Company: BRP  Entry submitted by: Jasmin Boudreau (Jasmin) Community Manager Community: BRP Community (https://community.bossweb.brp.com), a private B2B community Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer     BRP: Who we are, what we do and what’s our story!   BRP is the world leader in the design, manufacturing, distribution and marketing of motorized recreational vehicles and power sports engines. BRP products are distributed in over 100 countries by more than 3,500 dealers and distributors.   What makes your heart race? How often to you take the time to smile ear to ear and share good time with your family   We push ourselves for it. We come together to earn it. We try and try and try again to reach that prize. It's our motivation, our inspiration to move forward. It's the reason why we stand back up every time we fall. What are we talking about?   We are the company that invented the snowmobile and we`ve built 3,000,000 sleds to date!!!!!     We are not bringing you to the water; we are the company that brings the water to YOU.     We believe in a world where everyone can experience the exhilaration of the open road.     The riders. The ultimate rush. The Can-AM off-road thrills are never-ending.     LIVING THE LIFESTYLE. SHARING THE PASSION.   Take a deeper look at our culture in this short but powerful video: BRP - The history is made of stories   Now that you have a better understanding of who we are and what we do, you will better understand why we did our transformation and the pressure was high. We will also show you all of the reasons that explain why we deserve this award.   The Organization Game Changer   The BRP Community links all of the BRP dealerships and BRP together across the world to share advice, technical expertise and to connect in a completely different way. This community is the ONLY one in the power sports industry.   Our Community is a private Business to Business community and has been active since February 2012. We are still relatively young but have shown a tremendous growth and success since our go-live.   For years our North America after-sales support department have supported our dealer network by picking up the phone and answering questions. Considering our large dealer network, our continual growth of business, the complexity of vehicles and the large call volumes, we needed to change our methods of supporting our dealers.   Combined with the complexity of questions, the increasing volume of requests, the dealer survey results and the on-going frustration of not being able to provide more added–value in our customer lives, we decided it was time to change. We needed to look at the service experience and the structure of our after-sales department to address the challenges our network was facing in their day to day and meet their expectations of our company.   We decided to change our call center to a contact center by using new technologies to move towards a Dealer service transformation (DST).   2013 was the year of transformation for our BRP North-American after-sales service team and we changed the way we interacted with our dealers.   The changes took place with 4 key pillars 1)    Leveraging our Knowledge center 2)    Increasing the community usage and integrating it in our dealer`s day to day operations 3)    Introduction of webcases to receive questions from our dealers 4)    Changing the team structure to support our dealers by Regional Teams accessible via multiple channels instead of reaching departments and silos.   What does this mean to you, to us, to our customers?    We want to make sure our customer’s vehicles are fixed right the first time and that our customers never lose a ride!   Where Lithium does comes into play against our business goals?     The BRP Community powered by Lithium is a critical asset in our transformation.   “We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are!”   At this point, we are no longer a call center but rather a complete hands-on contact center.   Whenever a Dealer in service is looking for BRP information the 4 steps we ask them to take are the following: 1- First look on the Knowledge Center.   Dealers can now type a VIN (vehicle identification number or serial number) or use the keyword box to search hundreds of articles and technical information related to the unit in their service bay. They now have access to a VIN centric tool simplifying the amount of time and effort to have the information right away. They now have access to the best knowledge information from our top technicians 24/7 without calling in.   Our networking is consulting over 43 000 technical articles per year. 2. Go to Community and use the search tool for the network to provide support.   Our dealers can now follow BRP in this live environment and be informed on a daily basis on all parts, technical, and warranty related questions or any other after-sales service topics within this one stop shop. It’s also allowing them to access other techs around the globe. It’s given the chance for dealers to leverage the thousands of years of experience with BRP vehicles where before they were limited to their facility.   In the last 3 months, during our biggest Ski-doo season, we saw amazing numbers on our Community. Over 865 000 pages were viewed by 41 000 visitors. Remember, we are in a B2B environment so we are limited in the amount of users we can have and we need to keep them coming.   Again, this is not a typical community with customers coming in for their own personal interests. These are technicians and service managers that are taking time from their typical day to day activities to go in an environment that isn’t truly natural to them. Considering these users are not computer enthusiast, they could have felt that an online community was a waste of time and money but this was not the case as we see them coming back over and over again. This demonstrates our true success.      In the event they didn't find they were looking for, the step 3 comes into play. 3. Dealers can also submit a Webcase to get support from our Regional Teams.   We now have an online webcase system that allows for dealers to reach us whenever they feel the need to send inquires. We can prioritize their requests and within the same dedicated amount of time we will answer them. No more wait times on the phone, nor do they need to adjust their needs with our schedule.   We can provide a direct answer through the webcase and point them in the direction of the Knowledge Center or Community when necessary.   4. The Contact Center: For more complex or pressing issues, the BRP phone service also supported by our Regional Team is also available for our dealers. We receive hundreds and hundreds phone calls from our network.   Because of our Knowledge Center, Community and Webcase tool dealers can now use the time to phone us in order to discuss more complex issues without being rushed or having to wait on hold for long periods of time. Why is BRP the ideal candidate for this award?   We are the only manufacturer in the entire power sport industry with a dealer community (B2B) in place.  This is a tremendous achievement for our organization to have such innovation and success while being able to have our dealer network support this change.   The dealers, mostly multi-brands, are recognizing the power and benefits of our approach. It was a very big challenge for BRP to have them change their habits of going from phone to using our online community. We`ve heard so many times at the beginning of this transformation: “I don’t want my tech to lose time on the internet.” Or “I’m paying him to wrench, not to push keys on a keyboard” and the typical “Why would I spend time using your tool if I can just call you?”   Today we are no longer getting these comments, we are simply getting accolades and dealers will tell you that they cannot imagine working without these tools.   We are a Canadian company using technologies to outperform larger American or international competitors. It’s not an unfair battle; it’s a question of innovation, creativity and passion.   One of the ways to define our culture and company comes from this short video: The ultimate power sport experience - BRP the power to the go!   The partnership, a similar culture and passion and the will to change   The partnership between Lithium and BRP becomes a natural fit for our transformation but also falls within our culture of passion and willingness to do more for our customers and to strive in being the best at what we do.   The BRP community helps in so many ways:   Increasing shop efficiency and faster turnaround time: It’s much easier for our dealers to get answers to fix units of customers: The service is never closed at BRP since the community connects the planet together.   Securing vehicles that are fixed right the first time It’s allowing dealers to find the right information in minimal time and preventing customers to have to bring back the vehicle due to an improper fix.   Better CSI scores and greater chances of not losing a week-end of fun:  It’s helping dealers increasing the customer satisfaction by increasing technician’s knowledge and skills.   Service experience and greater connection between BRP and the dealer network: It’s allowing BRP to secure strategic initiatives to help secure MOTs (Moment of truth). The service MOT is one of the key pillars for our customer satisfaction.   Access to our partners in ways we never seen before: It’s allowing BRP to receive instant feed-back from our network in a real time environment and benefit from a continuous communication stream.   Remove pressure on our Contact center: The users and the MVPs in the community are allowing us to focus on more complex cases and offer added-value where it counts while the rest of the network is supporting each other by deflecting request to us and allowing dealers to have answers outside our business hours.   The question you have: Yes, that's all nice but what does it mean in numbers?   Within our closed environment where we operate with a limited amount of dealers and distributors, our metrics are not the same as the typical B2C ou P2P. For others, our metrics may look marginal but for us, and based on Lithium internal benchmark, we know we have outstanding results and a fantastic story to share.  History is made of stories; our story can also be understood with numbers.   We have seen incredible growth in 2013.  In the last 12 months Overall posts: 41 000 and 80% growth Logins: 1 344 000 and 134% growth User sessions: 1 200 000 and 252% growth Accepted solutions: 3 100 and 77% growth Searches: 100 000 and 51% growth Combining theses metrics to some of the previous numbers on the community we`ve shared at the beginning of this submission, you can see our dealer support transformation unfolding right before your eyes.   We truly believe that The Organization Game Changer award is meant for us. We have changed the communication method used by a thousand dealers after decades of habits; We were able to completely remodel and reshape our internal departments to remove silos; We leveraged new technologies to everyone’s benefit; We now have put the customer at the center of the operations.   More importantly, all of this transformation wasn’t possible if we didn’t have a strong community, powered by Lithium, supporting our goal and vision.    What are our next challenges? We will find new creative ways to push these innovations and support mechanism to uncharted territories and show our competition, within our industry, that we are true leaders. Everywhere & every time we put our mind, passion and efforts in our service and in our products is one more step closer towards providing our customers the ultimate experience.   You don’t believe it? If we did this, nothing can stop us. Just  Watch us!   --------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the following deck to better understand the overall transformation that took place in 2013 in our NA after-sales department:                                

Company: TalkTalk Group  Entry submitted by: Stephen Fell (Fellsteruk) Senior Online Engagement & Content Manager Community: TalkTalk Community (http://community.talktalk.co.uk) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   With more than 4 million customers TalkTalk Group is one of the largest Internet Service Providers in the UK, providing the best value home phone, broadband, TV and mobile packages to residential and business customers under the TalkTalk and TalkTalk Business brands. We pride ourselves on being innovative, and bringing disruptive new products such as TalkTalk TV, Britain’s fastest growing TV service, to market.   TalkTalk grew rapidly through a combination of acquisition and organic growth, and has spent the last year integrating its businesses to build a leaner, more efficient company offering competitive pricing backed up by good service.   Improving customer service has been key to realizing the company’s ambitions for growth.   This is being achieved by:       Getting things right the first time so customers don’t need to contact TalkTalk       Offering online solutions so that customers can fix problems themselves or seek help without calling   We promised customers that during the coming year we will deliver the best online self-service experience possible and created digital assets that provided a better experience than calling.    The Lithium-powered TalkTalk Community is at the centre of this work. It replaced the original forums, which launched in 2008, and were adequate for the time. As traffic on the old forums increased, cracks began to show in the infrastructure, and customers complained they were struggling to use the platform to self-help.   This made it hard to scale the forums as the company’s rapid expansion continued. Despite receiving no marketing or promotion from the wider business, the TalkTalk Community continued to quietly grow and evolve over time.    During 2013, the TalkTalk Community was re-launched, powered by Lithium, and with a new strategy. The idea was to slowly transition from being a traditional customer service channel, where Online Community Executives offered advice and support to customers, to a peer-to-peer network where customers could support each other.    We made our most helpful and prolific posters ‘Super Users’, who offered solutions to common problems. The mood of the boards improved dramatically, as members realized they could find answers to their questions about TalkTalk’s products and services quickly and with help from other customers.   TalkTalk set up an in-house Digital Care Team, made up of 12 support experts from across the business, along with a Community Manager to drive more customers to the Community.     Our new team and ownership of the community was placed under our Director of Digital, where it would be a part of our wider digital vision and supported by teams across creative, legal, PR, marketing and brand to name a few allowing us to give almost real-time feedback to the business of trending issues or to our customers with products suggestions and development.    In addition to helping us to leverage the power of our crowd sourced support platform to help shape our other online venues and future customer experience.   The team’s remit was to seek out customers from across all social media, forums, blogs and news sites, and drive them to the Community. Once signed up, new members would facilitate peer-to-peer discussions and help other members to find answers. The benefit to our customers has been clear:     TalkTalk Group has embraced the Community and placed it at the centre of our online support, communication and product development strategies, which has assisted with the creation of a marketing strategy to drive people towards the community.    Customers are encouraged to join the Community when they first join TalkTalk, in the Welcome Packs sent out with routers and other equipment, and in marketing emails sent to customers.   Email marketing activity alone has so far delivered an 18% increase in traffic to the Community.   In addition to measuring call deflection from community activity and to further our vision for the community, our strategic telephony teams have made efforts to reduce calls directly from the call center. Recently, we've added community messaging to our call center voice system- if a customer has a question that our Super Users have already answered on the Community, our IVR system lets them know where they can find the content online. Our initial tests have resulted in a 5% call drop off after this message is played, which shows great promise for directly correlating call reduction due from community content.       Customer Support Site Integration Using Lithium’s  REST api’s we integrated the best content and solutions from our members into our customer support site and help content. We did this by promoting the top accepted solutions for each product on our landing page and pushing relevant content to customers as they navigate through our site in addition to this we are surfacing targeted content from the community within our help articles, as customers are consuming our business answer they are encourage to view content from the community along with a federated search of community content in our global site search.   These changes alone have accounted for a 43% uplift in community traffic.         Collaborative Beta Testing Groups TalkTalk Labs is our beta testing team, who run trials on all the latest products and services before they go to market. The Community has been a valuable recruitment tool for new trials, and provides a secure, scalable discussion platform with private boards where they can discuss and share their opinions of new products.   Our Trials Managers who are easily identifiable within the Community have built the community into all their trial activities, leveraging our active base of advocates to test new services. During 2014/15 we plan to support the TalkTalk Labs team with more than 100 consumer trials being ran from the community. Our users’ voices will be heard within the business, and will help shape and define our innovations of the future.   The results so far Almost everyone across the business played a part in launching and continuing to develop the Community and although we are yet to celebrate the first birthday, we are truly proud of what we have achieved in just six months.       174% increase in traffic to the community       65% increase in registered users       Over 20% of our topics have an accepted solution       Over 58% Member Engagement with on average 6.5 replies/topic       £107k Call reduction cost saving   “Loyal customers and staff are a company’s strongest assets, and it has been fantastic to see the TalkTalk Community grow into a busy, useful forum that thousands of people log onto every day. We're looking forward to seeing it continue to develop in the coming months and years as we push ahead with our work to deliver a brilliant online self-service experience for our customers.” Dido Harding, Chief Executive Officer  

Company: Cisco  Entry submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Sr. Project Manager Community: Tech Zone (techzone.cisco.com), internal community Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator     Our group was able to leverage Lithium's capabilities to enhance the influence of Cisco's Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers, enabling them to easily capture knowledge created through collaboration and share it directly with Cisco customers.  We implemented more than 80 custom components in Lithium to deliver a solution called Tech Zone to the TAC organization that is optimized for their needs and fits within their standard workflow. We utilized Lithium's REST APIs to create an externalization channel to migrate the most useful articles from Tech Zone to Cisco.com.  Moreover, we extended our platform to enable our partners to collaborate with us on joint customer opportunities and challenges, and to retain these interactions as part of corporate memory.   The business impact for Cisco's TAC grew significantly in 2013 due to increasing participation driven by further integration of the Lithium platform within the existing workflow, mobile access, and content externalization.  Articles published on Cisco.com that resulted from collaboration within Tech Zone received 1.7 million views and saved Cisco nearly $10M due to case avoidance from February 2013 through January 2014.  The rate of cost savings due to external articles has grown significantly each quarter, and this trend is projected to continue.  For example, the quarterly cost savings increased by 48% over the last two fiscal quarters.   The Cisco Technical Assistance Center (TAC) is staffed by over 3,000 engineers; this team spans 20 TAC facilities worldwide, bringing support to Cisco customers in over 180 countries and in 17 different languages.  Cisco's TAC, enhanced by Lithium's capabilities, continues to change the way engineers think about collaboration with robust, organic Social Knowledge Management Environments.  Powered by Cisco’s Intellectual Capital Transformation group (ICT), Tech Zone has become a preferred channel for these engineers to collaborate, share and publish valuable content directly to customers via the web or mobile applications.  Since its launch over two years ago, Tech Zone has transformed not only the way TAC manages their intellectual capital but how Cisco communicates, collaborates, and serves partners and customers.  In addition, Tech Zone influences other engineering and consulting business units inside Cisco seeking similar benefits from Social Knowledge Management Environments.            Since its origins, Tech Zone has been pushing the boundaries of what a Social Knowledge Management Environment (SKME) is and what it can become. In addition to Lithium out of the box capabilities, we have enhanced the collaboration experience of the engineers with features such as:        Raise Hand Subscription The "raise hand" feature allows users to draw attention to a discussion in progress in order to ask for additional help. This feature was enhanced by allowing users to subscribe to raised hand events, enabling community experts to be easily notified when other engineers need assistance.     You can enable this subscription under your My Settings > Notification Settings            Solution Buddy Solution Buddy powers the reuse of the Tech Zone content by automatically surfacing relevant content directly within the salesforce.com interface that will assist the engineer in solving the customer issue quickly without the need to search or leave the salesforce.com interface.            Externalization Workflow Leveraging Lithium REST APIs, we created a path from within Tech Zone to externalize valuable content to our corporate website at Cisco.com. In addition to powering the externalization channel, we created a publishing lifecycle widget that lets engineers know the state of articles within the externalization pipeline:            Collaborative Review for External Publication To reduce redundant efforts to externally publish the same article, engineers can now see and join other engineers that are preparing an article. If no engineers are working on the same article, the default option is 'Initiate External Publication'. However, if engineers are already working on the document, others may 'Join'. Engineers may 'Unjoin' at any time, and if the engineer is the last to 'Unjoin',  the available option is 'Cancel External Process'.     Example actions for collaborating on external publication of documents        Related Content One of the key missions of Tech Zone is promoting content reuse. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we want to ensure engineers are consuming and leveraging already existing content, and adding to it as appropriate. With this in mind, we developed a widget that returns articles and posts containing content similar to the one being viewed (especially content related to the linked case in salesforce.com).            Empower External Publication of Naturally Captured Content Discussions that have accepted solutions will trigger the button "Share it for External Publication". This button triggers the Lithium feature "Start Article" from a discussion.          Me Too Integration with Case Linkages We enhanced the Lithium "Me Too" feature by triggering a pop-up to capture the case number in which the engineer is facing the same issue as described in the thread.        Label Widget We implemented a widget to highlight the labels assigned to the article being viewed. If the engineer clicks any of these labels, a list of all articles containing that label is presented.            Injecting Content Impact into Federated Search Results Results from our enterprise search engine now take into consideration the Content Quality Factor (CQF), which means the most valuable and useful content will be presented at the top of the search results. In addition, discussion threads with posts marked as Accepted Solutions will also appear at the top of the results.    Tech Zone's success is the result of three main components:   End-to-End Content Creation and Consumption: Collaborations between TAC engineers often contain large amounts of information spread out over multiple emails, messages, and tools. Tech Zone is able to act as an environment that captures and compiles these chunks of information into cohesive articles that can be cataloged and later referenced by engineers experiencing similar problems. The most helpful articles are published outside Cisco where they can be directly consumed by customers either on the corporate website or via the Cisco mobile application.   Fully Integrated Workflow: Tech Zone takes collaboration to the next level by not only providing an environment for TAC engineers to work together, but also integrates within the existing TAC workflow.  The Solution Buddy application binds Tech Zone with the TAC engineer case handling tool, MyWorkZone (Salesforce.com), to surface relevant Tech Zone content for assisting engineers in solving open customer issues.   Solution Buddy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyhbWZ4L3s   Reputation and Gamification: Gamification is leveraged to drive user engagement and innovation. Tech Zone recently launched a competition called "Knowledge Champions League" to empower engineers and drive the creation of valuable content in their respective technology spaces by teaming them up with similar engineers from different countries. Winners will be able to travel around the world to meet their colleagues.   Another successful gamification initiative was the “Best Greasemonkey Widget Contest,” for which engineers competed to create widgets that could enhance the Tech Zone user experience. Over 300 engineers submitted unique widgets and several were selected by the engineers to be implemented directly into Tech Zone.   1) Value Tech Zone initially focused on creating an internal repository for content that TAC engineers could leverage to collaborate, improve, and reuse to better solve customers’ cases. The next step was to share this content with Cisco's customers by externalizing TAC-authored content from Tech Zone to the Cisco website. These externalized articles have saved Cisco a total of nearly $10 million from February 2013 to January 2014.   2) Participation Participation in Tech Zone has skyrocketed since its launch. Tech Zone's user base has increased by 103% since 2012 to more than 26,500 registered users and content has grown by 145% to more than 23,300 TAC-authored articles. Although Tech Zone initially targeted TAC engineers, the user base has grown exponentially; so much so that the original TAC engineers represent only 21.6% of the population of Tech Zone.     Feedback from TAC engineers:    "Tech Zone has given a lot to TAC newbies like me and I sure would want to give back in whatever way I can!" - Vinay Raichur, Voice TAC Engineer from India    “This is an excellent website, I didn't know this existed until a couple days ago. The reason I like Tech Zone is the contributors are doing a fantastic job explaining concepts in simple and easy to understand language. I myself was able to understand quite a few concepts.” - Rahul Munot, Sales Engineer from US   Tech Zone has successfully created a model for dynamic corporate memory, displaying how knowledge can be leveraged, not only internally, but externally across Cisco as well. So well, in fact, that other organizations within Cisco and Cisco partners have requested Social Knowledge Management Environments similar to Tech Zone.   3) Mobility Starting December 2013, content from Tech Zone has been included in the new Mobile application (Cisco Technical Support), available for both iOS and Android. Since then, there have been almost 18,000 application downloads, and TAC authored articles from Tech Zone have received a total of almost 12,000 mobile views. The addition of these documents to the Cisco Technical Support mobile app has been well received by the Tech Zone community.   Feedback from customers:   "[Tech Zone Docs] are the publicly available documents that TAC has written to recommended best practices or address common customer issues, and many of them are pure gold! …Priceless" - Review by Ethan Banks, Network Architect, Chase Paymentech Solutions, Co- Host of Packet Pushers  

Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Organization Game Changer    CommSec is Australia’s leading online trading platform and a subsidiary of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank. We introduced CommSec Community in May 2013.   CommSec Community’s goal is simple - to be the largest active investor community in Australia. As a business, we recognized the potential to create a vibrant community where investors and traders can discuss trading strategies and ideas, and a place where those new to trading could learn from each other and feel free to ask questions about entering the market.    In launching a Community with Lithium, we have become the first major broker affiliated Community in Australia, giving us a key point of differentiation for our customers.   Recognizing the breadth of assets we have to draw on, we have built the Community experience around the ability to connect and learn from other traders, our expert analysts and our customer support teams.     We have realigned our business in a number of key areas to make it a success: -       The existing social team has been expanded to encompass Community management -       We’ve created specific environment for daily analyst commentary and encourage debate around this content -       In seeking to increase the ability for customers to make information easy to find and self serve, we have taken our FAQ library and expanded this into TKB content, adding a new level of depth and opportunity to cross promote where applicable in the forums. -       We have established a specific area for our new traders to tap into the collective knowledge of our other customers and support teams, with a dedicated team created to manage our customer support through this, and other social channels.   For us as a business, it helps create a better educated investor and at the same time facilitate greater customer experience and self service.   In the first 12 months, the CommSec Community now has over 10,000 registered users having made nearly 50,000 posts, and another 8,000 active guests who return each week to read the content.   Our new to trading board remains the 4 th most popular board within the Community, and has ~ 50% response rate on questions asked being answered by other Community members.

Company: CommSec  Entry submitted by: Ben Shute (Benshute) Manager, Social Business & Emerging Channels Community: CommSec Community (Commsec.com.au) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   CommSec is Australia’s leading online trading platform and a subsidiary of Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank. We introduced CommSec Community in May 2013.   CommSec Community’s goal is simple - to be the largest active investor community in Australia. As a business, we recognized the potential to create a vibrant community where investors and traders can discuss trading strategies and ideas, and a place where  those new to trading could learn from each other and feel free to ask questions about entering the market.    Building on the out of the box Lithium platform, we introduced a number of customizations at launch, including:   Automatic Board Assignment   To facilitate a breadth of discussion, our Community has been divided up into a range of boards, including general markets, charting, sections for new and advanced traders and sector specific boards to discuss individual stocks.   To make it easy for users to find the right boards, we created a stock code field in the new post pages which automatically assigns the best board for a post, and turns the stock code into a tag automatically.     Most discussed Stocks   The automatic assignment of a stock code to a tag helps us drive the Most Discussed Stock module that runs across various parts of the site and allows users to get an insight into the stock discussions that are trending over the past 5 days (this time period was set at a period dictated by the community).   This is presented at a Community wide level on general pages and the Community homepage, and at a sector specific level on board relating to areas such as materials and tech stocks.     Stock Sentiment   A further enhancement to the post creation page is the ability to add a sentiment towards a particular stock. This is built on conditional logic, and will only appear if a stock code is added. Users can select one of 5 types of sentiment – buy, accumulate, hold, reduce, sell – depending on their opinion of the stock at that particular time.   We then add this aggregated sentiment to the most discussed stocks to give a rounded picture of the Community’s activity and discussions.     Live Stock Pricing   We have also integrated the ability to buy and sell directly from the discussions.   At the top of stock specific discussions, we have included live pricing information about the stock, covering current price, change, bid and offer, 52 week high and low and volume. From there we offer users the ability to add a stock to their watchlist and alerts, get a detailed quote, as well as buy and sell.       We see the Community as an important piece of the overall research customers should do in deciding what stocks to purchase.   We have integrated the ability to interact with Community from a number of our key areas of the site.   Watchlists:    Quotes and Research:      In the first 12 months, the CommSec Community now has over 10,000 registered users having made nearly 50,000 posts, and another 8,000 active guests who return each week to read the content.   We have seen in excess of 13,500 trading actions commenced from Community – either addition of stocks to watchlists, or quotes, and over 3,000 trades placed via the platform.  

Company: Advent Software  Entry submitted by: Al Castillo (Al) Solutions Manager, Advent Direct Community Community: Advent Direct® Community (https://community.advent.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design     Advent Software has a 30 year history of technology leadership in the investment management industry. Our client base spans over 4,400 firms, from established global institutions to small start-up practices, in nearly 60 countries. We view our clients as collaborators, and are constantly seeking to improve our solutions to break down boundaries between systems, people, and information.   Technology as an industry, whether consumer-facing or in the enterprise, is becoming increasingly personalized for the individual user, and as a technology company, Advent strives to be at the forefront of that trend. In November 2013, Advent Software unveiled Advent Direct® Community, a new, interactive way for Advent clients and partners – from disparate parts of the investment management industry – to connect, share information, and learn best practices. In what is so frequently an adversarial and information-hoarding environment, Advent Direct Community provides a unique opportunity for financial industry practitioners and firms to engage with each other and with Advent in an open, personalized, collaborative, and transparent forum.   With Advent Direct Community, we set out to design a website that mirrored our goals of building a personal, transparent community while also providing a simple and familiar experience that would be true to the overall Advent brand. The community design thus is consistent with the look and feel of other Advent properties – simple but bold, sophisticated colors and graphics that reflect our business and client base. From the beginning, we included members of our Marketing and Product teams to ensure that everything from menu navigation and other user interactions to font and color was on par with the high standard we set for other Advent applications.   From the very first click on the landing page, the user experience is all about personalization and ease of use. Instead of sifting through cluttered information that may or may not be relevant, new users answer a few brief questions at the onset and are then presented with customized content personal to their particular interests, minimizing the number of clicks to get to that relevant, recent content.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY PERSONAL LANDING PAGE     For example, when a user decides to “follow” a product on Advent Direct Community, they are auto-subscribed to the Lithium discussion board for that product, their menu is customized to include a direct link to the discussion board, and a product tile is added to their home page. The tile uses a “counter” approach to highlight contributions from the last seven days on the Lithium platform – Discussions, Answers, and Ideas – and it also provides a count for new and recently updated knowledge base articles. With a single click on any product tile line item, the user can see a list of the three most recent items and by clicking an item link they can view the conversation.  Alternatively, they can start a new discussion or view all discussions. Three distinct actions, one click. ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD     The Lithium platform has proven immensely valuable in serving as a conduit between Advent and our clients. Through the discussion area and “Idea Exchange” areas of the site, it has enabled us to deliver on our promise of transparent communication and acting on client feedback. We are particularly excited about the “Idea Exchange”, a relatively new feature of Advent Direct Community, where users can suggest, share, and vote on new ideas for Advent products. This has generated a number of constructive ideas that we are incorporating into new releases for our products. The Idea Exchange is, in effect, co-creation between Advent and our clients in action.  In addition, the Lithium platform enables users to give peers a visual “kudos” for post contributions, something which users have particularly glommed onto and helps build a network between Advent product users. Posts that are the most active or receive the most kudos are the most prominently displayed.   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY IDEA EXCHANGE       “I love how Advent has gamified Advent Direct Community. I really thrive off getting kudos from other users and rising to the top of the leadership board. I’ve also enjoyed the clean design, which allows me to navigate the site very easily. There aren’t a lot of things that distract me from finding what I need.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   “The design isn’t simple, but it makes things simple. I can see all the information I want to see right when I login and decide if I want to go further or go back to it later. It’s far from basic, but the design of the site makes it easy and basic for me to easily navigate to all the information that’s relevant to me with a scroll of the mouse.” – Tom Harmke, Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Reaves Asset Management   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY BOARD ANNOUNCEMENTS     We attribute the professional, vibrant, and friendly design of the site to the remarkable success Advent Direct Community has seen almost immediately after launching. Within just three months Advent Direct Community surpassed Advent’s previous client portal in registration numbers, with 8,500 registered users. Ninety percent of registered users visit monthly and about 1/3 visit on a weekly basis. The number of unique visitors to our core products boards is consistently strong and growing – double-digit growth for our Axys, APX and Moxy products.  And users aren’t just visiting more often; they’re starting more conversations, getting more replies, and the number of answers being generated by the community is increasing.   “The enhancements to Advent Direct Community make me feel like Advent is interested in my success and my development personally because they are creating ways and avenues for me to quickly become a subject expert in my field. I didn’t really have a great connection with other Advent product users before and now I am easily able to find users who are in the same position as I am. I can reach out to these users and get the information that I need while at the same time create a strong network of professionals that allows me to excel at my job.” – Shawn Larrabee, Senior Control Analyst at JD Clark & Company, A Division of UMB Fund Services   ADVENT DIRECT® COMMUNITY DISCUSSION BOARD      

Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   Autodesk, Inc. is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created.    Like most software companies, Autodesk is focused on providing comprehensive solutions that our user base can rely on while also reaching new areas of the marketplace that were previously uncharted. Unlike other companies, Autodesk is also committed to reinventing our standard business model, moving away from standard licensing and into a flexible use anywhere, on any device, at anytime model.   With a very large portfolio of products, constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our nontraditional business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.   Lithium has provided us with an avenue to combat the above, providing a true peer-to-peer community space where users ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions, all the while reducing the need for direct one-on-one support (forums) and Research and Development (ideastations).     In November 2013 the Autodesk Community site was rereleased, following an extensive redesign process which was supported by Lithium Professional Services. The result was a new compelling, easy-to-use site & experience that: optimizes our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerates collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enables easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole.     Business Results          

Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Autodesk, Inc. is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created.    Like most software companies, Autodesk is focused on providing comprehensive solutions that our user base can rely on while also reaching new areas of the marketplace that were previously uncharted. Unlike other companies, Autodesk is also committed to reinventing our standard business model, moving away from standard licensing and into a flexible use anywhere, on any device, at anytime model.   With a very large portfolio of products, constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our nontraditional business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.   Lithium has provided us with an avenue to combat the above, providing a true peer-to-peer community space where users ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions, all the while reducing the need for direct one-on-one support (forums) and Research and Development (ideastations).     In November 2013 the Autodesk Community site was rereleased, following an extensive redesign process which was supported by Lithium Professional Services.     The result was a new compelling, easy-to-use site & experience that: optimizes our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerates collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enables easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole.   Business Results           Video entry   This video was used as an internal resource to provide an overview of the background and future of the Autodesk Community. We distributed it to all employees during the marketing phase of the community launch, just prior to the public release in the beginning of November.    Watch our video: https://autodesk.box.com/s/lcod9ztxrxfm7jexjyfd    

Company: Autodesk  Entry submitted by: Michael Pascucci (MPascucci) Senior Community Engagement Manager Community: Autodesk Community (http://forums.autodesk.com/) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Autodesk, Inc. is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created.    Like most software companies, Autodesk is focused on providing comprehensive solutions that our user base can rely on while also reaching new areas of the marketplace that were previously uncharted. Unlike other companies, Autodesk is also committed to reinventing our standard business model, moving away from standard licensing and into a flexible use anywhere, on any device, at anytime model.   With a very large portfolio of products, constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our nontraditional business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.   Lithium has provided us with an avenue to combat the above, providing a true peer-to-peer community space where users ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions, all the while reducing the need for direct one-on-one support (forums) and Research and Development (ideastations).     Autodesk Community Redesign   In November 2013 the Autodesk Community site was rereleased, following an extensive redesign process which was supported by Lithium Professional Services. The result was a new compelling, easy-to-use site & experience that: optimizes our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerates collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enables easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole.     Focus of redesign:          Update the look and feel        Improve the navigation        Increase offerings for interactions        Create a visually appealing and personal experience   We feel that we have taken a major step in accomplishing what we were set out to, after listening to our Community and what their needs were.   User Benefits:   The Autodesk Community redesign will deliver member-driven changes to enhance the structure, feature set and visual design of the community – all intended to deliver answers to our customers as quickly as possible and ease unnecessary overhead contributing to the community.   We have updated the look and feel, creating a true destination for our Community. We have improved the overall navigation, creating an intuitive interface for our Community to be able to find information easily. We have “up-leveled” our Idea Station and Articles to the front page for easy access. We are also highlighting our Community members (Expert Elites), which should help to increase our activity within member profile pages. We will also be updating the ToS of the Community to add Creative Commons licensing to all community content.   Business results           Watch our video showcasing our redesign: https://autodesk.app.box.com/s/lcod9ztxrxfm7jexjyfd

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

Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (jenh) Community Manager/Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Why BarclaycardTravel.com Should Win The Lithy Award for Best Community Design   The Barclaycard Travel Community is a one-of-a-kind design with an emphasis on travel photos that creates an aesthetically beautiful website. Community Members are encouraged to explore the site for travel inspiration and share their travel experiences to earn miles that can be redeemed for travel rewards or e-certificates.   A few key areas that differentiate the Barclaycard Travel Community design:   Real time home page updates display Community Members posted Travel Stories. Community Members enjoy an immediate gratification of seeing their Travel Story and photos directly on the Home Page. Rotating photo slide area of home page highlights the visual nature of the design and enables the Community Manager to highlight Blog and User Generated Travel Story content. Design includes an easy-to-post Travel Story process that includes a drag and drop options for uploading multiple photos seamlessly. Customized Blog Content area highlights the visual assets of each blog post as well as the Expert Travel blogger profiles. Enhanced Discussion area includes a real time Twitter feed. Revolutionary capability for both Barclaycard Arrival™ cardmembers and non-cardmembers the ability to earn miles for sharing their travel stories redeemable for travel rewards or Amazon e-certificates. Between the beautiful elegance of the design and the differentiating elements above, we believe Barclaycard Travel Community provides a step-change vision for the way digital communities will be designed in the future.   Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page features a rotating image area with emphasis on visually engaging photo content.      Cascading Travel Story tiles feature Community Member generated travel stories that emphasize the visual allure of exploring travel adventures.     Barclaycard Travel – Home Page   Home Page also contains an interactive map that encourages visitors to explore Travel Stories via location.     Barclaycard Travel  - Home Page & Search       Barclaycard Travel  - Easy Travel Storytelling     Barclaycard Travel  - Designed Blog Content     Blog format provides a highly stylized design that focuses on photos and expert travel blogger bios for easy consumption.     Each blog contains photos, kudos and comment capability as well as the ability to share out easily to social networks.     Barclaycard Travel  - Customized Discussion         Barclaycard Travel  - Unique User Profile     Barclaycard Travel  - Email Designs   Community members also receive Daily Alert emails when they have earned miles in the community. This follow-up email communication has increased engagement.     A monthly Travel Community Newsletter helps to drive increased registrations and provides an update on trending topics and blogs within the community. User generated content is also prominently featured.        

Company: Barclaycard US  Entry submitted by: Jared Young (jaredyoung) Social Media Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel (www.BarclaycardTravel.com) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Barclaycard US is the 9 th largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that social media provides the opportunity to change the dialogue between banks and customers and we are committed to building deep loyalty with our customers.   Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind out latest innovation, Barclaycard Travel, where a portion of Barclaycard customers are invited to join a community, share their travel experience and earn more miles for their next trip. We are living the values of changing the dialogue and earning customer loyalty.   BarclaycardTravel.com is a one of a kind travel community where Barclaycard cardmembers and non-cardmembers can share travel experiences and earn miles that can be redeemed for travel rewards or e-certificates. Here are 6 ways that highlight how BarclaycardTravel.com has innovated on the Lithium platform:       Uses Lithium gamification capabilities and backend activity data to grant Barclaycard Arrival Participation Miles to community members     Tracks and manages a unique system that manages separate community experiences  for cardmembers and non-cardmembers.  This allows for granting different point values for the two community member types.     Uses Lithium blog as a travel storytelling container for members, revolutionizing the way people share and remember their travel experiences     Integrates with Google Maps™ and includes the capability to geotag blogs so they are  searchable on Google Map interface     Allows Search travel stories with filtered data leveraging profile data and Google Maps to enhance the experience     Beautiful design overlay on search and storytelling board to leverage gorgeous community travel photos.    Barclaycard Travel – #1 & 2 Gamification & Miles = Loyalty   Profile page displays badges, miles earned, key profile information and the travel stories members have shared. Miles notification speaks to cardmembers and non-cardmembers – and the miles they have. Both sets of miles have distinct, real cash value.      Barclaycard Travel – #3 Blog as Travel Storyteller     Barclaycard Travel  - #3 Blog as  Travel Storyteller      …and once  opened, the full story can be explored.     Barclaycard Travel  - #4 Google Maps Provide Stories with Visual Context     All of the details the storyteller has provided are mapped using Google Maps data.     Barclaycard Travel  - #5 Filtered search to find stories   This module allows members to search for stories that will be tailored for them based on their profile.     Barclaycard Travel  - #5 Map Search   Members can expand the map and search for the last 250 stories.     Barclaycard Travel – #6 Design     Lithium provides a beautiful home for these travel stories and stunning photos from the community – throughout the site Lithium modules are simply and elegantly displayed enticing members to interact with the stories.     Our business results   In just 5 months since the marketing launch, Barclaycard Travel has added close to 50,000 registered users, had nearly 1M page views and granted 8.5M credit card miles to customers. We are very pleased with these early results and all due to the innovation we’ve been able to achieve leveraging Lithium’s platform.          

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

Company: Telstra  Entry submitted by: Karen Le (kazwalla) Head of Social Media, Telstra Digital, and Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: Telstra CrowdSupport (http://crowdsupport.telstra.com.au/) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Telstra is Australia’s largest Telecommunications Company and for over a hundred years we have connected Aussies with each other and the rest of the world.   History & Challenges          Telstra employs more than 39,000 employees.          In 2013 we had more than 15 million mobile customers (Australia’s total population is 22 million), 7.8 million fixed voice customers and 25.5 billion dollars in sales revenue.            Although large in size, fantastic business performance results and the fact that we have a long standing history in Australia, we are faced with our biggest challenge – Customer satisfaction. In 2011 our satisfaction rating was 66% when the industry average was 68%.     Business Goal As a Telecommunications company we know how significant it is for Australians to connect with each other, and we know that our role in connecting Australians needs to be one step ahead of the change in behaviour. Therefore Telstra’s goal is to create a brilliant connected future for all Australians.    One of the amazing things the Lithium platform has allowed us to do is not only let us having a conversation with our customers but allowed our customers to have conversations with each other.   CrowdSupport has helped us provide service to customers in a one to many channel and has helped build advocacy. By having customers answer each other’s questions we are able to assist more customers by being able to scale the customer service offered. We are also providing rich customer experience via Lithium Social Web; Telstra service agents are able to review each community post for accuracy and escalation which is a clear point of differentiation from other non Telstra brand supported forums.    We are using the Lithium platform to achieve our company purpose; by connecting people in connected channels. Telstra now has a community where the conversation starts with the community – this is at the very core of our DNA and our purpose. Every time we need to have a meaningful conversation with our customers about anything we can do it within CrowdSupport. Below are some examples of how we’ve used the channel as part of our digital strategy.    Handset Updates: Fortnightly device updates We launched the handset updates board taking a simple webpage on our corporate website that was updated every 3 months and converting it into a fortnightly community discussion with our customers around our mobile devices. This continual exchange of information around the process and steps we undertake to update these devices has not only helped to keep our customers informed but also helps us to prioritize what we need to review next. In the past few months the board has generated 46,000 unique visits, 884 post and 150 kudos.   This demonstrates how hundreds of thousands of people including news publications receive updates and information from Telstra at exactly the same time.   Product Exits: Facebook.Zero Application This particular post has been one of the top 5 most viewed posts on the Lithium platform over the past few weeks. The post was a result of the discontinuation of 0.facebook.com service planned for later this year and although it’s not a good news story, we acknowledge that it’s no longer acceptable for brands not to be transparent.   0.facebook.com was a new mobile site that includes all of the key features of Facebook but is optimized for speed with zero data charges. Crowdsupport has been used as one of our primary channels for communicating exits of products and services, and we have been able to communicate en masse to our customers around this upcoming change and allowed for a vibrant discussion around alternative options. The initial announcement post (for the exit of 0.facebook.com) has generated over 62,000 unique visits and 11 Kudos.      TVC: Crowdsupport P2P Community goes mainstream. We’ve had a community for 3 years and in this time we’ve demonstrated our purpose of connecting Australians and recognized that communities are no longer for a particular type of user; it’s for everyone.    As part of our customer awareness program around our online support tools, CrowdSupport featured in a nationwide television and outdoor advertising campaign with the tagline “More heads are better than one”. This campaign ran in primetime hours and helped to drive engagement and registration in the community. This not only demonstrates what an integral part CrowdSupport plays in our overall digital strategy but how this has translated into an overall business focus.    TV ad: http://bit.ly/1au3P4z   Driving organic search Crowdsupport growth strategy has always been focused on understanding the analytics that drive community discussion and prioritizing our initiatives. Our help and support team are actively involved in reviewing what our customers are posting in the community and generating supporting content. This continual content review, supported by regular community members, has resulted in over 50% of all the community traffic being generated from Google search. A recent example of how we leverage the community organic search was our campaign, “Telstra New Phone Feeling”, where we managed to post an article which returned a top 5 search result within minutes of posting.     Telstra Identity (Single Sign On) We have removed the biggest hurdle to contributing to our community by implementing single sign on. Customers can now sign in using their Facebook credentials.    Migration of the community registration and login process to Telstra Identity was a key initiative driven by customer feedback in CrowdSupport. This project involved moving over 50,000 registered users off the Lithium Technology login to Telstra Identity and involved several months of planning, design, development and testing to minimize disruption. This change has quadrupled weekly completed registrations by significantly reducing the barrier to registering and logging into the community.   Community Reach With our focus on creating advocacy through improved customer service, the CrowdSupport Community has become an integral part of our online support and engagement strategy. In 2013 over a quarter of the Australian population visited CrowdSupport (6 Million) to find information around Telstra’s products and services. In the same period, visits to the community have increased two-fold and the quality metrics have also improved; with the average time on site reducing by five seconds and average page depth down from 2.26 to 1.90 PPV (pages per visit); this suggests that our customers are finding the information they need faster. The improved reach without effect quality is a great example of how a branded, managed peer to peer community can not only be used as an additional support channel but also as a platform for creating customer advocacy.      Our results demonstrate the customer’s need and desire and the need to connect with us and one another via the Lithium platform.    Current results – as of March 20, 2014:          Posts: 121,241          Accepted Solutions: 3595          KB articles: 337          Ideas submitted: 364          Registrations: 113,699          Kudos awarded: 18,316   Future initiatives that we’re considering.   The digitization of our company means we are now taking what we’ve learned to enable our 39,000 strong workforce to change the way the entire organization works. Once again the aim is to provide a brilliantly connected future by staying one step in front of a societal change.            ITC Internal Peer Community: Extending on the knowledge gained and success of CrowdSupport, the organization has begun work on deploying an internal instance of a P2P community that will allow Telstra staff to collaborate on common IT support questions. The aim is to significantly improve collaboration between our multiple business units and grow our internal knowledgebase.                Live Chat Connection: We are personalizing our interactions with each of our customers. To support this initiative we are leveraging CrowdSupport by registering each of our live chat agents with a Crowdsupport profile and providing the customer this profile when we close off each chat interaction. If a customer chooses to stay in touch with the same Telstra consultant with whom they have been chatting, they can easily reconnect with the agent on Crowdsupport. Internally we call it “My Customer, My Responsibility” and the goal of the initiative is to build a strong relationship by listening and resolving queries quickly.             Develop socially enabled enterprise: An enterprise wide participation includes cross functional collaboration with the rest of the organisation i.e having all product leads contribute to content and answers within the platform. As part of an organization-wide Brilliantly Connected Advocacy program, we are currently investigating the possibility of using Crowdsupport as a direct channel for connecting our customers with a face for each of our online customer support agents. This functionality will also allow our customers to come back to these agents for future interactions.            Mobile First Strategy to drive better user experience: Across the last 6 months, 45% of visits to CrowdSupport have come via mobile handset or tablet device and as part of our mobile first strategy we are undertaking a full review of the community experience on a mobile device and over the next few months be making changes to ensure content is easily consumed.  

Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Courtney Pannell (cocopannell) EN Community & Social Manager Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: Digital Strategy Leader   Whether you’re a mom-and-pop shop in Austin asking an AdWords question via Twitter or you’re a global corporation in Dublin landing on an AdWords Community thread via a Google search, we want to be involved in that moment of connection. The AdWords team aims to form connections with our advertisers, advocates, and influencers, to improve both product functionality and brand perception.   To forge those connections, our digital strategy has been to create a social ecosystem for AdWords, one of Google’s main products. Our social channels — Community, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook — are not silos; we think about how each can drive traffic to all our social properties, assist in content creation, and amplify our brand message.   DRIVING TRAFFIC   Over the past year, traffic to our Community grew by nearly 3x, our Twitter follower count increased by 350% to 175K, our Google+ subscribers surpassed 1.1M, our Facebook fans grew to 75K, and our YouTube viewership grew by 80%. Put simply, we’ve used this social ecosystem to bolster traffic to all our channels and grow our brand’s reach.   Specifically looking at the Community, our growth strategy has focused on increasing traffic via organic search and social referrals. Our organic search traffic now constitutes nearly 60% of our overall traffic globally, as we’ve worked to refine our content to more closely align with what users search for help with.   Not only has our social promotion helped to increase direct awareness of our content, it may also have increased the visibility of community content in search results. We also see that visitors from social channels have nearly twice as high a pages/visit count as a regular user, so we have a great opportunity to interact with an engaged audience.   CREATING CONTENT   In the past year, AdWords underwent a significant launch called Enhanced Campaigns. Our Top Contributors were prebriefed on the update and helped us create nearly 100 unique content pieces to support the launch. In promoting this content, we utilized our multi-channel approach and saw a boost on all our properties.     As you can see above, we put a premium on rich media content, and we identify potential topics for videos and Hangouts on Air from our social media and Community interactions. An example of this strategy in action is our weekly #askadwords video series. For each episode, we solicit user questions on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ using the hashtag #askadwords. After uploading the video to YouTube, we promote it in the Community and on social channels to encourage engagement. The video series just passed its 20th week running and now regularly has 1K viewers per week.   BUILDING AN ARMY OF ADVOCATES   Instead of being a megaphone in our social ecosystem, we really want to empower influencers to share our content and amplify our message. Obviously, our Top Contributors have been a huge part of this for many years, but in the past year, we’ve also tried to identify social influencers that extend beyond the Community.   In identifying these social influencers, we do outreach to try to get them involved in the Community in a meaningful way. We are hosting several global influencer events this year to assist with this, and below is an example of a Community highlight we did with David Szetela, arguably one of the most influential people in the PPC space. He’s now writing articles for us in the Community.     Obviously, the fact that we use Lithium for our Community platform and LSW for our social responding/publishing makes it quite easy for us to grow and maintain this multi-channel social ecosystem. We’re able to see how beneficial our social traffic is to our Community growth, we’re able to identify budding influencers in the Community, and we’re able to easily promote all our content seamlessly to social channels via LSW.   This multi-channel social ecosystem has also made us re-evaluate the appropriate channel to communicate product and support launches for the first time. Although our product blog is typically the venue for such announcements, we’ve seen great success first posting updates to Google+ or the Community. Below is an example of a launch that we promoted solely on the Community at first, where it garnered the attention of online industry publications.             In addition to pure reach, we’re also interested in engagement: pages/visit on the Community, RTs/clickthroughs on Twitter, +1s/clickthroughs on Google+, Likes/clickthroughs on Facebook, and watch time on YouTube. Visitors to the Community from social referrals are twice as engaged as regular visitors, and in many markets, Community content shared on social networks is the content with highest levels of engagement. Our creation of this social ecosystem enabled us to build brand loyalty as well as educate and support our advertisers in new and creative ways.  

Company: Google AdWords Entry submitted by: Diana Ogarkova (Diana) Non-English AdWords Communities Team Lead Community: AdWords Community (www.en.adwords-community.com) Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer   AdWords is one of Google’s main products with customers from multi-million dollar companies to tiny mom-and-pop businesses and provides a feature-rich advertising platform suited to all types of advertisers. AdWords customers can access customer support via phone, email or chat channels and get in touch directly with a Google online specialist on a “one-to-one” basis. Google’s online specialists are subject-matter experts trained on a variety of Google online marketing tools. The online specialists provide support and help educate advertisers about the variety of advertising solutions.   Since early 2012 the AdWords Communidade discussion forum in Portuguese is the main platform for online conversations around Google’s online marketing tools, where users can discuss any relevant topics with other users and specialists from Google. We saw an opportunity to maximize the efficiency of direct customer support through active and deep engagement in the one-to-many channels in Portuguese, essentially scaling the “one-to-one” support model into “one-to-many”.   Internally the “one-to-one” and “one-to-many” customer support are provided by two different teams, and each would have a different set of success metrics. In the “one-to-many” team each market would have one Community Manager responsible for nurturing their online AdWords Community. And from user feedback, we know that users react well to a variety of Googlers engaged and creating content in the Community, especially when Googlers represent and actively share content from their various fields of expertise. Having high-quality online content available within a click, when a user is trying to solve an issue, can help customers save time and improve their knowledge, while having a direct impact on reduction of escalations to the “one-to-one” customer support teams.   Having an extensive content base created by online specialists from the “one-to-one” support team brings multiple benefits to customers. This is why establishing a productive relationship with the “one-to-one” customer support team is important, and is the reason why the Community Manager and the managers of “one-to-one” local teams in Brazil partnered to be able to offer an improved customer experience to local advertisers.   Bringing two teams to work on a shared goal proved to be initially an organizational challenge. The answer was to create an agile project team within the 1-to-1 support team that would focus on deliverables for the AdWords Communidade and social channels. The game changer with the team in Brazil was the amount of online specialists involved, and the variety of tasks they were completing.     Google’s full-time Community Manager for the Portuguese Community & Social channels received support to engage 13 online specialists into AdWords Communidade. The specialists had 1-2 days per week that they could to create content in various text and video formats, such as:   1) Articles with tips and use cases of AdWords to support various online marketing goals;     2) Quizzes to draw attention and give an opportunity to better learn about various features;     3) Hangouts on Air from online specialists from the AdWords customer support team two times per week. They focused on a variety of topics for new and advanced advertisers, for example: #sosadwords series was dedicated to the most popular escalations to the customer support team. The Hangouts are streamed live in the AdWords Communidade, and are available as recordings after that. The goal was to scale the content to as many advertisers as possible, and in a few months the team achieved over 800 viewers per Hangout with some topics reaching audience of over 1.4k viewers. In total 61 Hangouts on Air and 13 Hangout “office hours” were conducted in the second half of 2013. The feedback from advertisers was excellent: they see this as a great way to learn. Needless to say that the Hangouts on Air would not be possible without having subject matter experts from the customer support team actively engaged.     The Googlers from the one-to-one support teams became an active part of the user Community, by extensively sharing their experience with making most of the advertising solutions. In a way this means breaking the “wall” between the company and its users. We believe we have established a successful partnership between 1:1 customer support and 1:many team, which can become a model for community managers to adopt when designing org structure. Why we think this worked in case of AdWords Communidade is a good training of online specialists and breaking down the deliverables into specific workflow tasks with clear expectations on deliverables and success metrics (example of a task: conduct X Hangouts on Air with a minimum of Y Pageviews).   Looking at the bigger picture, we believe that by providing customers with targeted content related to their advertising goals enables a fast-track learning experience, ultimately helping AdWords users make the most of their experience with Google’s advertising products.   We were able to significantly increase the amount of new content pieces created, in particular build a good cadence and scale with the Hangouts on Air. On average the Hangouts received around 800 viewers with some topics getting as many as over 1.4k viewers. In total 61 Hangouts on Air and 13 Hangout “office hours” were conducted in the second half of 2013. All in all, hundreds of up-to-date and relevant pieces of content were created, which indirectly shows in the high % of traffic from organic search channel: over half of users come after performing a search query at Google.com.   This organizational structure in Brazil allowed for a faster user acquisition to the  AdWords Communidade(as compared with other AdWords online communities across different markets). In 2013 the traffic to AdWords Communidade grew 4x y/y, and in 2014 the growth stay high at ~3x year over year, which means that in January 2014 there were three times as many visitors as in January 2013. The growth was supported with high level of engagement as seen from the high speed of response: typically 4 out of 5 new questions receive a response within 6 hours.         

Company: Cortol Consors  Entry submitted by: Clemens Eckstein (CCornerstone) Senior Expert eBusiness Community: Die Wissenscommunity von Cortal Consors (https://wissen.cortalconsors.de) Lithy category: Most Creative Promotion or Launch   Cortal Consors is a leading direct bank for investment: from trading to long term savings.   With sustainable innovations and a modern interpretation of banking services.   Our mission statement – what is our attitude? As a leading direct bank for private investment, we liberate our clients from the restrictions of classical German banks.   We empower them to self-directed financial independence with all the support the client demands. Our know-how, our ability to innovate, the independence of our product offerings, and our unique passion are what drives us.   »Cortal Consors is the first address for self-directed investment.« Our Business Goals -       Financial Empowerment of Banking Customers -       Transparency and Trustworthy Relationship with Customers -       Innovation leader   The Lithium software builds the foundation for the three business goals described above.   Financial Empowerment:   Using the Tribal Knowledge Base we have the perfect platform for building and gathering trusted content.   The Forum offers real and up to date help for customers and place to discuss about financial markets. Since many long-term customers have gathered significant knowledge and experience in a wide array of banking topics the community allows us to tap this resource.   The Blog is another way for us to provide well-founded education to our banking clientele.   Transparency and Trustworthy Relationship:   Next to our presence in the forum and blog where we able to answer the questions of our customers we also provide the possibility to rate & review our products and services as one of the first banks in Europe.   This is a bold move for us since it puts great power in the hands of our customers. By allowing this open and public feedback from existing customers on our own platform we provide absolute transparency on our strength and weaknesses. The strong integration of our customer support in case of bad reviews allows us also to communicate, solve issues and build up a trustworthy relationshop.    Our Business Results:   As it's only been 1 1/2 months, we are still undertaking the first steps. However, below you'll find some KPIs which already show significant improvement in comparison to our old “Knowledge” area.      Most Creative Promotion or Launch (Video Entry):   The promotional video -       Array of possibilities within the community (Community, Wiki, R&Rs,…) -       The development of a newbie to successful investment -       Social interaction   Together we know more – The new Cortal Consors Websection Knowledge   No matter if beginner or professional: The new Cortal Consors Websection Knowledge gives customers a voice. It provides a platform to communicate and supports its users to make the best financial decision. The new Websection Knowledge is supposed to address a wide target group. Every user should be able to help others with their expertise or can ask for help – there are no stupid questions.It´s important that users have fun to exchange their knowledge and that they are empowered to push their financial concerns further.   We want to convey all these contents in an easy, comprehendible and entertaining way. This is why we transport our message with moving images.   Our storytelling focuses on personal stories because its more emotional and less educational. The idea is to show by means of a personal success story how the Websection Knowledge works. Furthermore it boosts the attention and also the capacity for remembering.   The concept "Open Kitchen" is based on the idea that cooking brings people together: beginners learn from professionals, ideas are exchanged, like-minded persons get together, people support each other. We think: This is what the Websection Knowledge stands for and this is why we chose it to build the frame of our storyboard.   View our video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0gAUDIIf5w&feature=youtu.be      

Company: Constant Contact  Entry submitted by: Rosalind Morville/CTCT Community Team (rosmorville) Senior Manager, Community and Social Support Community: Constant Contact (https://community.constantcontact.com/) Lithy category: Lithium Platform Innovator   Constant Contact®, Inc. wrote the book on Engagement Marketing™ — the new marketing success formula that helps small organizations create and grow customer relationships in today’s socially connected world. Through its unique combination of online marketing tools and free personalized coaching, Constant Contact helps small businesses, associations, and nonprofits connect and engage with their next great customer, client, or member. Launched in 1998, Constant Contact has long championed the needs of small organizations, providing them with an easy and affordable way to create and build successful, lasting customer relationships.   Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Constant Contact also has offices in Loveland, CO; Delray Beach, FL; San Francisco, CA; New York, NY and London, England. Constant Contact has been honored with numerous industry accolades and has ranked on Deloitte's Technology Fast 500 for five years running, most recently at number 179.   In 2013, the company continued to make significant product improvements across our offering of online marketing tools. Knowing that change can be difficult and feedback can only make our products stronger, we needed a way to harness our valuable customer feedback without incurring significant cost or introducing a new technology to monitor. We wanted the feedback to be readily available to the Product Owners and easily actionable for varied members of a multi-leveled support team.  As a company that highly values the customer experience and promotes transparency, we wanted the feedback to be public and accessible to all of our customers.  We also wanted our customers to be able to monitor the status of their ideas. Finally, as our early tests with other tools indicated, many of the “feedback ideas” our customers submitted were actually support issues that required moving out of feedback into a place where that support could be received in a timely manner. By knowing the areas where our customers had the most issues and using their ideas to further the products in the direction the customer wanted, we aimed to increase not just the usability of our products but also customer loyalty.   After evaluating out of the box products, we decided to develop our own “in product feedback widget” that would provide an avenue to learn more about our customers’ reactions to system changes and provide a quick way to incorporate feedback into the product development cycle. We decided to base this widget on the Lithium platform.   We determined that the idea exchange within Lithium provided the features we wanted:   the ability to vote and raise the most critical ideas to the top; a direct line to the customer making the suggestion to ask for more details when needed; the capability to rapidly move “Support” issues to the appropriate area of the Community to be answered by peers or our trained Community team; a way for our customers to easily see the status of their ideas; the ability for multiple people to view, edit and comment on ideas from all areas of the company be it product, support, or another; and an easy and visible way for our product team to demonstrate their empathy and involvement with our customers.   We added the widget to multiple pages within our current products and most critically to a new version of our Contacts Management tool.  With this widget, a customer clicks one button and provides their feedback directly to the people that can make the changes.   Due to the success of the widget in 2013, in 2014 we are implementing the widget across hundreds pages of our product and dividing this feedback across 16 idea exchanges in the Community.  The success of the widget is evident when you glance at how many posts exist today:   In Contacts alone (granted the most active area of our feedback forums, but also the most critical as we rolled out this new tool), we received 4600 ideas, 3498 comments and 274,056 page views to that area alone between July and December!  The product team has been able to deliver 71 implemented ideas that are directly attributable to the Lithium feedback widget.   Another area where we launched a redesign was in our Library area. The feedback through the widget was vital for improving the new design. The new design began rolling out on August 28 th , 2013. Between this date and December 2013 we received 949 ideas, 624 comments and 12,478 page views. So far, we have been able to implement 14 ideas based on this feedback.   Customers are given a “feedback” button within the flow of a task. Pop ups were not used to avoid distracting an engaged customer while the pervasive nature of the button on multiple screens allows a customer to enter feedback at any friction point.     When a customer clicks the feedback button, a pop up window appears. The customer selects a topic (labels), enters a subject, and then enters text (the idea body). They click “post to public forum” and the idea is posted to the idea exchange as a new idea with the right labels. There is also an opportunity here for the customer to identify that they need help. If the customer chooses “Get Help” from the drop down they post directly into a corresponding product board for help from the Community.      Once an idea is submitted, the window closes and a customer can continue wherever it is they left off. Feedback is a gift to us while not being difficult for the customer to provide.      

  Company: Vipnet  Entry submitted by: Hrvoje Puljko (puljac) Community (Forum) expert Community: VIP forum (http://forum.vip.hr) Lithy category: Best Community Design   Vipnet is the first private mobile network operator in Croatia, a part of the Telekom Austria Group. By entering the Croatian telecommunications market in 1998, Vipnet introduced competition into mobile telephony. Over the last 15 years Vipnet acquired the status of the most renowned innovation leader on the telecommunications market in Croatia.   Vipnet was the first in Europe to demonstrate the HSPA network, thus offering mobile Internet access that is faster than ADSL. Furthermore, Vipnet was among the first in the world to successfully test HSPA+ technology for mobile broadband.   In June 2013 at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Zagreb Vipnet set a new world record for the fixed segment with speeds of 5 Gbit/s using the hybrid fiber coaxial (HFC) network, and in the mobile segment presented speeds of up to 300 Mbit/s based on 4.5G – LTE Advanced technology. In September 2012 and again this year Vipnet was proclaimed winner in the Best value for money for business in the Business Best Buy Award. Vipnet currently has more than 2 million customers.   Vip forum as a goal has multiscreen customer experience, to increase street credibility, and to be customers' first choice when searching for support information’s.     Vip forum also has a purpose to increase brand awareness and to be the place for engaging existing and future Vip customers.     THE STRUCTURE In August 2013 we launched the first telco brand community in Croatia.   It is a small step in the world but big in Croatia where customers  don’t forgive unfriendly functionalities & illogical designs, because community is here for the users, not for designers or employees!   Well established names from online community and IT/telco journalists were involved in Vip forum trial and helped to design final version of community platform.   During the 2 week trial, beta testers spent more than 200 hours online and generated more than 50 different ideas and improvements which were implemented in final Vip forum version.   We made it clear in structure, transparent at the glance, light to use and spend time, easy to find answers & support.   We are the first telco community which is open to non-Vip & Vip customers with the intention to get customers help themselves.   COVER PAGE CALL FOR ACTION   FRONT PAGE BIG VISUAL BUTTONS – we are offering a way for a customer to Registrate / Login in to our community with these BIG buttons, familiar colors and sentences that are describing the action.     After customer login, he can now use his visual designed User Panel:   On the right side MENU of the cover we have visual help icons (links) to support customer  if this is his first time on Forum:   After customer login, he can now use his personalized custom component which depends on his rank and role: Personalized links Greeting and user avatar Last user posts   MENU CUSTOM COMPONENT TAB beneath main category icons allows customers to have an overview of what's new in a few seconds!     And depending on if user is logged in or not, he can see the personalized posts he didn’t read from the last visit to the community:     CSS CUSTOMIZATION   We made lot of CSS customization in our community but the latest demands from our community members were this three for better functionality and visualization:   Provided better “SOLUTION PROVIDED” visualization:   Provided better “QUOTE” custom visibility and automatically @mention the user we quote:   MOBILE VERSION   Cover page easy to use! Very similar to desktop version which is also available for mobiles. Same icons, structure & features are now available to customers!