Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year     Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone pro... See more...
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year     Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone providers to residential customers under the XFINITY brand and also provides these services to businesses. Comcast has invested in technology to build a sophisticated network that delivers the fastest broadband speeds, and brings customers personalized video, communications and home management offerings.    Who we are?   Comcast brings together the best in media and technology. We drive innovation to create the world’s best entertainment and online experiences. XFINITY TV offers customers the best viewing experience anytime, anywhere, with the most extensive collection of entertainment available on XFINITY On Demand, online at xfinity.com/tv, through the XFINITY TV App, XFINITY TV Go App, XFINITY My Account App and on XFINITY Streampix. The X1 Entertainment Operating System reflects the powerful innovation of bringing TV and Internet together to deliver a superior entertainment and communications experience for consumers. X1 delivers the simplest, fastest and most complete way for our customers to access all their entertainment from all of their screens. We provide the nation’s fastest most reliable Internet and in-home Wi-Fi speeds to more than 22 million high-speed Internet customers, even during peak use. Our millions of XFINITY Wi-Fi hotspots, allow customers to connect at the fastest Wi-Fi speeds around town. XFINITY Voice is an innovative and reliable IP-enabled home phone service that delivers digital-quality phone service with all of the functions of a traditional phone service, plus enhanced features that are integrated with other Comcast services. XFINITY Home is a growing collection of innovative security and smart home services that give customers added convenience and peace of mind.   Comcast Help & Support Forums:   Our Help & Support Forums are a great place for customers to find answers about their XFINITY products or to get help for service issues. Our forums get over two million unique visitors per month and if you search for a product or service question, links to our Forum pages are right at the top of the results.   Our forums are a place to learn from fellow customers. Nearly 98% of the searches conducted by visitors to the forums turn up related results that were generated by others posing similar questions. Our forums have been a great resource for years. In 2015 we strove to make the forums as easy as possible for our customers to use, so we rebuilt them from the ground up, with a completely new user interface and easier navigation. But we didn’t stop there, with over 40% of our customers accessing our community from smart phones and tablets, we partnered with Lithium to deliver a fully responsive design that launched in the beginning of 2016.   Improved Search   The most striking change in our new layout was bringing Search front and center for any customer to locate what they’re looking for. Additionally, our new search function now includes real-time suggestions for posts that match customer search terms. There’s also the option to create a new post right from the search bar if none of the results answer the customer’s question.     Improved Content Categorization    We’ve organized all the content to help our users find answers and solve problems faster. We were also able to move our most visited boards above the fold. Our layout helps customers save time and reduce effort to find what they’re looking for.     New Features   We’ve added improved visual cues to highlight trending alerts, recent solutions, and feature our most active users. We launched badging to encourage the right types of user behavior for new community members and recognize the efforts of super users—our Experts— to stand out for the expertise they’ve displayed in helping others.    Links to Related Content   When viewing a discussion thread, the bottom of the page now has links to related content that may help answer questions and green check marks to let you customers quickly see that the question in that thread has an approved solution.     Evolution of the Comcast Community:     Impact   We currently have more than 5.4M registered users. In 2015 we had 21.5M Unique Visitors to our community, nearly 10M from mobile and tablet devices. There were more than 45.5M Page Views in the Help & Support Community. Through our community redesigns and scaling up of a dedicated community-focused internal team, we set our focus on improving our Solution Views. We had our biggest year ever for Solution Views: more than 8.25 million (a 13% increase year over year). Our commitment to our customers is simple: respect their time, simplify their experience and make things right if we fall short. We understand many people will look online first before trying to contact us through our traditional support channels. Our forums are an invaluable tool for accomplishing all three parts of our commitment. We’re able to highlight existing answers to many common questions, promote a vibrant peer-to-peer community and allow customers to engage how they want. This saves time in quickly locating the information they’re looking for, or quickly ask their own question if they haven’t found what they need. With a diverse mix of products and tools our team continues to evangelize the voice of the customer with product teams and encourage expert engagement from our internal experts to share knowledge, tips and tricks, and deliver the best customer experience.        
Company:  AT&T Entry submitted by: Bridgette Butler  (Sr. Community Manager) Community: AT&T Community Forums Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) helps millions around the globe connect with leading entertainment, m... See more...
Company:  AT&T Entry submitted by: Bridgette Butler  (Sr. Community Manager) Community: AT&T Community Forums Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) helps millions around the globe connect with leading entertainment, mobile, high-speed Internet and voice services. We’re the world’s largest provider of pay TV. We have TV customers in the U.S. and 11 Latin American countries. We offer the best global coverage of any U.S. wireless provider*. And we help businesses worldwide serve their customers better with our mobility and highly secure cloud solutions. *Global coverage claim based on offering discounted voice and data roaming; LTE roaming; voice roaming; and world-capable smartphone and tablets in more countries than any other U.S. based carrier.   How we are implementing Community to meet our customer care business goals   AT&T customers have been finding solutions and connecting with AT&T on our Lithium community for more than 13 years. Given how well established our community is, we knew it wouldn’t be easy to dramatically increase the number of customers we serve in 2015, but that was nonetheless our goal.   To make the most of our limited budget, we used an intensely data-driven approach to community management and platform enhancements, identifying key opportunities for growth and improved customer success, and prioritizing accordingly. Guided by this approach, we:   Moved to a Lithium badging solution and added new badges to complement our member engagement program. The badging migration yielded significant cost savings, enabled faster time to market for badging enhancements, and contributed to page-load time reduction, which in turn contributed to a better customer experience Appended hyperlinked Accepted Solutions to 228 support articles on att.com, which not only assisted att.com users, but also drove traffic to our community Employed SEO techniques, including revisiting our archived content, to make it easier for customers and search engines to find answers. Our SEO efforts garnered at least 100k additional unique visitors per month. Improved posting flows to allow authentication after entering the text for a post. This contributed to nearly doubling the new threads posted in the community YoY. Removed traditional registration email verification to create a more effortless registration experience for our customers Launched a “classic view” to complement our Tile and List views, enabling our super-users to engage on the community using the interface of their choice     The result? The AT&T Community Forums shed nearly six million customer contacts from our call centers in 2015 – a more than 30% increase YoY – resulting in a cost savings of nearly $45 million.     Changes in our customer care organization that were implemented because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community    Believing collaboration and cooperation are the keys to cross-organizational success, the AT&T Community Forums team encouraged, educated and embraced skilled internal Care groups to supplement community knowledge and, when needed, to address specific customer concerns.   DIRECTV: Owing to the success we have seen with the Lithium-powered AT&T community, the decision was made to migrate the existing DIRECTV community from another platform into the AT&T forums in December 2015, and we launched and introduced a new DIRECTV customer care team to address the needs of our DIRECTV customers.       U-verse: After careful analysis of highly viewed threads regarding recurring issues, the AT&TU-verseCare team seeded 50 “how-to” posts replete with images.     The U-verse team also authored more than 3k posts in 2015 – a 155% increase over 2014.   Mobility: The ATTMobilityCare team launched in January 2015 and grew over the year, creating more than 8k posts last year.   Digital Life: The ATTDigitalLifeCS team created more than 700 posts in 2015 – a 350% increase over 2014.   AT&T wireless product subject matter experts answered community questions in two Ask an Expert events. More than 1.3k unique visitors viewed each of the discussions.   Additionally, we partnered with AT&T product subject matter experts to discuss topics of interest selected by our 50 super user ACES in two private-area Community Exchanges. The 269 posts in the eight topical threads were viewed more than 1k times, thus equipping our super users to better answer peer-to-peer questions.   Our metrics   Our efforts on the Community Forums achieved phenomenal results in 2015, with more than 30% incremental calls shed YoY, and with more than four million more unique visitors than in 2014. The lift in call shed and traffic/usage was accompanied by improvements in nearly every major metric of the business, including:   95% YoY increase in new topics 69% YoY increase in Accepted Solutions 13% YoY decrease in average monthly average response time (AMART) 91% YoY increase in ACE (super-user) replies 40% YoY increase in Cost Avoidance   Calculated using an established and verifiable formula, the AT&T Community Forums shed nearly 6M customer contacts from our call centers in 2015, resulting in a cost savings of nearly $45M.  
Company:  HP Entry submitted by: Teresa Proffitt (Community Engagement Mgr.) Community: HP Support Forums Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   At HP, our vision is to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhe... See more...
Company:  HP Entry submitted by: Teresa Proffitt (Community Engagement Mgr.) Community: HP Support Forums Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   At HP, our vision is to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere — every person, every organization, and every community around the globe. To invent, and to reinvent. To engineer experiences that amaze.   Road to Lithium   HP Social Support Footprint   With one printer and 1.7 PCs shipping every second, HP has a large and growing installed base of customers globally. Our Support Community is vital to the HP customer experience, and we are always looking for ways to partner with Lithium to deepen customer engagement, improve response and resolution rates, while leaving no customer behind. We believe in the vision and value of a total community; the Lithium platform and Lithium Social Web are crucial to HP’s customer support operations success.   With more than 125 million visits per year, our communities must support a large volume of diverse customers — 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Previously, it took a great deal of effort to accurately monitor our forums and social media engagement between social agents and customers. Our implementation of Lithium Social Web (LSW) has empowered our moderators and agents to engage with customers more efficiently and effectively. We are able to route issues, questions, and service events quickly to the right teams, allowing us to create a more positive customer experience and create HP fans.   We are now able to create robust dashboards with precise filtering capabilities - supporting our goals of leaving no thread unanswered, increasing customer response time and accepted solutions. The ability to see real-time engagement metrics allows us to monitor our efforts, identify gaps and understand trends. The easy to use dashboards allow us to monitor agent workloads and make resource decisions based on the volume of activity.   Strengthening our Community   HP’s Customer Support Community focuses on engaging a variety of customer inquiries. Whether seeking general information, finding specific solutions, or sharing knowledge and insights, our forums and social media channels allow users to connect directly with our agents and fellow customers to get the most from their products.   Lithium has played a pivotal role in supporting us in the following key areas: Lithium’s gamification package has educated & incented members on the types of activities we value. The gamification package has helped us move members across the engagement ladder, driving increased contributions over time. Our most engaged users are then rewarded with access to HP’s Inner Circle, a private forum where skilled employees & Experts converse. As members progress through the engagement ladder they are invited to a series of events including Expert Days, technical briefings, topic-specific Q&A sessions, global and regional meet-ups – with the intent of building an army of Super Users across the world.   Profile Page Badging   Lithium’s flexible platform allows us to enhance our community experience with custom components that showcase our expert users, top solutions, and similar topics. Using Lithium Studio, we have enhanced our community experience with a redesigned user interface that makes it easier for members to quickly access important information and for our users to share personal profiles and capabilities in a compelling format.   Home Page Redesign   The Lithium Monitor Wall showcases and tracks volume of conversations, activity, and community contributions within our social care environment. This, combined with Lithium Social Intelligence, enables us to accurately report community perspective, keep a pulse on our community, and capture our key performance indicators.   HP Social Customer Care Command Center   Our results    
Company:  AT & T Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (Social Media Sr. Strategy Mgr) Community: AT&T Community Forums Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) helps millions around the globe connect with leading enter... See more...
Company:  AT & T Entry submitted by: Becky Woodworth (Social Media Sr. Strategy Mgr) Community: AT&T Community Forums Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     AT&T Inc. (NYSE:T) helps millions around the globe connect with leading entertainment, mobile, high-speed Internet and voice services. We’re the world’s largest provider of pay TV. We have TV customers in the U.S. and 11 Latin American countries. We offer the best global coverage of any U.S. wireless provider*. And we help businesses worldwide serve their customers better with our mobility and highly secure cloud solutions.   *Global coverage claim based on offering discounted voice and data roaming; LTE roaming; voice roaming; and world-capable smartphone and tablets in more countries than any other U.S. based carrier.    Tune into the AT&T/DIRECTV Merger!   Our unique promotion and goal    Following AT&T’s 2015 acquisition of DIRECTV, we began plans to merge our two communities. We collaborated with our skilled Lithium success team to outline the migration mechanics potentially affecting 1.65M users (AT&T – 1.5M members with Lithium; DIRECTV – 150k members with Jive.) We wanted not only to incorporate 200k DIRECTV posts and 150k users into the AT&T Community, but also to establish trust in, and build enthusiasm for, the combined community experience.   Our strategy for community promotion   After the merger, we began with a soft launch of a new DIRECTV community within the AT&T community, seeding content and creating a one-stop community experience for our customers. We also reached out to DIRECTV community super-users at this time, months before the content migration, to introduce ourselves, let them know we valued their participation and to invite them to check out the DIRECTV forum on the AT&T Community.   When the time came to migrate the legacy DIRECTV community’s membership and content, we knew we had to create an effortless customer experience for DIRECTV and AT&T customers, and just as importantly, we wanted to present the migration in a way that would help the migrated community members feel at home.   To this end, we invited DIRECTV’s most well-known super user – Litzdog911 – to be the “voice of the merger” within the DIRECTV community. Rather than having our team of AT&T employees try to communicate the benefits of the migration to DIRECTV customers, we encouraged Litzdog911 to share what he thought was important to fellow DIRECTV community members. On the DIRECTV home page – and in his own voice - Litzdog911 bubbled over with excitement and explained why he felt the change was so positive, i.e., the advantage of the AT&T/Lithium user experience.     With an eye toward an effortless customer experience, every communication (including Litzdog911’s personal message) pointed to “one source of truth” – an AT&T Community Blog outlining the timetable, sharing illustrative “how to” examples, covering FAQ’s, etc.     To increase awareness, we used our #1 featured home page tile to point users to the blog.     Additional communication elements included Private Messages to AT&T super users as well as an announcement in their lounge; a system notification to DIRECTV users and regularly-updated home page messaging in both communities.   Post-migration in January, 2016: Communication continued with home page recognition for LItzdog911, our January ACE (super user) of the Month…..     ….plus we contextually-placed authentication reminders:     Our results   Partnering with our Lithium success team – and with only 12 hours of “read only” down time -               We migrated 200k DIRECTV posts 100% successfully into their assigned boards and categories.               We migrated 150k DIRECTV users – including their user stats and avatars - with only three users experiencing minor, easily corrected issues.   In the first 30 days post-migration, 309k unique visitors benefited from DIRECTV content – a 27% increase as compared to prior months on its previous platform.   From January 1, 2016 to March 23, 2016 in DIRECTV, we have enjoyed:             1.36M page views             766k visits             588k unique visitors             12k posts             800 Accepted Solutions created   We will continue to adjust the volume, and we might even give the remote control a shake – but we are sure not changing the channel on our great DIRECTV forum community. It’s where it needs to be – on our Lithium platform, with our combined 1.65M members fully understanding what we did, and why we did it. Like Litzdog911 said, “It’s more fun over here!”  
Company:  Electronic Arts Entry submitted by:  Jennifer Hughes (Director WWCE Social & Community) Community: Answers HQ  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star      The Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) organization provides supp... See more...
Company:  Electronic Arts Entry submitted by:  Jennifer Hughes (Director WWCE Social & Community) Community: Answers HQ  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star      The Worldwide Customer Experience (WWCE) organization provides support to customers across all the games that Electronic Arts (EA) publishes. The Social and Community team manages the Answers HQ Community and engages with players on social media channels. To provide the best customer experience, there for our players where they need us, when they need us. Social media and online communities are an integral part of our customer experience strategy and an important way that we support and engage with our players.   The AHQ online community is significant, with over 10.8M registered users and more than 277k new topics over the past year across five languages. In LSW, we monitor 75 social media channels with over 11.2M posts in the past year. Having an integrated approach to total community provides our team with a consistent experience that can be measured in LSI.   Total Community Details We have used Lithium Community for AHQ since its inception in 2012. In 2014, we added LSW for social media workflow.   LSW Each game that EA publishes has a unique brand and social media presence, resulting in a large volume of social media to monitor. We have leveraged LSW to manage these channels through 42 queues, 6 priorities, and 95 tags. We use custom close reasons to get the reporting that we need.   We recently deepened our unified approach by adding the Lithium Community into LSW for improved workflow capabilities. This addition enables us to prioritize incoming topics based on the types of issues that the community cannot solve in place. We expect to see an improvement in response times and first response rates.   Lithium Community AHQ is a player-to-player support community at its core, but it also allows for enthusiast conversations. Again, supporting many different titles we have used Lithium to provide a different look, feel, and overall experience for EA’s different games.     We have deployed a number of different features that make AHQ a robust community with high levels of participation. Instead of our customers calling in to report a game bug, the online contact routing system takes them directly to AHQ for self reporting. From there, we report bugs to studios and provide updates to players. AHQ also has a exceptional badging system that acknowledges community participation. We have issued over 7.4M badges since launching the program in September 2015.   LSI We Having detailed bulk data allows us to slice and dice our community and gain valuable insights, especially when connected with other data sources. The direct integration of community posts into our CRM tool allows for a unified 360-degree view across chat, phone, email, and Answers HQ. Community and social media data plays a vital role in helping us understand the full customer journey. We also use this data as an early warning system for emerging issues. The ability to tap seamlessly into a wealth of information provided by Lithium APIs is driving actions that are improving the overall customer experience with EA.   Total Community Advantage By working with one partner to leverage both the Lithium community and LSW to execute our social media and community support, we work more efficiently with a holistic strategy that best supports our players.  
Company:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impa... See more...
Company:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impact on the way we live. As the UK’s first provider of all four broadband, TV, mobile phone and home phone services, it’s not just the technology that interests us – what matters is how it can improve the lives and prospects of everyone.   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 community goals   Our primary goal is call deflection. We believe that this can be done by enabling a vibrant environment where customers can come to seek help, a place they’ll come back to in the future for assistance, and where they’ll want to return to share knowledge with their peers.   We’re also committed to supporting the wider business in trialling new products and services. We wanted to help customers who are now just using Google for their answers. The role of the Community as a shop window in the path to purchase is a key consideration, as is our continued desire to drive adoption and advocacy.   Both the wider Virgin Group, and ourselves at Virgin Media have, as you’d expect, some incredible brand guidelines to work with in terms of design, web functionality and tone of voice. These customer usability and the customer experience considerations are all tied-together by our guiding company ethos at Virgin Media, which is to be open-minded, fun and generous.   As part of our ‘Community Transformation Project’ (CTP) which ran from April –November 2015 we were able to analyse and refine our objectives and target in greater detail, and identify what we wanted to achieve as a result of our redesign.   Our specific design goals were as defined as follows: 1: Boost Helpful Answer views (reducing call traffic into Care)      a. Increase visibility (internally) and differentiate (compare and contrast to other posts)      b. Promote (external) 2: Increase traffic to the forums      a. Across the website estate      b. Across channels 3: Increase forum participation through to contribution:      a. Increase registered users and prioritise content      b. Improve repeat visits      c. Blog integration 4: Position the Virgin Media Community as a differentiator      a. Consideration phase of the consumer lifecycle – consideration-assimilation phase      b. For existing customers   What makes our community unique   We’re fully responsive. Our CTP has delivered a community that isn’t restricted by device, and is seamlessly accessible – regardless of where you are or how you use it.   We’re not just on brand – we’re shaping it. Brand guidelines were being re-written during the project, which meant we were the first implementation of ideas, palettes, and usability rules.   Community Hub page We’ve focused on creating a Community Hub page that is dynamic and welcoming. It incorporates all the key features of the community in bite-size chunks, and the principle behind this page is used throughout the site - surfacing content where and when it is needed. Our ‘Trending now’ function typifies this approach.   Personalised Each visitor is greeted with a role-specific message, with a call-to-action that fits their standing in the community. The ‘forum’ page can be adapted to hide boards that the customer isn’t interested in. There’s a different experience for non-members than members – they are directed to find help, and guided to our enhanced ‘Getting Started’ and on-brand ‘Community FAQ’ section.   Truly Social We’ve added a social-proofing community reach, which highlights the scope and reach of the site. YouTube help videos within the community – while using YouTube API to show the overall video views. This module allows us to quickly showcase topical information. The enhanced ‘Your conversations’ panel, as well as more conventional pop-up notifications and customer journey emails, means that it’s easier to know what’s been happening while you were looking elsewhere.   SEO Working with a top digital agency we assessed SEO across the site, and have introduced a number of both SEO enhancement and automated blocking features. This means that fresh relevant information will be found, and outdated or inaccurate postings can be removed from search with a click of a button.\       Navigation We’re really proud of our plectrum nav button – which we think should win an award on its own. Give it a try!   Swoosh!   How we executed our community design   We worked AGILE – which ultimately proved to be the right choice as it delivered efficient collaborative working. Following careful consideration and preparations, a small core team worked in a series of sprints to deliver a fully-responsive transformative design in six months from the Discovery Phase to Launch and Completion in November 2015.     The initial decision was whether to make a light version – a refreshed community look and feel, or for the transformative, fully responsive option, with a real emphasis on delivering results. There was really only one option: Go big, or go home.   This was the motto adopted by our project team, as they focused on a Mobile-first development. With the smallest device as the starting point, we were able to make sure that the same fully-featured functionality could upscale and prove accessible across all devices – and in doing so, we think made a big difference to the approach.    Co-location at Lithium / Virgin Media meant the team worked really closely in 10 day-long ‘sprints’, working with a Product Backlog, defined roles and responsibilities and shared project tools quickly identified across the two companies. Our core team of ten combined Lithium technical developers and a front-end / user interface designer, with Virgin Media User Experience, copy writing, design and UAT, under leadership and ownership from both parties.   Our community team populated the stage site with content, before along with our Superusers they were able to put it through its paces. In the staging environment, the community began to come together over the course of the sprints, and ideas could be tested, scrapped or implemented on the fly. One of our most successful features – ‘Trending now’ came about in such a manner at the tail end of the project.   Results (Comparing10/11/14 - 09/03/2015 and 09/11/2015 – 11/3/2015, unless otherwise stated.)     Comparing year-on-year results we can demonstrate that the CTP fulfilled it’s goal to Boost Helpful Answer views. We’ve used the functionality available within Lithium to surface Helpful Answers quicker, highlighted and authoritative with an assured bright-green border.   Our helpful content now surfaces across the wider Virgin Media help sites too in the same branded manner. We’ve seen a 54% increase in visitor referrals from other parts of VirginMedia.com since the cross-site promotion initiatives we launched along with CTP, and a steady rise in time online from those joining from Twitter.   In terms of “increasing forum participation through to contribution” we’re seeing marginal growth – this is an established mature community with over 300k registered members. However we have seen a 16% increase in Member Entrances. As a result of being responsive, we’ve taken a good look at the traffic from mobile. While the amount of visits from mobile is similar, the amount of posts has increased significantly as we’ve made it a much easier experience to participate from a device.     As a customer hub, for seeking support and sharing with their fellow customers we’ve seen so much more engagement – a 48% increase in posts, for example, and community health has rocketed – Kudos is up 80% year-on-year. Fantastic work everyone – the new community looks truly transformed, brilliant! Barbara Hall, Head of Channel Delivery, Virgin Media   Absolutely speechless, incredible team effort, you and the team should be very proud of what you have achieved. Shaun Hewitt, Senior Manager, eService – Liberty Global
Company:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star     Since the invention of the internet, digital technology has had an increasing impa... See more...
Company:  Virgin Media  Entry submitted by: James Woods (Community Lead) Community: Virgin Media Community 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 the UK’s first provider of all four broadband, TV, mobile phone and home phone services, it’s not just the technology that interests us – what matters is how it can improve the lives and prospects of everyone.   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 road to Lithium At Virgin Media, we believe in digital technology that makes good things happen for people, communities and businesses. We do everything we can to ensure technology is a force for good. This is why we’re committed to providing the best guidance, support and services – and working with Lithium has helped us to make this a reality.   We’ve been prominent on social media for around eight years now, and a Lithium-hosted community was established in 2009, and brought into the growing eService team in 2012. As these channels developed into popular care and support destinations, it became increasingly vital for us to be able to manage these conversations within an efficient, easy to use, reliable, configurable and data-rich environment.   After trying and testing every response tool, it was quickly clear that Lithium Social Web was the best match for our demanding requirements. We started using it towards the end of 2013 on the big three – Twitter, Facebook and Community – and haven’t looked back. Targeted queues, comment threading, publishing tools, advanced analytics and tagging – these are just some of the standard LSW features that we’ve now come to rely on as part of our day-to-day operation.   After one year of LSW we were already working 30% more efficiently. We no longer miss posts, delay responding to priority queries, and we can offer an individually tailored customer experience with true case ownership and empowerment for our people.   The benefits of having both a community and LSW    Our priority is providing the very best eService customer care experience. We’re firm believers in finding the next best action for our customers – and we utilize every aspect of our social media platforms and tools to do just that. We encourage and evangelize across our organization to think ‘Community First’. It now sits at the heart of our social media operation – the hub of our own Total Community. Our Twitter operation continues to go from strength to strength, Last year we became the first ISP to hit 1million tweets: 12 months on and we’ve added another half a million – all through LSW.   Our team respond to conventional care requests, as well as managing those conversations that result from marketing or brand posts. LSW’s smart tagging and work queues allow us to ensure the right conversations are handled by the right people – whether it’s prospective customers responding to hidden posts on Facebook, or having some light-hearted on-brand chat about sports on Twitter.   We understand that Twitter and Facebook aren’t always the appropriate channel for certain queries. If our teams can’t resolve the issue directly, we draw upon our YouTube help video collection, web-chat, a revamped and finely-tuned service status page, and a vast database of helpful links to make sure that we can get customers to the right place to answer their query. More and more, we’re encouraging them to visit our community.     We’re able to be more intelligent in this channel switching. We can optimise the incredible peer-to-peer power of the community, increase the visibility of curated trending topics and helpful answers, and encourage and stimulate the conversations customers need to have to get the help they need, and to bring them close to the business.   Results   The results of placing LSW and our Lithium Community at the centre of our next best action / community first philosophy are clear.   Our primary indicator is call reduction.   We’re seeing more Helpful Answers (Accepted Solutions) and views than ever before. Answers were up 22% from 2014-2015, while views rocketed 48% in the same time period.       It’s therefore no surprise that using a combination of our own benchmarking and Lithium’s value proposition, even a conservative estimate sees the community deflecting over 10,000 calls per week in 2016.   We know that membership of the community has a great value too – 87% of members who have sought help in the past will think ‘Community first’ the next time they need assistance from Virgin Media.     Analyzing customer journeys shows that the number of tweeters we refer to the community is increasing, and our cross-site promotion initiative means that we’re seeing a 54% increase in visitor referrals from other parts of VirginMedia.com.   Our newly launched Digital Life blog is also bringing our tech-smart Twitter followers into the community, introducing them to an environment where they can ask us the kind of questions that would take far more than 140 characters to answer.   Our social media and community teams are the place to go for sentiment and verbatim on any development or project. The information we can leverage from our social toolkit, especially that from LSW and LSI, mean we can provide both high-level data and in-depth analysis – the real voice of the customer.   The internal visibility and success of the community has led to an increase in opportunities to add further value to the wider business. On our last major trial had over 5000 forum posts between the project team and the triallists as they made sure we were ready to go to market.   We’re seeing more requests than ever before to run feedback trials and host focus groups.   As a result, with every new product we launch, with every potential contact-driver, Virgin Media is seeing the benefits of embracing our Total Community, first.
Company:  ScottishPower Entry submitted by: Chris Brennan (Senior Search and Social Strategy Manager - Digital Marketing) Community:  https://twitter.com/sp_energypeople https://twitter.com/ScottishPower https://www.facebook.com/Scottish... See more...
Company:  ScottishPower Entry submitted by: Chris Brennan (Senior Search and Social Strategy Manager - Digital Marketing) Community:  https://twitter.com/sp_energypeople https://twitter.com/ScottishPower https://www.facebook.com/ScottishPower Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   ScottishPower supplies energy to over 5 million homes and businesses in the UK, as part of the Iberdrola Group, a global energy company and world leader in wind energy.   As the number one European utility by market capitalisation we are helping to change the energy market for the better, driving innovation from the way we generate and supply energy to how we interact with our staff and customers.   Social Media is at the heart of our strategic growth and our constant drive to be an Energy company you would be happy to recommend to friends and family.   Our  customer satisfaction initiatives: 360 o Customer View   During 2015, we faced a challenge in managing the perception and reputation of our customer service after a sustained period of instability post implementation of a new Billing and CRM system. Prior to this, our Social Media landscape was a healthy and vibrant small community of engaged advocates. This community rapidly grew and became steadily more negative as customer service complaints and media focus increased. With only two full-time staff operating during business hours our situation quickly became unmanageable and added to the negative perception around ScottishPower at the time.   Faced with this challenge, we conceived, developed and began implementation of our Customer 360 O program focusing on re-engaging with customers and improving satisfaction and reputation scores. Central to this was bringing social media closer to our tradition customer touch points with a truly Omni-channel approach to service. In delivering this approach, we embarked on three key social initiatives utilising LSW to deliver a truly exceptional Social Customer Care experience.   Filter out the noise: Utilise LSW tags and routing to allow our small customer service team to focus on real customer engagements   Prioritise those who need help the most: Energy is an important part of our daily lives. Utilising priority rules in LSW we have refined key word routing to ensure when someone loses their electricity supply or are a vulnerable customer we are able to intervene quickly to help.   Reducing repeat contacts: From social listening, we identified a pool of repeat customers. Using LSW we have been able to revise and resolve issues through improved end-2-end case management to minimise the reputational damage from serial dissenters.   The most important customer issues we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation   Focusing on delivering excellent customer service on social We have always had a proud history in delivering exceptional service to our customer and that had been impacted somewhat by the migration to our new billing system. Through social it was important that we re-engaged with our customers and restored their confidence in ScottishPower as their energy provider.   By embarking on the Customer 360 0 project, we have been able to improve our customer service performance on social dramatically. LSW has been central to this strategy and has provided the platform to re-engage with our customers and restore confidence in our brand. Through the metrics that we track regularly we have seen a significant improvement and with a 13 point improvement in our social sentiment post LSW implementation it is clear that our customers are also seeing the benefits of our enhanced social service.     The robustness and confidence we have been able to install in our team since implementing LSW led us to re-open and cleanse over 2.5k pervious social service cases reducing our repeat contacts by 30% and restore faith in previously dissatisfied customers.   Due to our increased focus on measurement and performance management, we have now extended our coverage to 24/7 and our team has trebled in size. Internally Social First is our new approach with Monitor Wall visible in key departments such as THE Digital Innovations team, Customer Services and shared with all appropriate C-Suite leaders.   Making it easier to do business with us In-depth routing and reporting capabilities have allowed us to focus on the root cause issues to drive service improvement. As such, we are now able to embark on a pro-active engagement campaign to educate and help consumers and reduce the need for them to individually contact us.     Metrics  Positive and neutral sentiment improved from 77% pre Lithium to 90% post Lithium Repeat social complaints reduced by 30% Average response time for Priority 1 cases reduced from 1 hour to 20 minutes. 80% of mentions responded to in less than 1 hour with 98% within 2 hours. 200 repeat customer cases fully reworked and helped through re-engagement using Lithium Recent Independent Industry benchmarking by Social Bakers showed we had the 2nd highest number of service engagement in the industry (highest of the major suppliers by customer base) yet the fastest response rate of all suppliers Overall Customer Satisfaction scores are improving with the percentage of Very Satisfied increasing by 20 percentage points over the last 6 months    
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Company:  Critical Mass/Gyro/HP Entry submitted by: Dominic Ladden-Powell (Platform Director) Community: HP BusinessNow Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   HP Inc. is one of the world’s leading technology companies. Their miss... See more...
Company:  Critical Mass/Gyro/HP Entry submitted by: Dominic Ladden-Powell (Platform Director) Community: HP BusinessNow Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   HP Inc. is one of the world’s leading technology companies. Their mission is to create technology that helps businesses reinvent their competitive edge.   BusinessNow  is a content marketing programme that delivers useful, relevant news and advice to small and medium business decision makers establishing HP as a trusted advisor across 5 markets: UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.   Beginning life as ‘BusinessReady’ in a minor subcategory in another HP Lithium Community in early-2014, we moved BusinessNow into its own Lithium Community in February 2015 and obtained almost 3 million visits in the first year.   We launched the third iteration in February 2016.   Our community goals   BusinessNow aims to provide small to medium business owners and IT decision makers with insight and advice on issues that are important to them and can help them do their jobs better.   HP has a long-standing reputation within the technology industry for its products and services. BusinessNow is helping to position HP as a thought leader by offering insight and conversation around the prevailing themes and issues.   Search and social analytics inform the content to ensure it addresses what is important to the audience. This drives a regular programme of ‘always on’ content planned to support the overall market activity and providing a connected story that encourages the community to return for ongoing and regular advice.   Key to the strategy is elevating HP’s position as not only being a technology vendor who develops quality products but an organization that understands business. Content is amplified through social channels to drive traffic to the BusinessNow community and encourage interaction and debate building a brand experience that engages the audience.   Why our community is unique   We utilize Lithium’s blogging functionality as the sole use for our community and as such have found a great new use for the platform.   An in-depth user experience study was completed to drive the development of the design. A series of designs were then created and tested to ensure the audience’s needs and behaviours online were reflected.   The design represents the best of the best from publisher sites. This was a deliberate move to avoid the site becoming like every other IT content hub and compete against the best sources of digital and business insight like Mashable.   The clean fresh design is easy to navigate and digest and competes against some of the best publisher sites. Clever features such as the time it takes to read or view each piece helps the reader and parallax scrolling has been used to keep the sharing buttons always present and encourage the community to share.   Focusing purely on the blogging functionality provides a unique experience when compared to other Lithium communities as well as a unique content hub when compared to other IT vendor sites.   How we executed our community design   After working directly with Lithium’s engineers to create our first customized instance, we employed both front and back end developers to work within the Studio.   This, combined with the experience of community management we had accumulated within our previous communities, enabled us to augment existing components and functionality as well as create new page templates and components.   We use the API extensively to create dynamic pages based on custom filters and different language versions within single templates. Relying on existing functionality allowed us to ensure our community is as lightweight, dynamic and reliable as possible.   Metrics   We have only recently relaunched our new design but have already received encouraging metrics in the early weeks of operation including the following:     In addition to the above metrics, we have received funding from new HP corporate departments to produce custom content for their own individual campaigns as well as several inquiries about producing individual categories and communities for entirely separate departments within HP.   We took inspiration from popular online publications to create a, user-centered design, which tested extremely positively with audiences. The simple and clean design allows the content to shine on both desktop and mobile:     Within articles, the design remains clean and easy on the eye:  
Co mpany:  Volia Entry submitted by: Yulia Shevchenko (Head of social media customer care) Community: Volia Club Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Ukraine is the biggest territory in Europe.   VOLIA is a nationwide... See more...
Co mpany:  Volia Entry submitted by: Yulia Shevchenko (Head of social media customer care) Community: Volia Club Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Ukraine is the biggest territory in Europe.   VOLIA is a nationwide Ukrainian telecommunication provider that offers a set of modern telecommunication services: analog, digital, HD and interactive TV “VOLIA Smart HD” (OTT), broadband Internet and cloud services of the biggest Ukrainian Data-Centre.   VOLIA has a business across all biggest (by population) cities (except Odessa). And we are #1 Internet and TV provider across our footprint! In 2015 the Company created and continue developing  six own TV channels − «VOLIA CINE+», «VOLIA CINE+ HD», «VOLIA CINE+ MIX», «VOLIA CINE+ LEGEND», «VOLIA CINE+ Hit HD» and «VOLIA CINE+ KIDS».         VOLIA is recognized as the best provider of digital entertainments by International Festival-Contest Choice of the Year 2015.   One of our company's strategic directions is digital care. Since 2014 Volia created client oriented and innovative environment to serve our customers online. In a year, we grew share of digital customer care from 48% to 71%.   Two great instruments – new customer self-care portal “My Cabinet” (my.volia.com) and customer’s community Volia Club (club.volia.com), drove that growth.   In March 2016, the customer self-care portal “My Cabinet” was awarded as Best Customer Experience Project on International Conference of Customer Experience in Budapest.   In 2015, we focused on answering 2 questions:   How to increase digital care possibilities to our customers – that impact CES and NPS How to become closer to our customers and make them a real part of Volia   In 2014, our self-care included several IVR modules, a little of SMS informing, an ugly self-care portal that was designed as an old-school excel and old forum, that was driven just by moderators. All these instruments covered ~48% of interaction.   At the end of 2014, we delivered 2 great online instruments (a new self-care Portal and a Lithium-powered customer Community) in parallel with updating of IVR / SMS management. And in 2015, we made a leapfrog from 48% to 71%. They're incredible results, and we are proud of it!     The most important customer service issue we were looking to  solve via Lithium implementation   We love our customers and want to be their beloved provider with a long-term relationship! That's why it is necessary to by open-minded and a close-to-customer company.  It seems customers trust other customers the most. And people like to help other people and to be proud of it – especially if you offer them a proper environment for this exchange.   Knowing this, we set out to create Volia's online community. This high-tech platform gives great possibilities to manage a huge number of customer questions with little participation of Volia moderators. In addition, it has greatly increased customer brand engagement.   It’s really another attitude and principle of customer care It's integrated not just with self-care but with Volia facebook/twitter account It has an in-built, strong gamification that helps to involve customers into customer care and grow super users that become brand advocates     Community implementation both increased customer engagement, improved business process and impacted our Internet users' NPS and CES greatly!   Metrics   1. Customer satisfaction In May of 2015, we started to measure our Volia Club’s customer satisfaction among registered users (by Survey Monkey). The questionnaire was focused on ease of use, speed, and quality of answers inside the Community. And the key question was «What is your total satisfaction with the Volia Club».   The highest score was for quality of answers – 8.41 from 10. It’s really cool as 50% of all answers were given by community members!     2. The readiness to recommend Volia among the Internet-services users increased by 19 points (against 15 planned) all over the country and by +23 points among the audience in TOP-3 Internet cities (Kiev, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv).     3. The chain of complicated request solving became twice shorter! Average response time decreased to 2 hours from 24 hours in 2014.   The chain of reply to customers now has 4 steps instead of 8.     Before Community launch   After Community launch   4. It’s impact on CES is improving! This is due to both business process simplification and listening to direct complaints of customers and quick resolution!       5. In addition we improved efficiency! The job of moderators has shortened by 39.3% (against 30% planned).   All visits were served by 4 people (2 FTE). Nearly 50% of inquiries are served by customers.   The share of the e-mail service assignment has shortened by 30% (against 25% planned).     We were the first and only provider in Ukraine that launched a customer driven community! In 2015, we arranged Volia’s top-management and best customer expert meeting to discuss Volia’s strategy. Our clients became part of the Volia transformation team!   As a result, community is one of quickest channels for customer feedback. It is first in asking, replying and clarifying information about all issues - from city outages to price changes and new product launches! Often urgent escalation helps to solve the problem before it has a big impact on business, or to prepare proper communications to the entire customer base, or to test new products before going to market!     At the end of 2015, Lithium implemented a new survey built into the system that allow to track CSAT among non-registered users! And it's our next target to increase satisfaction and engaging among newcomers in 2016!       The customers are positive towards the changes in the Company! The search and innovations implementation process is ongoing. Volia is open to the changes for the better!   During the year, 5 super-users* were developed in our community. They become the brand experts – they don’t only help us with answers to less experienced users, but also take a large part in testing of new products and giving recommendations to their development. * in communities 5+ years – normally up to 10 super-users
Company:  SANE Australia Entry submitted by: Nicole Thomas (Community Manager) Community: SANE Forums Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   SANE’s mission is to help all Australians affected by mental illness lead a bett... See more...
Company:  SANE Australia Entry submitted by: Nicole Thomas (Community Manager) Community: SANE Forums Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   SANE’s mission is to help all Australians affected by mental illness lead a better life. SANE does this through three key areas of activity to promote a better life for all Australians affected by mental illness: Support, Training, and Education.   As part of the activity of Support, SANE runs an online peer support community for people affected by mental illness. This is done through two communities – one for carers of people affected by mental illness and one for those with a lived experience.   Our  customer satisfaction initiatives   Help those with affected by mental illness feel less alone: ‘Friday Feast’ (see discussion here) started in 2015, as an opportunity for members to come together on a Friday night, bring a virtual ‘plate of food’ and have dinner together. Friday Feast is one of our most visited discussions, and received Australia wide media attention during Christmas, when members who were alone for Christmas Dinner logged on to be less alone.   Service integration: Giving people a seamless experience between sane.org and saneforums.org through Lithium discussion tagging ability.   Strengthening and growth of the community: To increase the sense of community, a new Role/Rank was created for members who have demonstrated loyalty and commitment to the community. The new role/rank of ‘Community Guide’ was given to members who have now taken on extra responsibilities to nurture and grow the community through one on one interactions with new members or members who need extra support.   Live community events: Hosting “live sessions” for members to connect with experts conducted through the Lithium platform, to increase knowledge, skills and encourage help seeking. Topics of live sessions have included: Caring for someone with Bipolar Managing and changing your thoughts Myths of Borderline Personality Disorder   The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation   Member safety and those at risk of harm are identified and managed quickly, through 24/7 moderation: In 2015, SANE Australia built their moderation team to 77. The team is made up of SANE Australia’s Help Centre team and staff from our partner organisations, who are geographically spread across Australia. Through the Lithium Platform and specifically Moderator Manager, we have been able to create a strong team of moderators, who are consistent in monitoring guidelines and the safety of members. Alongside Moderator Manager, the Lithium platform has given us the ability to house training videos and to communicate with each other, in a ‘moderator only’ space. This communication has been vital to the consistency and quality of the team.   Increased access to people geographically or socially isolated, to connection, support and a community to belong to: Through our partnership syndicated model, more people have had the opportunity to access the Forums. We have continued to grow our partnership pool from 15 partners in 2014, to 35 partners by December 2015. (example of syndication)   Live Community Events: These sessions have given people access to information, advice and skill building opportunities to improve their mental health, which they may not have otherwise, due to their geographic or social isolation. In these two hour live session we see, on average, between 60 – 110 posts and thousands of views.       ‘Friday Feast’ has been particularly successful in reducing the sense of isolation, giving members a place to connect, sharing a virtual ‘plate of food’ and forget about their mental health difficulties. Over the Christmas period, Friday Feast gained extensive media coverage, as a place people who were alone on Christmas night could connect.     Website and community integration: We have provided people with a seamless transition between the SANE Australia website and SANE Forums. We have utilized Lithium’s integration ability by tagging forum discussions to be visible on SANE Australia’s website in specific and relevant locations (Example: below and SANE website factsheet).   Our metrics   Feedback: "I am a SANE community member for the long haul ..its in my home town ... not just a virtual reality existence."   “I cannot express how much hope you have given me. Thank you so much for sharing your experience because before I read that tonight I thought there was no hope.”   “Reading posts and sharing on this forum has been very important to me .. like the first time I feel fully accepted among a group of people .. like finding my tribe.”   “The forums have also helped me find motivation to do some important things I'd been putting off in my depression. This was with encouragement from other members and moderators. “I enjoy the 'Topic Tuesdays' (aka Live Forum Events), these are worth watching out for. They are like workshops where members and moderators are online participating at the same time. It's fine to be quiet or to add comments. The last one which happened about a week ago felt therapeutic. Thanks for running it”   2015 Evaluation: 82% reported feeling safe in the Forums 71% reported experiencing the support from peers in the Forums 77% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed they felt comfortable sharing their experiences   Metrics CHI average increased throughout the year and didn’t dip below 600 between August 2015 – December 2015, with 709 being our highest score in October.   Overall in 2015, 86% of posts were generated by members, demonstrating the peer to peer connection between members.   Since launch (5 May 2014) to 20 March 2016 Posts: 42,537 New discussions: 2316 Total members: 2816 Page Views - Total: 1,065,203 Page Views - Mobile: 260,860 Page Views - Tablet 59,964 Unique visitors: 110,746
Company:  Telstra Entry submitted by: Richard Manley (Project Manager – Digital First) Community: Frontline Peer Support Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Telstra is on a journey to become a world class technology company. A key par... See more...
Company:  Telstra Entry submitted by: Richard Manley (Project Manager – Digital First) Community: Frontline Peer Support Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Telstra is on a journey to become a world class technology company. A key part of this strategy is the use of Digital to improve customer advocacy. Through our Digital transformation program Digital First, we’re transforming the way we engage and support our customers. A key part of this has been the adoption of Lithium in August 2015 across our Global Call Centres.    How we are implementing Community and LSW  to meet our customer care business goals     As an international business with 37,000 staff worldwide and a 100 year history, Telstra has introduced the Digital First program with the mission to digitise our channels, remove cost, and help us become a world class technology company. In August 2015, Telstra adopted Lithium to support our frontline call centres. The tool also captures the expert knowledge of our consultants so this can be shared across the company. The adoption of Peer Support by our front line represents a significant commitment to improving our support tools and driving increased efficiencies across our business.     With Peer Support, we have improved on our existing knowledge management systems. We now also have a question and solution model, where a solution can come from anyone in the business and be validated by empowered Moderators. Critical knowledge gaps are promptly identified and flowed back full circle to improve the scope and quality of our knowledge management systems.       To ensure rapid adoption across our business, we produced a series of Peer Support training videos that are both engaging and punchy. These videos represent part of our core induction experience for new starters, and enable them to intuitively start using Peer Support to find solutions from day 1.   Peer Support Training Videos:   Check them out here.             But the Peer Support story does not end there. Our customers have also benefited, through improved service levels. This is evidenced by results showing an increase in First Call Resolution, and a reduction in Multi-Agent Events since we rolled out the tool. For our customers, this means we’re getting it right first time more often, and we’re transferring customers less. All this equates to greater customer advocacy, and brings to life what it means for Telstra’s journey towards becoming a world class technology company.   Changes we implemented in our customer care organization because of cost reductions based on Lithium Community and LSW   Through Peer Support our frontline staff across different countries are able to support each other, and reduce reliance on support staff. It has also expedited the onboarding process for new starters.     Telstra agents are now able to draw on the huge wealth of knowledge captured in Peer Support.  We’re driving efficiency by being able to serve our customers better and with less transfers as agents have access to more information. And we’re giving our centres visibility of key metrics and performance through the Lithium Social Web Monitor Wall which is enabling us to embed Lithium into the way our centres operate.   The efficiencies realised by Peer Support has been a critical enabler in reducing our reliance on traditional support channels. A great example of this is we have been able to reduce support FTE in centres, which is a direct cost-reduction benefit to the business. These cost efficiencies, delivered by our Digital First transformation program, will continue as we progress and industrialize the tool across our organisation, and in our journey to becoming a world class technology company.   Our metrics   Peer Support has enjoyed significant success since launch in August 2015, with results showing an increase of 1.92 percentage points in First Call Resolution, and a reduction of 1.19 percentage points in Multi-Agent Events (call transfers).   These impressive results were proven using a robust data analysis and benefits model.     The natural language search capability in Peer Support has been a real game-changer for Telstra, enabling our consultants to search for a solution using phrases intrinsic to their business area. Our traditional knowledge bases have always found this challenging. This has enabled a reduction in training time for new starters, as they can get up to speed more quickly by searching for solutions as they learn on the job. Lithium’s natural language search capability, combined with our multi-faceted approach to enabling the Global Call Centres to adopt the tool, led to 320,000 page views in the first 6 months.  Our strategic focus on questions and solutions has led to 96,000 verified solution views in the same period. These figures alone show significant value is being extracted from the tool, and there’s much more to come with plans to industrialize Peer Support as the de facto support channel not only across our call centres, but also into our retail channels.  
Company: Upwork Entry submitted by: Garnor Morantes  (Director) Community:  Upwork Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Upwork is an online global talent pool that connects professional freelancers with quality client... See more...
Company: Upwork Entry submitted by: Garnor Morantes  (Director) Community:  Upwork Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Upwork is an online global talent pool that connects professional freelancers with quality clients. We are the world’s largest talent marketplace with an annual run rate of over $1B+ in freelancer earnings. We have 4M clients and over 10M freelancers who have registered, with approximately 30,000 new freelancer registrations per week.   Our clients and freelancers are distributed globally. Our largest client regions are the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. Our largest freelancer regions are US, South East Asia (India, Pakistan, Philippines) and Ukraine.   What Total Community means at Upwork   Filling a void in the future of work Our community platform is a mechanism for users to connect with each other and with the Upwork brand in ways that contribute to their professional and work-oriented marketplace experience. The forums are used to foster the learning, social and collaborative relationships that are otherwise difficult to come by for freelancers and clients who often work in solitary workspaces.   Giving the brand a Voice The community also serves as a communication mechanism for the Upwork brand, allowing us to notify and position key product, policy, feature and other changes to a large customer audience. Through our forums and other community channels, we highlight tips, best practices and help content, thereby aiding in case deflection for our customer support teams.   Knowing our customers As a business, Upwork has a unified digital strategy built on Lithium technologies to monitor, gather and report on customer activity. Through LSW and the Lithium community (LSI), we use these channels to identify: Site performance and incidents Feature usage and reaction Customer sentiment   These insights are then delivered directly to product and business owners and shared with the entire organization in a formal report each week. With this unified approach the organization is closely aligned with customer needs and sentiment and we are rarely, if ever, surprised by customer response.   More about our Community and how it’s evolved   In 2014, we hosted two separate community forums, one each for the Elance and oDesk marketplaces. These forums were hosted on Drupal, and resulted in a combined page view total of ~1.3 million/ year. In November 2014 we launched our Lithium Community for oDesk and migrated over those users and approximately 12 months of historic content.   Within the first 6 months of our Lithium Community, we had surpassed 1.5 million page views and now regularly exceed that number on a quarterly basis.       Performance Results of Our Total Community: Since launch, we’ve consistently maintained a CHI score of 700+ and now reach around 1.5 million page views, each quarter! Consumption is trending higher every month. Users are clicking around the site more with an average of 6 page views per visit. Registrations are continually trending upwards with roughly 1000 new registrations a week. SEO is working very well with the majority of the traffic (83%) coming from Google. We are Best In Class for consumption and join rates.       Expanding our Total Community - What’s Next?   The Upwork Community has done well to bring our company closer to its customers and to enable members to fill a void that many of us who work in a traditional work environment take for granted. Our high engagement metrics prove this.   We’ve also become a reliable source for information and other resources that can contribute to success on the Upwork marketplace. According to our latest Value Analytics survey, users are coming to the community for answers and find our Community to be a reliable source of customer information and support.   An increased focus on Community Support To further our progression as a resource for customer support, we recently redesigned our community with a focus on ways to help with case deflection and assist new users in finding the information they need. We changed the way our search worked and provided a convenient call to action so users would know to post their questions right from the search bar. We’ve also added more descriptive text and an introduction video that gives a tutorial style walk-thru for new users to navigate the community. With the new redesign and optimization we aim to achieve the following:    Case deflection of Customer Support tickets; Increased CHI; Organized content to improve the user experience.   Launching LSW   An important step in our connection with our Social and Support teams was the launch of LSW. LSW went live at Upwork on February 2, 2016 and has helped our teams to be better equipped when addressing user concerns. Through LSW’s capabilities our teams have been able to seamlessly engage with our users, escalate communications to other teams, and respond to user's posts, questions and requests better than before.   LSW has helped in the following areas: Time to reply (avg. 3 mins faster): Because our teams can manage all activity from one location and leverage macros, bulk responses, etc. they are able to respond faster on social and in the community. The Lithium App also allows our CS agents to access tickets/messages through their mobile devices, which helps them stay informed/reactive when an urgent case comes in outside of their work hours. Queue management: Posts are flagged and deposited into appropriate queues, based on “@” mentions and other keywords. As a result, the teams are able to assign areas to specific personnel.  Tags help our agents ensure that more urgent issues take precedence over others in case of a backlog. The queue and priority system makes it easy to ensure everyone's taking care of priority posts first and nothing gets missed. Visibility: Because of the cross-functional dashboards and supervisor views our community, social and CS teams can see activity across channels, allowing us to collaborate more intuitively.  For example, outages and other incident activity have been identified via email ahead of our Engineering teams allowing us to use LSW to help with incident alerting and management. Tracking/User management: Agents can add user notes and are quickly able to identify a user’s social influence (followers) and social history (past posts/tweets). The customer conversion history and internal notes make both internal coordination and customer responses easier and better. Agents can tag customers (VIP, problem customer, Upwork employee/associate, etc.), store customer information (UIDs, contact info) and make internal notes to build a collective knowledge base. This allows us to readily handle inquiries, giving each agent a full perspective of who that customer is.  
Company: H & R Block Entry submitted by: Jerry Green (Enterprise Community Strategist)  & Jillian Bejtlich (Community Architect)  Community: The Community & DNA Communities Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan     H&R Block is the world’... See more...
Company: H & R Block Entry submitted by: Jerry Green (Enterprise Community Strategist)  & Jillian Bejtlich (Community Architect)  Community: The Community & DNA Communities Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan     H&R Block is the world’s largest tax services provider, having prepared more than 650 million tax returns since 1955. There are approximately 12,000 company-owned and franchise retail locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories, and on U.S. military bases around the world.   In fiscal 2015, H&R Block prepared 24.2 million tax returns around the world - 1 in every 7 U.S. tax returns and over $50 billion in tax refunds, credits, and other government benefits. All of this is done with the dedicated help and knowledge of over 80,000 highly trained tax professionals nationwide.   Our 2015 Community goals   When H&R Block embarked on its community initiative in 2013, the client community – The Community – was founded with the intention of providing clients a welcoming space to talk about the implications of taxes year round. What happens if I buy a house or get married? How does having a baby or adopting affect my taxes?   The Community was never intended to replace or impact H&R Block’s client services, but as it grew and matured it evolved from a community of practice to a highly effective and widely utilized client self-service knowledgebase. Our clients needed a different way to access help – regardless of the time of day, complexity of the question, or how long the wait time was for phone or chat support. We delivered.   By early 2014, we had the idea that community would not only help our clients, but could help our 80,000 associates across the country as well. After conducting a successful pilot within the client community, we built a second dedicated Lithium community – DNA Communities – in June 2015.   Together, the goals for H&R Block community initiative echo the values and visions of H&R Block:   Develop an active and thriving associate community that allows associates nationwide to share knowledge, best practices, and feedback. We believe in our people. Strive to provide a frictionless client experience regardless of time of day, type of question, or product used. We take care of all clients. Augment existing client support options with an efficient, cost-effective solution that contributes to the financial success of H&R Block as a whole. We deliver for our shareholders.   Our focus areas and tactics to meet our goals   In order to build an active, sustainable, and cost effective community for both H&R Block clients and associates, we identified the following as necessary focus areas.   Make self-service behavior the default behavior for clients and associates. In order to change the behavior of both clients and associates, we made subtle modifications to the environments they were already familiar with.   In the client community, this meant changes that encouraged searching and browsing instead of posting and leaving. Changes included re-locating the search bar in a prominent location, multiple modules for timely content and shifting the forum boards further down the page.     In the associate community, we mimicked the existing intranet down to every detail associates were familiar with from the internal intranet. We also developed a customized SSO portal that automatically recognized associates by employee ID and assigned permissions based on job codes. It is an entirely frictionless experience – and far easier than searching for the right contact to e-mail.     Build a strong network of members and associates with extensive tax knowledge. In order to effectively manage the volume of posts that occur during the tax season, we recognized and supported early “super users” in The Community and continue to employ strategies to identify potential new super users to help us support a growing member base. Super users, who are largely H&R Block associates and geographically dispersed, contribute to The Community when they have excess capacity, answering member questions at all hours of the day and creating economic efficiencies, supporting all three of our primary goals.   Our results   We built an active and thriving associate community. As of April 19 th (official close to the filing season), DNA Communities has proven to be a major success in just 8 months since launch. DNA Communities has provided over $1.64 million in services with 2,487 solutions and over 152,000 successful searches.     We provide a frictionless client experience. After two subtle revisions to the community interface and an abundance of pre-season efforts, we have observed dramatic positive changes to The Community. We have more page views than ever before and an impressive increase in successful searches and super user involvement. Community sentiment continues to trend more positive with every tax season.   As of April 19 th , The Community had provided approximately $2.7 million in services with 1,742 solutions and over 262,000 successful searches (87% successful search rate since improvements).   We provide an efficient and cost-effective support solution. Everything we have accomplished has been with two dedicated community team employees, less than a dozen very dedicated and passionate super users, and over 150 employees whose jobs have been made easier by leading community efforts in their existing roles. The value of services provided by the community is far more than the cost of providing these services.   Our top six active super users have voluntarily provided the client community 807 solutions that have been viewed over 1.2 million times. On average, our top super user – a retired tax professional – provides an estimated $45,000 in services per year.   In total, the community initiative at H&R Block has provided well over an estimated $4.3 million in services in the course of four tax seasons. We look forward to many more years of successful community building and helping millions of clients, potential clients, and associates.    
Company: PayPal Entry submitted by: Carolynn Bae  (Head of APAC Customer Early Life) Community: PayPal Headstart Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile pay... See more...
Company: PayPal Entry submitted by: Carolynn Bae  (Head of APAC Customer Early Life) Community: PayPal Headstart Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   PayPal is a leading technology platform company that enables digital and mobile payments on behalf of consumers and merchants worldwide. We put our customers at the center of everything we do. We strive to increase our relevance for consumers, merchants, friends and family to access and move their money anywhere in the world, anytime, on any platform and through any device.   We provide safer and simpler ways for businesses of all sizes to accept payments from merchant websites, mobile devices and applications, and at offline retail locations through a wide range of payment solutions.   Our unique promotion   We launched the PayPal Headstart Community to increase engagement with small business owners in 6 countries to help them through to their first transaction after signing up for PayPal and for existing businesses to increase our share of checkout through PayPal. Rather than launch the new community in the usual way we gave business owners the opportunity to connect with experts through the community and ask a question that really mattered to them and their business simultaneously helping the community gain traction and also help the business owners. We called the campaign Ask an Expert and had 3x ecommerce experts and a $100 Google AdWords incentive to kickstart the conversation.     Our strategy and tactics for community promotion   We provided a small incentive to encourage businesses to open the invitation and to submit high quality questions. We leveraged the experts bio’s as an email and social media campaign utilizing Facebook custom audiences to capture the attention of our existing business and funnel them to the community. Our hypothesis was that business owners who are more engaged with us as they set up their business are more likely to successfully integrate PayPal into their businesses and receive their first transaction.     Our results   Within 3 months we had a 2.5% lift in number of businesses making their first successful PayPal transaction across all 6 markets. And unexpectedly we also had a significant 1.84x increase in number of transactions for business segment that had activated PayPal in the last 3 months. During the 2 week campaign period we had over 500 new posts and 100k views.   Value Analytics YTD Results as of 3/31/16: n = 266 75% of respondents indicated they were able to find the information they were looking for. 66% of those respondents indicated they would have phoned or emailed had they not found their answer.
Company: Optimizely Entry submitted by: Amanda Swan (Website Product Manager)  Community: Optiverse Lithy Category: Community Design of the Year    Optimizely is the world’s leading experience optimization platform, providing website and... See more...
Company: Optimizely Entry submitted by: Amanda Swan (Website Product Manager)  Community: Optiverse Lithy Category: Community Design of the Year    Optimizely is the world’s leading experience optimization platform, providing website and mobile A/B testing and personalization for the world’s leading brands.   Our community goals   The vision of the Optiverse is to be the most-visited digital destination for optimization industry thought leadership, peer-to-peer discussions, tutorials, how-to education and resources.   The Optiverse Community helps Optimizely scale education and support.   What makes our community unique   The Optiverse is made up of our Community, Knowledge Base, and Academy. In order to facilitate easy navigation between the three properties, we implemented a sticky left rail and top global navigation so it’s easy for visitors to jump between properties and explore different types of content. The left nav has a hover and expanded state.     We also created a responsive homepage for the Optiverse that sets context and explains why a visitor might use each of the three properties.       We’re implementing a custom implementation for premium gamification in our community with unique badges our members helped design.     In our quest to provide the best possible digital experience for an individual visitor, we’re also personalizing headers and layouts based on behavioral and firmographic attributes. We continually use AB tests and user test to inform and guide our decisions.   How we  executed our community design   There’s a blog post that digs into this process in detail that can be found here.    Here are the main steps: Do you research and know your data. We were continually looking at analytics, talking to community members and performing user tests. Get the right people in the room. We gathered a team of internal stakeholders who were invested in the success of the community and set clear KPIs together. Draw a line in the sand. We created a strategy brief that became the source of truth for the entire design process. The Strategy brief outlined the vision and mission of the Optiverse, key user behaviors we wanted to influence, emotions we wanted the design to convey, target audience motivations, primary and secondary target roles, guiding UX priciples, and measureable goals. For example, based on common feedback trends from customers, the Optiverse team distilled the emotional and visual identity with six principles: Helpful, Educational, Trustworthy, Industry Leading, Thought provoking and Interactive. Of course, the tone and mood of the design should also follow these attributes. Having a strategy brief helped communicate the project to external team members and helped us evaluate success of the project. Move quickly and eliminate dependencies in design. Wireframes were essential for rapid prototyping because they allowed us to move quickly and are extremely cost-effective.  Along the way, we were constantly throwing new and crazy ideas on the wall to see what stuck. We always referred back to the user experience brief and used customer feedback to validate hypotheses.  Keep community members involved. Once we finally moved into the design phase, we made sure to keep our Community MVPs up to speed so they could contribute feedback and ideas.   Our metrics   2 months after the launch of the re-design (but still prior to rolling out gamification) we saw the following results (as compared to months prior to the launch):   Total Page Views 76% Total Unique Visitors 58% Completed Registrations 190% Member Time (min) 103% Member Entrances 117% # of Posts 15% Pages per Session 5% Session Duration 40%
Company: SAS Entry submitted by: Shelley Sessoms (Online Community Manager) Community: SAS Support Communities Lithy category: Marketing Champion (2 of 2 entries)   SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, busine... See more...
Company: SAS Entry submitted by: Shelley Sessoms (Online Community Manager) Community: SAS Support Communities Lithy category: Marketing Champion (2 of 2 entries)   SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 80,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW ® .   Our Unique Promotion   We launched external and internal Super User programs to give a recognition and commitment boost to super active community members. These programs publicly honored our strongest members for their outstanding contributions and gave them tools to expand their community leadership so they can get more out of their community experience – and help the community as a whole.   External SAS Super Users felt special because they: Received a badge and special rank icon that appears on their community avatar:  Had access to a private "Super Users" forum, where they can confer with their fellow "supers" and the SAS community managers. Were invited to "Super Users"-only meetings with SAS staff, where they get the inside scoop on SAS communities and other SAS goings-on. Received privileges like moving stray posts to the proper board and marking spam. Received periodic surprise community/SAS swag and personal gifts in the mail. They completed a “What are your favorites” Q/A so we knew what to send them. On their birthdays, we posted a “Happy Birthday” message on the community homepage banner that is visible only to the member with a birthday.       Internal SAS Super FREQs (FREQ is a name of a commonly used SAS procedure) received:   A special rank icon and badge:  Community management rights such as moving stray posts, featuring good ones and editing topics that need clarity. Note of appreciation and thanks to each of their managers. Choice of community swag: branded coffee cup or USB charger.     Our Promotional Strategy and Tactics   We identified our first pool of super members by analyzing community activity from Lithium bulk data. We decided to appoint a new group of Super Users/FREQS every six months and that “alumni” members will be awarded an Emeritus status and special badge. Example for Super Users:   We then defined program parameters like: Guidelines complete with “how-to” instructions for executing special tasks, posted on private board:   Promotions to serve two purposes: recognize super members and elevate awareness of communities in general.   Promotional tactics include:   Super Users Community Memo blog post and Getting Started TKB article. Feature on community home page: Social updates on SAS corporate, user-specific and personal channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, and external SAS-related communities, using multiple text variations, headlines and this social tile:     Super FREQS: Intranet article that highlighted employee contributions and what it means to participate in the community, including quotes from the Super FREQs themselves on their activity. Intranet video about how being a community star is like being a super hero.   Be a Hero       Results   Expanded community management coverage Using bulk data from Lithium, we saw that Super Users acted on new privileges like topic moves. From Feb. 1 – March 27, Super Users moved 92 topics to appropriate boards while the community management team moved 35. What’s more, these moves occurred at all hours of the day/night due to the global scope of our Super Users. In effect, the Super User program allowed for 24/7 community moderation; our Super Users became an extension of the SAS communities team.   Our Super Users increased their participation in the communities, as well. Analyzing the 60 days prior to the inception of the Super User program with the 60 days post-program launch we saw:   Super Users increased their shared content/messages posted between 18-90%. The number of accepted solutions given to Super Users increased between 30%-300%. Yes, you read that right: 300% for one Super User in particular.   Super User social sharing of program perks In one instance, a Super User shared a piece of Super User swag through a creative social update. The swag installment sent to Super Users was a pen made out of reclaimed wood from an old SAS building on campus headquarters. The package included an article about the building’s history and a note from SAS Co-founder and CEO Jim Goodnight. One of the Super Users tweeted about the pen, thanking Dr. Goodnight publicly for the gift.  
Company: SAS Entry submitted by: Shelley Sessoms (Online Community Manager) Community: SAS Support Communities Lithy category: Marketing Champion (1 of 2 entries)   SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, busine... See more...
Company: SAS Entry submitted by: Shelley Sessoms (Online Community Manager) Community: SAS Support Communities Lithy category: Marketing Champion (1 of 2 entries)   SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative analytics, business intelligence and data management software and services, SAS helps customers at more than 80,000 sites make better decisions faster. Since 1976, SAS has been giving customers around the world THE POWER TO KNOW ® .   Our Unique Promotion   We used the transition to Lithium as an opportunity to relaunch, reenergize and redesign SAS Support Communities. We aimed to make it easier for members to: Find correct information faster with intuitive searches Connect with peers Share what they know with others   We wanted members to recognize the immediate benefits of the new site, including: A quality mobile experience A new system of ranks and badges that rewards community contributions Better SPAM filters, keeping the noise level down so they can enjoy the good content   Our  Promotional Strategies and Tactics    The community management team deployed an integrated communication plan geared toward new and potential community members, employees and social media influencers to generate awareness of the relaunch.   After finalizing a launch-specific tagline for SAS Support Communities, “Your forum, transformed,” we came up with a succinct, evergreen tagline that invites community action: “Ask. Find. Share.”   Then we identified key pieces of “getting started” information for members, and produced six community articles and videos covering the points:   Welcome to the SAS Support Communities 3 ways to show off your skills on the SAS Support Communities How to get fast, helpful answers Community etiquette: The do’s and don’ts of the SAS Support Communities How to add SAS syntax to your post 5 features of an awesome SAS Communities profile   We held a soft launch phase for “super” active employee and external community members to gather feedback and create a sense of ownership among this influential group from the outset.   Social proved to be a critical channel for all promotional efforts. Over several weeks, we promoted the following assets across SAS corporate, user-specific and personal channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Facebook, and external SAS-related communities:   How-to videos SAS Users blog post Six social tiles with quotes from community super users. Examples:     Multiple SAS-owned websites promoted the news including the SAS homepage, support site, and appropriate support pages like SAS Training and Books. Three SAS user e-newsletters promoted it as well.   The relaunch received third-party validation through earned media placements including a Huffington Post interview and Social Business Engine podcast episode.   We internally promoted the launch through a video, article on the SAS intranet, post on social media blog, email blast to marketing and sales teams, posts on internal communities and email notices to other communications groups.   Our Results   SAS Support Communities have enjoyed healthy membership and web traffic since their inception in 2006. The relaunch built on this momentum resulting in bumps to online visits, membership and engagement.   Analysis* of SAS Communities traffic, post launch: Comparing Oct 1, 2015-March 27, 2016 to same time last year (Oct 1, 2014-March 27, 2015) 19% increase in sessions (visits) (1.53M vs 1.28M) 25% increase in page views (3M vs 2.4M) Higher rate of return visitors (80% returning vs. new, instead of 74.5% returning vs. new) 31% increase in new registered members rate (14,510 vs 11,067)   *Sources: Google Analytics and Lithium bulk data/history   Traffic to specific promotional tactics contributed to the online traffic boost. Here are a few sample metrics:   Cumulative views on how-to pieces: Articles with embedded videos: 4,407 Stand-alone YouTube videos: 1,061   Breakdown:   Welcome to the SAS Support Communities: article: 1,399; video: 325 3 ways to show off your skills on the SAS Support Communities: article: 1,064; video: 265 How to get fast, helpful answers: article: 560; video: 123 Community etiquette: The do’s and don’ts of the SAS Support Communities: article: 738; video: 77 How to add SAS syntax to your post: article: 471; video: 200 5 features of an awesome SAS Communities profile: article: 175; video: 71     SAS-owned social channel engagement:   We sprinkled promotions from corporate and user-focused social channels for months following the community relaunch date of Sept. 8, 2015. From Sept. 8 through Dec. 31, 2015, here are a few promotion results.   137 posts 940 engagements (709 likes, 13 comments, 218 shares) 282,500 account followers   Sample comments:   1. A quoted active member retweeted and pointed to specific SAS product board:     2. Same member replied and cited tagline, Find. Ask. Share:     3. One update received a technical question from a SAS user:     4.  Supporting visuals: Please include any supporting visuals/graphics into your above answers. Insert them into your text copy, so we’re clear on desired positioning of the graphics. We will accept videos for this entry. All videos must be submitted as publicly viewable links on YouTube or Vimeo.   Answer #2 includes links to external promotions, such as community articles with embedded videos. In addition, here are direct YouTube links to the videos:   SAS Support Communities: YouTube playlist of all introduction videos Welcome! Boost your rep! How to get answers… Community guidelines Create an awesome profile New for SAS programmers    
Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear s... See more...
Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   In February 2015, we launched http://community.smartbear.com on the Lithium engine. By that time, we had forums for different products. They had their own design, gamification features, etc. It was a big challenge for us to unite all forums on one Lithium engine – we didn’t want to reduce the features we had on our old forums. In addition to this, we wanted to add more modern features provided by Lithium.     One of the main requirements was related to the community design – we wanted to see a branded community. Our designers worked hard on every image we added to the Community pages. In addition to modern design, we wanted to have more than just forums in the Community. Now, the SmartBear Community includes forums, feature request areas, Community Matters Blog, SmartBear Developer Network, Customer Advisory Board, different user groups and much more.   Here is the Community home page:     We regularly analyze community metrics, and they prove the success of our new Community. We achieved the 500% growth of visits to our Community by the end of 2015! We expect to see this trend in 2016 as we put much effort into the SmartBear Community.   Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% #Solutions +240% #Kudos +280% Visits +500%
Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports mo... See more...
Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Support Savings MVP   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.   The SmartBear Community provides 24/7 assistance for all product users. In addition, the Customer Care Team helps our customers resolve technical issues during normal business hours. Decreasing the load on our Support Team was one of the important tasks for 2015.   People should go to the Community first In 2015, we were concentrating on increasing the number of questions asked in the Community. For this, we launched different community programs oriented towards increasing the community visibility and boosting the activity of current community members.   We allocated one community manager who worked with community members, launched different community programs oriented towards new and existing community members.   To decrease the number of support cases, we have implemented the pre-submission search on the Contact Support form. When a customer submits a case, we show community topics where a similar question has already been discussed. Answering one specific question in the Community often means answering the same question for dozens of people.   The results of this implementation were great – many people went to the Community instead of contacting the Support Team.   Involve different teams into discussions As a rule, different teams don’t have time to read all community questions. However, we had a community manager who could refer an interesting question to a certain developer, QA engineer, technical writer, etc. They would find an answer faster when given a specific question and not having to review all community questions. Involving employees in the community brings great quality to practically all community discussions.   In addition, community members see that they can talk to developers of the product they use. They like it and often return to them to ask other interesting questions or provide some valuable feedback.   Case Deflection Increase Working on all of our initiatives helped us increase the number of deflected support cases (cases that would normally go to the Support Team, but were resolved in the Community). Last year, we doubled those metrics – at the end of 2015, we had 12% of deflected cases in comparison with 6.8% of deflected cases at the beginning of the same year.