Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Bill Gerth (Gertht96) Director, Customer Service Strategy & Ops Community: Forums.comcast.com Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast, a Fortune 50 Company, is the largest mass media and communications company in the world by revenue.  Comcast is also the largest cable and home internet provider in the United States, servicing customers in 40 states.  Comcast strives to provide superior customer service through all channels – traditional and atypical.  An early adopter in using social media in the Care space, Comcast spends considerable energy and resources developing and implementing its digital strategy. Social Care and engagement is managed within Comcast’s Care team, National Customer Operations.  Our goal is to support customers in their preferred channel while enhancing the customer experience and expanding product knowledge. While social care is still new to most organizations we quickly recognized that there are critical areas of focus to deploy a successful program. Being able to effectively measure our efforts and to tell our story to the broader organization is key to determining our impact on our business goals.    Comcast recognized the value of engaging with customers through social media early on and became an industry leader in the social environment. However, Comcast had no scalable, efficient solution that enabled employees to connect with customers.  It was difficult to understand how many resources were needed to support customer demand for social engagement.  Lithium’s solution has provided the scalable and seamless agent to agent and agent to customer workflow we required.  Comcast has been using Lithium for all social care engagement for a year and, through our robust social care scorecard, are now using social data to drive change in the organization. Among our core social care metrics are In Channel Resolution rate – resolving the customer’s issue immediately in the initial social channel – and Escalation Rate – forwarding the customer to another team for resolution.  Effective management of these business objectives requires clean, easily accessible data. With this specific, reliable data we made effective changes in our team management to consistently meet those objectives and have begun to develop scaled forecasting models. This means more in-channel solutions for richer content and increased peer-peer and self-service opportunities.  Comcast also utilizes the voice of the customer feature within LSW, achieving 100% customer satisfaction month after month. While a relatively small portion of overall Comcast customer contacts, the DMO team has also contributed to year over year increases in overall self-service, Voice of the Customer and JD Power & Associates scores. Specifically:   Since 2010, Comcast has improved J.D. Powers Overall Satisfaction +92pts (Video) and +77pts (HSD) This improvement is more than any other provider in the industry during the same period Comcast’s recent improvements (’12 v ’13) in High Speed Data have improved our ranking by +3 places Phone: All-time high rating with largest gains in Communications & Cost of Service HSD: All-time high rating with significant gains in Cost of Service & Communication TV: All-time high rating  with largest gains in Cost of Service, Communications & Billing Since 2010, we have reduced our performance gap to Top Provider by: 80pts (Video), 77pts (HSD), 58pts (Voice) Gained more than any other provider during the same period in HSD & Video The Digital Media Outreach team has been recognized for being at the forefront of social care by numerous high profile blogs, public news articles, published in numerous books and known as an industry leader within the social environment.   The Lithium tool enabled us to quickly identify opportunities to create a better customer experience.  Within three months the changes were made and scores increased significantly.  The top two KPI’s are in-channel resolution and tickets being escalated as you see color coded below. As you can see, our in channel resolution rates doubled since we began using LSW while our escalation rates have continued to decline:     SOC: The Early Warning System enables a real-time escalation and proactive response from the brand.  Due to the effectiveness of Twitter and other similar platforms, we are able to identify events almost 30 minutes in advance compared to traditional lines of support.       Below are some examples of DMO recognition in customer satisfaction.   1) http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/exceptional-customer-service-on-twitter/?utm_content=buffereee2f&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Buffer       2) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/vala-afshar/the-top-100-most-social-c_b_3652508.html?utm_hp_ref=tw&utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer4617c&utm_medium=twitter      

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

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP     Vodafone Spain's aim is to provide best in class service to our customers with innovative and great value added offers and products. Vodafone Spain eForum Community serves the needs for those customers after product acquisition in order to provide a great experience and exploitation of their devices & acquired services.    Lithium provides Vodafone Spain the channel to enable direct communication with customers in order to satisfy their queries and incident resolution. At the same time, we provide customers with a Knowledge Center with loads of Tutorials and tips to engage and improve their mobile devices and DSL connection.   Vodafone Spain Heroes promotes both users as a support channel and new useful content creation. Those interactions and new content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. Furthermore, this Programme enables users to feel they are in a comfortable community where they may ask their questions and uncertainties, because many of the questions are either addressed or fully resolved by users on an equal level.     Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain. In addition, over 25 contestants actively help out other users.  A great amount of kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends. As a result of the Vodafone Heroes Programme, we managed to deflect call volume by over 1.6m total calls. In addition, we enhanced our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by an average of 5 NPS points YoY and unassisted resolution rate increased by 10.2%.   More about Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme   Our Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is focused on acquisition of new Community Members and Moderators outside the company employees to enable a real 2.0. approach.  Vodafone Spain Heroes is created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while helping each other solve their queries.   This gamification programme not only encourages greater customer/user participation but also promotes new useful content creation. Those new interactions and content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. This enables great Community growth for Vodafone Spain eForum users as a support channel to get helpful and resolute answers providing internal KPIs a real boost.   Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is closely monitored on a weekly basis by the Spain Community Managers who provide Heroes with guidance and one-to-one follow up on their adventure. The Programme includes 3 role categories (Vodafone Hero Apprentice, Vodafone Hero and Vodafone SuperHero) and 4 power badges (speed, wisdom, aim and creation) that allow users to possess different strengths.     Programme is based on nomination of weekly winners for each power badge providing users with exclusive benefits and privileges as they get Points of Power along with their nominations. Benefits are also related with fame and pride such as allowing users to moderate or ban other users as well as collaborating on official content creation published within Vodafone sites. There is a Points of Power catalogue accessible to the users once they enter the programme where users can redeem and select their desired prizes. Offer range is very wide not only offering goods but also “benefits” and events participation or pride recognition.   Any Vodafone Spain eForum registered user is eligible to participate in the Heroes Programme. Users need to pass the initial challenge to get their first “hero Apprentice” badge and from then, new badges unlocked will move users up in the scale of roles. Once a user reaches to unlock the 4 badges, they are appointed Vodafone Superheroes.   At Vodafone, we truly think we deserve to become Lithys winners as this Programme has evolved and demonstrated the value of the Vodafone eForum community, resulting in support savings through call deflection.   

Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Brief Company Info: Sony is one of the world’s leading companies in consumer electronics and entertainment offering state-of-the-art and innovative products, movies, music and much more. With our products and services we provide an incredible entertainment experience for our customers.   In June 2013, we successfully migrated our 12 year-old existing European Sony Electronics forum to Lithium, which is active in 9 languages in 34 different countries.   Goals: When we decided to pursue migration to Lithium, our main goal was to create a community, where people do not only talk about their technical problems, but also engage with the rest of the community in their passions by reviewing user-generated content, company generated blogs as well as tutorials and workshops to help them get more out of their products and our services.   We aspired to provide a platform where our huge fan base of photo enthusiasts could share their content in galleries participating in monthly photo competitions. In doing so, we could help them increase their photography skills by providing workshops and tutorials as well as our excellent master classes moderated by Sony World Photography Awards winners. We wanted to keep the community simple and clear, while being easy to navigate. In this context, we radically reduced the number of different boards, and provided an overview on our homepage to help users navigate.   Lithium has provided a robust platform with flexibility to adapt and measure our strategic goals via different content types, developer tools and metrics. Thanks to this flexibility, we were able to create a compelling photo gallery, full integration with other Sony websites and a simple design that follows Sony brand DNA.   The biggest innovation we brought was to re-purpose the whole contest module and use it as a photo/ wallpaper gallery. We really forced the limits of the module to have the most compelling look while following brand DNA. The same module is also used to run monthly Sony World Photography Award competitions which add around 2000-4000 photo submissions per month from users in 15 countries.   Gallery integration on homepage, achieved by REST API calls to retrieve recent contest entries:   The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily be managed on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated. Finally, small customizations have been added to improve user experience, like adapting “new entry” buttons based on what users want to submit: a photo, wallpaper or a board post.   Slideshow:   Data display of image detail:     Gallery entries:     Photo detail view:     We create a single competition each month that is referenced from multiple language communities. We adapt the page language of this competition page depending on the country user’s are accessing it from.   Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( English version):     Display of SWPA Competition based on language ( German version):     In addition to the photo gallery, Lithium is now fully integrated into our web presence, by sharing the same navigation, authentication and search functionality. This way, we can display the same header/footer navigation in different sites, which also has an integrated central authentication system. When a user is logged in in our marketing site, we also authenticate him in community, and retrieve its user details to welcome her in community header.      Search on our global website shows results from our community as well and customers can directly access our community to discuss with other customers. This is achieved by REST API calls to the related language community, incorporating the search term. As a result, we retrieve number of results in community and the first 3 results to display in an overview page to our users. Also support website is linked to our community by targeted REST APIs to give customers the best experience when looking for solutions. Here, we adapt the REST APIs based on product model and product category, to ensure users get the most relevant data as result.   Search on Global site with links to community search results:     Support Webpage, giving link to community results in each product support page:   We have simplified the navigation, pages and community structure, hence helping users to find their topics of interest much faster. The big and present search bar helps users to find related content as easy as on Google. By removing the right hand elements and moving them to the bottom of the page we focus clearly on the main message of the page such as banners, galleries and boards.   The new community is a big success! With 7,126,596 searches per month and 6,745 posts for 1,441 new topics, the community is thriving.           Additional product features   Simplified navigation:     Search bar:  

Company: Sony Europe Ltd.  Entry submitted by: Nico Henderijckx (tweety2b) European Forum & Community Manager Community: Sony Community (http://community.sony.co.uk) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Brief Company Info: Sony is one of the world’s leading companies in consumer electronics and entertainment offering state-of-the-art and innovative products, movies, music and much more. With our products and services we provide an incredible entertainment experience for our customers.   In June 2013, we successfully migrated our 12 year-old existing European Sony Electronics forum to Lithium, which is active in 9 languages in 34 different countries.   Goals: When we decided to pursue migration to Lithium, our main goal was to create a community where people do not only talk about their technical problems, but also engage with the rest of the community in their passions by reviewing user-generated content, company generated blogs as well as tutorials and workshops to help them get more out of their products and our services.   We aspired to provide a platform where our huge fan base of photo enthusiasts could share their content in galleries participating in monthly photo competitions. In doing so, we could help them increase their photography skills by providing workshops and tutorials as well as our excellent master classes moderated by Sony World Photography Awards winners. We wanted to keep the community simple and clear, while being easy to navigate. In this context, we radically reduced the number of different boards, and provided an overview on our homepage to help users navigate.   Lithium has provided a robust platform with flexibility to adapt and measure our strategic goals via different content types, developer tools and metrics. Thanks to this flexibility, we were able to create a compelling photo gallery, full integration with other Sony websites and a simple design that follows Sony brand DNA.   After the initial launch of our community with Lithium, we continuously added new functionalities to the platform based on the feedback we received from our volunteer super users. In this context, we initiated a complete redesign of the community to have a cleaner & well-designed look.   The homepage serves as a vitrine to give an initial idea on what type of content can be found. The new design allows visitors to see the whole community structure directly from the homepage in the cleanest way, so that users can directly access their areas of interest.   New homepage design:   This also allowed us to remove “sub-category” pages to reduce the number of steps to access the target destination. Photo gallery preview brings photo gallery submissions based on most recent, while the recent posts module is adapted to bring topics uniquely and display the most basic information in a neat design.   We have simplified the navigation, pages and community structure, hence helping users to find their topics of interest much faster. The big and present search bar helps users to find related content as easy as on Google. By removing the right hand elements and moving them to the bottom of the page we focus clearly on the main message of the page such as banners, galleries and boards.   New navigation structure on homepage:   We re-purposed the whole contest module and use it as a photo/ wallpaper gallery. We really forced the limits of the module to have the most compelling look while following brand DNA. The same module is also used to run monthly Sony World Photography Award competitions which add around 2000-4000 photo submissions per month from users in 15 countries. The galleries incorporate a slideshow function, display the EXIF image information and let users access the original image file. Images can easily manage on user profile pages where album functionality has been integrated.     Lithium platform has been seamlessly integrated into our web presence and has been skinned accordingly to match our global look and feel to offer our customers the best social experience. Most elements have been simplified to provide an excellent customer journey without hassle. In addition big graphics, modern large fonts as well as the light layout give a fresh and innovative look and feel – even if you watch our community on a smartphone or tablet. Thanks to the clear design, customers can easily share their content and discuss products with each other.   The new community design is a big success! With 7,126,596 searches per month and 6,745 posts for 1,441 new topics, the community is thriving.           Additional design elements from our community   New board design:     New thread design:     New blog design:      

Company: McDonald's  Entry submitted by: Julie Fuerst (juliefuerst) Social Media Supervisor LSW: McDonald's LSW (https://mcdonalds.response.lithium.com/console/agent) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   On a daily basis, McDonald’s has thousands of customers that contact the company via phone, email or letters; or through social media channels. Through innovative processes and systems, McDonald’s Customer Experience & Insights (CEI) team strives to engage with customers in the channel that they prefer, and provide insights that help protect the brand and customer loyalty. More specifically, the goals of the CEI Social Media team are to protect the brand by helping our customers in social media with issues or questions. The CEI Social Media team works to respond to as many customer service opportunities as possible in hopes that the customer will be “recovered.”   The CEI Social Media Team at McDonald’s has partnered with Lithium to help drive customer recovery on Twitter. McDonald’s began using the LSW platform in January 2014 after a successful demo of LSW at the end of 2013 showed that the platform could help drastically increase the number of customer service Tweets the team was responding to on Twitter.   Prior to Lithium, McDonald’s CEI Social Team was only able to have one “queue” where all of McDonald’s customer service related Tweets would filter into. Having only one queue caused the Social Team to spend a large amount of time filtering through the Tweets, and assigning Tweets to the appropriate teams within McDonald’s. Additionally, the Social Team was fairly limited with searching, filtering, and routing capabilities, which ultimately affected the number of Tweets the Team could respond to.   Lithium has drastically helped the CEI Social Team bring in AND respond to more customer service related Tweets while maintaining reasonable response times. The CEI Social Team’s ability to respond to more customers on Twitter has led to greater customer satisfaction and loyalty, as displayed in customer Tweets below.              The CEI Social Team has been able to use Lithium’s functionality to automatically route Tweets to the appropriate team/queue (for example, international Tweets automatically get routed to Global Team, etc.). The CEI Social Team has also been able to use Lithium’s functionality to setup a “Proactive” queue where we’re capturing Tweets outside of @mcdonalds and @reachout_mcd. For example, if a customer Tweets a customer service issue without using one of our Twitter handles, we’re now bringing in and responding to these Tweets when we previously hadn’t- hence increasing the number of customers recovered.   Lithium has allowed the McDonald’s team to bring in 60 times more incoming messages than what the team was bringing in with the previous engagement tool.   The team has also been able to reply to around 135% more customer service related Tweets with Lithium compared to the previous engagement tool and increase customer recovery by about 4%.     Screenshot from previous engagement reporting tool:   Screenshot from LSW Export during comparable time period for queues CEI Social Team monitors:      

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

Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Google recognizes the opportunity to help SMBs improve their businesses through adding features which improve their advertising campaigns. AdWords is one of Google’s main products with customers from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses and provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers. Advertisers can use the wide range of features available in AdWords to create campaigns to accomplish their business goals while staying within their budgets, helping to improve their return on investment and acquire additional customers.   Providing customers with targeted content related to their advertising goals enables a fast-track learning experience, ultimately helping AdWords users make the most of their experience with Google’s advertising products.   According to Nielsen (http://www.marketingcharts.com/wp/television/which-forms-of-advertising-do-consumers-trust-and-act-on-the-most-36767/attachment/nielsen-trust-in-advertising-sept2013/), 68% of customers are more likely to adopt a product or feature if it is endorsed by other users. In 2013, the AdWords Community team explored the link between active usage of communities and impact on the depth of product adoption. The key goal for the team was to shorten the gap between “Learn” and “Try it out”.   Adwords Community homepage   The first step for the Google team working on this project was to connect the activity on the community to activity in an advertiser’s AdWords account. This was achieved by improving the integration between Lithium platform and the Google infrastructure. Second, the AdWords Community team took a list of key product features they felt would be most helpful for their customers’ AdWords success and mapped discussions, threads and articles to this list via custom tags. Additionally, AdWords community managers created and curated content on the most important product features. On the backend, the team connected the customized tags with the AdWords accounts, and noted activity in the accounts after views of the tagged content.   When a thread has a solution, a Community Manager or one of the Top Contributors can select from a list of custom tags to trigger the reporting.   The custom tags allow to attribute the content piece to a specific product feature.   Measuring ROI of support forums is a step-level change. Google is a numbers-driven company, and it was important for us to unlock a way to measure impact of the content from support forums on the bottom line.    In around 1 out of 4 cases the users would take action in their advertising account within 48 hours of viewing content that had a specific recommendation for a feature. This result is 50% higher than in other online help resources with non-user created content. Additionally, with the community’s lower cost and scalability a single recommendation can contribute to hundreds or thousands times more feature uptakes that in the case of a single 1:1 support interaction.

Company: Google AdWords  Entry submitted by: Agata Krzysztofik (Agata) Program Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   AdWords is one of Google’s main products, used by millions of businesses worldwide, from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses.   With such a vast group of users, we wanted to create an online space where we could address any product related questions and provide strategic guidance to users in a scalable way.   We launched our AdWords Community on Lithium (in 6 languages) in 2011. The initial design was pretty “simple” reflecting the UI of broadly-known Google products such as Gmail.     Towards the end of 2012 we decide to redesign our Communities (in 8 languages at the time).     Our vision for the new design was “to provide members with a beautiful, engaging and wow! experience, and to make information easy to find”, while focusing on the following business goals:   Users are able to resolve their issues faster Users are more engaged with the Community Our Top Contributors are more satisfied with the Community Users have an improved perception of experts presence on the Community Users have increased satisfaction with ease of navigation The redesign wasn’t purely limited to a refreshed look, but also incorporated a launch of several brand new Community features that we defined and implemented together with Lithium developers.    The new Community features launched as part of the redesign spanned across 3 main themes:   1) Cleaner interface and easier, more intuitive navigation for user to get engaged   Custom Promo Carousel (With a banner builder incorporated into the admin)     More visibility into accepted solutions Stream of the most recent discussions and articles Recommended reading Quick access to follow discussions Ability to reply within thread At a glance view of discussions by categories Quick view of discussion stats   2) Better integration with social   Users able to add social networks to profile Easier social sharing of content across platforms   3) More recognition for engagement   Achievement badges Progress bar of your membership level Articles’ author box with integrated Google authorship tag The redesign has resulted in a 23% increase in the average daily accepted solutions, +28% in daily average kudos clicks and 19% increase in the overall satisfaction with the website (English Community results). The survey conducted among our Top Contributors also indicated overall positive feedback about the new UI combined with the newly added features. The main satisfaction driver among our top-engaged members were the achievement badges (86%).    

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: Rogers  Entry submitted by: Margaret Tsuji (MargaretT) Community Manager Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader     Rogers is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada’s largest provider of wireless voice and data communications services and one of Canada’s leading providers of cable television, high speed internet and telephony services. Through Rogers Media, we are engaged in radio and television broadcasting, televised shopping, magazines and trade publications, sports entertainment, and digital media.   Our goal is to be first to easily connect Canadians with what matters next and we offer better ways of living and working to Canadians who embrace technology.     Creating a better customer experience is one of our corporate strategies. As such, in August 2013, we launched Rogers Idea Box which is a co-creation platform based on Lithium's idea exchange technology. Idea Box lives within the Rogers Community Forums and is a place where users can submit/comment/vote on ideas to improve customer service and support, Rogers.com, the MyAccount App, and Rogers Stores.                We are the only major Canadian telcommunications company to host a co-creation platform/idea exchange.    Idea Box was so successful that we were also able to leverage it to collect ideas about the community forums itself (and we were able to archive the "Community Feedback" board).  And we are now looking at expanding Idea Box to include categories such as products, services, and pricing. Furthermore, we are now being approached by other areas of the business who want to leverage Idea Box.   When customers provide feedback to us via Twitter or Facebook, we now have a place to point them to; Idea Box is a place where they feel their ideas will be heard and not just a virtual suggestion box.   Idea Box's impact to our business: - We have received over 170 ideas in six months; 11 ideas have been launched, 9 are being reviewed and 8 are in progress. - Without doing a splashy PR campaign, news of Idea Box's launch was picked up by sites like Mobile Syrup and Eye on Mobility with comments like “It’s one more way that Rogers is trying to improve the dialogue with its customers.” and “This could be a step forward for customer service.” - Launching Idea Box drove traffic to our community in a normally quiet time of the year; the week Idea Box launched, we saw a 22% increase in page views and a 10% increase in unique visitors.  Traffic during Idea Box launch week was actually higher than our usual peak time around the iPhone launch! - We’ve even seen users going to other forums to ‘share’ their idea and encourage votes!  http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r28993963-Rogers-Standalone-Modem-Ideabox        

Company: Telefonica  Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez (UT04546) Community Manager Community: Comunidad Movistar (comunidad.movistar.es) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader     Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 24 countries. As of September 2013, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 320.3 million.   Telefonica Spain’s 2014 goals focused on the following: Reduce customer support telephone calls Increase CSI in social environments Increase commercial leads to homepage Improve SEO positioning (especially for FTTH and 4G) Improve the tone of the Internet buzz towards Movistar Improve customer self-servicing  Through our Lithium-powered community in 2013, we made significant improvements in SEO, traffic, and acquisition. We also achieved big wins in support savings (see our Support Savings MVP entry), in addition to CSI and CHI.   Community has positioned us as the SEO authority versus our competitors and local tech forums. (source: Opensite.org)      We also rank highest amongst our competitors in metrics like best traffic and lowest bounce rate. (source: similarweb.com)        18% of our homepage visits are generated by the community (source: alexa rank)        Some additional quantifiable results: -       Due to our community, our SEO traffic reached over 80% (top SEO positions in key words such as FTTH and 4G) -       Community is responsible for an increase in commercial leads: 20,000 click-throughs from community to homepage (movistar.es) in 2013 -      Telefonica has added 2.2 million subscribers as of June 2013 with more than 3 million homes in Spain now equipped with Fusion, an integrated product offering that brings together broadband, mobile, landline, and television services all in 1 simple package. Not only did they see existing customers switch over to Fusion, but 56% of Fusion subscribers are newly acquired customers who took advantage of the wealth of information and peer advice on the community about the new product to help make their purchase decision. Web traffic referrals from the community to the purchase funnel increased by 20% during the 1 st month of launch.