Company:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star     Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impact on the way we live. As the UK’s first provider of all four broadband, TV, mobile phone and home phone services, it’s not just the technology that interests us – what matters is how it can improve the lives and prospects of everyone.   Virgin Media is a part of Liberty Global plc, the world’s largest international cable company. Together Virgin Media and Liberty Global serve 24 million customers across 14 countries, helping connect people to the digital world and enabling them to discover and experience its endless possibilities.   Our road to Lithium At Virgin Media, we believe in digital technology that makes good things happen for people, communities and businesses. We do everything we can to ensure technology is a force for good. This is why we’re committed to providing the best guidance, support and services – and working with Lithium has helped us to make this a reality.   We’ve been prominent on social media for around eight years now, and a Lithium-hosted community was established in 2009, and brought into the growing eService team in 2012. As these channels developed into popular care and support destinations, it became increasingly vital for us to be able to manage these conversations within an efficient, easy to use, reliable, configurable and data-rich environment.   After trying and testing every response tool, it was quickly clear that Lithium Social Web was the best match for our demanding requirements. We started using it towards the end of 2013 on the big three – Twitter, Facebook and Community – and haven’t looked back. Targeted queues, comment threading, publishing tools, advanced analytics and tagging – these are just some of the standard LSW features that we’ve now come to rely on as part of our day-to-day operation.   After one year of LSW we were already working 30% more efficiently. We no longer miss posts, delay responding to priority queries, and we can offer an individually tailored customer experience with true case ownership and empowerment for our people.   The benefits of having both a community and LSW    Our priority is providing the very best eService customer care experience. We’re firm believers in finding the next best action for our customers – and we utilize every aspect of our social media platforms and tools to do just that. We encourage and evangelize across our organization to think ‘Community First’. It now sits at the heart of our social media operation – the hub of our own Total Community. Our Twitter operation continues to go from strength to strength, Last year we became the first ISP to hit 1million tweets: 12 months on and we’ve added another half a million – all through LSW.   Our team respond to conventional care requests, as well as managing those conversations that result from marketing or brand posts. LSW’s smart tagging and work queues allow us to ensure the right conversations are handled by the right people – whether it’s prospective customers responding to hidden posts on Facebook, or having some light-hearted on-brand chat about sports on Twitter.   We understand that Twitter and Facebook aren’t always the appropriate channel for certain queries. If our teams can’t resolve the issue directly, we draw upon our YouTube help video collection, web-chat, a revamped and finely-tuned service status page, and a vast database of helpful links to make sure that we can get customers to the right place to answer their query. More and more, we’re encouraging them to visit our community.     We’re able to be more intelligent in this channel switching. We can optimise the incredible peer-to-peer power of the community, increase the visibility of curated trending topics and helpful answers, and encourage and stimulate the conversations customers need to have to get the help they need, and to bring them close to the business.   Results   The results of placing LSW and our Lithium Community at the centre of our next best action / community first philosophy are clear.   Our primary indicator is call reduction.   We’re seeing more Helpful Answers (Accepted Solutions) and views than ever before. Answers were up 22% from 2014-2015, while views rocketed 48% in the same time period.       It’s therefore no surprise that using a combination of our own benchmarking and Lithium’s value proposition, even a conservative estimate sees the community deflecting over 10,000 calls per week in 2016.   We know that membership of the community has a great value too – 87% of members who have sought help in the past will think ‘Community first’ the next time they need assistance from Virgin Media.     Analyzing customer journeys shows that the number of tweeters we refer to the community is increasing, and our cross-site promotion initiative means that we’re seeing a 54% increase in visitor referrals from other parts of VirginMedia.com.   Our newly launched Digital Life blog is also bringing our tech-smart Twitter followers into the community, introducing them to an environment where they can ask us the kind of questions that would take far more than 140 characters to answer.   Our social media and community teams are the place to go for sentiment and verbatim on any development or project. The information we can leverage from our social toolkit, especially that from LSW and LSI, mean we can provide both high-level data and in-depth analysis – the real voice of the customer.   The internal visibility and success of the community has led to an increase in opportunities to add further value to the wider business. On our last major trial had over 5000 forum posts between the project team and the triallists as they made sure we were ready to go to market.   We’re seeing more requests than ever before to run feedback trials and host focus groups.   As a result, with every new product we launch, with every potential contact-driver, Virgin Media is seeing the benefits of embracing our Total Community, first.

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: Virgin Media Entry submitted by: Jim Meadows (mrjimmeadows) Content Manager Community: Virgin Media Help & Support Forum (virginmedia.com/forums)   Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impact on the way we live. As a leading communications provider it’s not just the technology that interests us – what matters is how it can improve the lives and prospects of everyone.   Today, Virgin Media is a part of Liberty Global plc, the world’s largest international cable company. Together Virgin Media and Liberty Global serve 24 million customers across 14 countries, helping connect people to the digital world and enabling them to discover and experience its endless possibilities.   Our aim is to provide the best customer care experience in the UK through eService. And, as the UK’s most socially devoted ISP, scaling our social media presence to meet the demand of our customers has been our greatest challenge. In March we became the first ISP to have sent 1Million tweets to customers and we believe the application of Lithium / LSW has been key to achieving this milestone. Our road to Lithium was born out of three critical requirements. The first was a desire for our platform to do more. Lithium was responsive and met our demand for performance improvements. We were specifically looking for a platform with both skill-based and priority routing; a single desktop to extend across both social and community; and the product needed to be responsive to Facebook & Twitter developments, adapting swiftly to changes such as page threading. The second was a need to improve reporting. Here we were looking to identify trends and accurately measure sentiment, with the ultimate hope for real time reporting across the piece.   The third and most important requirement was to maintain and improve customer experience: to align one agent per customer, to reduce customer response times, to use rich media in responses, and to moderate our multi-channel offering through a single console – taking control of conversations to actively encourage peer-to-peer support and improve on social KPI’s.   Lithium’s continued commitment to evolving their platforms, and their ability to adapt effectively to changes in both social networks and social culture is key to our relationship. As Lithium continue to deliver on product, Virgin Media exceeds their operational and transactional goals.   Benefits of a Total Community The marriage of LSW and Community has enabled Virgin Media to reimagine a niche online space, delivering a dynamic central hub for online help and support.   The transformation of Community places it at the heart of eService. The ability to create optimized content immediately supports customer navigation from social as we drive customers to the right information at the right time, and benefits such as Social Integration within Community and integrating user generated content into online help and support, have driven peer-to-peer support across all touch points.   Through applying rigorous routing principles across LSW we’ve been able to limit risk to our online reputation –high profile accounts are identified using Klout, Conversational Key Words and Verified Status. In addition we’ve been able to harmonize social engagement and combine content streams on Twitter adopting a larger audience for our acquisition & content marketing strategy, whilst developing our care team’s skills to respond to both care and engagement.   Employing a 24-hour snooze rule, we’re now proactively reaching out to customers who have yet to validate our advice and can ensure we close the loop on the majority of conversations – and have increased agent productivity by 24.07% and response times by 25.57% across social and a 59% increase in baseline productivity.     The impact of efficiency has given us scope to activate a new look and feel with more features from our Community supporting our strategy. Using a single console, we brought moderation in-house, developing people and the job role. We were able to implement an archive, improve the effectiveness of Community search and dramatically increase the number of useful solutions viewed. Mobile optimization has enabled customers to navigate content on the go, a huge benefit when home broadband connectivity may be the contact driver.       Appointing a Community Lead has leveraged the effectiveness of our new Superuser advocacy program, increasing their time spent online and overall contribution to support, this coupled with a new ability to our members has given us the opportunity to successfully trial key products through customer outreach – all in a controlled environment.   Our Total Community results Over the last twelve months we’ve achieved our target of managing a single Twitter feed for marketing and customer care, leading to new brand records in engagement – whilst remaining devoted to customer experience; handling increases in volume, team size and improvements in sentiment across social.   Through Community we’ve seen incremental growth across all KPI’s. As a result of new member entrances up 23% and innovations driving increase in time spent online up 21% we’ve seen impact in kudos and accepted solutions marked up an enormous 76%.   The real benefit of this? The increase in accepted solutions viewed rising by 37%.   We’ve supported 5 major projects with trials including over 2000 triallists, delivering over 22,400 pieces of insight that have developed product ahead of launch and increased customer education – as a result, Superuser activity has hit highs of 37 hours per week (each) with replies from the group contributing to 18% of the overall volume leading overall peer to peer support to reach 80% across the last 12 months.   Whether it’s been the implementation of video content, ranking or board restructuring the technology has been key to giving us the freedom we need to adapt our channels yet the solidarity to manage one of the greatest social media workflows across one of the largest teams in the world, confidently.   “As we pass the milestone of our millionth tweet I am reminded of the amazing journey the Social Media Care team have been on over the last 4 years as we have grown from an ad hoc team of a couple of people to‎ our current 50+ team members.   Always championing our brilliant basics of being there for our customers when they need us, a virtual listening ear, heartfelt service and served up with a dollop of humour, the team continue to push the boundaries and lead from the front in the UK social care space.   The future is bright as we continue to grow and will evolve the social support to be more encompassing across the opportunities for Care, Marketing, Revenue and PR.” - Cormac Connolly, Director Channel Development, Virgin Media  

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: 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:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impact on the way we live. As the UK’s first provider of all four broadband, TV, mobile phone and home phone services, it’s not just the technology that interests us – what matters is how it can improve the lives and prospects of everyone.   Virgin Media is a part of Liberty Global plc, the world’s largest international cable company. Together Virgin Media and Liberty Global serve 24 million customers across 14 countries, helping connect people to the digital world and enabling them to discover and experience its endless possibilities.   Our community goals   Our primary goal is call deflection. We believe that this can be done by enabling a vibrant environment where customers can come to seek help, a place they’ll come back to in the future for assistance, and where they’ll want to return to share knowledge with their peers.   We’re also committed to supporting the wider business in trialling new products and services. We wanted to help customers who are now just using Google for their answers. The role of the Community as a shop window in the path to purchase is a key consideration, as is our continued desire to drive adoption and advocacy.   Both the wider Virgin Group, and ourselves at Virgin Media have, as you’d expect, some incredible brand guidelines to work with in terms of design, web functionality and tone of voice. These customer usability and the customer experience considerations are all tied-together by our guiding company ethos at Virgin Media, which is to be open-minded, fun and generous.   As part of our ‘Community Transformation Project’ (CTP) which ran from April –November 2015 we were able to analyse and refine our objectives and target in greater detail, and identify what we wanted to achieve as a result of our redesign.   Our specific design goals were as defined as follows: 1: Boost Helpful Answer views (reducing call traffic into Care)      a. Increase visibility (internally) and differentiate (compare and contrast to other posts)      b. Promote (external) 2: Increase traffic to the forums      a. Across the website estate      b. Across channels 3: Increase forum participation through to contribution:      a. Increase registered users and prioritise content      b. Improve repeat visits      c. Blog integration 4: Position the Virgin Media Community as a differentiator      a. Consideration phase of the consumer lifecycle – consideration-assimilation phase      b. For existing customers   What makes our community unique   We’re fully responsive. Our CTP has delivered a community that isn’t restricted by device, and is seamlessly accessible – regardless of where you are or how you use it.   We’re not just on brand – we’re shaping it. Brand guidelines were being re-written during the project, which meant we were the first implementation of ideas, palettes, and usability rules.   Community Hub page We’ve focused on creating a Community Hub page that is dynamic and welcoming. It incorporates all the key features of the community in bite-size chunks, and the principle behind this page is used throughout the site - surfacing content where and when it is needed. Our ‘Trending now’ function typifies this approach.   Personalised Each visitor is greeted with a role-specific message, with a call-to-action that fits their standing in the community. The ‘forum’ page can be adapted to hide boards that the customer isn’t interested in. There’s a different experience for non-members than members – they are directed to find help, and guided to our enhanced ‘Getting Started’ and on-brand ‘Community FAQ’ section.   Truly Social We’ve added a social-proofing community reach, which highlights the scope and reach of the site. YouTube help videos within the community – while using YouTube API to show the overall video views. This module allows us to quickly showcase topical information. The enhanced ‘Your conversations’ panel, as well as more conventional pop-up notifications and customer journey emails, means that it’s easier to know what’s been happening while you were looking elsewhere.   SEO Working with a top digital agency we assessed SEO across the site, and have introduced a number of both SEO enhancement and automated blocking features. This means that fresh relevant information will be found, and outdated or inaccurate postings can be removed from search with a click of a button.\       Navigation We’re really proud of our plectrum nav button – which we think should win an award on its own. Give it a try!   Swoosh!   How we executed our community design   We worked AGILE – which ultimately proved to be the right choice as it delivered efficient collaborative working. Following careful consideration and preparations, a small core team worked in a series of sprints to deliver a fully-responsive transformative design in six months from the Discovery Phase to Launch and Completion in November 2015.     The initial decision was whether to make a light version – a refreshed community look and feel, or for the transformative, fully responsive option, with a real emphasis on delivering results. There was really only one option: Go big, or go home.   This was the motto adopted by our project team, as they focused on a Mobile-first development. With the smallest device as the starting point, we were able to make sure that the same fully-featured functionality could upscale and prove accessible across all devices – and in doing so, we think made a big difference to the approach.    Co-location at Lithium / Virgin Media meant the team worked really closely in 10 day-long ‘sprints’, working with a Product Backlog, defined roles and responsibilities and shared project tools quickly identified across the two companies. Our core team of ten combined Lithium technical developers and a front-end / user interface designer, with Virgin Media User Experience, copy writing, design and UAT, under leadership and ownership from both parties.   Our community team populated the stage site with content, before along with our Superusers they were able to put it through its paces. In the staging environment, the community began to come together over the course of the sprints, and ideas could be tested, scrapped or implemented on the fly. One of our most successful features – ‘Trending now’ came about in such a manner at the tail end of the project.   Results (Comparing10/11/14 - 09/03/2015 and 09/11/2015 – 11/3/2015, unless otherwise stated.)     Comparing year-on-year results we can demonstrate that the CTP fulfilled it’s goal to Boost Helpful Answer views. We’ve used the functionality available within Lithium to surface Helpful Answers quicker, highlighted and authoritative with an assured bright-green border.   Our helpful content now surfaces across the wider Virgin Media help sites too in the same branded manner. We’ve seen a 54% increase in visitor referrals from other parts of VirginMedia.com since the cross-site promotion initiatives we launched along with CTP, and a steady rise in time online from those joining from Twitter.   In terms of “increasing forum participation through to contribution” we’re seeing marginal growth – this is an established mature community with over 300k registered members. However we have seen a 16% increase in Member Entrances. As a result of being responsive, we’ve taken a good look at the traffic from mobile. While the amount of visits from mobile is similar, the amount of posts has increased significantly as we’ve made it a much easier experience to participate from a device.     As a customer hub, for seeking support and sharing with their fellow customers we’ve seen so much more engagement – a 48% increase in posts, for example, and community health has rocketed – Kudos is up 80% year-on-year. Fantastic work everyone – the new community looks truly transformed, brilliant! Barbara Hall, Head of Channel Delivery, Virgin Media   Absolutely speechless, incredible team effort, you and the team should be very proud of what you have achieved. Shaun Hewitt, Senior Manager, eService – Liberty Global

Company: upc cablecom GmbH Entry submitted by: Oliver Lutz (Project Manager Social) Community: upc cablecom Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   upc cablecom is a leading provider of communication and entertainment in Switzerland. Almost 1.4 million customers place their trust in the company’s various products for television, Internet, telephony and mobile.   The regional organisation for Austria/Switzerland generated revenue of CHF 1.7 billion in 2015 with more than 2,500 employees. upc cablecom has a strong parent company behind it in Liberty Global, which is headquartered in the UK.   Our unique promotion   upc cablecom had been running a community on an outdated platform for about 4 years. This platform was extremely limited in terms of moderation capabilities, gamification and features. Community moderators were faced with highly negative sentiment which could not be dealt with properly.   Lithium community was launched in June 2015 for upc. Target was to provide a scalable technology layer which could be used to further develop social activities. Expected benefit for the business was to provide an integrated state-of-the-art social and community technology for ease of use and effectiveness.   Specific goals we wanted to achieve (business case):   Quantitative: Increase NPS Decrease support cost   Qualitative: Improve sentiment drastically Go personal, human connection, adapt tonality, show the faces behind the company. Solidify the connections with our customers Increase internal awareness for social / community   Our strategy and tactics for community promotion   Based on our overall social strategy we defined tactics to gain the objectives listed above.   Tactics: Go personal and become truly social Surprise your customer – build human connections for the brand. Show presence onsite and offsite Try as much as you can, take up what works, abandon what does not work!   Since launch in June 2015 we worked on the following areas: Sweepstakes Videos Blog Community Live Talks Live Events Super Hero Programme Newsletters, personal letters   1) SWEEPSTAKES:    Push registration sweepstake   Target: Push registrations   Newsletter campaign for our customers in order to increase registration rate of the support community. Customer activity: Register and tell us why you deserve the new iphone 6s. Prize: iphone 6s     Halloween sweepstake   Target: Increase awareness and usage, create fun-factors   For Halloween we organized a sweepstake on tickets for the most exclusive Halloween party in Switzerland.   Customer activity: Tell us what your favorite horror movie is….   Sweepstake article in the blog       We produced a self-ironic YouTube Video (see chapter “Videos”) where we created a context between Halloween and a buggy product feature.   New avatars created for Halloween Especially for the occasion of Halloween we extended the avatar offering with a range of “spooky avatars”.     2) VIDEOS   We produced a number of homemade low-budget videos on different topics.   Examples:   Community promotional video Promoting the community. Video was used as TrueView campaign during 3 weeks and was published on YouTube. Main actor of the video clip is a community moderator. One of our community super users acted within this clip as well.     The „making-of” this video was published in one of our blog articles.   Halloween Video Self-ironic spooky Halloween video with reference to a buggy feature of one of our products.    Connect Box unboxing Video Production of an unboxing video for a newly launched modem. The product manager presented the new product. Users could ask questions online.     3) BLOG   Target: Content Marketing; drive traffic! We kicked off a blog in parallel with the community launch. Blog articles are produced on a regular basis and drive traffic to the community and to our website.     4) LIVE TALKS   Target: Increase engagement, drive traffic   To become even more personal we introduced a Community Live Talk on a bi-monthly basis. We are discussing specific topics with internal or external experts live. We got engaged on senior management level and brought senior management into our live talks. Users can ask questions upfront or during the live-session.   WLAN Live Talk       5) LIVE EVENTS   Target: Increase engagement For this year’s big company event we raffled tickets within the community. This generated a lot of interest and we had many community members on-site during the event. They got special treatment before, during and after the event and were really enthusiastic about it.   Live Ticker In parallel, community guys organized a live ticker during the event which was broadcasted via our community blog.     6) SUPERUSER PROGRAMME   Target: Strengthen peer-to-peer support We launched a new superuser programme this spring. Superusers are the fuel of our community and we rely highly on them in terms of peer to peer support. The relationship has been intensified over the past months. Our superusers love the programme and the appreciation which comes with it.     7) NEWSLETTERS/ PERSONAL LETTERS   Newsletters Target: Drive engagement A community newsletter is being sent out on a monthly basis to all registered users. We promote relevant topics and make sure that customers perceive us as number 1 source for relevant support information.     Personal letters Towards the end of the year we sent personal letters to the most active users of the community and said „Thank you“ for their engagement and their contributions..   Moreover, we produced a small video explaining with what we had been busy with during 2015.       Our results   Sweepstakes Videos Blog Community Live Talks Live Events Superuser Programme Newsletters, personal letters     1. Sweepstakes Push registration sweepstake 290 new registrations over 350 participants   Halloween avatars & sweepstake More than 100 users changed their avatar to one out of the Halloween range. Very positive feedback on the self-ironic video    2. Videos Community Promoclip Over 36’000 views on YouTube. Very positive feedback on YouTube & within the Community The YouTube Trueview-campaign performed clearly over the Google Benchmarks.     Connect Box unboxing: Top position in the (Google) SERPs for the product name 70 comments/questions on the new modem within the blog 8000 views on YouTube (without further promotion) 230 participants in the competition Very positive feedback on the personal style of the announcement     3. Blog 130 articles, 760 comments, 80’000 page views, 430 kudos since launch   4. Community Live Talks Over 40 questions raised by Community members upfront and during the talk High senior management attention Based on the results of our community live talks senior management decided to use the live talk format for internal communications as well.   5. Live Event & Liveticker High interest in the 20 seats Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the event Very positive feedback (external & internal) High interest in the 20 seats Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the Event Very positive feedback (external & internal) 6. Superuser programme - Programme was kicked off with 4 superheroes - Continuous exchange via Superhero board and Skype - Personal meetings on a regular basis   7.Newsletters and personal letters   Newsletters Open Rate ca. 35%, Click Rate ca. 20%, Resulting in a regular increase of contributions (Boards & Blogs)    Personal letters Intensified relationship with the top users

Company: NetApp Inc. Contact: Teresa Peluso (Head of NetApp Community,  Customer Success &  Loyalty) Community: NetApp Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   NetApp, a leader in data management and storage solutions, is committed to helping our customers achieve what matters most to them. Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future.   NetApp is a pioneer in online community building and launched an online community years ago to support its customers from around the world. The goal of the NetApp Community is to be a source of truth and belonging for our customers, partners and employees – a safe place to connect and share through a digital experience that cultivates relationships, conversations, and expertise. But most of all, NetApp realizes trust is earned and the community demonstrates NetApp’s commitment to ‘being there’ for its customers and partners.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives   NetApp has always valued and participated in online forums -- we launched our own online community years ago (2008) to support our customers from around the world. The goal of the NetApp Community was (and still is) to be a source of truth and belonging for our customers, partners and employees – a safe place to connect and share through a digital experience that cultivates relationships, conversations, and expertise. But most of all, NetApp realizes trust is earned and the community demonstrates NetApp’s commitment to ‘being there’ for its customers and partners.    In September 2014, we decided to take a bold step in order to stay true to that goal. We thought carefully about long-term community goals, analyzed the data, and realized we needed a new platform to support our marketing excellence strategy and customer-centric approach. NetApp migrated to a Lithium-powered community and transformed their entire digital customer experience for the better.   Transforming the NetApp community experience   We knew that to enable customer success and drive preference and loyalty for NetApp, we had to take stock. Was the community thriving? Are members happy with the experience? The solution became clear – we needed a powerful platform and a solid partner. By moving to a Lithium-powered community, we were on our way to greater ROI and increased customer engagement and satisfaction.   NetApp’s previous community platform and infrastructure did not meet their true goal of being customer focused. Prior to the relaunch, the NetApp community was plagued with technical issues. We were unable to focus on connecting with customers because we were inundated with cumbersome upgrades and spam. In fact, spam was so pervasive on the platform that NetApp employed a separate vendor to manage the problem. Plus, we did not have the controls required to govern for a robust and healthy community, so we knew massive overhaul was in order.   After a rigorous RFP process (no stone left unturned) , NetApp selected Lithium’s SaaS platform because it gave us the flexibility to make extensive customizations. Another benefit to choosing Lithium are the seamless bi-monthly technical upgrades, which is a huge improvement compared to before the move to Lithium. Lithium’s tools make it easy and simple to measure community performance and engagement. This real-time information has led to smarter decision-making based on hard data. The data has also helped us prove the value of our community investment.   Our results   Key metrics: 37,000+ registered members (1100 new members per month) 82% monthly average response rate +25% increase in accepted solutions since moving to Lithium +13.5% increase in community CSAT since moving to Lithium   NetApp now has a new look, new platform and a simplified structure. There have been several upgrades to the platform including site search, improved social sharing and browser support and have created a better mobile experience.   We now have a streamlined number of discussion boards to focus on three areas: Products and Solutions, Developer Network, and NetApp University & Training. We also consolidated and simplified the community structure for easier navigation. Using Lithium gives NetApp a competitive advantage by allowing customers to provide peer-to-peer support, share best practices, and connect with other NetApp influencers. We used this ‘fresh start’ to button up our governance, redefine user guidelines and moderation models (we now have ‘topic owners’ who are notified when new discussions are posted).   The NetApp community framework is based on member satisfaction balanced with business objectives. For measuring success, we established new custom index metric, which calculates different behaviors such as posts, kudos, replies, etc., into a weighted indices for engagement and satisfaction of the community. NetApp is also conducts an annual CSAT Survey which informs and validates the community roadmap from both a technical and program perspective. While there are always improvements to make, the member feedback has been positive.   “Our Lithium-powered community has continued to grow and to exceed all baseline metrics, including its newest key engagement metric, the number of kudos, which is a strong indicator of the customer’s overall satisfaction with content.” - Terri Peluso, Head of NetApp Communities,  Customer Success &  Loyalty  

Company: USAA Entry submitted by:  Bill Gerth (Director, Social Business) Community: USAA Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Organizational Background and Social ROI Goals USAA provides its membership access to competitive products, award-winning customer service and the tools and advice they need to make critical life decisions. As a financial services organization that has served generations of military families we know the importance of excellence in customer service. In 1922 when 25 Army officers met in San Antonio, Texas and decided to insure each other's vehicles, they laid the foundation for an organization that became one of the only fully integrated financial services organizations in America serving millions of members.   USAA acknowledges that social media is an important member service channel. In 2015 our Board of Directors required an end of year deliverable of the establishment of a social survey channel to measure the effectiveness of social customer care. The focal point of social customer care for our membership is the discovery of their immediate needs into full resolution with superior customer care. Our members want support through their social channel of choice and USAA is committed to extending customer care on our managed and owned social properties. USAA required business solutions which set the gold standard for member handling in social channels, facilitated dialogue management and meet the unique requirements of business units in the financial services, insurance and communications industries.   USAA’s 2015 social customer care and social business goals were to; establish a social customer care survey (2015 Board of Directors Deliverable), expand social customer care and social business strategies to managed and owned social properties, reduce social engagement SLA by 10%, reduce social acknowledgement time by a minimum of 15%, reduce cost of enterprise social customer care internal documentation by 25%, reduce cost for customer care from social channels to internal CRM processes, validate member community engagement and product acquisition metrics.   ROI from Social Customer Care, Social Business Initiatives In 2015 our partnership with Lithium and Enterprise Business Partners USAA was able to: Implemented a Social Servicing Experience Survey to measure and improve overall effectiveness of the channel, response rate at 15% (2015 USAA Board of Directors Deliverable used to determine overall corporate effectiveness score). Establish an enterprise social customer care SLA <30 minutes Reduced social acknowledgement time by 20%, 5% over goal Reduced social customer care internal documentation from 24 hours to 1 hour; time on task savings of 95% Eliminate internal email as a method for routing member inquiries to experts 5 FTE savings through LSW Social Handle USAA CRM Member Match technology Validate Member Community engagement, eligibility and product completion metrics   USAA knows that online identification processes were disconnected from a member’s true identity, and dissimilar to our internal CRM systems. LSW integration with our systems provides us a 'single member profile’. This ‘single member profile’ allows USAA to associate social insights with known member information and deliver the gold standard for social customer care.     Our members expect flawless interactions, regardless of the service channel, with personalized service. Our return on investment is a 95% reduction in time on task for multiple business processes and 2.5 FTE savings. USAA is effectively and efficiently recognizing our member’s preference for engagement through social media. With LSW USAA has an enterprise solution which integrates our managed properties like Facebook and Twitter with our Member Community; powered by the Lithium Community Platform. The USAA Member Community has over 300K members; this owned social property is an integral part of our social business strategy to maintain superior customer care in a member’s social channel of choice. USAA Member Community has hosted over 8M unique visits with 22% Eligibility Application Completion and 55.8% Product Application Completion Rates.

Company: Optimizely Entry submitted by: Amanda Swan (Website Product Manager)  Community: Optiverse Lithy Category: Community Design of the Year    Optimizely is the world’s leading experience optimization platform, providing website and mobile A/B testing and personalization for the world’s leading brands.   Our community goals   The vision of the Optiverse is to be the most-visited digital destination for optimization industry thought leadership, peer-to-peer discussions, tutorials, how-to education and resources.   The Optiverse Community helps Optimizely scale education and support.   What makes our community unique   The Optiverse is made up of our Community, Knowledge Base, and Academy. In order to facilitate easy navigation between the three properties, we implemented a sticky left rail and top global navigation so it’s easy for visitors to jump between properties and explore different types of content. The left nav has a hover and expanded state.     We also created a responsive homepage for the Optiverse that sets context and explains why a visitor might use each of the three properties.       We’re implementing a custom implementation for premium gamification in our community with unique badges our members helped design.     In our quest to provide the best possible digital experience for an individual visitor, we’re also personalizing headers and layouts based on behavioral and firmographic attributes. We continually use AB tests and user test to inform and guide our decisions.   How we  executed our community design   There’s a blog post that digs into this process in detail that can be found here.    Here are the main steps: Do you research and know your data. We were continually looking at analytics, talking to community members and performing user tests. Get the right people in the room. We gathered a team of internal stakeholders who were invested in the success of the community and set clear KPIs together. Draw a line in the sand. We created a strategy brief that became the source of truth for the entire design process. The Strategy brief outlined the vision and mission of the Optiverse, key user behaviors we wanted to influence, emotions we wanted the design to convey, target audience motivations, primary and secondary target roles, guiding UX priciples, and measureable goals. For example, based on common feedback trends from customers, the Optiverse team distilled the emotional and visual identity with six principles: Helpful, Educational, Trustworthy, Industry Leading, Thought provoking and Interactive. Of course, the tone and mood of the design should also follow these attributes. Having a strategy brief helped communicate the project to external team members and helped us evaluate success of the project. Move quickly and eliminate dependencies in design. Wireframes were essential for rapid prototyping because they allowed us to move quickly and are extremely cost-effective.  Along the way, we were constantly throwing new and crazy ideas on the wall to see what stuck. We always referred back to the user experience brief and used customer feedback to validate hypotheses.  Keep community members involved. Once we finally moved into the design phase, we made sure to keep our Community MVPs up to speed so they could contribute feedback and ideas.   Our metrics   2 months after the launch of the re-design (but still prior to rolling out gamification) we saw the following results (as compared to months prior to the launch):   Total Page Views 76% Total Unique Visitors 58% Completed Registrations 190% Member Time (min) 103% Member Entrances 117% # of Posts 15% Pages per Session 5% Session Duration 40%

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   Our Story We moved to the Lithium community at the beginning of 2015. One of the first tasks was to move all of our old product forums to one community engine - Lithium. We had products in different software areas with different customers. We had to take into account their specifics and habits.   What we did We started working from two directions – from the community members’ side (externally) and from staff’s side (internally).   We had many community members by the time we moved to Lithium. In addition, each month, plenty of new members joined us. We decided to help all of them get used to our new community and help them get as many benefits from us as possible. For this, we launched two main community programs: The first one was meant to boost activity of current community members; The second one was supposed to help new community members get started in the Community easier.   Moreover, we had been working with our highly-skilled users and nurturing community experts. They were ready to share their knowledge and help other users resolve their issues. Sometimes, getting help from other customers is much more effective than getting help from, for example, the Support Team. Customers know all cons and pros of a product, and they are not shy to share them.   To increase the quality of our Community, we tried to involve our company teams in the Community. We have been working with R&D, QA, Support and Documentation to make them participate more actively in the Community.   What issue were we trying to solve? One of the main issues we had was related to customer satisfaction. Our customers were completely unsatisfied by our Community, and they preferred submitting questions to our Support Team. That increased the load on the team, which was unacceptable.   Moving to Lithium helped us increase customer satisfaction. We saw that more and more people preferred asking the Community as they knew that they would get answers either from other customers or someone from the company.   Our results We are seeing awesome growth in all community metrics: Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% %Topics replied < 24hrs +12% #Solutions +240%     Our CSAT in January 2016 was 60%. We help new community members get involved in the community life faster. Our current community members understand the value of the Community, and they are ready to share their knowledge with other community members.  

Company: 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: USAA Entry submitted by:  Bill Gerth (Director, Social Business) Community: USAA Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Organizational Background and Customer Satisfaction Goals   USAA provides a full range of financial products and services to the military community and their families. Our world-class employees are committed to delivering superior products, appropriate guidance and exceptional customer service. We started as a word of mouth company, in 1922 when 25 Army officers met in San Antonio, Texas and decided to insure each other's vehicles they laid the foundation for an organization that would one day serve millions of members. USAA has earned its member’s trust by providing years of award-winning service through a comprehensive suite of financial products and advice. Our members expect excellence in customer service from a financial services organization that’s served generations of military families. Service, Loyalty, Honesty and Integrity, USAA stands ready to serve.   Our members were asking for support through their channel of choice and USAA was committed to extending customer care in social networks. Meeting our member’s needs with the immediacy of social customer care is an extension of our commitment to service. USAA recognizes that member care is a mission critical deliverable. “We know what it means to serve” is at the root of everything we do. In 4 months we moved at the speed of social to implement an enterprise platform that would enable the gold standard for member social care.   USAA’s 2015 customer care satisfaction goals were to enable an enterprise platform which meets the needs of individual business units in the financial services and insurance industries, address social customer care, member complaint and communications needs, achieve an enterprise SLA of 30 minutes or less, reduce social acknowledgement time by a minimum of 15%, expand social customer care coverage addressing the immediate needs of our membership, reduce enterprise social customer care internal documentation by 25%, enable seamless customer care from social channels to internal CRM processes.   Customer Satisfaction and Business Accomplishments with Lithium Implementation   Through a joint effort with enterprise business partners, calculated planning, resource training and the implementation of LSW for social customer care USAA was able to: Implement an enterprise platform for multiple business units Meet the unique social customer care handling needs of our financial services business partners Train an enterprise workforce of 104 users in 2 days to expand social customer care Establish an enterprise social customer care SLA of less than 30 minutes Reduce social acknowledgement time by 20%; 5% over goal Expand social customer care from 8 business hours to 24x7 coverage Reduce social customer care internal documentation from 24 hours to 1 hour; time on task savings of 95% Establish seamless customer handling from social channels into CRM processes Implement early alert system associated to key business indicators Implement LSW Social Handle USAA CRM Single Member Profile.     USAA has been recognized year over year for our service and commitment to members on traditional communication channels.       Our implementation of LSW enabled USAA to meet our member’s social customer service needs with speed and efficiency. The net result is a reduction in time on task for business processes and FTE savings. With LSW USAA has an enterprise solution integrating managed properties like Facebook and Twitter with our Member Community, powered by the Lithium Community Platform. Our Member Community has over 300K members; this owned social property was an integral part of our strategy to maintain superior customer care where members demand our presence. The USAA Member Community has hosted over 8M unique visits with over 35K same session product application completions. 11 major business units at USAA utilize LSW with 6 key financial service business teams interacting with members in social channels on a daily basis.

Company: USAA Entry submitted by:  Bill Gerth (Director, Social Business) Community: USAA Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   USAA provides a full range of financial products and services to the military community and their families. Our world-class employees are committed to delivering superior products, appropriate guidance and exceptional customer service. We started as a word of mouth company, in 1922 when 25 Army officers met in San Antonio, Texas and decided to insure each other's vehicles they laid the foundation for an organization that would one day serve millions of members. USAA has earned its member’s trust by providing years of award-winning service through a comprehensive suite of financial products and advice. Our members expect excellence in customer service from a financial services organization that’s served generations of military families. Service, Loyalty, Honesty and Integrity, USAA stands ready to serve.   Organizational Background and total Community Digital Customer Strategy   When someone joins USAA they have immediate access to free financial resources and personalized products and services — we understand the unique needs of our membership because we’re an organization founded by military members for military members. Our customers rely on us to suggest products and services that meet their financial needs and access to the tools and advice they need to make critical life decisions. Our customer care solutions and Member Community afford USAA’s member’s access to world-class employees that are personally committed to delivering excellent service and superior assistance in their social channel of choice.   USAA recognizes that social media is an important member service channel. We’re committed to delivering the gold standard for social customer care in our managed and owned social media properties. USAA is laser focused in our approach to the discovery of a members service issues in social channels with rapid issue resolution or the recommendation of advice which meets an immediate need.   USAA determined that online profile recognition methods were disconnected from a member’s true identity and out of sync with our internal CRM systems. Across the social customer care industry and CRM platforms the inability to identity stitch public and private customer profile information together proved to be a key issue in successful social customer handling, dialogue management and customer contact amendment.   One of our largest initiatives in 2015 was to develop a solution integrating information from our managed social properties, Lithium Member Community and CRM systems together to provide a 'single member profile’. The ‘single member profile’ would allow USAA to associate social insights with known member information and offer relevant personalized service in social networks or our Member community. USAA knows that the key to personalized service in social channels is immediate recognition of a member in their social channel of choice.   Total Community Benefits and Results   In 2015 USAA leveraged its Lithium Member Community and planned LSW integration to build a scalable 'single member profile’ we call the Unified Member View. This “360 degree customer view” is the centerpiece of our Total Community Strategy. The Unified Member View includes the Lithium Member Community identity, external social identities and Member Online profile data into a 'single member profile’. USAA’s digital strategy for Total Community focuses on the member profile; our efforts include connecting USAA’s official customer record with all of the public and private social profile attributes that we see emerging.            The holistic view of the member profile allows USAA to deliver a new level of digital experience and features informed by expanded awareness and insight. Digital features include; personalization informed by social insights or declared life events, member segmentation, peer to peer connection features that match an individual’s needs with member provided advice and solutions. USAA combined the Community Profile with formal customer profile data to create a single social customer experience anchor point Members can now select from personal details (location/military background) directly pulled from their formal profile to share The combined profile provides integrated access to USAA’s Community for our member base of over 10 million individuals The combined profile serves as the comprehensive external social network identity record for all members The aggregation of all member social profiles will be written to the CRM record and reused for customer outreach and promotion 2015 Unified Member View project for Total Community led to broader exposure of the Community Profiles, a 5x monthly increase in Member Community registrations (10,000 Registrations per month on average) LSW, USAA CRM Member Match Technology gives USAA a 5 FTE savings for looking up Member Profile Information and syncing that data to social handles    

Company: PT. XL Axiata, Tbk Entry submitted by: Ariesa Pramudito  (Manager, Social Media, Digital Experience Transformation) Community: XL Care  Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   PT XL Axiata Tbk. is one of the major cellular providers in Indonesia. XL’s focus is to provide digital services for the people of Indonesia as well as to encourage the development of Indonesia’s digital economy. XL commenced operations on the 8 th of October 1996, and has wide and high-quality network across the nation. Since December 2014, XL began to deploy its 4G LTE network.XL is part of the Axiata Group. The Group’s mobile subsidiaries and associates operate under the brand name ‘Celcom’ (Malaysia) ‘Dialog’ (Sri Lanka), ‘Robi’ (Bangladesh), ‘Smart’ (Cambodia), ‘Ncell’ (Nepal), ‘Idea’ (India) and ‘M1’ (Singapore).   Our initiatives in 2015 We created the Rangers who have Lithium weapons and are the admin of XLCare Social Media. We see the concern faced by netizen customers is when the customer has a problem or a question about service, they send the question to the company, but they don’t know if they’ll received an answer by a human or a machine (bot). With the Rangers, customers feel that a real person is serving them. Customers can interact with people who have high skills, have a relationship with the communities, and understand customer service.   XL Care Rangers:   Lithium Social Web (LSW) is the weapon used by XLCare Rangers to directly connect with customers. Rangers using LSW for several purposes:   Fast response & monitoring Service Level target: :   Quality monitoring (Conversation history checking):   The interaction / activity with followers/fans is not only questions and answers. We create some online & offline activities with our customers to build engagement and a close relationship with the customer:   1. #XLRangers, Social Media Journey activity by utilizing the Social Media Day (June 30, 2015). We introduce XL Care Rangers to our new followers and give them challenges related to Rangers hobbies, then we give gifts to the winner.   2. #XLGames invite customers to play games easily as routine activity.   From this example, customers should answer the name of XL package (LDR package) by cross checking with the image given.   Sometimes we give gifts as a surprise for the winners. For example, we had special #XLGames by utilizing the Independence Day 2015 (August 17, 2015). We gave free historical islands tour tickets to the winners (we invited Historia Community to give historical education to the participants).   3. #XLShare, sharing product & technology to customers as routine activity   In this example, we share a video editing application. We created a quiz game to build attention.   The most important customer issue we  were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation The basic needs from netizens when they complain or ask in social media is a Fast Response and Solution. This fast response can generate positive sentiments from followers. LSW can fulfill this need to achieve XLCare KPI.   Here is the video about XLCare Rangers generating a fast response and solution with LSW:     To measure our fast response to customers, we set the target. We used SL (Service Level) as our target. Our SL target is 70% incoming posts should be responded to under 10 minutes. Rangers use LSW to provide faster response and solution by these features in LSW:   The easy-to-use interface has helped Rangers provide a fast response and solution.   Rangers can manage all incoming posts (filtering function, sort by function, easy to claim, easy to assign, etc) easily.   The easy to read conversation history between customers & XLCare has helped Rangers provide the best solution to the customer. It also helps our quality assurance team in analyzing Rangers’ quality answers / solution.   With Lithium, it’s easy to monitor SL’s hourly, daily, weekly & monthly achievement.   It’s also easy to analyze trends & anomaly issues by using tags which were needed to improve our quality as well as the handling flow.   Our Lithium implementation has answered our needs to give a fast response & solution to the customer.   XL Care SL Achievement (2015) :     We exceeded our SL target (70%) in 2015. We achieved 79.46% average in 2015.   By using Lithium, we were able to provide a fast response and solution to customer and reached 1.044.998 incoming posts (9% of total incoming volume) from all XL assisted touch points in 2015.             Type Touchpoint 2015 % Assisted Hotline 7,957,616 69% Walk in Center 2,546,604 22% Email 40,863 0.35% Social media 1,044,998 9% Total 11,590,081 100%    Our metrics   From the online & offline activities in XLCare social media, we use an NPS survey to measure customer satisfaction, as well as engagement rate.   1. NPS Mechanism : We provide customers with a survey to recommend XLCare on a scale of 0-10.   0 – 6          : Detractors 7 – 8          : Passives 9 – 10        : Promoters   NPS formula: NPS = Promoters (%) – Detractors (%)   We have our segmentation of customer, then we divide NPS in 2 kinds of NPS. Regular customer NPS & Premium customer NPS.   Regular customer NPS: We send NPS survey to customer by the day after we give answer/solution to all customers. Regular customer NPS target is 55%.   We exceeded our NPS rate target (55%). We achieved an average NPS of 59.01% in 2015..   Premium customer NPS: Every premium customer will have dedicated Rangers to answer and provide solutions to them. We also have initiatives to create engagement events with them. To determine our premium customers, we set the priority of customers using Lithium tags (choosing by number of followers & Klout score).     We give the survey links using Lithium as well. We send our NPS survey to customers in batches (1 batch: 3 month) after we provide services and activities to our premium customers.     We exceeded our NPS rate target (70%). We achieved an NPS average of 75.48% in 2015.   2. Engagement Rate We use an Engagement Rate to measure how interesting XL Care posts/tweets are on social media from the customer side.   Engagement Rate Formula: Total number of times a user has interacted with a Tweet (Click, retweet, reply, follows, favorites) / Number of times users saw the tweet on Twitter * 100%     We exceeded our Engagement Rate target (1.8%). We achieved 2.09% average in 2015.  

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   In February 2015, we launched http://community.smartbear.com on the Lithium engine. By that time, we had forums for different products. They had their own design, gamification features, etc. It was a big challenge for us to unite all forums on one Lithium engine – we didn’t want to reduce the features we had on our old forums. In addition to this, we wanted to add more modern features provided by Lithium.     One of the main requirements was related to the community design – we wanted to see a branded community. Our designers worked hard on every image we added to the Community pages. In addition to modern design, we wanted to have more than just forums in the Community. Now, the SmartBear Community includes forums, feature request areas, Community Matters Blog, SmartBear Developer Network, Customer Advisory Board, different user groups and much more.   Here is the Community home page:     We regularly analyze community metrics, and they prove the success of our new Community. We achieved the 500% growth of visits to our Community by the end of 2015! We expect to see this trend in 2016 as we put much effort into the SmartBear Community.   Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% #Solutions +240% #Kudos +280% Visits +500%

Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   The SmartBear Community provides 24/7 assistance for all product users. In addition, the Customer Care Team helps our customers resolve technical issues during normal business hours. Decreasing the load on our Support Team was one of the important tasks for 2015.   People should go to the Community first In 2015, we were concentrating on increasing the number of questions asked in the Community. For this, we launched different community programs oriented towards increasing the community visibility and boosting the activity of current community members.   We allocated one community manager who worked with community members, launched different community programs oriented towards new and existing community members.   To decrease the number of support cases, we have implemented the pre-submission search on the Contact Support form. When a customer submits a case, we show community topics where a similar question has already been discussed. Answering one specific question in the Community often means answering the same question for dozens of people.   The results of this implementation were great – many people went to the Community instead of contacting the Support Team.   Involve different teams into discussions As a rule, different teams don’t have time to read all community questions. However, we had a community manager who could refer an interesting question to a certain developer, QA engineer, technical writer, etc. They would find an answer faster when given a specific question and not having to review all community questions. Involving employees in the community brings great quality to practically all community discussions.   In addition, community members see that they can talk to developers of the product they use. They like it and often return to them to ask other interesting questions or provide some valuable feedback.   Case Deflection Increase Working on all of our initiatives helped us increase the number of deflected support cases (cases that would normally go to the Support Team, but were resolved in the Community). Last year, we doubled those metrics – at the end of 2015, we had 12% of deflected cases in comparison with 6.8% of deflected cases at the beginning of the same year.    

Company: Fox Sports Australia  Entry submitted by: Shae Marlow (ShaeM) Community Manager Community: The Crowd (http://thecrowd.foxsports.com.au) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch     FOX SPORTS is Australia’s leading producer of sports television coverage and is home to Australia's favourite subscription TV sports channels, as well as Australia's number one general sports website – foxsports.com.au.   FOX SPORTS’ mission is to take fans closer to their favourite sports than ever before. We feed the passion of fans and give them access to sports, players and insights like they’ve never had - offering them an entertainment experience like no other, every day of the week.   Sport is incredibly tribal and controversial topics arise every day that people want to talk about. The vision was to offer the more passionate sports fans a seat at the table, to discuss the hottest topics with the best sports talent in the country.   The Crowd is a new FOX SPORTS community forum which offers fans and readers a place to offer their comments, thoughts and opinions on what is happening in sport at any time – the ultimate home of sports conversation in Australia.   The Crowd key outcomes: Own share of voice of sports conversation in Australia Build fan engagement by providing a platform for fans to interact with the best sports talent and key influencers in Australia Monetise through third party advertising FOX SPORTS Australia is the leader in delivering sports entertainment and so in order to bring a new and innovative digital product to life in a competitive market, it was important to align with Lithium.   Lithium provided a market-leading platform for FOX SPORTS to launch The Crowd with immediate community vibrancy and the most innovative user experience – a forum at the forefront of sports communities in Australia. The Crowd has been the most important digital product to come out of FOX SPORTS Australia in five years.   Lithum has enabled The Crowd to integrate existing FOX SPORTS digital and social strategies as a way to drive deeper engagement with fans, with immediate success. Launching an engaging and interactive sports forum in Australia required igniting the passion and excitement from within FOX SPORTS fans and continuing the FOX SPORTS promise of delivering the best and most entertaining experience like no other.   The launch promotion worked in three key phases.   STAGE ONE: EXCITE Objective: To raise curiosity of sports fans within an established and competitive environment.   Promotion included: A teaser TVC, version 1 of print, ad banners, social, guerilla marketing, eDM, key influencers and internal employees.    2. STAGE TWO: IGNITE   Objective: To raise awareness of The Crowd as the ultimate online destination for sports fans to continue their conversations.   Promotion included: Second more functional TVC, print, ad banners, social across facebook, twitter, google+ and youtube, FOX SPORTS talent, PR, eDM, key influencers and partner properties.     3. STAGE THREE: ENTICE   Objective: To convert awareness into interaction, by adapting creative based upon key learnings and evolving integration across on-platform and off-platform executions.   Promotion included: Honing various executions to drive key metrics of posts and registration numbers, including social, eDM, guerrilla and specific digital media display advertisements targeting other forum users from across different Australian verticals. Most importantly, content from The Crowd began integrating across print and TV.    ALWAYS TALKING SPORT? JOIN THE CROWD speaks to genuine sports fans, letting them know they have a new home to engage with likeminded enthusiasts.  To build strong brand equity this was executed across different mediums to achieve high brand recall. The integrated campaign launched with more than 14 different creative executions across more than 30 touch points, resulting in the most successful digital product launch for FOX SPORTS in the last five years. The immediate community vibrancy has exceeded all KPIs, including over 2000 posts in the first six weeks.   VIDEO: FOX SPORTS Australia launches The Crowd

Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category:The Organization Game Changer   Powered by the Lithium platform, we are shaping the new Social Knowledge Management Environments (SKMEs) that are transforming the way employees and customers create, consume, iterate and reuse knowledge across the enterprise. Through collaboration with partners and customers, we jointly address customer opportunities and challenges, capture, transform, and evolve intellectual capital across organizational boundaries into knowledge assets; while keeping stakeholders informed at all stages of our processes. We are converging Social & Enterprise Collaboration, Content Management and Knowledge Management within our SKMEs. Through our methods and capabilities of delivering SKMEs, we are able introduce new ways of thinking about how we do business as an organization.       We are part of Cisco Services – specifically the Services Transformation organization responsible for Intellectual Capital Transformation (ICT). Our goal is to transform the way we capture institutional knowledge at Cisco by not only changing business processes and outcomes, but changing the way people think about social knowledge and collaboration. We are doing that by delivering capabilities in which users can collaborate to solve problems and quickly identify solutions as candidates to be knowledge assets. Additionally, we’re evolving our workflow for content and knowledge management dynamically, thereby transforming our processes from three down to one. We are successful when people across the company are freely creating intellectual capital with each other in such a way that others can reuse it and improve upon it later. By realigning the way we do business, we focus on reducing costs and increasing revenue. These focus areas are nothing new to any business. However, we achieve this transformation by disrupting the how and why of our business workflows to achieve greater efficiency and improve customer satisfaction through four foundations:  Collaboration Opportunities, Expertise Acceleration, Content Lifecycle, and Knowledge Trace Back   By leveraging the Lithium platform we are able to deliver the following foundational benefits:   1) Collaboration Opportunities: Aligning our business processes across organizational boundaries, we are changing the way we interact and operate as a business. Using the tools that enable our Social Knowledge Management Environment, we provide real-time collaboration and push our business activities internally and externally. For example, we have a company-wide initiative that crosses over many areas of responsibility (silos). We need a source of truth for gathering information and connecting with others. We host discussions around the initiative that include our approach, the relevancy of what we're doing, why we're doing them and manage the projects connected to the initiative within our collaborative environment. We leverage Lithium to accelerate our ability to disrupt the usual way of doing business by bringing information into one place. It allows experts to find each other and a community can form around it. This has created a more transparent and collaborative culture.   2) Expertise Acceleration: Our Social Knowledge Management Environment expedites the processes of transforming new knowledge workers into experts, and sharing / contributing new information dynamically. For example, a relatively new executive needed a quick consultation and advice about a project. At the same time, he joined one of our webinars around the topic of securing networks. This webinar led him to Cisco Community Connector where he was able to explore, communicate and collaborate with his peers in other companies and industries. The result was an increase in his connections, more knowledge around his topic, and a greater network of resources than he had before. Just by being involved in the community, he gained the real-time knowledge that he needed to recommend the right solutions for his company.   By increasing this executive's ability to learn and be mentored, we've extended the learning process outside of the traditional training model. Learning new skills is enabled from within the platform by giving users and knowledge contributors instant access to knowledge from a variety of sources they didn't have previously.     3) Content Lifecycle: In the past, collaboration occurred in environments—such as email, document storage, and IMs—that didn’t require users to rethink the normal workflow or that was not engineered to facilitate easy content retention. Now with our Social Knowledge Management Environments (SKMEs) we not only retain the collaborative exchange, we are able to flag and promote these exchanges into knowledge articles that can be reused and distributed. This has enabled us to do a baseline exercise that wasn’t possible before. Now we’re able to isolate what’s appropriate to share vs. what’s not truly needed. And we keep content up-to-date, dynamic and searchable. It no longer lives on someone’s hard drive, inaccessible to everyone else.   Using the collaboration abilities in Lithium, we’re able to identify opportunities to share information across the enterprise and out to customers. This leads us into a proactive way of managing content within a team, versus the old way of being reactive. Additionally, we’ve become more transparent as an organization by allowing all users to contribute to knowledge (at any stage) instead of creating ideas, documents, and processes in a vacuum.   4) Knowledge Trace Back: Our SKME enables real-time tracking of an asset’s provenance. It provides the ability for us to identify who our knowledge experts are and how we get to them. We have better understanding about the contributors to our knowledge and our knowledge base.   Our Social Knowledge Management Environment connects experts to their contributions, making it possible to trace back and discover the true origin of any knowledge article. This capability drives deeper engagement through incentives, fosters scalable mentorship programs, reduces duplicate efforts, and enables a more efficient business process and streamlined communications. For example, a customer’s environment was changing rapidly due to new leaders, new deliverables, and unknown factors specifically around BYOD demands in a corporate environment. The challenge was finding a way for the customer to increase his knowledge base and insight into industry practices. We assisted this by connecting him with Cisco BYOD experts and colleagues he didn’t previously have a connection to. It removed obstacles and created a new collaborative network that didn’t exist previously.   As the Intellectual Capital Transformation (ICT) team within Cisco Services, we push the limits of the nature of collaboration. We not only extend and grow our capabilities—providing a comprehensive view of our team activities to various stakeholders—we use our knowledge-sharing and foundational approach to extend the thinking of new groups looking to use social knowledge management. It is about the dynamic, collective nature of social collaboration coupled with knowledge management that signifies the value of the activities producing, retaining, and reusing our intellectual capital in innovative ways. What's different? We're connecting people who hadn't been connected before and removing barriers to cross-functional and cross-industry knowledge through collaboration. It's about leveraging business process and workflow and establishing integral relationships with our technology that impacts the value of true social knowledge collaboration. We connect those senior level managers to each other so they can increase their expertise, learn more, create new content via white papers, or collaborate on things they may not have gotten a chance to do without this dynamic environment. We are creating a whole new model within Cisco that we, in fact, showcase in our own business processes that can be leveraged within any business function. Given the dynamic nature of collaboration we are able to connect experts with users, where before they would have never known the others existed. Moreover, we are able to scale in such as way that an expert can provide mentorship to many peers virtually rather than one or few in traditional mentoring models.   It all starts with conversations, which lead to the community, which provides the connections.  As word spreads, more people hear about it and want to be involved. The community naturally grows and produces reusable knowledge because of the ownership the community members take in making it a success. By measuring the number of accepted solutions to questions, the activity of discussions and knowledge bases, and overall user activity within the social knowledge management environment, we improve customer satisfaction and employee effectiveness—all of which can be measured in productivity time.   By leveraging our social knowledge management environment, ICT has reduced the time required for meetings, increased awareness and visibility internally and with our stakeholders, and has been able to move projects forward without the need for additional resources. Additionally, these same methods have enabled our stakeholders to have full visibility into what we are doing and the upcoming priorities, which has resulted in improving their own ability to move their initiatives forward in a more timely manner.