Company: Flybe Contact: Danielle Bassett (Customer Support Liaison Manager) Social channels:  https://twitter.com/flybe, https://www.facebook.com/Flybe  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Flybe is Europe's largest regional airline, operating more UK domestic flights than any other airline. They have received numerous accolades, including being named the top UK airline for punctuality in a report issued by UK consumer watchdog Which? and being honored as the ‘Best Short-Haul Airline’ at the 2016 Business Travel Awards.   Our road to Lithium Social Web (LSW)   Due to Flybe’s increasing volume of social customer service related queries, we recognized that social was quickly becoming a preferred channel for customer engagement. Our new focus was to use social as a customer care channel versus a marketing channel while still maintaining the ability to publish marketing posts when required. When the decision was made to set-up a dedicated social care team, we took the opportunity to re-assess their social tool, which was an inherited tool used by their in-house marketing team.   We explored other social care solutions, and we ultimately replaced our prior vendor with Lithium Social Web (LSW) to offer the ability to meet the needs of a growing social customer care team that could respond quickly and resolve issues efficiently.   How LSW has benefited our customer care organization   Our social media team works from different locations, but with LSW, the team is able to assign conversations that may require a corporate response or further investigation while not impacting response times. Even if you are not logged in to the tool, you are notified by an email alert that works really well. This has benefited a few key stakeholders outside of the social media team that use LSW, which include marketing and customer support management.   Flybe social media team   In addition, we currently utilize the LSW Shared Dashboard with other license holders, which enables greater real-time visibility throughout our organization. This ensures our customers are receiving the best possible service within business hours.   Our results with LSW   The implementation of Lithium enabled us to report immediately on the number of responses made within 15 minutes, half the time of that previously possible without LSW. As social channels are fast becoming the preferred communication method, it is important that we are able to promote our response times and shine amongst our competitors. LSW allows us to do that to address our customers’ needs.   Other metrics: 85% average response time within 15 min on Facebook 89% average response time within 15 min on Twitter Followers increased by 38% on Twitter and 50% on Facebook Incoming message volume increased 39% on Twitter and 57% on Facebook  

Company: Siemens PLM Software Contact: Susan Alig (Community Administrator) Community: Siemens PLM Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year    Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Digital Factory Division, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) and manufacturing operations management (MOM) software, systems and services with over nine million licensed seats and more than 77,000 customers worldwide. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Siemens PLM Software works collaboratively with its customers to provide industry software solutions that help companies everywhere achieve a sustainable competitive advantage by making real the innovations that matter.   Our community goals   Just as we inspire our customers to realize innovation, we at Siemens PLM Software must do the same. Within the marketing organization, our job is to facilitate better conversations, and our customers and prospects are choosing to have more of these conversations online. To meet our customers where they are and make a difference for our business, one of the areas we are focusing on is an improved user experience across all of our digital properties through user-focused interactions and a visually engaging design. The first of our properties to achieve this is our Community. February 25, 2016 marked three years since Siemens PLM Software launched its first online, public community. To celebrate the occasion, the users of the Siemens PLM Community received the first set of changes for a radically improved user experience, which features a new visual design language based on Siemens AG standards. This new user experience (UX) was greatly needed update to the Community. The UX offers several key benefits to our customers. First, it makes user-generated content the focal point. This is important in the Community because customers want to easily and quickly find information in their area of interest; information created by customers, for customers. To improve usability, the design allows for faster navigation in the most trafficked areas where customers spend the majority of their time. This unique category navigation allows them to navigate freely between interaction styles without ever leaving their “home.” Our unique community design   Design Space- Our top complaint from users was why didn’t we use the entire real estate on the screen. In our previous design, there is a vast amount of unused white space. Our target audience accesses our site 95 percent from desktop because they are typically designers and engineers sitting at their desk with two or more monitors. The old site used less than 25 percent of the total real estate for a typical designer. Because we launched Phase 1 of our redesign one month from the date of this submission, we are currently working on Phase 2, which includes adjusting the design to mobile and tablet devices where we can take full advantage of Lithium Responsive. Stylization – Using the Responsive Lithium template required heavy customization with our CSS. By focusing our efforts on styling the OOB components, we are able to offer the right information to our users in the way they want it presented. We concentrated our efforts on four page types – Community Homepage, Category Page, Forum and Forum Article page. Tapping our Community Manager I&II training, we focused on building these pages for the “90%.” Our more active users appreciate the threaded forum replies as this directly relates to the “History Tree” in our software, tying together elements from our product to community. Navigation – Staying in your “home” was another user request. Many of our users will spend a significant amount of time in one category. Creating a navigational element so a user doesn’t need to use the “back button” was key. The result? Category navigation sits below the “hero” image and provides a black indicator of where the user is on the site.     How we executed our community design   With a new set of design guidelines, we needed a partner capable of interpreting the design language and applying that to the Lithium platform, all while keeping the user’s experience at the forefront. To do this we partnered with Lithium Professional Services. Who better to know the platform than the creators! Together we interpreted the design guidelines, created and validated our vision, and then set off on a six-month adventure to bring the new design to life. A complete set of wireframes and mockups were created for this project, utilizing as many out-of-the-box components as possible while also allowing us the ability to customize certain areas that called for it.   Our “super user” @SeanCresswell (90,000 messages read, 208,000 minutes online) said it best, “Wow, that certainly is a revamped looking site! A fantastic step forward though...congrats to all involved in this monster effort.” This before and after picture of the homepage tells a compelling story about the massive undertaking.     Our results   Metrics are an important piece of our complex puzzle in evaluating the success of our community. Here’s a small snapshot of how well our community performed since the launch of the new design on March 25, 2016. Let’s start by giving you a glimpse into the growth of our Community:     Our Community has steadily grown in the three years existence. In FY2015 (Oct-Sept) we saw a 229% growth in HPV. We are on track to exceed that percentage again for FY16. In the 32 days after the launch of the new design, we’ve seen the following increases versus our monthly averages: 44% increase in Unique Visitors** 40% increase in Kudos Given 31% increase in Registrations 23% increase in Posts ** Our Unique Visitors for FY16 to-date just surpassed the FY15 total For us, these are simply numbers; a way to ensure our changes, enhancements and decisions make a positive impact on the users who participate in our community day-in and day-out. It’s the engagement of our users whose use our site to help them do their job better and demonstrate an “ingenuity for life” that makes the real difference for us. User @Stefan_Pendl hit the proverbial nail on the head: “Thanks to you and your team for bringing the community to the next level of usefulness.”

Company: Magento Commerce Entry submitted by: Sherrie Rohde (Community Manager) Community: Magento Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   Trusted by more than 250,000 businesses worldwide, Magento Commerce is the leading provider of open omnichannel innovation to retailers, brands and branded manufacturers across retail B2C and B2B industries. In addition to its flagship open source digital commerce platform, Magento Commerce boasts a strong portfolio of cloud-based omnichannel solutions empowering merchants to successfully integrate digital and physical shopping experiences. With over $50B in gross merchandise volume transacted on the platform annually, Magento Commerce is the foremost provider to the Internet Retailer Top 1000 and the Internet Retailer B2B 300, counting more than double the clients to the next closest competitor. Magento Commerce is supported by a vast global network of solution and technology partners, a highly active global developer community and the largest eCommerce marketplace for extensions available for download on the Magento Marketplace. More information can be found at www.magento.com.   Our unique promotion     While we can’t fully quantify the size of the Magento community, we know the Magento ecosystem comprises of 250,000 merchants, 300 partners, over 1,000 solution implementers, 130,000 developers with 5,900 of them being Magento certified.      In 2015, the Magento community created over 2,500 pull requests and issues for Magento 2.0 on Github, presented over 500 talks on Magento or at Magento-centric events, produced over 100 podcast episodes centered around Magento, organized conferences and meetups in over 24 different countries, wrote three books about Magento, contributed to official product documentation, wrote countless blog posts to raise awareness and education and answered thousands of questions on both StackExchange and the Magento Forums (Lithium Community).     As you can see, we have an amazing and highly active community who are constantly contributing to our product and advocating for our brand. However, until now, we have never had a formal recognition program in place. The absence of this program sometimes created confusion when looking to stakeholders for beta invites, feedback, event invites, etc.   This year, we created the Magento Masters (super user) program, the culmination of over six months of research and strategic planning to develop an initiative that elevates our most active community members, recognizes them for their contributions, and empowers them to help others learn more about the Magento platform and to succeed in our ecosystem.   Creating this program was no small feat as we really wanted to make sure that we had a full picture of our community contributions. We went through several revisions of a scoring algorithm asking various stakeholders if we were missing any aspect that helped those in our community move forward. For every type of contribution, we took the time to think through how we felt it should weight in relation to other contribution types based on the impact that contribution likely had on the community. After pulling data from multiple sources we had access to including Lithium Social Intelligence, we were able to start surfacing names. As we added to the data we were able to qualify the algorithm was what it should be. While some names were not a surprise, and shouldn’t be, it also gave us more insight to other members in the community who were less vocal contributors. Being able to connect with these contributors allowed us to really grow these relationships with key community leaders.   In addition to surfacing key community leaders that may not have been top of radar, this algorithm and data collection also allowed us to begin to share numbers like those above with our community. Our company was proud and our community was proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish together in just one year. In reality, that year barely scratches the surface. This data also gives us quick insights into community leaders by region, role and company type which is often needed when identifying who to connect with for initiatives and opportunities.   As we thought through the program, we tried to keep a “What’s in it for me?” mindset for our community leaders, not just for us. Magento Masters members benefit from recognition both online and offline. This means a special badge and rank created for them and applied to their account on our Lithium Community platform as well as access to a private Magento Masters Lounge there. We also recognized them on our blog and at our annual conference, where we presented them with a physical award, which we’ll expand on more while discussing the campaign. Magento Masters will have increased access to things like beta programs, roadmaps and feedback opportunities as they arise. Some of this will be facilitate via a quarterly call with our product team and other key team members. We were also able to host them for a VIP lunch event at our conference and offer discounts on both certification and events.     Our goal in creating the Magento Masters program was to create clarity within our organization on who to look to as community leaders at the same time as being able to recognize them in a way they truly deserve – valued in front of their peers. We strongly believe we accomplished this.   Our strategy and tactics   Before beginning promotion of the Magento Master program, we worked with our brand and design teams to create a unique visual identity. After many whiteboard sessions, we landed on Magento Masters with three types: Movers, Mentors and Makers: Movers are Magento’s top advocates and ecosystem thought leaders who have demonstrated their expertise in driving innovation through Magento solutions. They are influencers in the industry in delivering best-of-class Magento implementations and advocate for Magento at industry events. Mentors are top contributors to the Magento Community who are highly active educating others and developing resources for them. They have proven expertise on building successful Magento implementations. Makers are frequent contributors valued by Magento and other community members. They actively engage with others in the Magento Community, sharing ideas, insights, and constructive feedback.   By creating these types, we were able to share clarity around why each Magento Master was selected with individual reasons supplied for each one when announcing them on our blog.   We first announced this program during our MagentoLive France event in Paris: https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/introducing-new-magento-community-initiative-magento-masters https://twitter.com/magento/status/694477995839463424 https://twitter.com/ProductPaul/status/694477546386161664         Later that week, we echoed the announcement a presentation at a community-organized conference in Milan focused around how to get involved in the community and key people who were contributing in various areas of our community: http://www.slideshare.net/SherrieRohde/how-do-i-get-involved-in-the-magento-community-57914070.   Our 2016 Magento Masters were then selected and invited to the program based on their contributions to the community in 2015. Because our community is truly a “Total Community,” we created an algorithm that calculated their community contributions from key areas where we believe they truly help to move the community forward as a whole. These areas include our Lithium Community platform, StackExchange, Github code contributions, official documentation contributions, speaking engagements, blogging, published books and organizing both meetups and conferences.   We announced the Magento Masters via our social media channels, in our weekly community digests on the Lithium platform and on our blog: https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/meet-2016-magento-masters-movers https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/meet-2016-magento-masters-mentors https://magento.com/blog/magento-news/meet-2016-magento-masters-makers https://twitter.com/magento/status/703257126282461184 https://twitter.com/magento/status/704375271286132736 https://twitter.com/magento/status/704740099456536577 https://twitter.com/magento/status/705546325354536960 https://community.magento.com/t5/News-Announcements/MagentoMonday-Community-Digest-2016-02-29/m-p/30701 https://community.magento.com/t5/News-Announcements/MagentoMonday-Community-Digest-2016-03-07/td-p/31406   During our opening keynote at our 2016 6 th annual Imagine conference in Las Vegas, our CEO, Magento Evangelist and Community Manager were able to bring 16 of the 20 Magento Masters on stage to recognize and award them in front of 2,500 attendees.     Our results   The results of this program exceeded our expectations, to say the least. Our Magento Masters are so humble and talented, which really added to the experience in the best way. It’s hard to even know where to start with the impact Magento Masters has already had for both our community and our company. Our community organized podcast brought our Magento Evangelist and Community Manager on for an exclusive interview: http://magetalk.com/magetalk-episode-79-magento-masters/ One of our Magento Masters has added this to his LinkedIn https://pl.linkedin.com/in/snowdog, was celebrated by his company with both a party https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10153675678633192.1073741837.71921053191&type=3 and a blog post: https://snow.dog/blog/kuba-zwolinski-announced-magento-master/ . Other Magento Masters were also announced on their companies’ blogs: http://creatuity.com/2016/03/25/creatuity-ceo-joins-magento-masters/ http://store.fooman.co.nz/blog/magento-masters-kudos-to-an-awesome-community-initiative.html https://blog.limesoda.com/2016/03/anna-voelkl-zum-magento-master-ausgezeichnet/ http://www.somethingdigital.com/Blog/Meet%20the%20Team/Magento%20Masters.aspx Several others mentioned Magento Masters in their Imagine recaps: https://blog.limesoda.com/2016/04/magento-imagine-2016-we-are-magento/ http://www.somethingdigital.com/Blog/Events/Imagine%202016%20Recap.aspx http://divante.co/blog/imagine-magento-general-session-magentos-future-day-2/ https://www.iweb.co.uk/2016/04/magento-imagine-conference-day-two-recap/   We of course gave them some love in our event recap as well: https://magento.com/blog/events/we-are-magento-imagine-2016-highlights   Creating this program has inspired ideas across our organization about how to better implement councils, or involve the Magento Masters, in various decisions going forwards. It has also given us massive insight into actually being able to quantify what it is our community brings to the table (e.g. the stats I provided at the beginning) which has astounded and impressed both the community and those across our team.   Even before we officially announced the program, we had various departments coming to our community team in search of community members for various things (e.g. EMEA developers) and we were able to provide them with this information quickly and efficiently from the scoring algorithm created for the Magento Masters program. We are finally equipped with a way to connect key community members with key opportunities. Since announcing the community, several who were once engaged in our old forums are now inspired to be more active on our new forums and the community team, comprising of four Magento Masters, that organizes a Q&A hackathon for the Magento StackExchange has discussed including the forums in their “MageStackDay” events.   Also, one of our Magento Masters has been repeatedly approached on how to get involved in the community and especially how to get started speaking about Magento and our female Magento Master (fingers crossed for more next year) is truly being looked to as a mentor for other women in our community, encouraging them to contribute more to qualify themselves for 2017.   Digging Into the Numbers The Magento Masters program launch received over 250 individual posts across Twitter in support from our team, including our executive team, as well as from the community.   Our initial tweet announcing Magento Masters remains one of our top 10 posts in the past 90 days with 443 total engagements and 15,061 impressions: https://twitter.com/magento/status/694477995839463424   In addition, our tweet announcing the Movers also logged in as a top tweet with 425 total engagements and 16,656 impressions while our top tweet announcing the Mentors received 574 total engagements with 25,487 impressions and the Makers top tweet received 415 total engagements and 16,114 total impressions. A final wrap up announcing all 20 Magento Masters logged in at 340 total engagements and 14,655 impressions and our tweet congratulating them during Imagine logged in at 355 total engagements and 8,422 impressions: https://twitter.com/magento/status/719935530427756544, while several in the audience created their own renditions and our Magento Masters and their companies celebrated on social media throughout the conference. Our blog post announcing the program is our 4th most popular blog post, excluding product announcements, in Q1 of 2016 while our announcement posts spotlighting the Movers, Mentors and Makers weigh in at 17th, 14th and 12th, respectively.   On our Lithium Community platform, Magento Masters visit 92% more than other members. In the first month of implementing the initiative, Magento Master participation increased by 56% while other members increased participation by 6%.   Overall we’ve had an overwhelmingly positive reception and heard from our community that this was greatly needed. The next step? Individual in-depth profiles on our blog for each of the Magento Masters as well as launching into our quarterly calls to learn more.  

Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digital world. Our aim is to inspire our customers with the best network, superb offers and outstanding service. Swisscom is one of the most famous and popular brands in Switzerland.   Our service leadership is not only distinguished by the fact that we offer an outstanding level of service in our own service touchpoints, such as the hotline and shops, but also that we reach our customers where they are most active from day-to-day: online and especially on the social web.   Swisscom’s road to Lithium Total Community   The decision to use Lithium was made in 2009. As an early adopter, we were among the first ten European clients to launch a Lithium Community. Two years later, we were the second client in Europe to put LSW into operation. As soon as the partnership began, it became clear that Lithium would be able to help us assert our service leadership in the social web as well.     Fig. 1: Social Media Universe of Swisscom   LSW for service dialogue in four languages   For the digital avant-garde, we offer full-blown customer care on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Messenger. Simple service requests and complex issues alike are resolved on these channels. Our goal is to offer an end-to-end resolution of the customer’s request on the channel of his choice.   LSW allows not only for effective dialogue management, but also, and in particular, a smooth internal organisation. Service inquiries we receive in German, French, Italian, and English can be distributed easily among two teams in different locations. Since PR, Marketing, and Incident Management specialists also work with LSW, it is possible to provide qualified responses to such inquires as well.   Fig. 2: LSW Setup at Swisscom   Community forum for the “long tail” of service requests   With our quadrilingual customers-help-customers forum, we aim to bring together experts from the “crowd” with the niche requests of our customers. It is not our goal to treat every issue raised in the forum, but mainly those service inquiries:   whose problem must first be identified by way of dialogue/discussion, which largely depend on the customer context (e.g. technical setup) and for which no standard solutions exist, or which are not primarily related to our core products (fixed network, TV, web, mobile).   The majority of the service requests can be resolved by the customers themselves via our extensive online help pages. The community therefore plays a vital role in dealing with the “long tail” of customer requests.   Fig. 3: Positioning and Role of the Community within the Solution Space   The benefits of Total Community   With LSW and the community, we lay the foundation to fulfill the promises of our brand – being a trustworthy companion in the digital world and providing outstanding service – also on the social web. Furthermore, with the Total Community approach, we are able to address the fundamental points of our guiding principles in our social media strategy. As Swisscom, we particularly wish to stand by our customers, to make the first move toward meeting their needs by taking their requests seriously. Similarly, we are open to new ideas, which means we listen to and strive to understand our customers. We put these promises into action as follows:   LSW within our social media strategy   Thanks to LSW, we have a scalable solution to handle our ever-growing service requests in a quick and efficient manner and with high technical expertise by using also the extensive knowledge of our community. Our customers appreciate the simplicity of the interaction and the high level of problem-solving expertise in these channels. As a result, social media care has an excellent reputation.   Community within our social media strategy   In addition to customer insights which we gain by listening and engaging through LSW, the community also provides us with greater understanding of the thought processes of our customers. We are therefore better able to grasp what it is that motivates our customers, as well as recognize their needs and discover the issues they discuss with one another. Along with passive listening, we actively invite our customers to participate in product development. As an example, pilot users submitted over 900 posts with suggestions for improving our recently launched UHD TV receiver.   In order that the entire company may benefit from the knowledge derived from these activities, agents and community managers carry these insights on a regular basis to the relevant stakeholders within our company.   Fig. 4: Community and Forum Homepages   The results of Total Community   Since the community and LSW are mainly used in the area of customer care, the focus lies on reducing service costs while maintaining a high customer satisfaction.   Directly measurable savings   From an efficiency point of view, the community helps us deflecting a very substantial amount of calls (savings of about 6k hours/month). Customers who were able to resolve their issues with the help of the community would otherwise have phoned in 75% of the time. The workload savings excel the investments made to license and manage the community tenfold. Furthermore, interacting with customers through LSW has a strong effect on efficiency indicators as well. These overall positive effects are also a result of a community with a current Community Health Index of just over 700.   Fig. 5: Evolution of the Community Forum   Service recovery through social media dialogues   Along with the likewise high resolution rate of the LSW-administered dialogues, this service touchpoint is particularly impressive thanks to its high customer satisfaction index of 8.5 (on a scale of 10) and an above-average NPS compared to other service channels.   Indirectly measurable results within the company   In addition to directly measurable advantages, we clearly see also indirect business outcomes: Voice of the customer: Customer attitudes regarding our products and services are easily recognizable by all employees, which is especially advantageous for product managers. The monitoring of these online discussions helps us identify major problems promptly. Quick feedback loops: It is easy for community users to become involved in product development. This speeds up the development process and ensures customer needs get addressed. Easier troubleshooting: In the case of breakdown, forum discussions help to better understand the cause and thus repair the trouble faster. Thanks to the community’s link to our CRM, affected customers can be identified easily. The sharing of knowledge within the customer care department: Complex customer issues via traditional service touchpoints are often cleared up more quickly with the collective knowledge of the community    

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

Company: Sky UK Contact: Graham Henderson (Community Manager) Community: Sky Community Lithy category:  Excellence in  Customer Satisfaction   Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company. The group serves 21 million customers across five countries: Italy, Germany, Austria, the UK and Ireland. We offer the best and broadest range of content, deliver market-leading customer service and use innovative new technology to give customers a better TV experience, whenever and wherever they choose.   Our 2015 customer satisfaction initiatives   Community Oracle Programme   At Sky our service message is a simple one; “We want to offer the best service in the country”. The Sky Community was founded in 2010. Since inception we’ve adopted and tested a number of engagement models. At the outset we had a handful of staff and then moved to full service model with over 50 fulltime agents responding to customer posts in the Community. The long-term aim was for the Community to move to a peer to peer model when the user base was high enough. We felt the time was right at the end of 2015 when we had a staggering 1.5 million Community members. We now operate with a peer to peer model with strategic engagement from a team of 5 Community Engagement Specialists and one Community Manager. How can you go from 50 staff to 5 staff overnight while growing a community and out performing business KPI’s like NPS and call deflection? For us, the answer was simple! We had to empower our members by opening our doors and letting them look inside- a real challenge with multiple sites and over 30,000 employees across the UK. We had been running a community Superuser program since 2011 with a relatively small number of members, typically ranging from 8 to 12 members. Despite this small number, these particular members were responsible for creating the best engagement, sharing the best knowledge and generating balanced discussions. We’ve never had a formal Superuser structure in place. No events, no incentives, limited communication and no additional tools. We literally gave them a Superuser badge and said “off you go”. We realized that this had to change!   The most important customer issue we  were looking to solve via our Lithium implementation   We wanted to increase NPS, increase the number of accepted solutions and ultimately deflect calls. We wanted the community to become our customers first port of call, regardless of their interests and levels of digital platform usage. We had already identified our Superusers as the solution, but had to find a way to increase their contribution, offer them more support and grow our Superuser numbers. So what did we do? The first thing we did was listen! We asked our Superusers for feedback and spoke Lithium about best practice. Some of the feedback was great, but much of it was tough to hear. Our conclusion was simple; “we’re letting these members down and need to do more. We’ll never increase NPS or call deflection with this current model”. It was then that the “Oracle” programme was born. We launched in January 2016.   Features of the Oracle Program: Annual event – We introduced an all expenses paid annual event to show them how much we care. For the first time we brought the whole business together using our community. They viewed our product labs, touched Sky Q for the first time, toured our news and sports studios, sat in a McLaren F1 car and met some of our TV presenters.   Our Sky News HQ presenters left the studio to meet our Oracles. (from left to right: Natalie Sawyer (Presenter), Robbie (Oracle), Adam Leventhal (Presenter)   Our Oracles toured Sky studios and many fulfilled a lifetime dream to see and touch a real McLaren Mercedes F1 car.   Annual program that recycles every year. This allows us to keep the program fresh and current. It also allows us the ability to take time out to reward our best members. Incentives – for the first time our best members are rewarded. The annual program allows us to modify and improve the incentives as we learn through data and qualitative feedback. We also invite Oracles to adhoc events, such as the Sky Q press launch. Two Oracles attended and subsequently answered over 90% of all questions related to the product up until launch.   Andrew Olson (Director of New Products) presents Sky Q to the world during our London launch event. Our Oracles were there along with the press and VIP’s.   Quarterly hangouts – We jump on a call every quarter and tell our Oracles about our jobs what we’re working on. We also invite guest speakers from across Sky to answer their questions. They love the techie stuff! Badging- we implemented Lithium gamification and incorporated an Oracle badge to recognise their community contribution. Access to ALL product BETA trials. Our Oracles are the first customers in the UK to use our new products and apps. VIP access to priority customer service line.   Our metrics   After months of work, many late nights and a trip to SKY HQ we had to ask our Oracles for feedback. This is what they said about our first ever Oracle event held at Sky Studios, London:   A few quotes from our Oracles after our first ever oracle event:   “Great day”   “Lovely to see you all there Thank you for a lovely day. “   “It was great meeting you all and sure was a busy day. I’d just like to say a big thank you to all the staff involved in making this day possible, and to those of you who were able to come along”.   “Thanks again to all those there today, thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish”.   The Results   Our NPS rose by 71 points following the introduction of our Oracle programme.   Our accepted solutions more than trebled following the launch of the programme. We asked our Lithium Strategy Consultant to run a short session to explain how to write and structure posts. This was delivered to our Oracles in a fun and interactive session- the results speak for themselves!   Post volumes of Oracles that we invited to the Sky Q VIP launch. Following the event, they became advocates for our new product offering. The red line signifies the Sky Q launch and Sky Q comparison shown in relation to existing TV product..   In summary, we increased our net promoter score (NPS) by 1800%. Increasing accepted solutions by 467% was key to our uplift in NPS. We made solutions easier to find by installing the “featured thread” component and highlighting solutions at the start of all discussion threads- both Lithium features. Inviting Community Oracles to take part in our new product launch resulted in them responding to over 90% of all customer questions within that new product area. In addition, we promoted community blogs via our Twitter help handle by utilizing publisher in LSW. We focused on promoting digital services and Sky Q. This increased blog views by 682%.      

Company: Dixon Schwabl (representing Frontier Communications) Entry submitted by: Jessica DiLuglio    (Social Media Account Executive ) Social channel: https://www.facebook.com/FrontierCorp/ Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Frontier Communications is an S&P 500 company and is included in the Fortune 1000 list of America’s largest corporations. Frontier serves predominantly a mix of urban, suburban, and rural areas across the U.S. The company offers a variety of services to customers over its fiber-optic and copper networks, including video, high-speed internet, advanced voice and Frontier Secure digital protection solutions. Frontier Business Edge offers communications solutions to small, medium, and enterprise businesses.   A focus on customer support   The company’s social media networks are primarily used for customer engagement, support and retention.   On April 1, 2016, Frontier acquired over three million customers from the states of California, Texas and Florida. To manage the anticipated volume of conversation, Frontier needed a tool that could coordinate community engagement between its 100+ customer service representatives, determine strategic workflow of responses and help the company easily serve its new customers.   With Lithium, Frontier was able to help listen to the conversation, identify pain points that customers were having and respond to the customers in a timely manner. Due to the efficiency of Lithium Social Web (LSW), social media became a key source of information for Frontier’s senior leadership. What are the main concerns of the customer? Where is the largest amount of volume occurring? How can we help the customer?   Thanks to LSW, Frontier was able to answer all of those questions and more in a timely and efficient manner. Plus, Lithium has made it easier for Frontier to prepare for business as usual conversations that occur on the page – and will help them transition forward with helping their customers at an optimal level.   LSW helps with customer retention   Frontier’s social media platform is a vibrant collection of customers and prospects that use the social channels to ask questions, seek customer support and learn new information. Since every interaction with the customer matters for Frontier, this online network is vitally important to the success of the company and its digital goals.   For these reasons, Frontier views their social media, and digital strategy, as a customer retention platform. If the customer remains happy they will continue to purchase the services that Frontier offers.   Lithium’s presence for Frontier allows its customer service team to be more efficient and knowledgeable with customers while keeping them happy throughout the communication process. In particular, the workflow operations enabled by LSW allow the Frontier team to work together while helping each customer, ensuring that customers are not seeing duplicate messages or requests.   Plus, Lithium’s data allows Frontier to stay ahead of the game when it comes to customer pain points and trending topics that the company needs to be aware of.   Frontier’s customer satisfaction results   Before the acquisition began, Frontier set a goal of an 85% SLA under 1 hour. During the first few days, Frontier looked at the data and realized that SLA was not reaching the target goal. Knowing what they were tracking at, Frontier was able to readjust and after April 5, the target SLA of 85% under one hour was met each time – it did not get back under 86%.   Other helpful metrics that Frontier was able to track were total inbound posts, volume of Facebook, Twitter and Spanish comments, response time, and top topics of what customers were talking about on social media. By being able to track volume of posts, to topics and its average response time, Frontier was able to find out how quickly customer questions were answered and compare concerns expressed by customers on social media to concerns expressed by customers calling into contact centers. This helped the company as a whole quickly identify service issues before they became widespread.   The Frontier digital management team has continually exceeded its SLA under one hour goals since April 1, and they have been able to do this despite the volume of the social media conversation increasing by 10x since March.  

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

Company: Optus Contact: Karen Le (Community Manager) Community: My Optus Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As Australia's second largest Telecommunication provider, Optus is in the business of connecting people. We offer a broad range of communications services including mobile, telephony, internet, business network services, satellite services and subscription television to over ten million customers every day.   While we are a company that is focused on enabling homes and businesses with technology and entertainment, our vision is to lead Australia in outstanding customer experience.   How community meets our customer care business goals   Like many companies, the provision of customer service through traditional channels contributes to a significant proportion of our operational cost base. This year, our overarching Customer Service Strategy has been firmly rooted in digital with the dual purpose of meeting the shift in customer preference and reducing support costs. The under-utilisation of community based customer support was recognised as a key area of opportunity. The resulting business objective was to actively drive My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre during FY16 (March ’15 to April ‘16). What we actually achieved was an incremental 500,000+ calls. There were a number of key initiatives that were implemented in order to achieve these goals;   Integration of Community within our digital assets   This focused on the inclusion of contextually relevant widgets that surface community conversation on the optus.com.au website, including the homepage, help & support, product and sales pages. Strong community CTA’s were on all electronic communications and a further extension of our online integration strategy has been to develop campaign landing pages directly within the community; giving customers the opportunity to directly ask questions, comment and respond directly. These questions are work flowed into to LSW where moderators are able to respond where required. This has worked so well that the Pre- Paid team have made the community landing page part of the customer on-boarding journey, allowing all new Pre-Paid customers ask questions at the time of setup to provide a seamless experience. Pre-Paid Welcome Hub   Default support channel within our Go to Market Programs   One of the most significant cultural changes was to position to community as THE default support channel for our Go To Market programs. When Optus launched a new mobile App in September, WiFi Talk (gives customers with limited indoor mobile coverage can use the app to make and receive calls over a WiFi connection), My Optus Community was used as the primary support channel and for the very first time all the customer broadcast communications directed customers to a blog post in My Optus Community with all of the key details. Over 67,000 people viewed the post, resulting in 230 comments. This was so effective that only 20 support calls were logged about WiFi Talk issues each week since it launched. This has been successfully replicated a number of times since with equal success and is now considered BAU practice. WiFi Talk Launch   Australia’s First Responsive Community   We’ve acknowledged the trend of needing support on-the-go by making My Optus Community the first fully responsive community in Australia, ensuring that members have the same experience across all of their devices. This has resulted in a jump from 510K mobile visits last financial year to 1.3 million this year. Today over 50% of our traffic is generated by mobile devices.   Driving traffic and informing customers through the Optus Blog   In June of 2015 we launched the My Optus Community Blog, which has played an important role in our content marketing strategy and has been an excellent vehicle for the discovery of community content. Since launch, we have maintained a steady rhythm of content production with over 125 articles published, which have received over 500,000 page views and contribute a significant proportion of search referrals.   My Optus Community Blog   Improving the Resolution Rate   In a world first, we customised the way that the Tribal Knowledgebase (TKB) module is traditionally used to change the way articles are created and published. In doing so, we give community members the control to identify support content they want and think other members might need, allowing us to scale through crowd sourcing. Threads can be nominated as Wiki articles by the community, who can also make updates to the content, giving them power to help other members. Since we launched this module in September, 63 articles have been authored and received over 26,000 views. My Optus Community Wiki   This combined with prioritised routing of unanswered posts into the social media team through LSW has seen the customer reported resolution rate increase from 9% to 37%.   Retaining & recognising our members   The implementation of a formalised Super User program and the introduction of Premium Gamification has seen the contributions made from our super users increase by almost 300% year on year. This translates to almost 1,500 hours being spent in the community by our top 5 users. The program runs on a 6 month cycle, is built on deep personal relationships (that extends into the ‘real’ world) and actively recruits users from other communities based on a set of attributes.   The execution of our strategy in combination with attentive and responsive community management has seen us exceed the 350,000 incremental call reduction target by more almost 60%, delivering a 230% increase on Opex saving.   Cost reductions from our community   The organisation’s business objective was to actively utilise My Optus Community to deflect an incremental 350,000 calls from the call centre. These call reduction projections are used to plan for our voice channel workforce. The number of actual calls are recorded and tracked against the projection figures ensure that capacity planning and headcount is accurate and adjustments are made accordingly, and due to these reduced volumes we are able to incrementally increase capacity when unforeseen issues arise.   Also, through the increased participation by members there a reduction in the reliance on Optus moderators to input into the discussion by 40% in comparison to the previous financial year, meaning we were able to handle an 82% increase in engagement volume across social with minimal increase in resource (4 FTE).   Our results   The combination of executive support, solid strategy and a focused team has delivered an outstanding set of outcomes for My Optus Community including an incremental reduction of over 500,000 calls delivering 230% increase on Opex savings. There has been a considerable impact, not only on the number of calls reduced but in the way we organise and plan our headcount and workforce. This has meant we’ve been able to provide more support to customers when they need us as well as a significant reduction in our operational expenditure.   Listen to what the VP of Customer Service has to say about the results and the impact they’ve had on the organisation’s performance.    

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

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

Company: Zuora Contact: Lana Lee  (Support Community Manager) Community: Zuora Community Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Zuora’s Relationship Business Management (RBM) solution helps businesses launch or shift products to subscription, implement pay-as-you-go pricing and packaging models, gain insights into subscriber behavior, open revenue streams, and disrupt market segments to gain competitive advantage. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Zuora also operates offices in Atlanta, Boston, San Francisco, London, Paris, Munich, Beijing, Sydney, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Vienna, Copenhagen and Stockholm. Clients come from a wide range of industries: media, travel services, consumer packaged goods, cloud services, and telecommunications. Clients include Financial Times, Schneider Electric, Box, Honeywell, NCR, RTL, lynda.com, The Guardian, YP.com, BlueJeans, Shutterfly, TripAdvisor, Vivint and Trulia.   How our community meets our customer care business goals   The Zuora Community is a one-stop destination for our customer and partners to discover “just-in-time” solutions through peer-to-peer collaboration and easy access to knowledge documentation, contribute and vote on product ideas, learn about new product releases and grow in their Zuora expertise. Using our Zendesk integration with our Community, any non-Zuora community post that has no intial response within 48 hours will automatically create a Zendesk ticket. Once a Support agent answers the Zendesk ticket, the answer goes back to the Community as a response and is auto-selected as an accepted answer.  With over 30 support agents in our global Customer Support Services and Community team, we ensure that no issue is left unattended. Our Community uses Lithium’s topic discussion boards, blog, ideas, forums and user group features to engage with our customers: Our Topic Discussion Boards provide a collaborative space for customers to ask questions from Zuora staff and other users, gain credibility via kudos and accepted answers and share best practices. Our Announcements area informs customers about release notifications and product updates and allows Zuora to interact with our customers when they have questions. The Ideas forum is our most popular area because it allows our customers to interact with our Product Managers to potentially impact our product roadmap. We use User Groups to help connect users before events, network with each other locally and grant access to limited availability programs where customers can provide feedback to product managers on our latest releases and new features.   In only 3 months, at at an average of 20k page views per month, we trust that the Zuora Community is a “home run”  for our company and we look forward to its bright future. Since our Community launched, the reduction of support tickets was seen immediately which gives us time to become more focused on strategic initiatives such as customer advocacy, SME training, and increasing product adoption through self-service.   Our results Within a week of our community’s launch, the Support Team saw a 9% reduction of support tickets.  Now, in our third month post-launch, we have reduced support tickets by 11% - proving that the Zuora Community is rich with content that helps our customers easily find the information they need to power their subscription business.  

Company: Domo Contact: Dani Weinstein (Senior Community Manager) Community:   Dojo Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction    As the world’s first Business Cloud, Domo brings together all the data, all the people and all the insights business users need to run their entire business to make faster, better-informed decisions to improve performance.   Dojo Community   Domo’s online customer community, the Dojo, includes more than 1500 members and serves as a platform for customers to collaborate with fellow customers, post and receive answers from Dojo experts, connect with peers, share best practices, offer ideas to improve the Domo product, participate in contests, events, rewards programs and much more.   Recently passing its one-year anniversary, the Dojo realized exceptional growth and customer adoption, increasing the number of community posts by over 200% by the 4 th quarter of its first year. With consistent growth, Dojo is cultivating a community of Domo super fans.   Dojo and Lithium Integration   Utilizing the Lithium platform, the Dojo community set out to increase customer participation and engagement including the creation of the Dojo Ideas Exchange.   The Ideas Exchange was created as a place for members to contribute thoughts and ideas surrounding the Domo products and services. Members can submit ideas or suggestions, facilitating conversations and allowing their voices to be heard with the goal of improving Domo’s products and services.   To date, the Ideas Exchange has generated nearly 500 customer ideas with almost 1 out of 7 ideas being approved and or implemented to date in product. By integrating the Lithium platform, the Dojo was able to develop a robust process using Domo software to pull in the data from the Ideas Exchange and providing a consumable and easy-to-view dashboard for our product management team that includes:   Real-time status updates for all ideas on the Ideas Exchange What product manager owns the specific idea, pending review and approval Hyperlinks to the Ideas Exchange allowing for updates and comments on specific data   Product managers can view ideas by status in a real-time pie chart     The moment a new idea has been posted and received at least one vote, Domo’s product management team receives an alert to assign that idea to a product manager for review. The goal is to ensure each idea that receives at least one vote, be assigned for review from a product manager. It’s easy for our product managers to see and track all of the ideas they have been assigned.     From there, product managers can drill down to see the detailed view with hyperlinks to the exchange where they can manage and update ideas status real time.     Nearly 14 percent of ideas submitted have been approved and executed in the Domo product thus far and a number of other ideas are pending serious consideration. Customers love this exchange because they have a voice in influencing the Domo product road map. Ideas are crowd-sourced and voted on by fellow members.   One of our Dojo members submitted an idea for a new card that would track how many Domo licenses they had used up and how many licenses were left open. We were able to create this Participant License Gauge to better track our customers license usage.     At our annual user conference that we held in March 2016, we honored one of two Ideation Champions (who delivered more than 70 combined ideas) during our Dojo VIP awards lunch.   The winner, Robyn Linden stated, “The Dojo has been an amazing resource for me. I know when I submit a question or idea, my voice is heard by Domo staff members. It’s great to know that my ideas are being reviewed and discussed to have a greater impact on the overall product.”   Linden posted a tweet following her win as Ideation Champion.     In the Dojo’s first year as a community, we achieved a 185% percent increase in the combined number of posts made and ideas submitted in comparison with the first quarter that the Dojo went live.     Finally, we have seen almost a 600% increase in idea votes received in Q1 2016, compared with Q2 2015, while we witnessed more than a 250% increase in likes received in Dojo during the same time frame. Customers love the Ideas Exchange which has driven community engagement and customer satisfaction!    

Company: Vodafone Spain     Contact: Alejandro Moreno ( Community Manager) Community:   Foro Vodafone  Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Vodafone Spain is part of Vodafone Group, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and provides a range of services including voice, messaging, data and fixed communications. Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries, partners with mobile networks in 57 more, and fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. As of 31 December 2015, Vodafone had 461 million mobile customers and 13 million fixed broadband customers.   Vodafone Spain has 14.255.000 mobile customers and 2.960.000 fixed broadband customers. All of them get benefit of the experience and capacity of a world leader that helps its customers to be better connected. For more info: please visit: www.vodafone.es   Our community goals   We wanted to increase visits to the community, the number of users. To achive them, we redesigned our community homepage and added a new version accessible via Smartphone and tablets. We have also boosted our Vodafone Heroes User Programme and enhanced content created in the Community.    The design elements that make our community unique   We have created a very visual and usable community where you can browse all categories at a glance to directly choose where to post. Also we have included direct links to the most important sections Vodafone’s website like mobile coverage and Management tips for our Vodafone Private Area from web and App.   Community design:     Mobile design:     How we executed our community design   We used Clicks heatmaps to detect the hotspots and help us to do a better design tracking most popular links and sessions. We wanted to make it more useful and organized through a very simply and insightful menu of categories and attractive banners.   Our metrics     Our achievements during 2015 were:   Nealy 15K new registered users. Over 386 content posts generated by Community Manager to engage users. Almost 4.8 million visits during 2015 and over 100K total posts within the Community. 15% increase on NPS and over 90% resolution rate on our Employees contacts.     Visits     Completed Registrations     Member Time     CHI         

Company: Vodafone Spain     Contact: Alejandro Moreno ( Community Manager) Community:   Foro Vodafone  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Vodafone Spain is part of Vodafone Group, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and provides a range of services including voice, messaging, data and fixed communications. Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries, partners with mobile networks in 57 more, and fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. As of 31 December 2015, Vodafone had 461 million mobile customers and 13 million fixed broadband customers.   Vodafone Spain has 14.255.000 mobile customers and 2.960.000 fixed broadband customers. All of them get benefit of the experience and capacity of a world leader that helps its customers to be better connected. For more info: please visit: www.vodafone.es   How we are implementing Community our customer care business goals   Our target are: Increase total number of registered users. Increase Community Content counting number of created posts Increase community participation Acquire new “super-users” that help us as community mods. Increase NPS and Employees Resolution Rate.    Changes we implemented because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community   The changes we have made:   New community home: it’s more visual and accessible. We have used click map to detect the hotspots. Launch new mobile version enabling users easier access to the community for smartphones and tablets. New badges for super-users integrated on console. We create content based on Key trends such as movies, series and video games to increase user participation and gain awareness to promote eForum Channel. Our employees are continuously improving their answers and performance to encourage further volume of customers using eForum as the contact mechanism prior to Call Center contacts.   Our results   €3.7 M potentially saved on incoming Customer Call Center Calls.   

Company: Vodafone Spain     Contact: Alejandro Moreno ( Community Manager) Community: Foro Vodafone  Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Vodafone Spain is part of Vodafone Group, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and provides a range of services including voice, messaging, data and fixed communications. Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries, partners with mobile networks in 57 more, and fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. As of 31 December 2015, Vodafone had 461 million mobile customers and 13 million fixed broadband customers.   Vodafone Spain has 14.255.000 mobile customers and 2.960.000 fixed broadband customers. All of them get benefit of the experience and capacity of a world leader that helps its customers to be better connected. For more info: please visit: www.vodafone.es   Our 2015 goals for our  Lithium-powered community    Our target are: Increase total number of registered users. Increase Community Content counting number of created posts Increase community participation Acquire new “super-users” that help us as community mods. Increase NPS and Employees Resolution Rate. A quality customer care Redirect our customers to the online customer care       Our focus areas and tactics to meet our goals   The changes we have made:   New community home: it’s more visual and accessible. We have used click map to detect the hotspots. Launch new mobile version enabling users easier access to the community for smartphones and tablets. New badges for super-users integrated on console. We create content based on Key trends such as movies, series and video games to increase user participation and gain awareness to promote eForum Channel. Our employees are continuously improving their answers and performance to encourage further volume of customers using eForum as the contact mechanism prior to Call Center contacts.    Our results   Our achievements during 2015 were:   Nearly 15K new registered users. Over 386 content posts generated by Community Manager to engage users. Almost 4.8 million visits during 2015 and over 100K total posts within the Community. 15% increase on NPS and over 90% resolution rate on our Employees contacts.    

Company: Vodafone Spain     Contact: Alejandro Moreno ( Community Manager) Community:   Foro Vodafone  Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Vodafone Spain is part of Vodafone Group, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies and provides a range of services including voice, messaging, data and fixed communications. Vodafone has mobile operations in 26 countries, partners with mobile networks in 57 more, and fixed broadband operations in 17 markets. As of 31 December 2015, Vodafone had 461 million mobile customers and 13 million fixed broadband customers.   Vodafone Spain has 14.255.000 mobile customers and 2.960.000 fixed broadband customers. All of them get benefit of the experience and capacity of a world leader that helps its customers to be better connected. For more info: please visit: www.vodafone.es   Our unique promotion and goal   Vodafone Spain launched their Vodafone Heroes Programme in 2013 for super-users to help other customers in their enquiries. There are currenly 24 active super-users in the Programme contributing to help other customers. However, the total number of nominated Heroes throughout those 3 years surpass the 100.   Our  strategy and tactics for  community    These super-users participate in a contest, fighting to unlock new badges while earning rewards points. There are 4 main categories that help us to achieve our goals and SLA: Speed, Wisdom, Aim and Creativity. We have implemented new badges on their profiles and created a catalogue of rewards as well as small benefits and ad-hoc contests.   Our results   Super-users activity in 2015: Over 3,500 customer served. 1700 posts managed directly via Vodafones Heroes. Over 1600 attributed Kudos and 500 accepted Solutions.    

Company: Electronic Arts Contact: Dana Baldwin, Community Program Manager Community:  Answers HQ  Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   The Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) organization provides support to customers across all the games that Electronic Arts (EA) publishes. The Social and Community team manages the Answers HQ Community and engages with players on social media channels. To provide the best customer experience, there for our players where they need us, when they need us. Social media and online communities are an integral part of our customer experience strategy and an important way that we support and engage with our players.   The AHQ online community is significant, with over 10.8M registered users and more than 277k new topics over the past year across five languages. In LSW, we monitor 75 social media channels with over 11.2M posts in the past year. Having an integrated approach to total community provides our team with a consistent experience that can be measured in LSI.   Community Goals Answers HQ (AHQ) provides support to our customers with both player-to-player and official EA answers to game information, game play, and technical questions. AHQ support stretches across five languages and over 150 titles. With the AHQ Redesign launch in 2015, our team set five major project goals: Improve global navigation, site search placement, and site structure to connect our customers with the information they need quickly and efficiently. Introduce site theming for game-specific branding all the way down to the post level. Establish a look and feel for site assets that fit within the overall EA brand. Integrate iconography, rank icons, badges, and avatars that reinforce customer status and brand identification. Expand a limited responsive feature set into a fully responsive site.   AHQ Site Elements:   EA Brand Identity   Answers HQ was the first full EA site to launch within the new EA corporate brand identity. By utilizing our established, EA pattern library and game-themed visual assets, AHQ is now part of a more cohesive experience for players arriving to the site from in-game support links, EA Help and other EA franchise sites.             Navigation and Search Answers HQ grew from a single language Beta site into supporting five languages over a period of three years without any major design upgrades. There were several side effects of adding features on one at a time such as, an absence of language selection options, poor site navigation options, and a search box relegated to the header of the page.        AHQ Home Page before site update – September 2015   With the site update, we created a global header that incorporates site navigation, language navigation, site login, account links, and search into every page of the site.       AHQ Home Page after update – Current     Content Blocks and Promotional Spaces On average, 95% of Answers HQ visitors come from search engines and referrals from non-EA sites. AHQ posts often outrank our own help articles in search results. Because of this, many AHQ users are unaware of help articles and paths to contact EA Advisors for issues that the community cannot solve. The updated AHQ site design utilizes the headers of all home category and board pages, and the right side of all site pages, to link our players to popular EA Help articles, top posts on AHQ, and the path to contact us. Our Content Services team works closely with our Community team to keep the content updated and relevant to current issues for each game and language.   Game-specific content placement   Game-specific help and promotional content blocks   Issue-based and promotional content blocks   Game theming Before updating the site, AHQ had a single, fixed background for all pages. Adding a leaderboard to a page, changing the boards on the home page, and any updates outside of site-driven content and announcements required a developer to update site code and deploy changes during a maintenance window. We set out to increase the flexibility of page layouts and introduce game-specific imagery across all pages with the site redesign. Game backgrounds provide additional context for players that arrive on AHQ pages via search and help our game teams preserve their brand identity.   Franchise and game-level site imagery   Iconography and Bounty System The AHQ site update introduced a new icon set for all posts. The icon set helps players navigate across types of posts, hot issues, and solved posts. We introduced an “EA Official” solution icon that alerts customers of solutions written by or approved by EA Community Managers. We also introduced a point value, or bounty, for unanswered posts based on the number of replies, me too count, XP (kudos) total, and age of the post. Players who provide an accepted solution to the post receive additional XP for the total bounty amount.   Post icons and icon legend   Execution   Every step of the AHQ Redesign involved both EA stakeholders and our community super users. We wanted to make sure we were designing and executing the project with both EA and player needs in mind. As we gathered internal requirements needed to support our business, we utilized ideas submitted via AHQ and surveys to prioritize features and design elements that the community wanted. Throughout the design phase of the project, we held review sessions with our team and our super users to refine the site mock ups and images. Prior to scheduling our launch, we granted super users full access to our staging environment. This allowed them to test out the new designs alongside our internal testing teams.     In September, we rolled out the final site design in one large deploy. This allowed for site updates and configuration before our extremely busy fall and holiday launch schedule. In the immediate weeks following launch, we merged two large communities from other EA forum sites into AHQ.             Results   In addition to bringing in two additional EA communities to our AHQ structure, the AHQ Redesign resulted in improvements year after year in multiple areas: On-site searches increased 51% XP (kudos) per post increased from .1 to 2.9 XP per topic increased from .5 to 9.2 Replies per topic increased 10% Players have earned over 7 million badges for community activity   Game-themed badges Rank-based badges Achievement-based badges

Company: Leroy Merlin Espańa Entry submitted by: Francisco Campos Dominguez (PacoCampos) Social Media Manager Community: Comunidad Leroy Merlin Lithy Category:  Total Community All Star   Leroy Merlin is the home improvement leader with +60 stores and has been in Spain for the last 25 years. Part of the ADEO Group, Leroy Merlin is the European home improvement retail leader.   The company culture of sharing, co-constructing and co-directing, is in the DNA of each "collaborator" and therefore Leroy Merlin Spain is a “community” in itself.   The Community: The heart of social evolution   The strategy was to "truly be social and not just seem social.”  This means that each "partner" should know the opportunities and concerns that the new environment poses in the company’s "mission" and every individual in the company is responsible to seize it. The option of trying to “seem social” in all the social activity in the marketing department was discarded.   Beyond our objectives with Total Community, you will find the promotion and support between clients encouraging self-learning DIY, decoration, etc. These existing activities provide the best user experience for our customers but also a relief in the workload of our employees in the brick and mortar stores.    On the other hand, we obtained an increase in sales both indirectly in stores through workshops, tips/ideas shown in Bricopedia (Wikitips), and the Project Gallery. In addition, people can directly purchase in the online store by gathering all the materials required directly from the shared project in the community.   Finally, we achieve a greater commitment from our employees. They are getting to know the customers and their needs and discovering customers with a very high commitment when responding to complex questions, technical issues, or questions requiring advanced knowledge.    Benefits of a Total Community A Lithium community and LSW are very important to our social strategy of providing customers. LSW enables seamless engagement with our customers, allowing us to respond to their support requests on Facebook, Twitter, Instragram and our community that help us as source of relevant content creating sinergies between our social channels. In the community you can buy some projects in one click.  The UGC is integrated in Newsletters, brochures and guides welcome you to interact, visiting the webpage, participating in workshops or sharing your passion about homes in the community. Too, the best projects become the protagonist in the most popular TV program in the country.    Social networks and Community build the "Social Ecosystem Leroy Merlin" with more that 3MM followers: + 720.000 Followers in Facebook +65.000 Followers in twitter +63.000 suscriptors in youtube +12.000 followers in pinterest and instagram. +2MM users uniques in the Community 32% Blogs 21% Forum 27% Projects (Ideas) 18% Bricopedias (TKB)     To measure the success of the Community, Leroy Merlin focused on 3 main KPIs:  +2MM Number of visits: Whenever a client resolves a question by visiting the Community, the company saves hours of customer service in stores, improves brand image and increases commercial potential +23.000  Number of content generated: Whenever members of the Community generate content for free, the company saves the cost of producing marketing/corporate materials +20.000Number of visits to the store: Every time the Community drives a customer to visit the online store a sales opportunity is generated     You cant see it, but you can perceive that it is a company that listens its clients, that tries to help them and that wants to improve every day.