Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: A1 Telekom Austria Entry Submitted by: Claudia Religa Customer Interaction Manager (A1_Claudia) Community: A1 Telekom (http://www.a1community.net) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight     As we prepared for the ... See more...
Company: A1 Telekom Austria Entry Submitted by: Claudia Religa Customer Interaction Manager (A1_Claudia) Community: A1 Telekom (http://www.a1community.net) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight     As we prepared for the launch of our A1 Support Community, we decided to run a beta test with our customers – the output was amazing! – we had 16 users who wrote 450 postings in just three days!   That was also the start of our special SuperFan story – about our community member, Simon. He joined the beta test and called our attention to small bugs that we would never have found without his support in this short time.   After the launch we organized a design game workshop to define the future of our community together with our customers. Simon didn’t miss the chance to be part of it, although it was hard work for him to get there: As he is only 15 years old he had to ask his parents for permission to join the workshop.  It’s a four hour train ride from his home to our headquarters in Vienna. His parents weren’t impressed about the idea, but finally they agreed – on one condition – he had to pay the ticket from his pocket money! When he told us his story we were really astonished and proud about the fact that we have committed Super Fans like him who care so much about our community. Without hesitating we refunded the costs for his train ticket and additionally donated a goodie bag for his dedication.   After the workshop he wrote us the following kind words:   "I just wanted to say thank you again for giving me the opportunity to join your workshop yesterday! It was a great day for me and I won't forget it for a long time. I’ve really learned a lot, such as what other users think about A1 and what suggestions they have to improve the community. I got my train back home just in time – one minute later and I would have had to spend the night in Vienna ;-)” From this time on Simon wrote 150 posts and got 56 kudos in the community. He also applied for a job at A1 and is going to support us as a trainee in his summer vacation.   Even the three week house arrest that he got after returning home from our workshop couldn’t keep him from being part of our community!   The story of Simon was spread across all the departments of our company. Everyone who heard about it was impressed by his dedication to our online community. Therefore, he is now known companywide, throughout A1 Telekom as 'Simon, the Super Fan of our hearts'.
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Company: giffgaff Entry Submitted by: Vincent Boon Head of Community (Vincent) Community: giffgaff (http://community.giffgaff.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community ROI 'giffgaff’ is an old Scottish... See more...
Company: giffgaff Entry Submitted by: Vincent Boon Head of Community (Vincent) Community: giffgaff (http://community.giffgaff.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community ROI 'giffgaff’ is an old Scottish term referring to the process of mutual giving – the perfect name for a company whose passionate and knowledgeable members are not only the front line of customer support but also a driving force in the running of the company itself. In fact, our tag line is ‘The mobile network run by you’.   We don’t do large call centres and we don’t do big budget advertising. Instead, we rely on our growing user-generated pool of knowledge that is our community, where people get help fast and where customer debate and discussions helps us shape and grow the business. And using this community-based model saves costs and ensures giffgaff is outperforming month-after-month across a wide variety of metrics, from traffic to active members.   Our customers are so helpful we do not need a traditional customer service centre, but use our community support forums instead. Saving us the cost and overheads of traditional CS.   Although giffgaff saves a lot of costs by not having a traditional customer service model, the quality of service is still a high priority, which is reflected in a recent customer satisfaction survey, where our members rated our customer service 9/10 and our Net Promoter score was 73% (in context, according to the NPS website, Google rates as 73% and Apple as 74%).   giffgaff's Community Health Index is 877, which puts giffgaff as a leader when compared to all communities globally serviced by Lithium.   We are seeing these types of results through a combination of programmes we run here with the community, which ensures that any question asked on the community is answered within 90 seconds on average.   But not only does our community help by answering peoples specific questions, we can see 8% of all page views going directly to an accepted solution, guaranteeing a great many call deflections.   With our highly-engaged community, we create a huge volume of content, which gets picked up in search engines, driving more and more traffic to our site. So much so, that we can see 30% of all organic traffic going straight into our community and finding answers to questions they didn’t even know they had!   Of course, just like any other business we look at the retention rates in our business and are able to see the following amazing results over a running twelve month period:   People who’ve received payback are 52% more likely to stay with the network  People who’ve activated a friend are 35% more likely to stay with the network  People who’ve posted on the forum are 31% more likely to stay with the network  People with more than 5 page views are 41% more likely to stay with the network  Through our community we use a 'member get member' program, which enables people to bring new customers to our business and we are extremely successful with this, ensuring our existing members bring in much more than 25% of our total new customers.   There are as many people who participate in ‘member get member’ activity on our forums as there are not. However, those people who are involved on our forums are twice as likely to bring on a friend. Our members are helping us out with marketing, sales, development, creating anything from marketing materials, to handing out our product to developing mobile applications for us.   In terms of developing the business we use a dedicated Ideas Board, with over 6,000 ideas and more than 50,000 comments and on average an implementation of 1 idea every 3 days.   giffgaff's mutual model paves the way for a new generation of social brands, which provide real consumer value through embracing the passions and skills of their membership communities, whilst growing an army of loyal advocates in the process.   I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as we enjoy all the various great things we do with our community.   Without them, giffgaff would be nowhere.
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Company: HP Enterprise Entry Submitted by: Margaret Nugent Social Media Marketing Manager (maugent) Community: HP EBC (http://h30499.www3.hp.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Summary HP built one world-wid... See more...
Company: HP Enterprise Entry Submitted by: Margaret Nugent Social Media Marketing Manager (maugent) Community: HP EBC (http://h30499.www3.hp.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Summary HP built one world-wide community on a single instance for all enterprise customers Executed 11 community migrations to the instance, retiring these communities on their legacy platforms To date, five languages are hosted on a single instance Mobile version is available in all languages Benefits:  Cost efficiency; more accurate data of our members (not spread over several platforms) Facts The HP Enterprise Business Community (hereafter referred to as HP EBC) was launched on January 29 th , 2010 with a single category called “BladeSystem”. Three years’ worth of content belonging to 3,500 members was migrated from a third party proprietary platform to our new Lithium instance for the initial launch. It was the first of seven migrations that took place in 2010, bringing total membership to over 200,000 Our migrations came from a combination of HP legacy sites, third party proprietary platforms and an acquisition The HP EBC has enabled us to bring all our disparate communities together on one platform and present a single holistic view of our members and their activities in detailed metrics reports Our goal for the first two years was to consolidate all the external-facing communities managed by HP Enterprise onto a single instance.   Within our first year we built five brand new categories and migrated four local language communities from our Asia-Pacific Region (APJ):   Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Japanese Korean This was the first time non-English language content had been hosted together on a single instance along with English, so it took great collaboration and partnership between HP and Lithium to make this happen.   In 2011 we completed the largest migration, with over ½ million members from an 11 year old HP support forum to our instance.  Despite the year’s notice we were given, this migration was a huge project for both HP and Lithium.  The go-live date was fixed due to HP server retirements.  Thanks to Lithium’s experience garnered from the smaller migrations completed in 2010, we were able to complete this with minimal downtime to our members. We also worked with our super-users to help facilitate the change and support while communicating the benefits of the migration.    Here is what our members said: “I’m excited about the changes coming soon. I have always enjoyed this forum, but participating at the new Consumer Forum since it opened 11/08 I have come to really appreciate the extra features it offers…hyperlinks, macros are just two that I think of instantly. Kudos is another great feature. It is very rewarding to have multiple people give kudos to a solution or tip that you provide and be able to realize how many actually benefited.  I believe everyone here will soon come to wonder how they ever did without all the extra goodies. It may take a bit of time and some adjustments, but is well worth the effort.” Cheryl G. “Thanks for the heads up about what's getting ready to happen with the forum. I'm looking forward to the new functionality. And thanks to HP for continuing to provide such a great place to share ideas and to get and receive help.” Prof Julie November, 2011 saw HP EBC launch a mobile version of the community:  http://m.hp.com/ebc in combination with a new HP.com redesign.   Learning HP Software originally launched its own instance in April 2010, with a view to migrating the software support boards from the HP legacy community (aka HP ITRC) in June 2011.  Once HP Software made the announcement of their intentions at their annual customer event, they received lot of feedback from members asking “Why?”  HP Software’s perception was that software customers were different from other enterprise members and only focused on software products.    The reality proved quite different as approximately <20% of HP Software members were active on both communities.  They were asking why HP Software had their own community, why was HP asking members to join two communities.  So HP Software listened and acted on this by migrating their instance to HP EBC.   ROI The platform has become ingrained in the way we conduct our support business, here are some examples:   HP Software Support HP Software Support uses discussion boards for members to have technical discussions on the software product portfolio with a goal to ensure a better understanding of all the features these products have to offer.   In order to provide additional value, to those customers with a valid support contract, they offer a Limited Access area that enables two-way discussion with a support expert. HP Software see this as an extra service to their support customers that results in reducing the number of deferred calls from their support center.  They have created a formula which calculates the potential number of deferred calls each month. The metric that plays an important role is the ‘number of accepted solution views’. We are reporting on this metric in all of our support forums (public and limited access forums).  Throughout 2011, HP Software saw the number of accepted solution views increase from 24,000 in January to 405,000 in December 2011 Support Call Deflection The HP EBC community provides HP a significant cost avoidance opportunity as many customers are able to resolve their support issues via the community, as opposed to contacting HP directly (via phone contacts, email, or chat).  Together with other web-based self-solve service capabilities, this is a critical success factor for HP’s support services organization.   HP Expert Days Following completion of our support forums migration to one unified community, we began to partner with the HP consumer side of the business (which was also utilizing the Lithium platform) to offer our customers a broader “Expert Day” experience.  The ‘HP Community Expert Days’ provide our community members a 24-hour period during which to interact directly with HP employees within the forums.  HP Expert Days are typically hosted once a quarter, and are a great way to create awareness of the forums for customers who may not typically choose to receive support in a social manner.  Registrations, logins, posts, and page views consistently see impressively sized increases during Expert Days: Registrations 73% Logins 73% Posts 135% Topics 127% Accepted Solutions 157% Kudos 38%   Growth The evolution and growth of the HP EBC has brought about a new requirement to bring in a limited access area to meet specific business needs with our customers (members) and our channel partners.   HP Software has introduced three Limited Access programs within the community:   1. Customer Advisory Boards (CAB) These are Advisory Boards for our top customers, who have the opportunity to meet face to face twice a year.  All meeting notes, presentations and discussions conducted are shared within this category.   2. BETA Testing program HP Software has started to conduct beta testing of the next software product versions with our beta customers within limited access categories in the HP EBC.  In the past all communications were conducted via email after the software was downloaded and installed.  Using the HP EBC has been a great success as more customers have seen the advantages of using the discussion boards versus email.    These advantages are: Increased efficiency and reduction in time to resolution Easier to share knowledge Forums are searchable, enabling customers to find solutions to issues Easier to see where customers are struggling and can put together essential webinars throughout the beta testing period. Opportunity to train customers on new features of the product, so that they can take advantage after upgrading to the new version Ongoing relationship using the forum until the release is launched and can easily train customers on new features and get their ongoing feedback 3. Practitioners Forum The Practitioners Forum provides a unique opportunity for experienced members to share their experiences and learn from other like-minded practitioners.  Outside of the discussions taking place in these forums we also conduct bi-weekly one hour round table sessions between HP product experts and members, where active participants can contribute or simply listen. Experienced members wanted a place where they could conduct discussions or have conversations with other members with the same level experience.   HP EBC is really a cluster/nest of communities – each managed by separate ‘neighborhood’ or ‘category managers’ and one overall administrator.  It is funded by seven internal cost locations within HP by internal cross charges based on proportionate page view costs.    
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Company: Sky Entry Submitted by: Stephen Marshall, Community Operations Manager (StephenMarshall) Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community Technical Integration Communi... See more...
Company: Sky Entry Submitted by: Stephen Marshall, Community Operations Manager (StephenMarshall) Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community Technical Integration Community Launched: 25 Oct 2010 Sky’s Social Customer Support journey started with the launch of the Sky Help Forum (http://helpforum.sky.com/), on 25th October 2010. Here at Sky, service through Social Media means our customers can be confident in finding answers to their issues, from our community and staff, irrespective of the type of question or the complexity of the problem.   Since launch, our forum has grown extremely quickly. With the realisation of the potential we could unlock through Social Media customer service, we decided to extend this support to Facebook and Twitter in March 2011.    Our mission – At Sky we strive for our customers to ‘Believe in Better’ and as one of the UK’s largest broadcasting, telephone and broadband companies, we aim to lead the way in customer service.   With the help of Lithium, we are building a programme in which goes beyond the service we provide to our customers via traditional contact methods.  As well as customers still being able to contact us via telephone and email, with the introduction of our Help Forum, Facebook and Twitter channels we are also now enabling an all-round social customer experience. The customer can simply type their query on to our Help Forum, Facebook and Twitter pages and then await a response. And the power of the social community means that our super-users and other customers often solve many of the questions.     For any issues that cannot be resolved by our community, we have a team of in-house Sky experts ready to assist. Hello to quick and easy resolutions through Social Media!   Our Highlights –  30,000 registered users by June 2011 More than doubled that to 70,000 registered users  by March 2012 Over 150 new registered users each day 1 million thread views per week 144% increase in Sky service Tweets since July 2011  54% growth in Sky Facebook service interactions since July 2011 Sky social media teams’ deal with 1000-1300 total interactions each day Launched in February this year, we are the first company in the UK to offer single-use Live Customer Chat for one-to-one private case resolution We have had 90-100% customer satisfaction/resolution for our social media Live Chat service Consistently over achieving our customer satisfaction and customer resolution goals across all channels     Broadening our reach – In October 2011, we started listening to our social customers out with our branded channels. This meant that we can look to provide advice and assistance to people that mention Sky services or products within their Tweets, Facebook updates and other forum posts.    We are currently able to respond within forums that aren’t official Sky channels.  We also have the tools to monitor tweets and Facebook posts about Sky from customers, and are able to help and respond when needed.   Seeing the query through to the end – When our customers ask questions in our Help Forum or social media channels, we don’t want anything to get in the way of providing a complete end-to-end resolution.    If a customer’s query requires account sensitive information to be exchanged, our staff are happy to privately interact with that customer. But this requires a one-to-one interaction with one of our Sky staff members and isn’t something for a public area.     To solve this, we have introduced an innovative solution to deal with more sensitive social support issues.   Sky is the first company in the UK to use one time chat links which direct the customer back to the original advisor they were speaking to on the help forum, Facebook or Twitter. Once the customer has clicked the one-time link they immediately enter a private chat session so they can have a real-time confidential discussion. This ensures that the Sky team member can have access to the customer’s Sky account and share sensitive information, which wouldn’t be possible in the forum. Since we launched this private chat, customers have reported 90-100% satisfaction and resolution.    Our belief – We believe we are excellent contenders in providing the best social customer experience along with the best technical implementation.   We have a programme in place which means each individual customer will have their question answered or problem resolved. There are some customer questions and issues that require our Sky experts due to the knowledge they have and the requirement to access Sky customer accounts.   Our aim is to own the customer’s social interaction until they are satisfied with an answer or resolution.
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Company: Tagged Entry Submitted by: Matthew Savage (msavage) Community: Tagged (help.tagged.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community, Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Integration Community Launched: 26 Sept 2011   Tagg... See more...
Company: Tagged Entry Submitted by: Matthew Savage (msavage) Community: Tagged (help.tagged.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community, Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Integration Community Launched: 26 Sept 2011   Tagged's Community, launched in late September 2011, is one of our proudest achievements of the year.   We wanted to provide our users with a venue to ask questions, crowdsource solutions, suggest ideas, report bugs and read updates about important changes to the site.   With the power of Lithium's platform and expertise, our small team of 2-3 people implemented a customized solution that supported all of those goals and integrated with a number of other systems and products.   We've organized our Community into five main areas to allow users to communicate with us and each other:   Forums- for user support and discussion FAQs- to answer popular user questions Ideas- to listen to user suggestions and potential improvements Bugs- for users to report site issues and view resolution statuses News- to broadcast information about important events and changes to our site   Integration into other systems was another key goal of this project and we've successfully leveraged Lithium to authenticate and interact with our login process, global navigation bar, games, contact form and ticketing system.   Users are logged into Lithium via SSO- all they need to do is pick a nickname and they're ready to post! They can also use our overall site nav. bar from any Lithium URL.   We've created landing pages for each of our main game titles so that players can easily access the corresponding forums, ideas, FAQs and bugs for their favorite Tagged games.   Perhaps our crowning achievement is the integration with Parature, our ticketing system. We've maintained consistent UI across on our contact form, so users have the option to jump from the Community to contact us directly. In addition, community posts that require personal support can be escalated directly to a queue in our ticketing system in 2 simple clicks! This allows our agents to respond publicly to posts or take the discussion to a private email when necessary.   This solution has vastly increased our ability to provide excellent customer support, as solutions can be provided by our agents or other members of the Community with ease.   Results: Five month in, the stats have been amazing. In the first three weeks of February, we've averaged almost 95,000 page views/day and nearly 285,000 post views/day.   Just last week, we set our Q&A app as our default Facebook page tab and saw search metrics soar exponentially as those users also harnessed the power of our expanding body of content! Most importantly, we're glad to report that our users view over 2,000 marked solutions each day!   This sustained growth each month has been great to see and we're quite excited about future plans to engage and utilize the full arsenal of our Community as we progress.   We're incredibly proud of what we've created and hope to continue building an amazing destination for our users, developers and support agents to interact!       
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