Company: Symantec  Entry submitted by: Tim Lopez (Tim) Project Manager, Social Customer Care LSW: Norton Social Support (http://www.twitter.com/NortonSupport) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Symantec was founded in 1982 by visionary computer scientists. The company has evolved to become one of the world’s largest software companies with more than 18,500 employees in more than 50 countries. We provide security, storage and systems management solutions to help our customers – from consumers and small businesses to the largest global organizations – secure and manage their information-driven world against more risks at more points, more completely and efficiently than any other company.   Our 2014 customer satisfaction goals were to decrease response times from 9 minutes to 6 minutes, move our team from a shared resource “hybrid” model to a dedicated team for Social Response, extend our hours of coverage from 12 hours a day to 24x7, increase our reach by expanding to areas outside of our branded properties, and develop a metric for gauging customer sentiment conversion trends. Through strategic planning, including continued use of Lithium Social Web, we were able to: Reduce response time to just about 5 minutes. Launch 24x7 coverage with our newly formed full-time dedicated response team. Expand support response coverage to Google Play, YouTube, Amazon Reviews, and many popular forums and blogs across the internet. Develop an innovative scoring system that averages the score of sentiment conversions allowing us to track the trend of our ability to delight customers and to ensure that as we grow we continue to focus on maintaining or improving customer satisfaction. Move from English only support to now include Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian – on both Twitter and Facebook. Generate reports that get distributed on a regular basis to the entire Norton Business Unit.   Sentiment Conversions and Time to Response have always been our driving factor. We want our customers to be thrilled with our engagement so we ensure that all of our metrics and KPIs reflect what we can do that benefits the customers. We want our customers to know that we care for them even after we have won over their business.      Using Sentiment Conversion tagging that we developed for use with LSW over the last year, we were able to show visual representations on our monthly reports. Using a system that translated the type of sentiment conversion in to a tangible score, we were able to create an average score that represents our success in delighting customers, further allowing us to track the trend. We were able to streamline our response time by moving to a full time team (in February) and balancing our scheduling around hourly volume trends.   Last year we had an 80% increase in individual cases and responses, at the same time we slightly decreased in ‘noise’, 50% increase in Positive Sentiment conversion, on over 14,000 cases handled in over 160,000 conversations monitored.    

Company: Indosat  Entry submitted by: Ghina Aliya (GhinaAliya) Community Manager, Forum ICITY Community: Forum ICITY (http://icity.indosat.com)  Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Indosat Tbk is a leading telecommunication and information service provider in Indonesia that provides cellular of prepaid services (Mentari and IM3) and postpaid services (Matrix), 3G services using HSDPA-technology, fixed data services including Multimedia, Internet & Data Communication Services (MIDI) and fixed voice (fixed telecommunication) services including IDD services and fixed wireless services. PT Indosat Tbk was established by the Indonesian Government on November 20, 1967 and now part of Ooreedoo Group (Formerly Qtel Group).   Forum ICITY (formerly Ngobrol Bareng) launched 3 years ago and known as “Indonesian 1 st Crowdsolution Forum”. We utilizes Lithium platform to take Indosat customer experience to the next level. We empower our Community members to be powerful advocates for us. More than just awareness and advocacy, we were bond in the same passion, the joy of being part of Indosat Community.   On March 2015 ICITY has gained more than 20.000 members, more than 115.000 postings, over than 9 million pageviews and 2.500 questions that have received a resolution or answer in the community. These valuable answers have received 2. 431.002 views resulting in direct deflections and support cost savings.   Duta IM3 and Indosat Blackberry Community are former community members whom presence trigger others to join and participate on the forum discussion. Potential influencers that reach diverse segmentation, from youth to more mature audience.   Our marketing campaign   Welcoming Ramadan-holy fasting month for moslems worldwide- in Indonesia, on June 2014 Indosat launch “IM3 Play 24 Jam” Campaign which gave more benefits to customers such as free Calls and SMS for 24 Hours. To leverage community word of mouth toward this new service, we initiate Takjil24 program in 10 areas (smaller version of Indosat region).   The objectives are to empower Duta IM3-Indosat youth brand ambassador-on becoming powerful advocates also utilize Forum ICITY and social media to spread the stories. Beside online buzz, we gave more advantage to the surrounding communities through this program.   Date: July 19 2014 (simultaneously across Indonesia) Time: 5-5.24 PM (local time) Participant: Maximum 5 groups/Area (5 Duta IM3 per group)   To make it more fun, we launch missions for DUTA IM3 with Takjil24 as the 1 st assignment. Advocacy “IM3 Play 24 Campaign” is the main focus while distributing takjil (snacks for Muslims to break their fast) to the surrounding communities in their own creative ways. 5 best groups will get top up on their balance also shopping vouchers.   The participants needed to upload: Posts on ICITY, Sub Category Sahabat IM3 Tweets Youtube Videos (max 4 minutes) All using #IM3Play24Jam #Takjil24 #DutaIM3 #GroupName hashtags   Results of our campaign   The stories about our new “IM3 Play 24 Jam” product spread out widely 37 groups (185 DUTA IM3) all across Indonesia were joined 11,000 views on ICITY posts related to this mission 1,600,000 impressions on Twitter, 700.000 accounts reached 33,000 views on Youtube More coverage on local electronic and online media Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=45&v=DdAWRYNIJhA https://youtu.be/dIKI567PwhE https://youtu.be/r8NBon8HdlY

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

Company: Optimizely  Entry submitted by: Amanda Swan (amanda_optly) Community Manager Community: The Optiverse Community (https://community.optimizely.com/)  Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch   Optimizely is the world's leading experience optimization platform, providing A/B testing, targeting and multichannel optimization for websites and mobile apps. The platform's ease of use and speed of deployment empowers organizations to conceive of and run experiments that help them make better data-inspired decisions. Optimizely meets the diverse needs of more than 8,000 customers looking to deliver connected experiences to their audiences across channels. To date, those customers have created and delivered more than 7 billion optimized visitor experiences. To learn more, visit optimizely.com.   The goal of our Community promotion   We live in an increasingly digital and fast-paced world. Much of our daily interaction now exists online. When we’re unsure, we resort to Google or Quora. When we need help, we file a support ticket and expect our question to be answered instantaneously. What’s the challenge with this reality? It’s easy to forget that real humans are answering our support tickets, or responding to our community discussions.   So, for the 1 year anniversary of Optimizely’s community, Optiverse, I want to showcase the talented and fearless people who participate in our community every day. I created a weeklong campaign that was centered around the most crucial part of any community: its members. The goals of the promotion were 1) to make our community members proud that they are a part of Optiverse, and 2) to increase awareness about our community and encourage new registrations.   Our promotion strategy   We sent a message to our top community contributors and asked them to take a picture of themselves holding a sign that follows the prompt: “I am _______.” Each of these individual photos were used to create a video that emphasizes the idea -- “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Each unique community member has an impact on the success of the Optiverse.   To distribute the video, we sent an email to all existing Community members and a separate emails to our customer base who have not yet joined the Community. Each had a unique message and CTA. We used Optimizely to drive each segment to a personalized community landing page.   We gave each of the featured members their own “social pack” to make it easy for them to share on social networks. The pack included their photo, suggested tweets and LinkedIn posts.   Over the course of the week, Optimizely shared the journey of the Optiverse on Twitter. We shared some data highlights of the past year, but the main focus around the people (see screenshots below). We posted pictures of our VIPS alongside quotes about why they love the Optiverse. Typically, “year in review” campaigns are centered around all the statistics, data points, and numbers that convey success, so this approach was unique.   Finally, as an added incentive, we had a “birthday gift giveaway” running all week long for certain actions. As part of the week-long campaign, we were choosing random winners who posted, shared a testing story, or shared the community across social networks. This was a fun way to reward our top members and to involve those who aren’t always so active.   Promotion results   Over the course of the week, we saw large increases in posts, unique visitors, pageviews, and registrations. Here are a few results: Engagement (posts + kudos) increased 125% as compared to an average week in the prior month. Registrations increased 81% as compared to an average week in the prior month. Page Views increased 66% as compared to an average week in the prior month. Visits increased 71% as compared to an average week in the prior month. Unique Visitors increased 75% as compared to an average week in the prior month.   Our video    

Company: giffgaff logo Entry submitted by: Gregg Baker (gregg) Head of Community Community: giffgaff Community (http://community.giffgaff.com) Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch   giffgaff founded 5 years ago and known as “the mobile network run by you”, utilizes Lithium to provide a first class experience for our members. We don’t have call centers, high street stores or any of those expensive things, instead we are online only and pass on the savings to our members.   The goal of our Community promotion   The goal was based around loyalty. Rewarding the passion and effort from our members, positive reinforcement for other members to follow and a genuine thank you to our amazing community.   Our promotion strategy   Each year we look to acknowledge the outstanding efforts within our community, so we began an annual event known as “The GAFFTAs”. The GAFFTAs see members nominate other members for certain categories (such as most helpful, most welcoming, etc) and then a panel of judges from the Community will review these to determine the winner. This year we wanted to make this extra special so took it to the road, hand delivering the awards to the winners with a custom performance from two amazing performers – singing songs adapted for the winning members.   The results   It is hard to measure the quantitative value of an initiative like this. Qualitatively, it helped reinforce our values, it rewarded amazing members and kept them engaged, it empowered other members to be a part of the whole activity and it made our members feel even more special. That probably translates well when considering retention, life time value, loyalty, etc. Participation in the whole thing was strong, with 100s of nominations, 1000s of votes and lots of members getting involved in the whole thing.   Our video    

Company: StarHub  Entry submitted by: Darren Choo (darren) AVP of Social CRM Community: StarHub Community (http://community.starhub.com/) Lithy category: Marketing Champion   StarHub is Singapore's fully-integrated info-communications company, offering a full range of information, communications and entertainment services for both consumer and corporate markets. StarHub operates a mobile network that provides 4G, 3G and 2G services. It also manages an islandwide HFC network that delivers multi-channel pay TV services (including HDTV, Internet TV and on-demand services) as well as ultra-high speed residential broadband services. StarHub operates an extensive fixed business network that provides a wide range of data, voice and wholesale services. Over Singapore’s fibre-based Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network, StarHub offers a broad range of home and business broadband plans along with a host of advanced media-rich value-added services, such as IPTV for commercial entities.   StarHub Community activates its superfans to support its marketing strategies. Six in every 10 visitors come for its contests and user-generated marketing content instead of customer support. http://community.starhub.com/t5/Commendations-Testimonials/StarHub-Community-is-growing-and-we-have-YOU-to-thank-for-it/m-p/27176#M10     1) Beating the ZMOT Challenge The Social Customer believes more in actual user reviews than a brand’s marketing messages. This phenomenon—commonly known as Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)—can easily nullify the work of traditional marketing. To address this shift in consumer behaviour, StarHub Community generates user reviews. Lithium’s excellent SEO often surprises us with excellent search results. In fact more than half of the Community’s traffic comes from Searches. This allows StarHub to better manage ZMOT, instead of losing control to third party forums or showing no reviews at all  For example, here are some HomeHub reviews: http://community.starhub.com/t5/HomeHub-Reviews/idb-p/HomeHubSurvey     2) Influencer and Content Marketing Strategy Traditional influencer strategy pays influential bloggers to share content with their followers.  However, these blogs are off-domain and their credibility may also/often be questioned. Utilising Lithium’s blog function, an ordinary community blogger’s post can be promoted via the Community (using Outbrain native advertising and social syndication) and can have significant reach and effect, e.g: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Mobile-Handset-Reviews/Samsung-Galaxy-Note-Edge-Review-Changes-To-My-Smartphone/ba-p/112652. It is noteworthy that even a few ordinary commentators can greatly boost credibility, as people generally believe in actual users’ experience and reviews.    Lithium’s Group and Ask the Expert functions allow interests groups to be formed thus creating threads for common interests and within which there is greater perceived credibility for posted user reviews, e.g http://community.starhub.com/t5/Windows-Community-Group/Welcome-to-the-Windows-Community/gpm-p/75901#M88   3) Contest Engagement Strategy Traditional engagement utilises expensive microsites and Facebook applications with no consolidation of the relationships/connections with the customer. Often, contestants also do not get to see other contestants’ entries as well. The above issues are solved using Lithium’s Contest module for photo contests, for example: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/Contest-Closed-Win-a-Trip-To-Glasgow-to-watch-the-MTV-EMAs-2014/m-p/99559#M516) and Idea Exchange module for free flow user generated content contest with an added voting mechanism (see example http://community.starhub.com/t5/Past-Hackathons/CONTEST-CLOSED-Win-passes-to-meet-Kim-Soo-Hyun-in-person/m-p/73605#M16)   Our marketing campaign    Lady First SG is a StarHub-produced, localised version of the immensely popular Taiwanese beauty variety show, Lady First (女人我最大).  Each season lasted for about three months. To date, StarHub has produced two seasons in the past two years.   Female viewers in Taiwan, after watching the beauty programme, would go to the forums to discuss the beauty tips and products featured.  Tapping into this insight, social TV executions were executed on StarHub Community to bring these discussions online via StarHub Community.      The first mission was to source for beauty influencers to be the experts running the forums.  In the first season, we set up beauty forums by topics http://community.starhub.com/t5/Lady-First-SG/ct-p/ladyfirst and ran a contest for the top six beauty influencers to surface.    Eventually through intense competition, the top six contestants arose.  Please visit http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/StarHub-Community-s-first-offline-event-Meeting-up-with-the/m-p/26076#M218 to view the offline event. Together with partnering beauty brands’ influencers, they not only generated tonnes of beauty tips, but also became beauty experts from which others could seek advice: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Ask-The-Beauty-Expert/Learn-beauty-secrets-from-the-StarHub-Community-Beauty-Brand/m-p/44331#M2   Partnering brands also ran some contests: In the 2014 season of Lady First SG, we activated two of the original six beauty influencers.  Grace Tan was commissioned to blog about each episode in English while Yuki Ng did so in Chinese. The blog entries from both ladies were not mere translations but their own interpretations of the tips after watching each episode. We ran a contest asking members to post a comment on their blog entries or ask them questions. At the same time, we ran another contest to curate beauty tips from users with a chance to win a beauty workshop: http://community.starhub.com/t5/Past-Hackathons/Contest-Closed-Beauty-Workshop-by-Xiao-Kai/m-p/79381#M1  The contests were publicized on the TV trailers as well as online media.     Campaign results   Between Grace and Yuki, there were over 64,000 views and almost 600 comments on their blog entries alone. There are over 611,000 views on the Beauty section of the community where members get to discuss beauty and fashion related matters, such as finding out where to purchase the products featured in the show and share personal tips. Users can search by episodes or beauty topics to record their comments. In fact, the search term “Lady First” on Google yields StarHub Community as a prominent result.   With combined views of 675,000 across the blogs and forums on Lady First SG and Beauty and Fashion discussions, the execution has been a great success and has greatly enriched the content consumption experience with useful online content and engaging contests. The timeless tips shared on StarHub Community also continue to bring in traffic for the Community.      

Company: StarHub  Entry submitted by: Darren Choo (darren) AVP of Social CRM Community: StarHub Community (http://community.starhub.com/) Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   StarHub is Singapore's fully-integrated info-communications company, offering a full range of information, communications and entertainment services for both consumer and corporate markets. StarHub operates a mobile network that provides 4G, 3G and 2G services. It also manages an islandwide HFC network that delivers multi-channel pay TV services (including HDTV, Internet TV and on-demand services) as well as ultra-high speed residential broadband services. StarHub operates an extensive fixed business network that provides a wide range of data, voice and wholesale services. Over Singapore’s fibre-based Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network, StarHub offers a broad range of home and business broadband plans along with a host of advanced media-rich value-added services, such as IPTV for commercial entities.   Best in Social, a Social Business   The objective of StarHub Community is to transform StarHub into an engaging social business by letting different departments execute their social media initiatives on the platform, interacting more intimately with their targeted audiences and thereby positioning StarHub as a leader in Social Media.   A company-wide balance score card was created based on the number of projects the company activated on the platform. It was based on the Threshold, Target and Stretch targets of seven, eight or nine projects.   We achieved the Stretch benchmark of nine projects at the end of 2014 and bagged a regional award for Best Use of Social (http://www.marketing-interactive.com/le-awards-sg/winnersasiaall/).  StarHub Community also won the Lithium APAC Star Award (http://www.lithium.com/company/news-room/press-releases/2014/lithium-announces-lithy-award-and-hackathon-winners-at-linc-2014).   The success also enabled StarHub to be a thought leader in several industry seminars, including a Social CRM seminar and a Social Media Branding Conference in Singapore and Hong Kong, a testament to the success of StarHub Community and the credibility of StarHub’s social media presence. https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/pacific-conferences-presents-first-social-074500138.html, https://www.apconnections.com/industry-events/all/icalrepeat.detail/2014/08/11/131/-/-    StarHub Community has certainly helped StarHub to achieve leadership in the Social Media landscape, transforming the company to become a more social business and eventually facilitating the efforts of advocates to promote the brand.   In addition to the above strategic objectives, several tactical objectives were also listed:   Drive Peer to peer support Generate sales leads Increase customer satisfaction Attain most socially devoted brand status in Singapore   The nine projects which spanned across different departments of the organisation were: Content contest on MTV http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/Contest-Closed-Win-a-Trip-To-Glasgow-to-watch-the-MTV-EMAs-2014/m-p/99559#M516, Sponsorship contest on a famous Korean pop star http://community.starhub.com/t5/Past-Hackathons/CONTEST-CLOSED-Win-passes-to-meet-Kim-Soo-Hyun-in-person/m-p/73605#M16, StarHub e-books product contest partnering a company to form a Writing Interest group http://community.starhub.com/t5/Young-Author-Club/Welcome-to-the-Young-Author-Club/gpm-p/81977 New Channel “Hits” launch contest activation http://community.starhub.com/t5/HITS-TV-Shows/Welcome-to-the-HITS-TV-Shows-group/m-p/81919#U81919 Social TV Blog content for a popular women programme http://community.starhub.com/t5/Lady-First-Episodes/Welcome-to-the-Lady-First-Community/m-p/81285#U81285 Travel group as content strategy for our roaming product http://community.starhub.com/t5/General-Travel-Discussion/Welcome-to-the-Travel-Group/td-p/80637 Local music scene sponsorship contest http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/CLOSED-Win-a-pair-of-tickets-to-Xinyao-Reunion-Concert-%E6%98%8E%E5%A4%A932%E6%96%B0%E8%B0%A3%E6%BC%94%E5%94%B1%E4%BC%9A/m-p/94569#M284 Cross Bundle Product market research user reviews and inforgraphic http://community.starhub.com/t5/Hubbing/HomeHub-Review-See-what-our-customers-saying-about-HomeHub/m-p/86839#M324 Revamp of the super user programme http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/Meet-StarHub-Community-s-top-contributors-and-advocates/m-p/108091#U108091 Sales Leads Revenue   Although the main return on investment (ROI) for StarHub Community was a reduction in customer support costs, a surprising result was that when we channeled below-the-line recontract EDMs to StarHub Community for a few months, we actually saw huge ROI.  A post dedicated to broadband renewal promotions was created and when we directed EDMs to that post, we found that the conversation rate increased from 17% to 26%. We surmised that StarHub Community had become a place where customers can look at the most common questions and they can get their queries answered there quickly. This has become one of the most popular threads with 143,000 views. Considering StarHub has only about over 400,000 broadband households, the reach of the post is quite significant. From the leads generated from the web-based form, we are able to account for S$2.8 million in sales revenue.  http://community.starhub.com/t5/Broadband-Recontract-Offers/StarHub-Broadband-Recontract-offer-HomeHub-and-more/m-p/24794#U24794   Customer Support Savings   Within six months of implementation, the traffic to StarHub Community superseded the traffic to starhub.com/support page. It quickly managed to realise significant cost savings of S$300,000 in Customer Support in 2013 through peer-to-peer (crowdsourcing) support.   For 2014, we saw traffic increase by 84% and the resultant cost savings ballooned to over S$500,000. Our top three super users alone spent 3,800 hours on the community helping others!   Based on a poll we did, we found that 43% of visitors to community were here for support reasons and 82% eventually got an answer resulting in 34% of them no longer needing to call the contact centre.   Customer Satisfaction and Brand Equity Based on internal brand equity study results, StarHub scored significantly higher ratings on “online brand support forums” as compared to its competitors which have contributed to StarHub improving in the national published study on customer satisfaction according to The Customer Satisfaction Index of Singapore (CSISG).   Socially Devoted Because of the TKBs and accepted solutions on StarHub Community, we were able to provide better responses on Facebook, which remained the primary source of customer support queries on social.  The improved efficiency helped us earn the coveted most “Socially Devoted” brand in Singapore according to Social Bakers for all 4 quarters of 2014.   

Company: StarHub  Entry submitted by: Darren Choo (darren) AVP of Social CRM Community: StarHub Community (http://community.starhub.com/) Lithy category: Most Creative Community Promotion or Launch   StarHub is Singapore's fully-integrated info-communications company, offering a full range of information, communications and entertainment services for both consumer and corporate markets. StarHub operates a mobile network that provides 4G, 3G and 2G services. It also manages an islandwide HFC network that delivers multi-channel pay TV services (including HDTV, Internet TV and on-demand services) as well as ultra-high speed residential broadband services. StarHub operates an extensive fixed business network that provides a wide range of data, voice and wholesale services. Over Singapore’s fibre-based Next Generation Nationwide Broadband Network, StarHub offers a broad range of home and business broadband plans along with a host of advanced media-rich value-added services, such as IPTV for commercial entities.   The goal of our Community milestone promotion   The original advocate programme, called Sparklers Club, was launched in 2013 and it was a success with over 40 advocates. Not only were the members active in helping others, they are also our product trialists, beta testers, bloggers, market research respondents, advisors and co-creators. They were also helping us to avert social media crises and ward off social media trolls and bullies. To sample the Sparklers Club, please visit http://community.starhub.com/t5/General-Discussions-Community/We-want-YOU-for-our-Sparklers-Club/m-p/78177#M1149   However, we wanted a smaller group of super-active advocates to make the programme even more exclusive.  Hence, we redesigned the advocate programme, featuring three different types of advocates. The Superstars are the top three advocates and others who made waves via the gamification engine are Rockstars.  A different category called Heroes were created for their contribution of interesting content such as blogs, or creating interest groups or contests.       The goal of this new Community milestone promotion was to relaunch the StarHub Community advocates effort. We called it the StarHub Community All-Stars Programme.  http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/Meet-StarHub-Community-s-top-contributors-and-advocates/m-p/108091#U108091   To gain some insight for the campaign, we interviewed the advocates to understand better their motivations for helping others. The top three advocates, for instance, spent 3,800 hours on the Community helping others! However, they could not explain why they spent so much time doing so. However, when we showed them the carefully crafted Manifesto, they could immediately identify with the statements. We concluded that they truly believe they are making a difference to the Community, to the company and to the world, with a spirit of altruism.   The new Community tagline was aptly changed to “The Community Run by You” to credit the advocates who passionately run and drive StarHub Community. Besides the new tagline, a new gamification badge system  http://community.starhub.com/t5/badges/userbadgespage/user-id/10764/page/1 and a new landing page http://community.starhub.com were created to support the entire new advocate branding programme.   Our promotion strategy   We took the first step to let the company know more about our advocate programme. The top 3 advocates (Superstars) on StarHub Community were recognised at StarHub’s internal Staff Comms Session which was attended by hundreds of StarHub employees. Our CEO, Mr Tan Tong Hai, presented certificates of appreciation to them on the stage and shared their contributions with the whole organisation. The crowd cheered, applauded and stood up for our superusers!   Next, we identified the advocates from the 4 th to 10 th positions (Rockstars) and special contributors (Heroes). We consolidated all their profiles (Superstars included) and assigned custom gamification badges to each advocate based on their skill sets and contributions.   Each of them was given a write-up for the Community to get to know them better.  http://community.starhub.com/t5/Latest-Contests-and-What-s-New/Meet-StarHub-Community-s-top-contributors-and-advocates/m-p/108091#U108091   An offline event was planned to celebrate the new Community programme’s re-launch. The objective of the promotion campaign was to make our advocates feel like they are superstars. In line with the superstars or superhero theme, we booked the Mint Museum of Toys for the event and advocates were encouraged to dress up as superheroes for the event.     A creative name #SCREAM14 was given to the event (#SCREAM14 = StarHub Community Reunion Event for Advocates and Members). Specially designed posters, tote bags and “trophies” were created for the event. Watch this video to see what happened at the event:   Our promotion results   The #SCREAM14 event was a success!  Since our theme was Superheroes, several advocates came dressed in costumes and some even brought their own props!   During the event, each member was given a customised trophy in recognition of their contribution to the community. Many of them proudly display them in their offices.   The group was also given an exclusive preview of an upcoming revamp of the StarHub Community landing page for their feedback. In so doing, they are made to feel that they are the co-creators of the revamped StarHub Community.   As the event happened on the birthday of our top advocate (@IncTEh), we took the opportunity to celebrate his birthday together with another member who is also an October baby.   At the end of the event, we let our hair down, broke out into smaller groups and lingered way past the event’s end time. There were no agendas—just casual conversations about life, work and everything else. It was a great way to unwind even though it was a Thursday night.   The StarHub Community All-Stars programme public post went “live” right after the event, announcing the criteria for joining and the list of those in this group.   The result of this campaign is that the advocates were made aware of the fact that they are deeply treasured by the company, that they helped to win several industry awards and the Community now knows who run the Community. StarHub once again lived up to its promise of delivering “Power to the People”!        Video entry:    

Company: Orange Spain   Entry submitted by: Santiago Martín Martín (tiako) Social Support Manager Community: Comunidad Orange (https://comunidad.orange.es) and La Comunidad amena.com (https://comunidad.amena.com) Lithy category: Total Community All Star   Orange Espagne SAU is one of the biggest telecom companies in Spain with almost 15 million of customers. It is part of Orange Group and operates with three brands in the Spanish market: Orange, amena.com and Simyo.   In 2014, Orange Spain took the decision to take a big step in the social support of our customers. Lithium applications were a key enabler and platform for the execution of this new strategy.   The cornerstone of this strategy has been the launch of new communities, in our two brands (Orange and Amena.com) as a new space of conversation and help among our customers.   Our main business goal has been call deflection with a big focus in superusers cultivation program (see Marketing champion Orange Spain application). We have used extensively gamification facilities of Lithium community to get our superusers to create a big amount of solutions to other customers issues.     Orange Spain community replaced our old forums and it proved essential to not losing SEO positioning of main threads thanks to the easy and proper migration process.   The benefits of having both Community and LSW for our digital strategy   Community is the link between our social strategy and the website. Users are creators of many content that complement help & support contents. It is also a strongest generator of traffic to the website, because of  the good SEO performance it has.   In our omnichannel strategy, communities is central regarding social. All our social marketing and customer support in other media is always referencing and linking community content.   In our brand amena.com, which is oriented to digital customers, community is even more important: 25% of our customers visit the community every month.   In addition, we decided to put in place a new social customer support model, mainly in Facebook and Twitter, focusing on customer satisfaction, resolution and response time.   LSW has helped us to build this new model and to get the highest performance of our support and comms teams. We have made extensive usage of tagging, queuing and reporting facilities of the application, getting the better efficiency of our agents who only have to be focused in solving our customer request and incidents.   Our Total Community Results   Regarding communities, we have got 300k monthly visits. Mainly, these visits are coming to communities to solve any doubt or problem. We have found that 27% of visitors surveyed, say that they get their problem solved in their visit, so we are saving costs consistently: around 500k euros at year.   We are very happy also with the contribution to the community of our superusers: 56% of topics of the last month, got a solution by one of them.   Regarding social media, Facebook and Twitter, we are very proud of achieving our goals of response time and customer satisfaction: we answer 90% of posts in our SLA time (2 hours), and we got 80% of customer satisfaction in these interactions.   These indicators have put us consistently in the top-5 of most socially devoted brands in Spain on Facebook, month by month, according to Social Bakers ranking (http://www.socialbakers.com/resources/reports/regional/spain/2015/january/)    

Company: Microsoft Mobile  Entry submitted by: Delfin Vassallo (DJVassallo) Social Media Operations Manager LSW social channels: Facebook- global, Twitter- global, plus local ones, in total 107 social presences managed Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT”) is the worldwide leader in software, services, devices and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.   In 2012, Microsoft Mobile (Nokia at the time) had a presence in social media with Twitter and Facebook accounts; however, many of the cases went unanswered and unaddressed. This was simply because they were not listening on social due to having insufficient tools with their first vendor and an inadequate team to manage social care requests.   Microsoft Mobile needed to invest in and get serious about social—and fast. They switched to a second vendor from 2012-2013, but their solution was falling short and they needed to operationalize their Social Care Practice on a bigger scale. That was the tipping point.   In 2013, the business—now Microsoft Mobile after Nokia’s acquisition—launched a critical quest for a new digital solution that offered multiple features and a stable platform that could grow with them over time.   GOAL Implement a new, long-term digital solution that can grow with Microsoft Mobile’s expanding needs on social media to offer customers top-tier customer service   In 2014, Microsoft Mobile chose Lithium Social Web (LSW) primarily because they needed a tool that they could trust in terms of stable, scalable technology.   To be successful on social, brands need three elements: 1) Adequate tools/technologies 2) Seamless processes for handling customer feedback 3) A team of people who are trained in the brand’s internal voice, as they are the stars of the show   If one of those three elements is broken, the whole solution doesn’t work. With LSW, Microsoft Mobile is now confident in the technology piece and that the tool will continue to evolve as the social media industry changes.   “LSW was implemented to provide social customer service across 100+ social media presences globally, in 24 languages with a 140+ staff working around the clock from 7 different locations. Our highly complex operation is coordinated by only four internal resources; Our LSW set up is one of the most complex of all Lithium clients,” said Delfin Vassallo, Social Media Operations Manager Europe at Microsoft.   Changes as a result of LSW implementation   Microsoft Mobile started this project with two Twitter handles in two languages and one Facebook page. Now with LSW, they are efficiently managing an entire expanded suite of social channels: 66 Facebook pages 34 Twitter handles 7 contact centers (working around the clock to service customers in 24 languages)   To organize and coordinate all of these channels, personnel, languages, and time zones is quite complex, but the LSW platform allows Microsoft Mobile to do it seamlessly.   They are handling 230% more volume of cases than before the adoption of LSW, while only increasing headcount by 15%.   LSW has given Microsoft Mobile the immediate ability to manage the astonishingly fast increase in volume (on average 70k unique cases per month) while making teams more efficient and productive in order to meet the target response times.   One of the most noticeable impacts to the Microsoft Mobile organization is the development of their Social Care team. In 2013, the global team comprised 90 staff members. Now they are at 145 full-time social media agents plus team leaders, quality monitors, and trainers.   With the right technology now in place, Microsoft Mobile is able to focus on developing and growing a very well-curated hiring and training program. Their management team saw the opportunity and decided to prioritize it by investing in the right tools and the right team to make their social customer support program world-class.   They predicted social would be big, but not THIS big. Through Lithium analytics and reporting, the Microsoft Mobile leadership team has been able to validate that they made the right decision to invest in social. Therefore, they continue to support the growing Social Care program due to the impressive results.   From a cross-functional perspective, LSW has allowed Microsoft Mobile to optimize resources in smaller, typically budget-constrained markets. Marketing now provides the content and creativity, and the Social Care team handles the social presence. The result of multiple teams working through one tool is that the customer receives one single answer through one unified brand voice.   “We could handle a 230% 2013-14 YoY volume increase by only increasing 15% our staff,” said Delfin Vassallo, Social Media Operations Manager Europe at Microsoft.   Business results   The Microsoft Mobile customers immediately saw a change with LSW. The Social Care team was flooded with positive comments, thanking them for the competent and quick responses on social.   Microsoft Mobile was able to get back to the customer faster than they expect (as quick as 4 minutes with an average response time of 2 hours vs. the industry benchmark of 7 hours)-- and with a meaningful and complete answer to their problem.   “Customers are becoming more demanding on social channels. They ask a lot of support questions and express doubts about products/services, so the key for brands is to answer fast. That sounds pretty simple, but if you don’t have the right tools in place, you aren’t able to do that. LSW allows us to service our customers quickly and competently. Lithium continues to stay ahead of the game with regards to customer behaviors and demands." Delfin Vassallo, Social Media Operations Manager, Microsoft Mobile Europe   Microsoft Mobile is able to resolve 95% of cases in-channel on social, which means they rarely redirect customers to other assisted channels such as phone or chat. As a result, their volume has skyrocketed, because the more they answer customer inquiries quickly and efficiently, the more customers trust them and want to ask additional questions.   Microsoft Mobile customers’ satisfaction is the ultimate metric of success— Microsoft Mobile is thrilled to receive overwhelmingly positive sentiments, indicating that they are making a huge impact on customers.   In summary, Microsoft Mobile agents’ productivity increased as they are now able to handle more cases and faster: First contact resolution rose to 95% (some languages keep a steady 100%) Average case handling time went down from 20 minutes to 9mins Response time was kept under 2 hours despite the overwhelming increase in demand. The overall cost saving of handling more cases in social rather than in traditional assisted channels was around 80%            

Company: Barclaycard  Entry submitted by: Jennifer Hitchens (JenH) Community Manager Community: Barclaycard Travel Community (BarclaycardTravel.com)  Lithy category: Marketing Champion     Barclaycard US is the 9 th  largest credit card issuer in the US. We believe that building community environments helps to support our credit card products creates a differentiated customer experience through enhanced support and innovative engagement.   The Barclaycard Travel Community: A portion of Barclaycard cardmembers are invited to join a community, share their travel experience, look to other members for travel inspiration and earn miles for engaging in community activities.   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.  Lithium’s community platform is the driving force behind out latest marketing initiative for the Barclaycard Travel Community.   The Barclaycard Travel Community Great Getaway Giveaway Campaign This campaign utilized the Lithium platform capabilities in 5 different ways to launch an online sweepstakes promotion in November of 2014 called the Great Getaway Giveaway.     The primary focus of the marketing campaign was to increase community registrations to BarclaycardTravel.com and helped in exceeding the 2014 goal of 100,000 total community member registrations.   Using the Lithium platform, we were able to develop a campaign that would:    Represent the premium quality of the Barclaycard US brand in design and experience Increase awareness of the Barclaycard Travel Community Include meaningful interactions with contest participants - without creating obstacles to entry Allow users to stay within a single, mobile-friendly environment     Our marketing campaign   We incorporated a variety of the Lithium platform functionality to build a successful marketing campaign:  1) The Great Getaway Giveaway featured a two-tier prize structure which not only promoted Community registrations through a sweepstakes, but highlighted the storytelling aspects of the Community that utilizes the blogging platform on Lithium.   2) Our customized home page on the Lithium platform enabled us to feature the Great Getaway Giveaway prominently in the rotating image “Hero” area:   3) The Lithium registration and login path was modified to enable existing Barclaycard Travel Community members to sign in, share their dream trip on the dedicated Lithium ‘Great Getaway Giveaway’ Discussion Board for a chance to win the Grand Prize. The registration flow also enabled a new registration flow where new users were seamlessly taken (after registration) to the dedicated Lithium ‘Great Getaway Giveaway’ Discussion Board for the second step of the sweepstakes.   4) We created a responsive registration page that enabled for a seamless mobile experience.   Step 1: (New registration path that is mobile optimized)     Step 2: Submitting a dream trip as an ‘entry’ in the dedicated discussion thread (also mobile optimized). Discussion board was customized for optimal viewing on multiple browsers and devices and Lithium out of box board settings were implemented so that a registered community member could only submit one dream trip.   5) To encourage our active (and newly registered) users to socially share the marketing campaign, we implemented a customized Lithium social sharing component with pre-populated text for a quick and easy method of spreading the word.   We also launched a #TravelSkills Twitter Chat with one of our key influencers, Johnny Jet and reinforced the #GreatGetawayGiveaway hashtag.     #TravelSkills Twitter Chat with Johnny Jet featuring #GreatGetawayGiveaway images in all questions 1,300 tweets with 339 contributors 3.3M reach 3M timeline deliveries Key Participants: Travel and Leisure, Marriott International, SmarterTravel, JDAndrews, Brett Snyder   Our campaign results   Great Getaway Giveaway Campaign Results: Exceeded 100K Goal 31,824 new registrants: Exceeding our total campaign goal by 59% 26,510 “Dream Trip” submissions by community members; averaged 1 submission every 2 ½ minutes 430K Page Views during Sweepstakes; normal Page View average is 237K per month. Increased engagement with existing Arrival cardmembers During the sweepstakes promotion, increased Arrival cardmembers registering in the community by 20%. Increase Social Media Mentions  1,123 Social Media Mentions (sentiment was 100% positive): 5% of mentions on Twitter #GreatGetawayGiveaway 27% of mentions on Facebook Promoted posts = 252 shares   In addition to promoting the campaign via email, we also incorporated a paid media campaign on Facebook: 14% of all registrations originated from Facebook Utilized 11% of budget for FB ads     Email Campaigns provided high impact with very low cost: 61% of all registrations attributed from newsletter Utilized 2% of budget to deploy 3 emails   Key Learnings: Mobile capability integral Integration of social sharing essential Email targeting highest performing results Creative assets: build in house Repurpose existing assets & terms for potential future campaigns utilizing Lithium platform  

Company: Orange Spain   Entry submitted by: Santiago Martín Martín (tiako) Social Support Manager Community: Comunidad Orange (https://comunidad.orange.es) and La Comunidad amena.com (https://comunidad.amena.com) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   Orange Espagne SAU is one of the biggest telecom companies in Spain with almost 15 million of customers. It is part of Orange Group and operates with three brands in the Spanish market: Orange, amena.com and Simyo.   In 2014, Orange Spain took the decision to take a big step in the social support of our customers. Lithium applications were a key enabler and platform for the execution of this new strategy.   The cornerstone of this strategy has been the launch of new communities, in our two brands (Orange and Amena.com) as a new space of conversation and help among our customers.   Our main business goal has been call deflection with a big focus in superusers cultivation program (see Marketing champion Orange Spain application). We have used extensively gamification facilities of Lithium community to get our superusers to create a big amount of solutions to other customers issues.     Orange Spain community replaced our old forums and it proved essential to not losing SEO positioning of main threads thanks to the easy and proper migration process.   Besides, we decided to put in place a new social customer support model, mainly in Facebook and Twitter, focusing on customer satisfaction, resolution and response time.   LSW has helped us to build this new model and to get the highest performance of our support and comms teams. We have made extensive usage of tagging, queuing and reporting facilities of the application, getting the better efficiency of our agents who only have to be focused in solving our customer request and incidents.   Our customer care organization changes as a result of cost reductions with Community and LSW   All the activity in communities and social media channels is managed by two different areas of the company: Comms and Customer Support, with more than 50 people conversing with our customers. In telco industry, main part or social activity is about customers asking support. It is a big challenge to be able to build a model that integrates social support seamlessly in the whole customer support processes.   LSW has allowed us to organize tasks and people and get the most of everyone. We have been able to integrate the work of community managers, support agents, web advisors and community moderators. All they know who is the responsible to answer any tweet or post coming to our social accounts thanks to the queues and rules that we have built over LSW.   We are proud of our highly motivated and skilled teams!!  Our business results   Regarding communities, we have got 300k monthly visits. Mainly, these visits are coming to communities to solve any doubt or problem. We have found that 27% of visitors surveyed, say that they get their problem solved in their visit, so we are saving costs consistently: around 500k euros at year.   We are very happy also with the contribution to the community of our superusers: 56% of topics of the last month, got a solution by one of them.   Regarding social media, Facebook and Twitter, we are very proud of achieving our goals of response time and customer satisfaction: we answer 90% of posts in our SLA time (2 hours), and we got 80% of customer satisfaction in these interactions.   These indicators have put us consistently in the top-5 of most socially devoted brands in Spain on Facebook, month by month, according to Social Bakers ranking.         

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Jared Schultheis (jschultheis) Executive Director, Digital Care Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums (Forums.comcast.com)  LSW: @comcastcares, facebook.com/xfinity Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   Comcast Corporation is a global media and technology company with two primary businesses, Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal. Comcast Cable is the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Our 2014 objectives   Comcast strategic enhancements in 2014 included expanding the use of Lithium Social Web and completely redesigning and enhancing our Comcast community.  We significantly expanded our use of all features of the engagement console to measure the investment, success and the increasing need to support the social channel better.  Similar work was done in the community, such as building:   Gamification Author profiles Mobile Expert user program Content management Search Dedicated moderation Cross-channel integration   Key achievements include:   Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Integration The integration of CRM is a significant first step in allowing us to analyze customer behaviors, close the communication gap from social to other front line channels and identify account health opportunities. Below is a timeline reflecting the integration of social with other touch points a customer had with the company.   Escalation Workflow We now have a more stable workflow to escalate conversations to our divisional teams and senior specialists within the Digital Care team. The new enhanced workflow increased our in-channel resolution rates significantly (nearly 20 pp).   Routing Enhancements The routing system was built with multiple triaging capabilities. Specialists can now work on specific issues based on their background and strengths.  This provides not just a better customer experience but a more in-depth measurement on trending tags.  Below shows an example of the tagging system Comcast uses to triage social volume.  Early Warning System The dashboard helps the Digital Care team alert multiple organizations within the company on trending events on social. In many cases, outages or viral events were recognized 30 minutes in advance of a normal call center trend or spike in volume.  In the first three months of using the console, the cost savings have exceeded expectations.   While the Digital Care team is saving Comcast significant costs through call deflection, call avoidance, customer health and customer engagement, the most passionate win for the team the improvement in the overall customer experience.  Our biggest ROI measurement is our increased ability to provide best-in-class service to our customers.   Comcast’s number one goal is to transform our customer experience. We strive to provide outstanding service to our customers, offer them the best products in the market and be proactive with our communication.  Social media has become a strong and effective service channel for our customers to seek solutions to issues or answers to their questions.  The ROI for Comcast is the improved capability of our Digital Care team to provide excellent service.  Our customers deserve the best experience every time they interact with us and to find care and support through whatever channel they want to use.  With the help of Lithium communities and LSW, we are able to measure success and track volume and engagement from each social platform.  With these simple measurements, we have been able to demonstrate the effectiveness of social care leading to a tripling in size of the Digital Care team (http://corporate.comcast.com/comcast-voices/now-hiring-comcastcares ). With these additional team members we will be able support customers across more platforms and get to them faster.  The growth of digital care has been explosive the past two years.  The following chart shows the growth and development of our social care strategy and capabilities over time.   In addition, our Community roadmap continues to be geared towards: optimizing and growing the community, organizing and improving content, and scaling and integrating cross-channel. Through these initiatives, we expect the ROI on our community to increase by 500% by the end of 2015.   Additional business results achieved   The Digital Care team has a unique opportunity to improve the overall customer experience.  As we have built out our social care capabilities our data has shown us that although the social care team is providing timely and effective resolutions to issues, the sentiment of the social conversation remains neutral (see diagram below).  When customers reach out to the Digital Care team for support, they expect us to resolve their issue.  Although the care specialist resolves the issue, the customer can still have a negative or neutral sentiment because the issue happened in the first place.  To increase customer satisfaction and brand perception, the Digital Care team now conducts a wellness exam to proactively look for potential problems or red flags on accounts.  For example, the specialist researches a customer’s bill to discover when his or her promotion is up, makes the customer aware, and in some cases repackages them on the spot to a more affordable package.  This is a great way to inform and educate customers about their services and provide opportunities to surprise and delight them.    We measure customer contact rates from multiple channels and are finding that social can be very effective at providing a better customer experience.  Since 2010, we have seen nearly a 25% reduction in calls coming in and a 35% reduction in the need for service visits to customers’ homes in part by providing solutions through social and community channels. Through detailed analysis and application of data garnered through our LSW Analytics and LSI for our communities, we have seen that the amplification benefit or providing solutions that other customers can use has helped the Digital Care team handle nearly double the volume of more traditional channels. Assuring customers that the person on the other side of the social conversation is doing everything he or she can to be responsive and helpful will help increase customer loyalty. Our mission is to provide care and support to anyone who needs help, wherever they want it through accurate measurement and timely responses on all channels while continuously improving the customer experience. 

Company: Orange Spain   Entry submitted by: Santiago Martín Martín (tiako) Social Support Manager Community: Comunidad Orange (https://comunidad.orange.es) and La Comunidad amena.com (https://comunidad.amena.com) Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Orange Espagne SAU is one of the biggest telecom companies in Spain with almost 15 million of customers. It is part of Orange Group and operates with three brands in the Spanish market: Orange, amena.com and Simyo.   Lithium platform is a key enabler for engaging our community members and achieving our key objective: develop and motivate superusers to 1) help other customers, 2) develop quality content. We rely on Lithium´s ranking configuration to create in the Orange Community a hierarchy of users based on participation and offer specific incentives, allowing us to increase the value of the contributions and improving brand perception. Different user roles (solucionadores –solvers-, master tekkies, friendly) help to perceive the user as a “superusuario” (superuser) with special privileges granted to those considered experts in different matters such as Smartphones tips and  tricks, Model recommendation or Trouble-shooting.   In the same way, thanks to gamification programs, those not yet “superusers” increase their participation and stickiness to the Community in order to achieve “superuser” status. Superusers amplify both brand advocacy and belonging to the Community.   During the last ten months (From May to February) we extracted data about users from “Metrics” section (post, visits, response, threads, most  active users, most  engage users, etc…). We needed to identify our most valuable users. Regarding these KPIs  we designed different sections within the community structure in order to redirect their “know how” (solutions, reviews, etc..) to specific categories,  and empower them within our Community. We reached out to them and they accepted to increase their participation in the community. Then,  we designed a public ranking with the best users (solvers, Kudos, etc..) and the users tried to achieve the top rank. The ranking shows number of post, visits to community, logins and when they achieve a high level the users win a medal/badge that identify the user as a “superuser”.   We identified and promoted different types of users that added value to the Community. Based on the pattern of their participation, we designed a strategy of monitoring and encouraging trough incentives to increase the value of their contribution, both for the company (reduction of service calls, increased brand perception, commercial communication increase, etc…) and the Community users. We can now distinguish different types of “superusers”, each identified with their own medal.   Solvers: users who give support and help with solutions to user`s incidences without intervention even of official moderators. They reduce the number of calls to call-centers, improve the post/solution ratio and become a model to follow in the Community. They have their own medal. 30% of traffic in the Community is related to solved problems posts. Master Tekkies: Users with an active role and faithful to the Community. They participate, help others and give kudos. They are advocates of the Brand as they rise online positivity. Friendly: Newly arrived users that encourage help and collaboration. Results of the SuperUsers program   Since launch of the Superusers program in May 2014, traffic in the community has doubled, reaching 300k monthly visits. Since launch of Solvers program in November 2014, the solution ratio increased from 20% to 60% by March 2015 due to two main reasons: LSW optimization by agents (flux, labels, priorities) and participation of “Solvers” in the Community.  Ten months ago, we did not have any superuser , and currently there are 12 “superusers” solving doubts and writing reviews.  

Company: SANE Australia  Entry submitted by: Faruk Avdi (faruchidor) Director – Digital, Service Design & Technology Community: SANE Forums (www.saneforums.org) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction     SANE Australia is a leading mental health charity. It is devoted to helping all Australians affected by mental illness lead a better life -- through support, training, and education. SANE began its operations almost thirty years ago, and its award-winning information services and Helpline are highly regarded.   In 2014, our customer satisfaction initiatives were as follows: The release of anonymous, moderated online peer-to-peer support services for people affected by mental illness, in the form of two online communities: one for people living with mental illness, and one for family, friends and other carers An innovative Partner-and-syndicate model (the first to our knowledge in the health sector) involving syndication of the communities to 15 other not-for-profit service providers (See: https://saneforums.org and then http://saneforums-access.org/t5/custom/page/page-id/Forum-Access for partner versions. By ‘syndication’ we mean the communities are ‘embedded’ in partner websites, taking on their branding, and seamlessly available via primary navigation. Partner organisations are also enabled to publish their own content via custom components within the communities, see: http://mindaustralia.saneforums.org/t5/Our-experience-stories/bd-p/le-forum-0001 for an example) A mobile customisation of the services mentioned above (Lithium mobile version 1), integrated into SANE’s website menu and adopting branding elements for partner versions.   The most important customer issues SANE Australia was looking to solve via its Lithium implementation were: Providing a moderated and anonymous online peer-to-peer service to all people affected by mental illness, in all locations of Australia, including those isolated by distance or other factors A service covering the full spectrum of mental illness, but focused on the person, not the diagnosis Creation of strong and welcoming communities Enabling members and non-members alike to safely obtain and discover quality peer support and information, which empowers them to deal with mental health issues Contribute to the improved mental health of Forums users Enable discovery of the service via trusted relationships formed within pre-existing (offline) communities   SANE Forums has been designed as a service, end-to-end, utilising user-centred design. User-centred service design helped SANE identify potential difficulties in discoverability of the service (with only a small budget for marketing).   This led to the design and eventual delivery of the partner-and-syndicate model referred to in Q1. This model allows individuals in the community to discover and participate in SANE Forums via a trusted context of an organisation they are already familiar with. This has extended the reach of SANE Forums to tens of thousands more individuals.   This partner-and-syndicate model has had many collateral benefits. Taken together they demonstrate a ‘gold-standard’ approach in the mental health sector: Between 60% and 75% of users are obtaining the intended benefits of the service THE Community Health Index (CHI) of SANE Forums sits around 500-550 since the launch of the forums in August Nearly 30% of service traffic has come in through partner websites The service is free-of-charge to partner-organisations in return for a contribution of hours and/or expertise into the pool of moderators, thus increasing the specialist advice available via the forums Organisations in an underfunded sector are able to leverage expensive world-class technology, pooling efforts and expertise    SANE Forums is unique in Australia, providing the first non-diagnosis-specific, online peer-to-peer support service for people living with mental illness, and the first truly national and viable online peer-to-peer support service for families, friends and other carers.   ‘I so truly love that I can honestly share a little of me here and be privileged to read and know of others stories. Thank you Sane and all the people here sharing. I feel a glimmer of understanding and connection in this forum that I have not felt before.’ -  Member, Lived Experience Forum    ‘ Hi Everyone, Just wanted to let you know how helpful I have found the information posted here. My husband has major depression and has been receiving treatment in a clinic. This process was a stressful one for us both, including the time leading up to the hospital stay.   As a result of your input, I have found myself being far more assertive and proactive … and I have made contact with carer support organisations and have a couple of referrals in for programs for both myself and my husband.   Thankyou for helping me navigate a way through/ into the system!’   - Member, Carers Forum   SANE Forums was funded by the Australian Government, Department of Health and launched in August 2014. The service has exceeded all expectations and metrics set by the Department for visitation and usage. Within seven months of the launch and as at 21 March 2015, SANE Forums have had: 32,141 unique visitors 8,700 visitors from rural, regional and remote areas (estimate) 1,002 members 265 members (27%) from rural, regional and remote areas 10,795 comments posted 339,366 pages of comments and information viewed 101,334 pages of comments and information viewed via smart phone Almost one third of users (28%) have accessed the service through our partner organisations.   Registrations for the service have very steadily increased since launch. An initial seeding and testing pool of 300+ members helped launch a warm and welcoming service, vibrant with helpful discussion, from day one.   Member registrations per month   The service remains non-diagnostic in focus, and uniquely available to people experiences health issues across the full spectrum of mental health issues.   Content analysis in an Evaluation conducted on the service found a great diversity among members, with 29 different diagnoses discussed across the Carers and Lived Experience Forums.   Common non-diagnosis specific discussion themes include the following: Issues Carers Forum % Coping with mental illness and symptoms of loved ones 60% Navigating mental health systems 45% Refusing treatment 40% Relation breakdown/conflict 40% Stress/worry/anxiety 30% Lived Experience Forum % Symptoms 63% Assessment/treatment 40% Medication 47% Relationships 41% Stress/worry/anxiety 26%   Both communities are showing various signs of good and growing health, including a CHI score hovering between 500 and 550, and the vast majority of comments being posted by and in response to community members:   Member and moderator generated posts % In terms of the primary purpose of the service, early indications look very promising. The highest-rated themes reported by respondents to the recent Evaluation survey were: Safety Connection Less stigma Feeling supported by peers   The fostering of these elements will assist in continual growth and participation of members and the overall sense of community. Evaluation findings also show that mental health benefits are emerging. Increased mental health literacy and empowerment were highly rated across both communities.   Repeat visitors to the service average 25-30% per week. Average session durations on the forums averages above 10 minutes per session. The Evaluation referred to above has many positive statistics indicating the service is becoming an important resource for people living with mental illness, and for families, friends and other carers in Australia.   To share some statistics from just one category, concerning ‘access to reliable information, advice and referral drawing on the vast experience and expertise of peers as well as that of experts in the field’, the Evaluation found: 88.9% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 64.4% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they can find advice and support that is suitable and/or relevant for their needs 81.5% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 80% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they have gained new insights through hearing about other people’s experiences 51.9% of respondents from the Carers Forum and 48.9% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they have used information resources (links, phone numbers and other) provided in discussion threads 55.6% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 48.9% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they’ve learned new practical strategies 37.0% of survey respondents from the Carers Forum and 31.1% from the Lived Experience Forum agree that they have accessed services recommended by members and/or moderators   These statistics show that the service is making a real difference in people’s lives.   This marks a turning point for online, peer-to-peer support services in Australia.   All of this has been made possible via the efforts of talented and caring people from Snaffle Web, Isobar, Persistent Systems and Lithium, and with Lithium's platform and ongoing generous support.  

Company: Comcast  Entry submitted by: Jared Schultheis (jschultheis) Executive Director, Digital Care Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums (Forums.comcast.com)  LSW: @comcastcares, facebook.com/xfinity Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast Corporation is a global media and technology company with two primary businesses, Comcast Cable and NBCUniversal. Comcast Cable is the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build an advanced network that delivers among the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Transforming the customer experience is Comcast’s number one goal. Our customers deserve the best experience every time they interact with us. We have made significant changes and investments in our infrastructure, systems, processes, technology, and tools to improve the customer experience, including the ability to reach our customers quickly and easily through social media.   A key strategy in our multi-year roadmap to improving customer experience is using technology and innovation to delight customers. Expanding and continuing to evolve our Digital Care is an essential tactic in giving customers more choice in how they connect with us and solve problems.   The Digital Care team’s mission is simple: provide care and support to anyone who needs help, whenever and wherever he or she wants it. In 2014, the Digital Care team was challenged with these goals:   Increase the percentage of customers served through social media (by 100%), Improve our ability to resolve customer inquiries directly within social care (to 90%+)   Through the application of technology, operational rigor and a determination to provide world-class service, the team more than exceeded our goals.   Our 2014 objectives were to achieve greater scale, resolve customer inquiries directly within our channel and drive positive change within the organization through actionable insights.   Scale: The number of customers supported by the Digital Care team since forming in 2008 has increased by 2,000% and continues to expand exponentially.  Satisfying our customers’ needs begins with organizing the team in a way that is scalable, flexible and fully supported by the larger organization. We created distinct roles within Digital Care that include three teams: Triage Generalists Tenured experts capable of addressing complex inquiries.   Creating this team and new processes was made possible by the advanced routing, tagging and tracking within LSW.   In Channel Resolution: When customers call, chat or tweet about their service, they expect a resolution to happen through that channel. Our ability to resolve customer inquiries directly within social media depends on the team having access to all appropriate tools, the training to use those tools and direct lines of contact to other internal teams. Even when we call in other teams to help work through the customer’s inquiry, we remain the single point of contact for a customer. Through this approach, we have garnered credibility and demonstrated the long-term viability of social as a strong and effective service channel that requires much less effort from the customer.     Insights:  Through LSW, we have created a Social Operations Center and Alerting System that provides real time trending specific to our product lines. This gives us an unfiltered stream of customer input and the ability to alert the appropriate teams when issues begin trending. This technology allows us to sort through the noise and provide meaningful information to the organization on a real time basis to consistently seeking out opportunities to transform the customer experience.     Because social and community support are ‘one-to-many’ interactions, a solution for one customer can often help out dozens or even hundreds of others, helping to avoid unnecessary customer questions and contacts. Based on a number of factors, including the ability to reach us through digital and social channels and tools like the My Account app that allow customers to more easily troubleshoot issues, Comcast has reduced the volume of customer contacts in traditional channels. Since 2010, we have seen nearly a 25% reduction in calls coming in and a 35% reduction in the need for service visits to customers’ homes in part by providing solutions through social and community channels. Through detailed analysis and application of data garnered through our LSW Analytics and LSI for our communities, we have seen that this amplification benefit has helped the Digital Care team handle nearly double the volume of more traditional channels.   There are several key areas where the Digital Care team is driving improvements that directly and indirectly impact customer satisfaction including:    Efficiency Gains: making it easier and faster for customers to find resolution to their issue Channel Shift: meeting customers where they live online or in social media Reducing Need To Call: solving customer issues through shared resolutions

Company: giffgaff Entry submitted by: Gregg Baker (gregg) Head of Community Community: giffgaff Community (http://community.giffgaff.com) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP     giffgaff, founded 5 years ago and known as “the mobile network run by you”, utilizes Lithium to provide a first class experience for our members. At giffgaff we like to do things differently. We don’t believe in having shops on the high street, call centers you have to ring for help or generally just making life difficult for people. Instead we are online only and pass on the savings to our members.   ‘giffgaff’ itself is an ancient Scottish word meaning mutuality and from day one we ensured we founded a business built on mutual relationships and understanding. We built the business around having a community at the heart of it, suggesting ideas, helping each other and keeping us real. This allows us to operate a very lean business and pass on the savings to our members. Lithium as a platform allowed us to facilitate that and evolve our thinking even further.   Our community provides first line support for our business by utilizing the Lithium platform. Members answer support questions, create knowledgebase articles and even create tutorial videos. We utilize standard platform features as well as embedding a tool to ask the community on our product pages. We empower our Community members to be powerful advocates for us, driving acquisition, while also giving them the tools and the channel to be our front line support. Reflect on that for a moment, our members provide all support for us (apart from private account related issues). As a result, we have seen a contact rate from our customers of once every five years.   Community members write the articles that go into our Knowledge Base, they help create the video tutorials taking members through difficult set ups and they are on hand to answer member questions, with an average response time of just 90 seconds (that's well under the average of 11 minutes for call centers). Typically tracked in minutes or even hours, our Community can solve a situation in seconds and then have that solution seen by at least 50 other people a month.   On average we receive 10,000-11,000 questions a month, of which the solutions are viewed at least 500,000 times a month. That’s a lot of calls deflected. We estimate savings in the region of $35M a year thanks to all of the amazing work our Community does. The best part is that members are happy with the responses they receive, in fact so happy we even picked up an award from ‘Which?’, that’s a pretty big deal here in the UK. We even found a way to add some giffgaff charm to that by letting one of our Community members go and accept the award on our behalf.   We truly believe we have a better way of providing customer service and so far satisfaction scores of over 80% would agree.  

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Gustavo Casado (Piquio) Social Media Specialist Community: Foro.Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es/) Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Vodafone Group is a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in London and with its registered office in Newbury, Berkshire. It is the world's 2nd-largest mobile telecommunications company measured by both subscribers and 2013 revenues (behind China Mobile), and had 434 million subscribers as of March 31, 2014.   Our most important customer satisfaction initiatives are: 1) NPS 2) Resolution rate 3) Customer experience program   Our challenge that we were looking to solve via our Lithium implementation was to reduce calls through social media support. 6,000 interactions on our Lithium eForum per month reduced 50,000 customer service calls on Vodafone's customer service platform!   Additional results: 2% savings in customer service calls 20 points of increase in NPS 30 points of increase in resolution rate 100 points of increase in CHI score  

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Gustavo Casado (Piquio) Social Media Specialist Community: Foro.Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es/) Lithy category: Social ROI Titan   Vodafone Group is a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in London and with its registered office in Newbury, Berkshire. It is the world's 2nd-largest mobile telecommunications company measured by both subscribers and 2013 revenues (behind China Mobile), and had 434 million subscribers as of March 31, 2014.   In 2014, we established three main KPI's: 1) NPS 2) Resolution rate 3) Customer journey   We set our goal to increase at least 10 points of improvement in NPS and resolution rate in the year ahead. We needed a customer profile for creating links and conversations with different customer's segments.   Due to this policy through our Lithium-powered Community, we moved not just 10 points but more than 20 points at the end of the fiscal year!    Results: 1) Our NPS increased by 20 points. 2) Our resolution rate moved from negative results to 40 points positive! 3) In including differenciated new ranks and roles, we improved our communication with customers, bringing in more than 20% of new users!   In addition, LSI gave us the chance to extract the most mentioned keywords and topics that are nowadays used by our fraud and complaints departments to improve the satisfaction score of the company.