Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guid... See more...
Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness.   Our 2015 goals for our Lithium-powered community and LSW   Fitbit helps people lead healthy and active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration, and guidance to reach their goals. Our community connects millions of users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.   Keeping focus on our brand commitment to excellent experiences, our 2015 goals centered around establishing better connections between customers and product support. We sought to increase our presence on social media, bring even more visitors to our established forum content, and ensure quick, consistent responses through all our channels.   We recognized that achieving these primary goals would also result in equally substantial secondary benefits. By providing excellent support via social platforms, we would deflect contacts from other support channels, which offer a more traditional one-to-one communication model. By surfacing relevant Community discussions and Accepted Solutions, we would have the opportunity to resolve customer inquiries before their question was even asked.   In addition, we were excited to begin routing all content through LSW, from social engagements and forum posts to marketing responses and app reviews. Through tagging, volume metrics, and social listening tools, we aimed to improve our understanding of what users are seeking when they reach out to us. This data is a vital part of improving our internal analytics and reporting to the business around milestone events.   Our focus areas and tactics    We set out to meet - and even surpass - these goals with an ambitious multi-pronged strategy.   The largest single move to unite customers with content involved transitioning our Community from private to full public accessibility. The ensuing SEO visibility resulted in 3x visits and page views.     In anticipation of this new traffic, we launched a major project to maximize the value of Accepted Solutions, which appear prominently in search results. Our team worked to ensure that every Community topic included a satisfactory response, which is an effort we continue with new threads today.   Another significant step toward this goal was promoting our Community and Twitter support channels on both the help site and contact page. As this is the most common avenue used to reach Fitbit via email, phone, and chat, we hoped the prospect of a more rapid response on our platforms would appeal to customers.   We recognized that this effort would only be worthwhile if we could indeed deliver on that promise of excellent and rapid resolutions. To this end, we developed a capacity plan and staffing model to accommodate the growing popularity of our social support channels, aiming for the 4 hour maximum response time featured on our contact page, 24 hours a day. Through collaboration with our social marketing teams, we aggressively added support for newly-established regional brand pages and new channels including Instagram and app store reviews. We also put LSW’s tagging logic to work by applying product, platform, and feature-based tags to content, allowing us to get deep insights into social and community commentary.   In addition to bolstering our social coverage, we began acknowledging emerging issues in real-time through proactive tweets, floated community threads, and help site banners (which often linked straight to community threads). We’ve also engaged our Community Council superuser group to escalate concerning posts for quick attention. With this infrastructure in place, we were on the right track to make Fitbit a leader in the social support realm!   Our results   As we compare our current state to where we began at the start of 2015, it’s clear that the aforementioned efforts have been wildly successful.     Social media interactions increased rapidly as we strengthened our support presence and featured these channels on our contact page. Per the above graph, we saw a 616% increase in contacts to our dedicated support handle on Twitter between January 2015 and January 2016 (compared to a 393% increase the year prior). We also noted a substantial gain in channel subscriptions as we passed 100,000 followers on Twitter. Our growing audience brings increased amplification and adds value to proactive tweets, aiding us us in our mission to further reduce support contacts. As depicted below, we've calculated that by providing Twitter support alone, we've saved approximately 29,000 agent hours in Q3 and Q4 of the past year, by resolving customer issues without the involvement of email, phone, or chat.     Our shift to a public Community was impossible to overlook, as forum content quickly occupied the top spots for relevant search results. We saw daily traffic more than double in the month following this change, and noted the balance shift to more than 60% mobile visitors. As we ramp down from the last Holiday season, we now find ourselves at about 500% traffic compared to the closed community of 6 months ago.   To better visualize the full value of this growth, we ran a series of Community surveys to gauge the likelihood for Community visitors to open support cases after their visit. Prior to the open community, we saw potential for about 500,000 annual case deflections. Following the public relaunch, we were able to greatly increase this ROI potential, even considering increased staffing costs. Per the results of these surveys, we estimate about 225% ROI for our Community last year.     The 2015 year was one of lofty goals and great strides for both our team and our platforms. These numbers give us confidence that our hard work has resulted in better support experiences for Fitbit customers around the world, and also that we continue to significantly contribute to an efficient, versatile, and economical Customer Support department.
  Company:  Alteryx  Entry submitted by: Julie Hamel (Senior Community Manager) Community: Alteryx Community Lithy Category:  Marketing Champion   Alteryx is the leader in self-service data analytics. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts w... See more...
  Company:  Alteryx  Entry submitted by: Julie Hamel (Senior Community Manager) Community: Alteryx Community Lithy Category:  Marketing Champion   Alteryx is the leader in self-service data analytics. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts with the unique ability to easily prep, blend and analyze all of their data using a repeatable workflow, then deploy and share analytics at scale for deeper insights in hours, not weeks.   Our unique promotion    When we began conceptualizing the future of community at Alteryx in early 2015, we made bold investments to begin a transformation of the way that our customers and employees connect with each other, discover new solutions to complex analytical challenges, and contribute fresh ideas to the broad industry discussion. If we were going to successfully launch our new community and scale alongside our rapidly-growing business, creating an equally-bold awareness and adoption campaign was critical.   The Alteryx Community team dedicated significant resources in a short timeframe to design an aesthetic that translates well across the boundaries of digital and physical promotional efforts. The team did a fantastic job of creating a natural feel to long-time users of our products and appealing to the forthcoming generation of business analysts. This led to three major themes that define the core our campaigns: - Be part of something bigger than yourself - Take pride in sharing your knowledge - Keep exploring Below are examples of how we’ve applied that strategy to execute tactically in a number of areas. The resulting lifts in awareness, engagement, and satisfaction around community have been amazing.    Our strategy and tactics   Video - To introduce the Alteryx Community and pique interest around launch, the team employed little Dot with the blue hair in a fun and light welcome video, which later made 2015’s Top Videos from Video Brewery. It was an instant hit with Alteryx Associates, who previewed the video at a pre-launch Community 101 All-Hands meeting. Externally, the video was shared via social channels a few days prior to the launch to tease our followers and promote our launch date.     Swag – People love free stuff. To raise awareness internally, all employees were provided with community superhero mugs and notebooks, where they were encouraged to help spread the words with our partners and customers. We continue to hand these out during the new hire boot camp alongside a Community 101 session to help employees get familiarized with the community and their roles in it. We occasionally send these out to customers to thank them for their participation as well.     Gamification – We’ve made great use of Gamification through an extensive collection of badges used to welcome members on their first visit, introduce them to new features, and to recognize their affiliations & status within the global community. Community Members who were migrated from the original community received the community founders badge at launch, which triggered email notifications to let them know the new community was live and thank them for their support. The competition to collect them all is fierce!   Contests - To help generate user content and create a fun & positive atmosphere we launched the 10 Things I love About Alteryx contest where we encouraged users to share reasons they enjoy the product and share tips with other community members. The 10 best quotes were gathered to create the first ever Alteryx Community t-shirt and the winner took away a GoPro!   Hangouts - Our community launch coincided with the release of version 10.0 of Alteryx Designer, so we hosted a live event using Google Hangouts allowing the community to get up close and personal with Product Management, executives, and our Alteryx ACEs (our superusers who beta’d the product) to hear about new features.  Hangouts have become a regular part of our repertoire. Our customers love tuning in to hear the latest and interact directly with Alteryx staff and each other!     Our results   After our re-launch in September 2015, post count increased by 2000%, going from an average of 30 posts a month to 1,000+! The community received 10,000+ unique visitors who generated nearly 100,000 pageviews. Active members increased by 2,300%. Metrics continued to trend up in October, with traffic peaking on the day of our first live event as 4,000+ unique visitors stopped by the community. Since then, we have hosted live Alteryx | Hangouts on a monthly basis, which have provided a great way for us to preview what we are working on, share tips & tricks, and connect with our members to recognize them for their efforts.   All of our efforts have had a major impact internally as well. Employees have embraced the community to support customers and collaborate internally. Having hundreds of champions to support our cause is a big key to our success. Employees make up only 1.5% of our visitors, but generate nearly 44% of posts and 38% of solutions (much of that in the internal employee-only area of the site). The community as a whole has generated 14,000+ posts and 1,000+ solutions in just 6 short months. Its passion and rapid growth continue to amaze us.
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phone provider... See more...
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    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.    Comcast’s number one goal is to transform our customers’ experience with us. Social media has become a strong and effective service channel for our customers. In 2015 we expanded the use of Lithium Social Web and completely redesigned Comcast’s community. The Digital Care team works to resolve all customer inquiries in a timely matter with a heavy focus on quality interactions. Lithium’s LSW and Community solutions both provide significant support in our goal to provide excellent service 24x7x365. With these solutions, we are able to measure success and track volume and engagement from each social platform.   Key 2015 Milestones: Created and deployed NPS survey program Achieved higher than industry average NPS score based on nearly 60% survey response rate Increase in channel (social) resolution rates to 99%+ Deployed a Quality program for our team which focused on the customer experience and the behaviors necessary to change customer perceptions & sentiments from negative to positive Deployed Spanish Language support for Xfinity Latino Twitter and Facebook Reduced non-social channel escalations per month from 4000 to 400 5M Page Views in the Help & Support Community 5M Unique Visitors to our community - nearly 10M from mobile and tablet devices More than 8.25M Solution Views - a 13% increase year over year More than 5.4M registered community users   My Account App integration with @comcastcares The XFINITY My Account app is a self help tool for the customer. Customers are guided through interactive troubleshooting guides. If the issue persists after completion of basic troubleshooting, customers are given the option to tweet @comcastcares. Utilizing LSW’s Routing features we are able to seamlessly support customer inquiries received via this channel.     Expert Help Lithium’s Expert help feature has been a game changing addition for the Digital Care team. From any platform we support we are able to escalate the conversation to key stakeholders within the company. This helps the Digital Care team provide the best customer experience by getting to the right solutions as quickly as possible. This also helps alert key stakeholders within the company about potential issues with the products and services under their direction.     Smart View Smart Views have allowed us to significantly enhance our approach to queue management. This has given us the ability, based on event, topic or outage, to capture the volume and help shift resources to the specific event or topic. As most issues found on social media are time sensitive, we have the ability to provide reactive statements and provide real-time communication to internal stakeholders.     Approvals The Digital Care team has had significant growth over the past few years. Due to this growth we have found that LSW’s Approval feature has helped our team with training new hires and our quality program. The Approval feature gives our team’s SMEs (subject matter experts) the ability to approve new hire posts to ensure they meet the Digital Care quality standards. This also helps with developing the necessary confidence to engage on social and provides a cleaner method of learning the brand’s social voice. This allows us to focus on providing the best overall customer experience.     Dashboards/Alerts The Digital Care Team utilizes dashboards to provide micro level operational insights to our Digital Care leaders and broader information to key stakeholders from throughout the company. This feature has changed the way Digital Care Team communicates with our colleagues. We no longer have to capture the volume and send an email alerting the stakeholders. We currently have 165 users with dashboard access. Many are also set up for alerts pertaining to what product or service they support. This provides real time alerts and insight to what is happening on social media.     Forums 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 customers quickly see that the question in that thread has an approved solution.     KB integration With the Knowledge Base integration, we are able to respond to customers on Twitter or Facebook with self-help or approved solutions from our community. This allows us to not only provide accurate information, but also helps us introduce potential new users to our growing Community. In addition to driving new users to our community, we are also able to introduce the new community user to our solution, thus furthering our reach from one-to-one to one-to-many solutions.  
Company: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian Schärtl (Project Coordinator Digital Services ) Community:  Vodafone Forum  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Ger... See more...
Company: Vodafone Germany Entry submitted by: Sebastian Schärtl (Project Coordinator Digital Services ) Community:  Vodafone Forum  Lithy category:  Marketing Champion     Vodafone Germany is a telecommunication company based in Germany, with more than 14,000 employees and it's headquarters in Duesseldorf. It is part of the Vodafone Group, one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. Currently, more than 45 million people are making use of Vodafone services in Germany.   Since 2015, Vodafone Germany and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland have become one company. Vodafone Germany provides mobile service, fixed network, internet and TV from a single source. Thereby, Vodafone Germany offers the customer a unique converged service experience. Converged service has an impact on the service strategy as well.   A merger brand strategy   Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland decided to implement a common brand strategy. Following this approach we decided to merge our communities as well. Each community was based on different providers.   However, both communities had their own identities, topics, rules and working principles. For this reason – and to make them part of the story - service agents were deeply involved in the project to represent the agent’s perspective of the community.   Based on their platform expertise and operational experience, they provided the basis for a common community management and harmonized principles wherever necessary. Workshops revealed the key differences in moderation approaches between the Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities.   In addition, agents visited each other to understand their daily business. This encouraged agents to work together more closely and intensively. Community coffee cups and a team poster were created to promote the team spirit. Above all, agents appreciated the team building measures:     Vodafone Community used the header to update the users. A changing visualization highlighted the upcoming merger. Additionally, more details were communicated within the community itself. Both user groups should feel as one new common community.   Our Super-User Event   Of course the user involvement is crucial as an active user base is core to any community. Vodafone Germany and Kabel Deutschland communities together accumulate more than 40 active Super-Users. Users appreciate posts from Super-Users, as they are considered authentic customer feedback. This year, one of the Super-users wrote his 23,000 th post. To continue the good cooperation, the Vodafone Community invited all Super-Users to a merger event in Düsseldorf. All participants received detailed merger information. During a brainstorming session, we, the core project team, agents and Super-Users, developed the major components of our Vodafone Community slogan “Know. Share. Help.”     Some users were skeptical, but Super-Users supported the community, to convince them of the advantages of the new converged community. In cooperation with the Super-Users, the Community also tidied up and moved posts. After having cleaned up, all content was migrated to the merged community, not to lose valuable user input. All users were migrated automatically as well, to make the move as simple as possible for the customers.   At the beginning of the common community, each Super-User got a personalized Community coffee cup and received welcome flyers.     Other events and contests   Related to the upcoming Christmas 2015, the Vodafone Community defined a strategy to get users engaged with the new community. During a competition, users learned more about the new community design structure and had the opportunity to win prizes. Users engaged with the Vodafone and Vodafone Kabel Deutschland product portfolio:     After the merger, all agents got an invitation to celebrate at the headquarters in Düsseldorf. Besides networking, the team analyzed the current collaboration, identified open issues and defined measures to get rid of them. Also the formerly separate Super-User events will be one common central happening in the future.   Now more than 200,000 users are on the platform to exchange, discuss and answer questions. The Vodafone Community is comprised of almost 1 Million posts. Wherever the community is not able to support, Vodafone service agents provide expert know-how.
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Comcast Cable is one of the nation's largest video, high-speed Internet and phon... See more...
Company:  Comcast  Entry submitted by: Matt Verna (Analyst) Community: Comcast Help & Support Forums  Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   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.    Our customer satisfaction initiatives    In 2015 Comcast’s Digital Care Team strove to:   Create and deploy NPS survey program Increase in-channel (social) resolution rates Deploy a Quality program for our team which focused on customer experience and the behaviors necessary to change customer perceptions & sentiments from negative to positive   Comcast’s Digital Care Team experienced significant growth in 2015. That growth drove a material increase in customer interactions making it necessary to employ tools that helped drive customer-centric behaviors across our multi-site organization. Our growth, while clearly good for our ability to meet more customers in the channel of their choosing, could have, without careful planning, resulted in the loss of the boutique, one-stop-shop customer experience we have worked to build. A primary tool in our effort to maintain the highest customer satisfaction levels possible is our newly deployed Quality program. The Quality program’s primary goal is to ensure a consistent, high quality customer experience for each and every interaction. With the technology in place to track conversation sentiment and newly allocated resources dedicated to ensuring its accuracy, Digital Care has been able to maintain and improve upon our ability to fully serve our broad customer base.   Along with assuring the quality of conversations, the quantity of conversations continued to increase, encouraging even more operational changes. Expanding the team into two divisions, Operations and Strategy, allowed our Operations team to focus on coaching, while letting our Strategy team focus on Quality, Reporting, Forecasting & Scheduling, Technology, Training and the Customer Experience. In 2015, the Digital Care team implemented an entirely ‘in-channel’ Net Promoter System (NPS) survey to its customers on Facebook and Twitter, sending more than one thousand surveys. In 2016 we’ve already sent out more than two thousand surveys. Keeping the customer in-channel from inception to completion was imperative to operational success and ultimately proven with NPS survey results that exceed industry averages and are among the highest for any group in the company.   The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via  Lithium implementation and what makes our approach to customer satisfaction a gold standard in the industry   The solutions that Lithium provides directly aligns with Digital Care’s key objective - building a better customer experience. To manage the increasing volume of incoming posts and facilitate a streamlined response process, Lithium’s robust tag and routing hierarchy allow Comcast’s social team to provide the highest quality conversations with its customers and eliminate as much room as possible for error. The newly integrated Quality program keeps these processes in check and also allows frontline specialists to participate in peer-to-peer review and approval processes for new employees. Combining the approval process, Quality program and the tag structure has created the necessary balance between technology and operation goals, which in turn has provided a better customer experience. To prove the success of this collaboration, the team’s NPS score places well above the industry average score and surveying the customer in the social channel they interacted in has resulted in a nearly 60% response rate. Our customers’ experience with us will always be the Digital Care Team’s number one priority but the accessibility of viable technology contributes to the successes of the team.    Our metrics   Our focus on the customer experience in 2015 and 2016 has had meaningful and tangible results for our customers.   We are no longer last resort support channel, customers are coming to us first Nearly 75% of customers that came in negative left neutral or positive Reduced non-social channel escalations per month from 4000 to 400 Higher than industry average NPS score, nearly 60% response rate to in-channel surveys In-channel resolution increase from 95 to 99% in 2015  
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: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration ... See more...
Company: Fitbit, Inc. Contact: Allison Leahy (Director of Community) Community: Fitbit Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness.   Our road to Lithium   Fitbit helps people lead healthier, more active lives by empowering them with data, inspiration and guidance to reach their goals. As the leader in connected health and fitness, Fitbit designs products and experiences that track everyday health and fitness. Our community connects millions of Fitbit users around the world so they can support one another in achieving their wellness goals.   In the past few years, Fitbit has had a number of exciting opportunities to connect with its customers. Following a successful Lithium Community launch in late 2013, we stepped up our social media game by bringing LSW into the mix and integrating the toolset with our forums and CRM system.   LSW’s polished visual interface, customizable workspaces, and flexible backend settings have increased our productivity and allow us to quickly support our customers. LSW has also been one of the most intuitive and enjoyable platforms for us to use! Community Specialists leverage the advanced tagging and routing capabilities to surface emerging support issues, which helps us more quickly get our customers back on track.   Email Advocates benefit from the CRM integration, which equips them to handle escalations that come through our social channels, and offers a more complete view of each customer’s journey. Our management and partner teams appreciate the Mobile Shared Dashboards and extensible Smart View-based Analytics, and our BI team has made an easy time of report building with the APIs.   Before embarking on this journey with Lithium, we recognized that true community support involves listening and engaging with customers on their platform and medium of choice. Providing responses solely within a 9-5 workday left some customers waiting most of a day to hear back from us, which is a veritable eternity on social media. By using LSW to coordinate multiple teams around the globe, we are now able to provide stellar 24-hour support across our customers’ preferred channels. Growing our teams globally has given us the flexibility and bandwidth to continuously add new regional pages and channels, expanding the footprint of Fitbit’s social support brand.   Fitbit now engages millions of customers each month across its global Community Forums and an ever-increasing variety of social media channels. We are better positioned than ever before to continue growing Fitbit’s support presence and championing the voice of our customers.   The benefits of having both a community and LSW   Fitbit’s customer support strategy has always centered around delivery of clear help instructions. Our Community and LSW platforms contribute significantly toward providing our customers the help they need, when they need it.   The most architecturally complex example of our Community and LSW platform integration is our handling of product retailer and mobile app reviews. We are able to get visibility into 16 unique review channels across a variety of retail websites, as well as the Apple, Google, and Microsoft mobile app stores. Reviews from these sites automatically route to a Community board, where they appear as new topics organized by review ranking. LSW monitors our Community, collecting this content into a queue where our team of trained advocates responds to customer concerns and support opportunities. Their replies in LSW are posted to Community threads, where content is relayed via API to the review sites. While this may (accurately) sound like an elaborate construction of workflows, the end result is a familiar and straightforward process for our team and attentive support for customers who aren’t yet fully enjoying their Fitbit tracker.     Perhaps the most high-profile benefit of integration is LSW’s ability to intelligently escalate conversations based on key topical phrases, profile attributes like follower count, or past interaction with our team. This escalation ensures our ability to identify and resolve the highest priority conversations within a target of 30 minutes (and often more quickly than that). Since every Community post is routed through LSW, we’re able to provide this vigilant prioritization to all conversations.   Integrations contribute to our powerful listening capabilities. We’re able to support Fitbit marketing initiatives by providing keyword analytics and extracting crucial content into triage queues, so that we can respond without slowing productivity on other channels. We watch other non-traditional channels like Reddit to remain aware of brand-related conversations across their communities and providing us with a holistic view of the customer experience.   Our results   Our social tools enabled the Fitbit team to listen, evaluate, and apply our business rules to prioritize engagement for over 21,000 community posts, 27,500 tweets, 8,000 Facebook posts, 1,300 Instagram posts, and 3,000 consumer reviews across eight languages every week. Since these tools were implemented in May of 2015, we’ve added social media channels to our support contact page and are successfully handling about 150x the contact volume that we saw three years ago.     The flexibility of the rules engine greatly increased our ability to maneuver media blitzes, giving us the ability to respond to the most critical social conversations while we deliver unique customer insights back to the business. In the exciting time surrounding major product releases, our content and sentiment analysis contribute to our launch-related health reports.   While case deflection is the showstopper, we have defined 25 Community KPIs around growth, engagement, membership, and content, as well as three KPIs for social, including TAR, in-channel resolutions, and response rates.   The graph below illustrates community case deflections based on the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) Support Deflection Value model and our own survey data. The inflection point in November 2015 is a result of removing the login requirement and opening our community forums up to the public and to search. Today, nearly 70% of our traffic is organic, and we’re better able to meet the needs of our fast growing community by delivering effective content faster.     In addition to the KPIs above, we also illustrate  the diverse value of community through less traditional means. For example, members of the Community Team are involved in pulling together deep analysis on critical issues and themes for our product marketing, firmware, design, and other partner teams. We deliver uniquely tailored reports to make sense of customer input and raw support data, often unveiling insights unavailable before our integration with the LSW toolset . This ever-growing stack of virtual reports is one of our clearest value statements within the business.   We take pride in knowing that our unique vantage point, disciplined team structure, and versatility of subject matter make the Community Team a go-to resource for decision makers and leaders across the company as we continue to help them make informed decisions about our products.
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by ... See more...
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.   At Cisco, customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success.   Our 2015 goals for our  Lithium-powered community    Breaking Down Social Barriers   Cisco is the worldwide leader in networking that transforms how people connect, communicate and collaborate, today. At Cisco Systems, our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) of over 4,000 engineers has fully adopted our Social Knowledge Management platform (Tech Zone), behaviors and practices. The knowledge they create within the Tech Zone TKB is externalized as content our customers use to self-serve and self-solve, which allowed us to realize over $25M in case avoidance savings in 2014.     In 2015, we wanted to do much more. Yes, we wanted to continue finding ways to increase case avoidance savings, but we also looked beyond our TAC organization to understand the broader ecosystem engaged in resolving complex customer issues. This led us to the organization that is most often consulted in escalations – Engineering, the group that designs and develops our products. That’s when we realized we had an opportunity – our over 35,000-strong engineer community.   We set out to break down barriers by extending our social knowledge capabilities beyond our Services organization borders and into Engineering, providing capabilities and workflows to foster collaboration with the TAC, thus bringing people together in new ways to create a living, breathing, social organism. This is critical to our continued success because as our customers’ environments become more complex, borderless engagement channels are key in solving their biggest challenges. So we targeted over 35,000 Engineering employees.     Our focus areas and tactics to meet our  goals   Bring in your advocates!   Our engagement began at a summit last year in which the Engineering teams came together to discuss improving collaboration and escalation processes with the TAC. At the time, Engineering was using hundreds of email aliases to communicate with their TAC colleagues as part of their escalation procedures. Our Social Knowledge program manager attended to talk about how Tech Zone could improve the collaboration processes between Engineering and TAC.   As part of the summit objectives, the Engineering team had to agree to standardize on a single, escalation management system. We saw the opportunity to introduce Tech Zone as a means to collaborate early, thus avoiding potential escalations. We also highlighted the added benefit of capturing vital knowledge that could be externalized to help our customers – knowledge that would otherwise be lost in an email exchange. Or worse, asked over and over again.   We brought along our strongest and most influential TAC advocates who highlighted and endorsed the benefits of using Tech Zone, and who influenced Engineering to agree to use the site to collaborate.   At the end of the summit, Engineering agreed to include Tech Zone training and onboarding within the escalation management system training plan. We then identified Engineering advocates who agreed to be early adopters and who would help communicate the benefits of Tech Zone to their colleagues. TAC continues to encourage their engineering partners to use Tech Zone to collaborate today, helping to create the adoption “stickiness” needed for continued success.     Our results   To date, we have established an Engineering Adoption roadmap and have onboarded nearly 15,000 Engineering employees onto Tech Zone to engage and collaborate with TAC engineers. The results have been phenomenal: Engineering has become our fastest growing, knowledge-producing community within Tech Zone, and currently produces 12% of Tech Zone content.     This in turn translates to faster problem resolution and higher customer satisfaction scores as vital, actionable knowledge captured in TKBs is externalized on Cisco.com. Our results prove this as we have observed record-high support content satisfaction scores (4.46 out of 5.00), and consumption numbers for TAC-authored articles (4.7M views of ~2,000 articles) as customers increasingly opt to self-serve and self-solve whenever possible.   In addition, we have retired ~40 email aliases to date (with many more to come) as Engineering teams continue to migrate to Tech Zone.   The benefits for Cisco have been staggering! We’ve more than met our 2015 goal to increase case deflection savings – with an approximate $54.2M in savings for the year – more than double our $25.2M savings from 2014.  
Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digita... See more...
Company: Swisscom Contact: Armin Ledergerber (Social Media Service Designer) Community: Swisscom Community Lithy category: Total Community All Star   As Switzerland’s leading telecom provider, we are a trustworthy companion in the digital world. Our aim is to inspire our customers with the best network, superb offers and outstanding service. Swisscom is one of the most famous and popular brands in Switzerland.   Our service leadership is not only distinguished by the fact that we offer an outstanding level of service in our own service touchpoints, such as the hotline and shops, but also that we reach our customers where they are most active from day-to-day: online and especially on the social web.   Swisscom’s road to Lithium Total Community   The decision to use Lithium was made in 2009. As an early adopter, we were among the first ten European clients to launch a Lithium Community. Two years later, we were the second client in Europe to put LSW into operation. As soon as the partnership began, it became clear that Lithium would be able to help us assert our service leadership in the social web as well.     Fig. 1: Social Media Universe of Swisscom   LSW for service dialogue in four languages   For the digital avant-garde, we offer full-blown customer care on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Messenger. Simple service requests and complex issues alike are resolved on these channels. Our goal is to offer an end-to-end resolution of the customer’s request on the channel of his choice.   LSW allows not only for effective dialogue management, but also, and in particular, a smooth internal organisation. Service inquiries we receive in German, French, Italian, and English can be distributed easily among two teams in different locations. Since PR, Marketing, and Incident Management specialists also work with LSW, it is possible to provide qualified responses to such inquires as well.   Fig. 2: LSW Setup at Swisscom   Community forum for the “long tail” of service requests   With our quadrilingual customers-help-customers forum, we aim to bring together experts from the “crowd” with the niche requests of our customers. It is not our goal to treat every issue raised in the forum, but mainly those service inquiries:   whose problem must first be identified by way of dialogue/discussion, which largely depend on the customer context (e.g. technical setup) and for which no standard solutions exist, or which are not primarily related to our core products (fixed network, TV, web, mobile).   The majority of the service requests can be resolved by the customers themselves via our extensive online help pages. The community therefore plays a vital role in dealing with the “long tail” of customer requests.   Fig. 3: Positioning and Role of the Community within the Solution Space   The benefits of Total Community   With LSW and the community, we lay the foundation to fulfill the promises of our brand – being a trustworthy companion in the digital world and providing outstanding service – also on the social web. Furthermore, with the Total Community approach, we are able to address the fundamental points of our guiding principles in our social media strategy. As Swisscom, we particularly wish to stand by our customers, to make the first move toward meeting their needs by taking their requests seriously. Similarly, we are open to new ideas, which means we listen to and strive to understand our customers. We put these promises into action as follows:   LSW within our social media strategy   Thanks to LSW, we have a scalable solution to handle our ever-growing service requests in a quick and efficient manner and with high technical expertise by using also the extensive knowledge of our community. Our customers appreciate the simplicity of the interaction and the high level of problem-solving expertise in these channels. As a result, social media care has an excellent reputation.   Community within our social media strategy   In addition to customer insights which we gain by listening and engaging through LSW, the community also provides us with greater understanding of the thought processes of our customers. We are therefore better able to grasp what it is that motivates our customers, as well as recognize their needs and discover the issues they discuss with one another. Along with passive listening, we actively invite our customers to participate in product development. As an example, pilot users submitted over 900 posts with suggestions for improving our recently launched UHD TV receiver.   In order that the entire company may benefit from the knowledge derived from these activities, agents and community managers carry these insights on a regular basis to the relevant stakeholders within our company.   Fig. 4: Community and Forum Homepages   The results of Total Community   Since the community and LSW are mainly used in the area of customer care, the focus lies on reducing service costs while maintaining a high customer satisfaction.   Directly measurable savings   From an efficiency point of view, the community helps us deflecting a very substantial amount of calls (savings of about 6k hours/month). Customers who were able to resolve their issues with the help of the community would otherwise have phoned in 75% of the time. The workload savings excel the investments made to license and manage the community tenfold. Furthermore, interacting with customers through LSW has a strong effect on efficiency indicators as well. These overall positive effects are also a result of a community with a current Community Health Index of just over 700.   Fig. 5: Evolution of the Community Forum   Service recovery through social media dialogues   Along with the likewise high resolution rate of the LSW-administered dialogues, this service touchpoint is particularly impressive thanks to its high customer satisfaction index of 8.5 (on a scale of 10) and an above-average NPS compared to other service channels.   Indirectly measurable results within the company   In addition to directly measurable advantages, we clearly see also indirect business outcomes: Voice of the customer: Customer attitudes regarding our products and services are easily recognizable by all employees, which is especially advantageous for product managers. The monitoring of these online discussions helps us identify major problems promptly. Quick feedback loops: It is easy for community users to become involved in product development. This speeds up the development process and ensures customer needs get addressed. Easier troubleshooting: In the case of breakdown, forum discussions help to better understand the cause and thus repair the trouble faster. Thanks to the community’s link to our CRM, affected customers can be identified easily. The sharing of knowledge within the customer care department: Complex customer issues via traditional service touchpoints are often cleared up more quickly with the collective knowledge of the community    
Company:  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: Telenet NV Entry submitted by: Geoffrey Ramon (Social Media Lead) Community: Telenet Community Lithy Category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Telenet’s purpose is to help and inspire our customers to make the most of life... See more...
Company: Telenet NV Entry submitted by: Geoffrey Ramon (Social Media Lead) Community: Telenet Community Lithy Category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Telenet’s purpose is to help and inspire our customers to make the most of life and business in the digital world, and to do so wholeheartedly.   We brought superfast broadband to Flanders, we made phone calls via cable cheaper, and we made digital TV the standard. Telenet introduced its customers to a world of new possibilities.   Technologies which were in their infancy only yesterday are now accepted as standard. Customers don’t have to think about them;  they just want to get on with things.   If you are supported by exceptional services, you can let yourself go completely in what you want to do. Infinite possibilities help you focus on opportunities.   Families discover a completely new style of entertainment where they can watch what they really want to see, anytime, anywhere. Businesses are also discovering new opportunities as Telenet helps them to fully embrace the digital world.   Opportunities to make the most of life and do what we wish wholeheartedly and share it with others.   1 year of an amazing customer experience   Within Telenet, our mission is to make it our customers as effortless as possible. One our strategic pillars is to deliver an amazing experience, whether it is through our products or along the customer journey. To emphasize this, a separate department was founded 'Ace' = Amazing Customer Experience. Following from customer insights an intensive multi-year program was set in place, that allows us to visit all of our customers to fix inhouse connectivity issues, as this is the biggest grievance of customers.   Bearing the customer effortless and an amazing experience in mind. It brought us to being the N°1 Social Devoted Brand on Facebook in Belgium since June 2013 and belonging to the top 500 Socially Devoted companies in the world.   We’ve learned that there is a good appreciation in the market from our customers, prospects and opinion leaders on social media (acknowledged by www.socialbakers.com).   Resulting from, amongst others, these excellent results and keeping the effortless/ ACE in mind Telenet was ready to take on the next level in its social maturity by launching its own branded platform powered by Lithium in 2014.   As from the start it was made clear that the Telenet Community Forum needed to be an addition to the existing customer proposition and not a replacement. The main focus is out of boundaries support by a peer to peer community and being a home for internal and external beta tests.   Throughout the first year we achieved a great success in consumption, unique visitors and registrations.   But most of all, from the very start, we noticed an analytical but positive mindset from the community members towards each others and towards new members. Best illustrated during our latest price adjustment, we saw a neutral-objective tone of voice. A self- regulating base has been made for our future superuser program .      The issue that we are looking to solve with Lithium   Together with the growth of the approachable social media accounts, so grew the out of boundary questions towards Telenet.   A growing number of connected devices with specific settings and operating systems “Out of the ordinary” set-ups of connected audio and video devices together with our inhouse modems/routers and their specifics Numerous “internet of things” that are way out of our (company) league   All of these challenges needed a centralized, searchable and Telenet-branded approach, as an addition to our existing customer propositions.   From 2014, we were able to redirect customers towards the Telenet community. Both our spoken and our social media team had a specific solution towards our customers for all of their “out of boundaries” questions, resulting in linked traffic between social media and The Telenet community. 
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow ... See more...
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.   At Cisco, customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success.   How we're implementing Community to meet our customer care business goals   At Cisco Systems, our customers and partners benefit when our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers share their expertise by publishing actionable, vital knowledge as content on Cisco.com.   Our challenge was how to accelerate the knowledge expertise of over 4,000 worldwide technical support engineers while sharing critical information across a global population. We’ve leveraged Lithium to engage and motivate our TAC Engineers worldwide to seamlessly transform their knowledge and expertise into knowledge for our customers and partners.   We’ve had year over year success in building a borderless technical support community where the following are now embedded into our normal, everyday workflow: skills-based inventory skills-based routing a reputation engine interactive collaboration through gamification   Now, as a knowledge asset is consumed, the reputation of that piece of knowledge grows. Our Lithium community has helped us gain record-high support content satisfaction scores (4.5 out of 5.00), as well as through the number of views of TAC-authored articles (4.7M views of ~2,000 articles). This in turn benefits Cisco, as we’ve realized an approximate $54.2M in case deflection savings for 2015, which is more than double our $25.2M savings from 2014.   The changes we implemented due to cost reductions from community   Lithium has fundamentally changed the way Cisco creates and consumes knowledge in Technical Services.   How do we engage and motivate 4,000+ TAC Engineers globally to transform their expertise into vital knowledge that our customers and partners can use? By hosting a competition with the chance to win a 2-week work rotation at any global TAC location. We called this competition the Knowledge Champions League (KCL).   KCL is a competition where TAC engineers collaborate to create articles within Tech Zone, our internal workflow-enabled community. Articles are published to the Cisco.com support site where customers and partners can access them to self-serve and self-solve. The KCL team that creates the highest volume of most impactful content wins the grand prize.   Although only one team wins, all KCL participants realize the benefits of working collaboratively in global teams across technologies: building their network of contacts, building cultural awareness, and strengthening their collaboration skills while developing articles. Our goal was to encourage this collaboration while creating valuable content for Cisco.com.     How we constructed the KCL Competition:   Phase 1 – The Qualifying period: Each engineer must qualify as a top contributor within their Technology Space.   Phase 2 – The Games: Top contributors for each technology and site (Europe, Americas, Australia, India) were grouped into teams, each with a coach. The team that creates the highest amount of customer-impactful content wins.   Game Elements     The winning team was awarded a two-week rotation to work remotely from a Cisco Customer Support Site.   Our results       By using innovative Gamification techniques and integrating social knowledge and content publishing into TAC workflows, Cisco Services has successfully addressed the challenge of converting the intellectual capital in over 4,000 support engineers' heads into exceptional quality, reusable content. Our Knowledge Champions League efforts fostered sustainable behaviors of collaboration, teamwork and healthy competition resulting in the production of the highest quality, most impactful content our customers can use to solve some of their most complex problems.    
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:  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:  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: upc cablecom GmbH Entry submitted by: Oliver Lutz (Project Manager Social) Community: upc cablecom Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   upc cablecom is a leading provider of communication and entertainment in Switz... See more...
Company: upc cablecom GmbH Entry submitted by: Oliver Lutz (Project Manager Social) Community: upc cablecom Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   upc cablecom is a leading provider of communication and entertainment in Switzerland. Almost 1.4 million customers place their trust in the company’s various products for television, Internet, telephony and mobile.   The regional organisation for Austria/Switzerland generated revenue of CHF 1.7 billion in 2015 with more than 2,500 employees. upc cablecom has a strong parent company behind it in Liberty Global, which is headquartered in the UK.   Our unique promotion   upc cablecom had been running a community on an outdated platform for about 4 years. This platform was extremely limited in terms of moderation capabilities, gamification and features. Community moderators were faced with highly negative sentiment which could not be dealt with properly.   Lithium community was launched in June 2015 for upc. Target was to provide a scalable technology layer which could be used to further develop social activities. Expected benefit for the business was to provide an integrated state-of-the-art social and community technology for ease of use and effectiveness.   Specific goals we wanted to achieve (business case):   Quantitative: Increase NPS Decrease support cost   Qualitative: Improve sentiment drastically Go personal, human connection, adapt tonality, show the faces behind the company. Solidify the connections with our customers Increase internal awareness for social / community   Our strategy and tactics for community promotion   Based on our overall social strategy we defined tactics to gain the objectives listed above.   Tactics: Go personal and become truly social Surprise your customer – build human connections for the brand. Show presence onsite and offsite Try as much as you can, take up what works, abandon what does not work!   Since launch in June 2015 we worked on the following areas: Sweepstakes Videos Blog Community Live Talks Live Events Super Hero Programme Newsletters, personal letters   1) SWEEPSTAKES:    Push registration sweepstake   Target: Push registrations   Newsletter campaign for our customers in order to increase registration rate of the support community. Customer activity: Register and tell us why you deserve the new iphone 6s. Prize: iphone 6s     Halloween sweepstake   Target: Increase awareness and usage, create fun-factors   For Halloween we organized a sweepstake on tickets for the most exclusive Halloween party in Switzerland.   Customer activity: Tell us what your favorite horror movie is….   Sweepstake article in the blog       We produced a self-ironic YouTube Video (see chapter “Videos”) where we created a context between Halloween and a buggy product feature.   New avatars created for Halloween Especially for the occasion of Halloween we extended the avatar offering with a range of “spooky avatars”.     2) VIDEOS   We produced a number of homemade low-budget videos on different topics.   Examples:   Community promotional video Promoting the community. Video was used as TrueView campaign during 3 weeks and was published on YouTube. Main actor of the video clip is a community moderator. One of our community super users acted within this clip as well.     The „making-of” this video was published in one of our blog articles.   Halloween Video Self-ironic spooky Halloween video with reference to a buggy feature of one of our products.    Connect Box unboxing Video Production of an unboxing video for a newly launched modem. The product manager presented the new product. Users could ask questions online.     3) BLOG   Target: Content Marketing; drive traffic! We kicked off a blog in parallel with the community launch. Blog articles are produced on a regular basis and drive traffic to the community and to our website.     4) LIVE TALKS   Target: Increase engagement, drive traffic   To become even more personal we introduced a Community Live Talk on a bi-monthly basis. We are discussing specific topics with internal or external experts live. We got engaged on senior management level and brought senior management into our live talks. Users can ask questions upfront or during the live-session.   WLAN Live Talk       5) LIVE EVENTS   Target: Increase engagement For this year’s big company event we raffled tickets within the community. This generated a lot of interest and we had many community members on-site during the event. They got special treatment before, during and after the event and were really enthusiastic about it.   Live Ticker In parallel, community guys organized a live ticker during the event which was broadcasted via our community blog.     6) SUPERUSER PROGRAMME   Target: Strengthen peer-to-peer support We launched a new superuser programme this spring. Superusers are the fuel of our community and we rely highly on them in terms of peer to peer support. The relationship has been intensified over the past months. Our superusers love the programme and the appreciation which comes with it.     7) NEWSLETTERS/ PERSONAL LETTERS   Newsletters Target: Drive engagement A community newsletter is being sent out on a monthly basis to all registered users. We promote relevant topics and make sure that customers perceive us as number 1 source for relevant support information.     Personal letters Towards the end of the year we sent personal letters to the most active users of the community and said „Thank you“ for their engagement and their contributions..   Moreover, we produced a small video explaining with what we had been busy with during 2015.       Our results   Sweepstakes Videos Blog Community Live Talks Live Events Superuser Programme Newsletters, personal letters     1. Sweepstakes Push registration sweepstake 290 new registrations over 350 participants   Halloween avatars & sweepstake More than 100 users changed their avatar to one out of the Halloween range. Very positive feedback on the self-ironic video    2. Videos Community Promoclip Over 36’000 views on YouTube. Very positive feedback on YouTube & within the Community The YouTube Trueview-campaign performed clearly over the Google Benchmarks.     Connect Box unboxing: Top position in the (Google) SERPs for the product name 70 comments/questions on the new modem within the blog 8000 views on YouTube (without further promotion) 230 participants in the competition Very positive feedback on the personal style of the announcement     3. Blog 130 articles, 760 comments, 80’000 page views, 430 kudos since launch   4. Community Live Talks Over 40 questions raised by Community members upfront and during the talk High senior management attention Based on the results of our community live talks senior management decided to use the live talk format for internal communications as well.   5. Live Event & Liveticker High interest in the 20 seats Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the event Very positive feedback (external & internal) High interest in the 20 seats Over 3000 page views blog visits (LiveTicker) during the Event Very positive feedback (external & internal) 6. Superuser programme - Programme was kicked off with 4 superheroes - Continuous exchange via Superhero board and Skype - Personal meetings on a regular basis   7.Newsletters and personal letters   Newsletters Open Rate ca. 35%, Click Rate ca. 20%, Resulting in a regular increase of contributions (Boards & Blogs)    Personal letters Intensified relationship with the top users
Company: NetApp Inc. Contact: Teresa Peluso (Head of NetApp Community,  Customer Success &  Loyalty) Community: NetApp Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   NetApp, a leader in data management and storage solut... See more...
Company: NetApp Inc. Contact: Teresa Peluso (Head of NetApp Community,  Customer Success &  Loyalty) Community: NetApp Community Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   NetApp, a leader in data management and storage solutions, is committed to helping our customers achieve what matters most to them. Leading organizations worldwide count on NetApp for software, systems and services to manage and store their data. Customers value our teamwork, expertise and passion for helping them succeed now and into the future.   NetApp is a pioneer in online community building and launched an online community years ago to support its customers from around the world. The goal of the NetApp Community is to be a source of truth and belonging for our customers, partners and employees – a safe place to connect and share through a digital experience that cultivates relationships, conversations, and expertise. But most of all, NetApp realizes trust is earned and the community demonstrates NetApp’s commitment to ‘being there’ for its customers and partners.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives   NetApp has always valued and participated in online forums -- we launched our own online community years ago (2008) to support our customers from around the world. The goal of the NetApp Community was (and still is) to be a source of truth and belonging for our customers, partners and employees – a safe place to connect and share through a digital experience that cultivates relationships, conversations, and expertise. But most of all, NetApp realizes trust is earned and the community demonstrates NetApp’s commitment to ‘being there’ for its customers and partners.    In September 2014, we decided to take a bold step in order to stay true to that goal. We thought carefully about long-term community goals, analyzed the data, and realized we needed a new platform to support our marketing excellence strategy and customer-centric approach. NetApp migrated to a Lithium-powered community and transformed their entire digital customer experience for the better.   Transforming the NetApp community experience   We knew that to enable customer success and drive preference and loyalty for NetApp, we had to take stock. Was the community thriving? Are members happy with the experience? The solution became clear – we needed a powerful platform and a solid partner. By moving to a Lithium-powered community, we were on our way to greater ROI and increased customer engagement and satisfaction.   NetApp’s previous community platform and infrastructure did not meet their true goal of being customer focused. Prior to the relaunch, the NetApp community was plagued with technical issues. We were unable to focus on connecting with customers because we were inundated with cumbersome upgrades and spam. In fact, spam was so pervasive on the platform that NetApp employed a separate vendor to manage the problem. Plus, we did not have the controls required to govern for a robust and healthy community, so we knew massive overhaul was in order.   After a rigorous RFP process (no stone left unturned) , NetApp selected Lithium’s SaaS platform because it gave us the flexibility to make extensive customizations. Another benefit to choosing Lithium are the seamless bi-monthly technical upgrades, which is a huge improvement compared to before the move to Lithium. Lithium’s tools make it easy and simple to measure community performance and engagement. This real-time information has led to smarter decision-making based on hard data. The data has also helped us prove the value of our community investment.   Our results   Key metrics: 37,000+ registered members (1100 new members per month) 82% monthly average response rate +25% increase in accepted solutions since moving to Lithium +13.5% increase in community CSAT since moving to Lithium   NetApp now has a new look, new platform and a simplified structure. There have been several upgrades to the platform including site search, improved social sharing and browser support and have created a better mobile experience.   We now have a streamlined number of discussion boards to focus on three areas: Products and Solutions, Developer Network, and NetApp University & Training. We also consolidated and simplified the community structure for easier navigation. Using Lithium gives NetApp a competitive advantage by allowing customers to provide peer-to-peer support, share best practices, and connect with other NetApp influencers. We used this ‘fresh start’ to button up our governance, redefine user guidelines and moderation models (we now have ‘topic owners’ who are notified when new discussions are posted).   The NetApp community framework is based on member satisfaction balanced with business objectives. For measuring success, we established new custom index metric, which calculates different behaviors such as posts, kudos, replies, etc., into a weighted indices for engagement and satisfaction of the community. NetApp is also conducts an annual CSAT Survey which informs and validates the community roadmap from both a technical and program perspective. While there are always improvements to make, the member feedback has been positive.   “Our Lithium-powered community has continued to grow and to exceed all baseline metrics, including its newest key engagement metric, the number of kudos, which is a strong indicator of the customer’s overall satisfaction with content.” - Terri Peluso, Head of NetApp Communities,  Customer Success &  Loyalty  
Company: USAA Entry submitted by:  Bill Gerth (Director, Social Business) Community: USAA Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Organizational Background and Social ROI Goals USAA provides its membership access to competitiv... See more...
Company: USAA Entry submitted by:  Bill Gerth (Director, Social Business) Community: USAA Community Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan   Organizational Background and Social ROI Goals USAA provides its membership access to competitive products, award-winning customer service and the tools and advice they need to make critical life decisions. As a financial services organization that has served generations of military families we know the importance of excellence in customer service. In 1922 when 25 Army officers met in San Antonio, Texas and decided to insure each other's vehicles, they laid the foundation for an organization that became one of the only fully integrated financial services organizations in America serving millions of members.   USAA acknowledges that social media is an important member service channel. In 2015 our Board of Directors required an end of year deliverable of the establishment of a social survey channel to measure the effectiveness of social customer care. The focal point of social customer care for our membership is the discovery of their immediate needs into full resolution with superior customer care. Our members want support through their social channel of choice and USAA is committed to extending customer care on our managed and owned social properties. USAA required business solutions which set the gold standard for member handling in social channels, facilitated dialogue management and meet the unique requirements of business units in the financial services, insurance and communications industries.   USAA’s 2015 social customer care and social business goals were to; establish a social customer care survey (2015 Board of Directors Deliverable), expand social customer care and social business strategies to managed and owned social properties, reduce social engagement SLA by 10%, reduce social acknowledgement time by a minimum of 15%, reduce cost of enterprise social customer care internal documentation by 25%, reduce cost for customer care from social channels to internal CRM processes, validate member community engagement and product acquisition metrics.   ROI from Social Customer Care, Social Business Initiatives In 2015 our partnership with Lithium and Enterprise Business Partners USAA was able to: Implemented a Social Servicing Experience Survey to measure and improve overall effectiveness of the channel, response rate at 15% (2015 USAA Board of Directors Deliverable used to determine overall corporate effectiveness score). Establish an enterprise social customer care SLA <30 minutes Reduced social acknowledgement time by 20%, 5% over goal Reduced social customer care internal documentation from 24 hours to 1 hour; time on task savings of 95% Eliminate internal email as a method for routing member inquiries to experts 5 FTE savings through LSW Social Handle USAA CRM Member Match technology Validate Member Community engagement, eligibility and product completion metrics   USAA knows that online identification processes were disconnected from a member’s true identity, and dissimilar to our internal CRM systems. LSW integration with our systems provides us a 'single member profile’. This ‘single member profile’ allows USAA to associate social insights with known member information and deliver the gold standard for social customer care.     Our members expect flawless interactions, regardless of the service channel, with personalized service. Our return on investment is a 95% reduction in time on task for multiple business processes and 2.5 FTE savings. USAA is effectively and efficiently recognizing our member’s preference for engagement through social media. With LSW USAA has an enterprise solution which integrates our managed properties like Facebook and Twitter with our Member Community; powered by the Lithium Community Platform. The USAA Member Community has over 300K members; this owned social property is an integral part of our social business strategy to maintain superior customer care in a member’s social channel of choice. USAA Member Community has hosted over 8M unique visits with 22% Eligibility Application Completion and 55.8% Product Application Completion Rates.
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: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, Smart... See more...
Company: SmartBear Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager) Community: SmartBear Community  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   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.   Our Story We moved to the Lithium community at the beginning of 2015. One of the first tasks was to move all of our old product forums to one community engine - Lithium. We had products in different software areas with different customers. We had to take into account their specifics and habits.   What we did We started working from two directions – from the community members’ side (externally) and from staff’s side (internally).   We had many community members by the time we moved to Lithium. In addition, each month, plenty of new members joined us. We decided to help all of them get used to our new community and help them get as many benefits from us as possible. For this, we launched two main community programs: The first one was meant to boost activity of current community members; The second one was supposed to help new community members get started in the Community easier.   Moreover, we had been working with our highly-skilled users and nurturing community experts. They were ready to share their knowledge and help other users resolve their issues. Sometimes, getting help from other customers is much more effective than getting help from, for example, the Support Team. Customers know all cons and pros of a product, and they are not shy to share them.   To increase the quality of our Community, we tried to involve our company teams in the Community. We have been working with R&D, QA, Support and Documentation to make them participate more actively in the Community.   What issue were we trying to solve? One of the main issues we had was related to customer satisfaction. Our customers were completely unsatisfied by our Community, and they preferred submitting questions to our Support Team. That increased the load on the team, which was unacceptable.   Moving to Lithium helped us increase customer satisfaction. We saw that more and more people preferred asking the Community as they knew that they would get answers either from other customers or someone from the company.   Our results We are seeing awesome growth in all community metrics: Metrics YoY Growth,% CHI +18% New Topics +58% %Topics replied < 24hrs +12% #Solutions +240%     Our CSAT in January 2016 was 60%. We help new community members get involved in the community life faster. Our current community members understand the value of the Community, and they are ready to share their knowledge with other community members.