a product range. For example, we're not talking about a "current account", but of "money every day" to be more online with our client's needs and usages of banking. We're a partner who understands them and their life and not only a dealer of products. The users of the community may easily find the good category to ask questions and the right place to share their expertise.   The community has been enriched with a rich gallery of avatars (male and female). The design of those avatars answered several requirements. They are serious enough for a bank company, rich, but also sympathetic. Some dedicated and personalized avatars have been drawn for the ING Direct community team.                    The community is a real success. In 4 months, the community has about 2 800 active members and more than 73 000 unique visitors. 741 discussions have been raised and more than 270 ideas to improve the lives of customers and build the bank of tomorrow have been shared.   Our business results: "Le Web Café", with more than 466 247 pageviews and 741 discussions. 69% - Topics posted by members generated reactions from other members. 45% - Topics posted by members received answers from other members. 21% - Discussions related to the category "Become a customer" 62% of these discussions are about the process    

Company: Groupe Casino Entry submitted by: Marina Lin, Project Manager Community: C'Vous (www.cvous.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   In February 2012, we launched Cvous.com, the first community in France where customers can interact to create products and services for stores. C’Vous is the oral abbreviation for “C’est vous” meaning “It’s you”. Designed to be a community space and not a commercial website, we deliberately chose to develop a new graphic identity, different from our stores' branding.   We wanted a simple and colorful website that would convey a sense of proximity, a key value to the Group. The website tone also had to be positive so the members give useful ideas, comments and don’t use the community to complain about their individual problems. Our agency developed characters to embody the community: funny and happy, they have become a key element of the C’Vous identity. Their language is fresh and catchy and draws users’ attention.               Our avatar library:                           With its bright colors, banners and icons, the website is welcoming and easy to navigate. The community interface is simple and playful with an incentive to participate: we revamped the kudo and branded it “C’Top” (meaning “it’s great”). The green button turns grey when you have voted. The colors are especially vibrant when visiting the community on an iPad.                                         We have also adapted the content to allow 2 levels of user experience: For new users who are not yet logged in, the homepage displays a large carousel explaining the 3 main sections of the website. It is much more pedagogical while the logged in user's experience is more personalized with our notification system that allows returning members to see immediately what's new.                                         Finally, the community identity has been extended offline in store promotions, catalogs and product packaging and they are all by-products of C’Vous! The characters can be found in our stores as they help to highlight the community’s favorite products.      

Company: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian Schärtl (Project Coordinator Digital Services ) Community:  Vodafone Forum  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Germany, with more than 14,000 employees and it's headquarters in Duesseldorf. It is part of the Vodafone Group, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. Currently, more than 45 million people are making use of Vodafone services in Germany.   Since 2015, Vodafone Germany and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland have become one company. Vodafone Germany provides mobile service, fixed network, internet and TV from a single source. Thereby, Vodafone Germany offers the customer a unique converged service experience. Converged service has an impact on the service strategy as well.   A merger brand strategy   Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland decided to implement a common brand strategy. Following this approach we decided to merge our communities as well. Each community was based on different providers.   However, both communities had their own identities, topics, rules and working principles. For this reason – and to make them part of the story - service agents were deeply involved in the project to represent the agent’s perspective of the community.   Based on their platform expertise and operational experience, they provided the basis for a common community management and harmonized principles wherever necessary. Workshops revealed the key differences in moderation approaches between the Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities.   In addition, agents visited each other to understand their daily business. This encouraged agents to work together more closely and intensively. Community coffee cups and a team poster were created to promote the team spirit. Above all, agents appreciated the team building measures:     Vodafone Community used the header to update the users. A changing visualization highlighted the upcoming merger. Additionally, more details were communicated within the community itself. Both user groups should feel as one new common community.   Our Super-User Event   Of course the user involvement is crucial as an active user base is core to any community. Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities together accumulate more than 40 active Super-Users. Users appreciate posts from Super-Users, as they are considered authentic customer feedback. This year, one of the Super-users wrote his 23,000 th post. To continue the good cooperation, the Vodafone Community invited all Super-Users to a merger event in Düsseldorf. All participants received detailed merger information. During a brainstorming session, we, the core project team, agents and Super-Users, developed the major components of our Vodafone Community slogan “Know. Share. Help.”     Some users were skeptical, but Super-Users supported the community, to convince them of the advantages of the new converged community. In cooperation with the Super-Users, the Community also tidied up and moved posts. After having cleaned up, all content was migrated to the merged community, not to lose valuable user input. All users were migrated automatically as well, to make the move as simple as possible for the customers.   At the beginning of the common community, each Super-User got a personalized Community coffee cup and received welcome flyers.     Other events and contests   Related to the upcoming Christmas 2015, the Vodafone Community defined a strategy to get users engaged with the new community. During a competition, users learned more about the new community design structure and had the opportunity to win prizes. Users engaged with the Vodafone and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland product portfolio:     After the merger, all agents got an invitation to celebrate at the headquarters in Düsseldorf. Besides networking, the team analyzed the current collaboration, identified open issues and defined measures to get rid of them. Also the formerly separate Super-User events will be one common central happening in the future.   Now more than 200,000 users are on the platform to exchange, discuss and answer questions. The Vodafone Community is comprised of almost 1 Million posts. Wherever the community is not able to support, Vodafone service agents provide expert know-how.

Company: Microsoft  Entry submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Community (http://community.skype.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   The Skype Community has earned a seat at the table of all levels of the business by delivering:   Ideas –Two major product teams are currently fielding new ideas for their products from the Community with more to come. Interactions – The Skype Community is made up of both users and staff, allowing previously unseen levels of direct contact with end users.   Insight – Weekly feedback reports to product, marketing and operations are fuelled by inputs from the Community.   Influence – The Community is viewed as a strategic communications asset distinct to social media, blogs, service status and promotional channels.     Since its launch over two years ago, the Skype Community has been the best destination to discuss and learn about all things related to Skype. With over two million registered users across eleven languages, it is a well-established community with deep roots in Skype’s user-base. For that reason, our recent initiatives to develop the Community further have looked into the way Skype does business day-to-day and create meaningful change on behalf of our users.   These efforts have been a resounding success due to the ability of the Skype Community to deliver on four key promises to the business and shift the thinking within our organization.   Ideas   A good community has the ability to provide a feedback loop in the tail end of the product development cycle. A great community provides clear and direct user input before the development cycle even begins.   More and more product teams are sponsoring idea boards on the Skype Community to gauge user interest and help shape development priorities for their products. At the moment, Skype for Windows desktop and Skype for Windows Phone both have idea boards open, and Community ideas are already making their way into products as a result.   These idea boards, and their promotion through Skype’s social media channels, have been highlighted by the Social Media Examiner as a “great example” of learning from customers what they really want.     While we expand this initiative to cover more of Skype’s products, other teams have not ignored the potential of the Community to generate ideas. The Skype Tips & Tricks blog recently published the first two articles in a series the Community requested through a Lithium poll.     Tapping into this resource has brought Community into the heart of Skype decision making for the good of all its users.   Interactions   But the Skype Community is more than just a bank that we withdraw ideas from. In order to grow a community there must be some give and take, and we encourage Skype staff to get involved on the Community as well.   Members of staff who make frequent visits to the Community earn themselves the title of Staff Champions. They do sterling work in rewarding our users for their contribution to the Community, but the staff find the experience rewarding too. When we asked one of our Mac developers what was the best thing about being on the Community, he answered:   First of all, it’s not always easy to know what users think about Skype – Community provides one way of finding out. It feels great to see a user's reaction to receiving a reply from an actual developer.                         In addition to our regular contributors, we also create live events for users to interact with us. Most recently, we organized the first Ask Skype event using the Lithium Groups feature. For an hour, three program managers answered questions about our iOS client as submitted by Community users.     Creating this direct engagement between our staff and users is invaluable in putting users at the heart of our decision making. As user-focused decision making is a fundamental value at Skype, the Community is widely respected internally for filling that role.   Insight   Another way in which the Skype Community has changed how we do business is by providing insight into user thinking, experiences and issues. In Skype, this information is one of the driving forces behind a weekly Product and Customer Experience report. The PACE report is voraciously consumed by the product development and marketing organizations, as well as core operations teams.   What makes the Community unique in this space, and lends weight to its voice in the Skype business, is users’ ability to confirm, clarify or contradict each other’s reports. This often serves to provide a more holistic understanding of issues than can be found in one-to-one contact channels. This makes Community a sought after voice in any and all user focused discussions.   Influence   If you were to ask ten people what the best way is to communicate with your users, chances are you’d get eleven different answers. For better or worse there are no shortage of channels through which businesses talk to users, and it’s becoming harder and harder to find the distinctions between them.   The Skype Community, however, has managed to carve a niche for itself separate to social media, blogs, service status bulletins and marketing channels. It is recognized as a channel which has real influence amongst our user-base on all levels of the business.   The Community is sought out by the business as the best place to land communications which:          Request information or log gathering          Address widespread threads of discussion in the user-base          Provide solutions for small to medium size incidents or bugs   This growth of the Skype Community as a communications channel was an organic shift in the business which resulted from recognition of the authority of the Community. That authority stems from the user-base, which the Community represents faithfully throughout the Skype business.                                                                 ***   The Skype Community has changed the way Skype does business, whether it’s feeding the user voice into product design, allowing users and Skype staff to interact directly, providing insight post release, or enabling meaningful communications. The ideas, interactions, insight and influence provided by the Community have made the business sit up and take note. That’s a good thing too, because the Community speaks with the voice of the user.   If you think this is impressive, wait till you see what we’ve got coming up. Keep checking in on the Skype Community throughout the year as we continue to expand these initiatives with more idea boards, Ask Skype events and other innovative ways to drive Community into the core of our business.    

Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build a sophisticated network that delivers the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Our customer satisfaction initiatives    In 2015 Comcast’s Digital Care Team strove to:   Create and deploy NPS survey program Increase in-channel (social) resolution rates Deploy a Quality program for our team which focused on customer experience and the behaviors necessary to change customer perceptions & sentiments from negative to positive   Comcast’s Digital Care Team experienced significant growth in 2015. That growth drove a material increase in customer interactions making it necessary to employ tools that helped drive customer-centric behaviors across our multi-site organization. Our growth, while clearly good for our ability to meet more customers in the channel of their choosing, could have, without careful planning, resulted in the loss of the boutique, one-stop-shop customer experience we have worked to build. A primary tool in our effort to maintain the highest customer satisfaction levels possible is our newly deployed Quality program. The Quality program’s primary goal is to ensure a consistent, high quality customer experience for each and every interaction. With the technology in place to track conversation sentiment and newly allocated resources dedicated to ensuring its accuracy, Digital Care has been able to maintain and improve upon our ability to fully serve our broad customer base.   Along with assuring the quality of conversations, the quantity of conversations continued to increase, encouraging even more operational changes. Expanding the team into two divisions, Operations and Strategy, allowed our Operations team to focus on coaching, while letting our Strategy team focus on Quality, Reporting, Forecasting & Scheduling, Technology, Training and the Customer Experience. In 2015, the Digital Care team implemented an entirely ‘in-channel’ Net Promoter System (NPS) survey to its customers on Facebook and Twitter, sending more than one thousand surveys. In 2016 we’ve already sent out more than two thousand surveys. Keeping the customer in-channel from inception to completion was imperative to operational success and ultimately proven with NPS survey results that exceed industry averages and are among the highest for any group in the company.   The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation and what makes our approach to customer satisfaction a gold standard in the industry   The solutions that Lithium provides directly aligns with Digital Care’s key objective - building a better customer experience. To manage the increasing volume of incoming posts and facilitate a streamlined response process, Lithium’s robust tag and routing hierarchy allow Comcast’s social team to provide the highest quality conversations with its customers and eliminate as much room as possible for error. The newly integrated Quality program keeps these processes in check and also allows frontline specialists to participate in peer-to-peer review and approval processes for new employees. Combining the approval process, Quality program and the tag structure has created the necessary balance between technology and operation goals, which in turn has provided a better customer experience. To prove the success of this collaboration, the team’s NPS score places well above the industry average score and surveying the customer in the social channel they interacted in has resulted in a nearly 60% response rate. Our customers’ experience with us will always be the Digital Care Team’s number one priority but the accessibility of viable technology contributes to the successes of the team.    Our metrics   Our focus on the customer experience in 2015 and 2016 has had meaningful and tangible results for our customers.   We are no longer last resort support channel, customers are coming to us first Nearly 75% of customers that came in negative left neutral or positive Reduced non-social channel escalations per month from 4000 to 400 Higher than industry average NPS score, nearly 60% response rate to in-channel surveys In-channel resolution increase from 95 to 99% in 2015  

Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year     Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build a sophisticated network that delivers the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Who we are?   Comcast brings together the best in media and technology. We drive innovation to create the world’s best entertainment and online experiences. XFINITY TV offers customers the best viewing experience anytime, anywhere, with the most extensive collection of entertainment available on XFINITY On Demand, online at xfinity.com/tv, through the XFINITY TV App, XFINITY TV Go App, XFINITY My Account App and on XFINITY Streampix. The X1 Entertainment Operating System reflects the powerful innovation of bringing TV and Internet together to deliver a superior entertainment and communications experience for consumers. X1 delivers the simplest, fastest and most complete way for our customers to access all their entertainment from all of their screens. We provide the nation’s fastest most reliable Internet and in-home Wi-Fi speeds to more than 22 million high-speed Internet customers, even during peak use. Our millions of XFINITY Wi-Fi hotspots, allow customers to connect at the fastest Wi-Fi speeds around town. XFINITY Voice is an innovative and reliable IP-enabled home phone service that delivers digital-quality phone service with all of the functions of a traditional phone service, plus enhanced features that are integrated with other Comcast services. XFINITY Home is a growing collection of innovative security and smart home services that give customers added convenience and peace of mind.   Comcast Help & Support Forums:   Our Help & Support Forums are a great place for customers to find answers about their XFINITY products or to get help for service issues. Our forums get over two million unique visitors per month and if you search for a product or service question, links to our Forum pages are right at the top of the results.   Our forums are a place to learn from fellow customers. Nearly 98% of the searches conducted by visitors to the forums turn up related results that were generated by others posing similar questions. Our forums have been a great resource for years. In 2015 we strove to make the forums as easy as possible for our customers to use, so we rebuilt them from the ground up, with a completely new user interface and easier navigation. But we didn’t stop there, with over 40% of our customers accessing our community from smart phones and tablets, we partnered with Lithium to deliver a fully responsive design that launched in the beginning of 2016.   Improved Search   The most striking change in our new layout was bringing Search front and center for any customer to locate what they’re looking for. Additionally, our new search function now includes real-time suggestions for posts that match customer search terms. There’s also the option to create a new post right from the search bar if none of the results answer the customer’s question.     Improved Content Categorization    We’ve organized all the content to help our users find answers and solve problems faster. We were also able to move our most visited boards above the fold. Our layout helps customers save time and reduce effort to find what they’re looking for.     New Features   We’ve added improved visual cues to highlight trending alerts, recent solutions, and feature our most active users. We launched badging to encourage the right types of user behavior for new community members and recognize the efforts of super users—our Experts— to stand out for the expertise they’ve displayed in helping others.    Links to Related Content   When viewing a discussion thread, the bottom of the page now has links to related content that may help answer questions and green check marks to let you customers quickly see that the question in that thread has an approved solution.     Evolution of the Comcast Community:     Impact   We currently have more than 5.4M registered users. In 2015 we had 21.5M Unique Visitors to our community, nearly 10M from mobile and tablet devices. There were more than 45.5M Page Views in the Help & Support Community. Through our community redesigns and scaling up of a dedicated community-focused internal team, we set our focus on improving our Solution Views. We had our biggest year ever for Solution Views: more than 8.25 million (a 13% increase year over year). Our commitment to our customers is simple: respect their time, simplify their experience and make things right if we fall short. We understand many people will look online first before trying to contact us through our traditional support channels. Our forums are an invaluable tool for accomplishing all three parts of our commitment. We’re able to highlight existing answers to many common questions, promote a vibrant peer-to-peer community and allow customers to engage how they want. This saves time in quickly locating the information they’re looking for, or quickly ask their own question if they haven’t found what they need. With a diverse mix of products and tools our team continues to evangelize the voice of the customer with product teams and encourage expert engagement from our internal experts to share knowledge, tips and tricks, and deliver the best customer experience.        

Company: Symantec  Entry submitted by: Tim Lopez (Tim) Project Manager, Social Customer Care LSW: Norton Social Support (http://www.twitter.com/NortonSupport) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Symantec was founded in 1982 by visionary computer scientists. The company has evolved to become one of the world’s largest software companies with more than 18,500 employees in more than 50 countries. We provide security, storage and systems management solutions to help our customers – from consumers and small businesses to the largest global organizations – secure and manage their information-driven world against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently than any other company.   Our 2014 customer satisfaction goals were to decrease response times from 9 minutes to 6 minutes, move our team from a shared resource “hybrid” model to a dedicated team for Social Response, extend our hours of coverage from 12 hours a day to 24x7, increase our reach by expanding to areas outside of our branded properties, and develop a metric for gauging customer sentiment conversion trends. Through strategic planning, including continued use of Lithium Social Web, we were able to: Reduce response time to just about 5 minutes. Launch 24x7 coverage with our newly formed full-time dedicated response team. Expand support response coverage to Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Reviews, and many popular forums and blogs across the internet. Develop an innovative scoring system that averages the score of sentiment conversions allowing us to track the trend of our ability to delight customers and to ensure that as we grow we continue to focus on maintaining or improving customer satisfaction. Move from English only support to now include Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian – on both Twitter and Facebook. Generate reports that get distributed on a regular basis to the entire Norton Business Unit.   Sentiment Conversions and Time to Response have always been our driving factor. We want our customers to be thrilled with our engagement so we ensure that all of our metrics and KPIs reflect what we can do that benefits the customers. We want our customers to know that we care for them even after we have won over their business.      Using Sentiment Conversion tagging that we developed for use with LSW over the last year, we were able to show visual representations on our monthly reports. Using a system that translated the type of sentiment conversion in to a tangible score, we were able to create an average score that represents our success in delighting customers, further allowing us to track the trend. We were able to streamline our response time by moving to a full time team (in February) and balancing our scheduling around hourly volume trends.   Last year we had an 80% increase in individual cases and responses, at the same time we slightly decreased in ‘noise’, 50% increase in Positive Sentiment conversion, on over 14,000 cases handled in over 160,000 conversations monitored.    

Company: Indosat  Entry submitted by: Ghina Aliya (GhinaAliya) Community Manager, Forum ICITY Community: Forum ICITY (http://icity.indosat.com)  Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Indosat Tbk is a leading telecommunication and information service provider in Indonesia that provides cellular of prepaid services (Mentari and IM3) and postpaid services (Matrix), 3G services using HSDPA-technology, fixed data services including Multimedia, Internet & Data Communication Services (MIDI) and fixed voice (fixed telecommunication) services including IDD services and fixed wireless services. PT Indosat Tbk was established by the Indonesian Government on November 20, 1967 and now part of Ooreedoo Group (Formerly Qtel Group).   Forum ICITY (formerly Ngobrol Bareng) launched 3 years ago and known as “Indonesian 1 st Crowdsolution Forum”. We utilizes Lithium platform to take Indosat customer experience to the next level. We empower our Community members to be powerful advocates for us. More than just awareness and advocacy, we were bond in the same passion, the joy of being part of Indosat Community.   On March 2015 ICITY has gained more than 20.000 members, more than 115.000 postings, over than 9 million pageviews and 2.500 questions that have received a resolution or answer in the community. These valuable answers have received 2. 431.002 views resulting in direct deflections and support cost savings.   Duta IM3 and Indosat Blackberry Community are former community members whom presence trigger others to join and participate on the forum discussion. Potential influencers that reach diverse segmentation, from youth to more mature audience.   Our marketing campaign   Welcoming Ramadan-holy fasting month for moslems worldwide- in Indonesia, on June 2014 Indosat launch “IM3 Play 24 Jam” Campaign which gave more benefits to customers such as free Calls and SMS for 24 Hours. To leverage community word of mouth toward this new service, we initiate Takjil24 program in 10 areas (smaller version of Indosat region).   The objectives are to empower Duta IM3-Indosat youth brand ambassador-on becoming powerful advocates also utilize Forum ICITY and social media to spread the stories. Beside online buzz, we gave more advantage to the surrounding communities through this program.   Date: July 19 2014 (simultaneously across Indonesia) Time: 5-5.24 PM (local time) Participant: Maximum 5 groups/Area (5 Duta IM3 per group)   To make it more fun, we launch missions for DUTA IM3 with Takjil24 as the 1 st assignment. Advocacy “IM3 Play 24 Campaign” is the main focus while distributing takjil (snacks for Muslims to break their fast) to the surrounding communities in their own creative ways. 5 best groups will get top up on their balance also shopping vouchers.   The participants needed to upload: Posts on ICITY, Sub Category Sahabat IM3 Tweets Youtube Videos (max 4 minutes) All using #IM3Play24Jam #Takjil24 #DutaIM3 #GroupName hashtags   Results of our campaign   The stories about our new “IM3 Play 24 Jam” product spread out widely 37 groups (185 DUTA IM3) all across Indonesia were joined 11,000 views on ICITY posts related to this mission 1,600,000 impressions on Twitter, 700.000 accounts reached 33,000 views on Youtube More coverage on local electronic and online media Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=45&v=DdAWRYNIJhA https://youtu.be/dIKI567PwhE https://youtu.be/r8NBon8HdlY

Company: BRP Inc. Entry submitted by: Peggy Carrier (Peggy) After Sales Service & Community Manager Community: BRP Community (www.brp.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program _______________________________________________   BRP is the world leader in the design, manufacturing, distribution and marketing of motorized recreational vehicles and power sports engines. BRP products are distributed in over 100 countries by more than 3,500 dealers and distributors.   Our Community is a private community which has been active since February 2012. We are still relatively young and learning a lot on dealing with our Community, but how can we not be? For years we have supported our Dealer Network by picking up the phone and answering questions. Although 1:1 support continues to have its benefits, we realized over the years that the overall technical complexity of our products meant that Dealers needed to call us more often and therefore experience longer wait times on the phone. Our customer service support began to suffer. We needed a better way to support and communicate with our Dealers.     For us the Community meant a huge channel shift on how we support our Dealers, and we began to see benefits right from the start: Dealers answering Dealers, members answering or asking questions on evenings and weekends, videos and diagrams being shared on the community 24/7 and all of this across the globe in different languages. The fact that a post and subsequent solution can be read by our entire global Dealer and Distributor network has saved us many, many 1:1 encounters.   Our support process on the Community is structured as follows: Our Product Specialists are assigned to keep our Dealer Network informed with the latest technical information. They are also there to share best practices, tips and tricks as well as engage in any discussions they deem fit. They are the deepest technical resource for Dealer Technicians. Our Parts Specialist is there to ensure that information on estimated time of delivery, any transport issues or general parts questions are addressed. When we see a call driver, we immediately post the latest information on the community. We also have moderators, across the globe that monitor the site to ensure that guidelines are being followed. They escalate cases in times of need. We use the automated escalation email capability for posts that have not received replies after 24 to 48 hours depending on the product and season. These e-mails are sent to our Product Specialists who respond to the posts. We include community support (case escalation) in our daily roundtable meetings. Our community is a success today because everyone supports one another and both Dealers and BRP staff provide diverse solutions and fast resolutions to problems. The community has helped to increase communication within our company and with our global Dealer Network. We are able to share information globally so much faster than before. We do not go one day without speaking about our community here at our call center. We have never been more certain that supporting our Dealers through our online community is the way of the future. 1:1 support for complex situations will always be a part of our business strategy , but supporting hundreds and thousands of Dealers at one time through our online community definitely elevates the customer experience. Our young community is quickly maturing and we are excited for what the future holds!    

Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness.   Our road to Lithium   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness. Our community connects millions of Fitbit users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.   In the past few years, Fitbit has had a number of exciting opportunities to connect with its customers. Following a successful Lithium Community launch in late 2013, we stepped up our social media game by bringing LSW into the mix and integrating the toolset with our forums and CRM system.   LSW’s polished visual interface, customizable workspaces, and flexible backend settings have increased our productivity and allow us to quickly support our customers. LSW has also been one of the most intuitive and enjoyable platforms for us to use! Community Specialists leverage the advanced tagging and routing capabilities to surface emerging support issues, which helps us more quickly get our customers back on track.   Email Advocates benefit from the CRM integration, which equips them to handle escalations that come through our social channels, and offers a more complete view of each customer’s journey. Our management and partner teams appreciate the Mobile Shared Dashboards and extensible Smart View-based Analytics, and our BI team has made an easy time of report building with the APIs.   Before embarking on this journey with Lithium, we recognized that true community support involves listening and engaging with customers on their platform and medium of choice. Providing responses solely within a 9-5 workday left some customers waiting most of a day to hear back from us, which is a veritable eternity on social media. By using LSW to coordinate multiple teams around the globe, we are now able to provide stellar 24-hour support across our customers’ preferred channels. Growing our teams globally has given us the flexibility and bandwidth to continuously add new regional pages and channels, expanding the footprint of Fitbit’s social support brand.   Fitbit now engages millions of customers each month across its global Community Forums and an ever-increasing variety of social media channels. We are better positioned than ever before to continue growing Fitbit’s support presence and championing the voice of our customers.   The benefits of having both a community and LSW   Fitbit’s customer support strategy has always centered around delivery of clear help instructions. Our Community and LSW platforms contribute significantly toward providing our customers the help they need, when they need it.   The most architecturally complex example of our Community and LSW platform integration is our handling of product retailer and mobile app reviews. We are able to get visibility into 16 unique review channels across a variety of retail websites, as well as the Apple, Google, and Microsoft mobile app stores. Reviews from these sites automatically route to a Community board, where they appear as new topics organized by review ranking. LSW monitors our Community, collecting this content into a queue where our team of trained advocates responds to customer concerns and support opportunities. Their replies in LSW are posted to Community threads, where content is relayed via API to the review sites. While this may (accurately) sound like an elaborate construction of workflows, the end result is a familiar and straightforward process for our team and attentive support for customers who aren’t yet fully enjoying their Fitbit tracker.     Perhaps the most high-profile benefit of integration is LSW’s ability to intelligently escalate conversations based on key topical phrases, profile attributes like follower count, or past interaction with our team. This escalation ensures our ability to identify and resolve the highest priority conversations within a target of 30 minutes (and often more quickly than that). Since every Community post is routed through LSW, we’re able to provide this vigilant prioritization to all conversations.   Integrations contribute to our powerful listening capabilities. We’re able to support Fitbit marketing initiatives by providing keyword analytics and extracting crucial content into triage queues, so that we can respond without slowing productivity on other channels. We watch other non-traditional channels like Reddit to remain aware of brand-related conversations across their communities and providing us with a holistic view of the customer experience.   Our results   Our social tools enabled the Fitbit team to listen, evaluate, and apply our business rules to prioritize engagement for over 21,000 community posts, 27,500 tweets, 8,000 Facebook posts, 1,300 Instagram posts, and 3,000 consumer reviews across eight languages every week. Since these tools were implemented in May of 2015, we’ve added social media channels to our support contact page and are successfully handling about 150x the contact volume that we saw three years ago.     The flexibility of the rules engine greatly increased our ability to maneuver media blitzes, giving us the ability to respond to the most critical social conversations while we deliver unique customer insights back to the business. In the exciting time surrounding major product releases, our content and sentiment analysis contribute to our launch-related health reports.   While case deflection is the showstopper, we have defined 25 Community KPIs around growth, engagement, membership, and content, as well as three KPIs for social, including TAR, in-channel resolutions, and response rates.   The graph below illustrates community case deflections based on the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) Support Deflection Value model and our own survey data. The inflection point in November 2015 is a result of removing the login requirement and opening our community forums up to the public and to search. Today, nearly 70% of our traffic is organic, and we’re better able to meet the needs of our fast growing community by delivering effective content faster.     In addition to the KPIs above, we also illustrate  the diverse value of community through less traditional means. For example, members of the Community Team are involved in pulling together deep analysis on critical issues and themes for our product marketing, firmware, design, and other partner teams. We deliver uniquely tailored reports to make sense of customer input and raw support data, often unveiling insights unavailable before our integration with the LSW toolset . This ever-growing stack of virtual reports is one of our clearest value statements within the business.   We take pride in knowing that our unique vantage point, disciplined team structure, and versatility of subject matter make the Community Team a go-to resource for decision makers and leaders across the company as we continue to help them make informed decisions about our products.