Company: Total Access Communication (dtac)  Entry submitted by: Orraphan Saengsawat (nnnfonnn) AVP, Digital Service & Channel Strategy Community: dtac Online Community (https://community.dtac.co.th/) Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Total Access Communication Public Company Limited, commonly known as DTAC. We are one of Thailand's leading mobile service operators. Founded in August 1989, dtac currently has customer base of more than 28 million numbers (by Q2/2014) with various service freqencies of 800 MHz, 1800 MHz and recently acquired 2100 MHz – prompting dtac to be the only Network in Thailand with the biggest bandwidth at present. In this age of the vocal customer, there is no better advocate for our business than a happy and engaged customer. One of the most rewarding and cost-effective ways of forging strong bonds with our customers is to create an active community.   We implemented our dtac Online community in December 2014. We can hear our customers who are talking about us, see what’s going on, and also positive or negative trends, and can solve negative voices in time. And we are setting the response rate of each question in our community around less than 2 hours in the beginning of the question. Our SuperFans and other members in the community will try to help their friends in this community. If the problem still can’t be fixed, our support team will take care of the case.   Our Community is growing up by community member collaboration. That means consumers, SuperFans, Management team, Support team, volunteer staff, and experts are involved and contribute in our community. Also they serve our objective to build this community for customer centricity and self-service.   Our marketing campaign   Our main objective was to build the customer centricity and cost savings from all forms of contact point, including call to call center, e-mails, social media posts. Customers will help to answer most of the cases. To support the campaign, we launched both internal and external campaigns.   External campaign Soft-Launch event with Online Influencer and dtac SuperFans ‘CEO COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT SHOWS MEMBER ,YOU’RE THERE AND YOU CARE’ We had  the Thai’s online influencer and dtac Superfans special dinner meeting with Mr.Sigve – dtac’s CEO on October 2015.We invited an additional 100 customers who are the dtac’s SuperFans from our community to enjoy dinner and talk with our CEO. This special dinner was live broadcast via Youtube channel. eDM - Invite Online Influencer, Brand advocates, SuperFans dtac had more superfans in Pantip.com – No.1 public community in Thailand. And we had good relationship with online influencers and bloggers. Also we invited  100 people in our first group to trial the service at the end of November.   And we sent this eDM to 100,000 dtac customers that are heavy internet users in 10 december for the commercial launch period.   Monthly Activity An ongoing campaign to drive members to share good ideas for the dtac community. Every department can be an activity host or sponsor; they will have a chance to design the activity or useful question that will help improve this service. There have been more than 500 ideas/activity.   Example :  Topic : Which is the dtac prepaid promotion that you love and need back? https://community.dtac.co.th/t5/ดีแทค-ไอเดีย/โปรที่ใช่-โปรที่ชอบ-ที่อยากให้-dtac-และ-Happy-นำกลับมาอีกครั้ง/td-p/6847 Host By : Prepaid Product Result :  560 comments   Topic : What offer or privilege do you want to find in the dtac reward campaign? https://community.dtac.co.th/t5/ดีแทค-ไอเดีย/dtac-Reward-จัดให้-อยากได้ส่วนลดจากร้านไหน-แนะนำเรามา-ลุ้นรับ/m-p/9966#U9966 Host By : Reward Team Result :  340 comments   Internal dtac Buddy campaign – (Volunteer Staff Campaign) We assembled a volunteer staff to create a team of key contributors that represent the organization to others members in various capacities ranging from development, support, marketing and all the way through to sales. We had provide the training and all volunteers must pass the writing skill exam. Through this process we could ensure that all of the messages would not look like a robot dialog.   Campaign results   In 4 months we reached 1.3 m visitors and 9.3 m page-views and more than 6,000 members. With this number, we created over 2,456 topics and helped resolve 1,263 cases. Half of the cases were resolved by community members and volunteer staff. And our big challenge was to convert 100 participants (Superfans from other communities) at the CEO’s meeting event to be a part of dtac's online community to help answer questions in our community. The result was the ability to convert 40 SuperFans to be a part of our community.  That meant we established the online community as one brand channel through which consumers can offer feedback and share the experience of the brand.   Additional supporting materials   We had integrated marketing communication during November 2014 – January 2015. We are projecting a unified message in both our digital and traditional media and utilize all dtac media asset as below: Digital Signage at outlet Social Network – Facebook Fanpage, Twitter, Youtube, IG Chat Application – Line Direct E-mail SMS Call Center PR Commercial VDO : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZ7zAEM0nY How to VDO : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AeTYLuTnp0   Press Release : http://www.mxphone.net/031214-dtac-launch-online-community/ http://www.thairath.co.th/content/456982 http://www.manager.co.th/Cyberbiz/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=9570000118800 http://www.hooninside.com/news-detail.php?id=409207      

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

Company: SFR Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (Community Strategist) and Stéphane Guillemot (Community Project Manager) Community: RED by SFR Lithy category: Community Design of the Year   Recently initiated February the 16th, 2016, RED by SFR brand targets the Digital Natives people and is meant to complete the SFR company proposal. In order to answer these target expectations, we imagined a model where the community dimension would be a structural pillar from our customer proposition. Thus was born the Community RED by SFR powered by Lithium. Two major objectives: mutual assistance between our customers and commitment to the brand and with the brand.   THE CONCEPTION AND THE LAUNCH It is in a very tight schedule that we realized the entire project. From the strategic thinking to the release candidate, six weeks have passed and only 2 employees supported this goal from the beginning to the end, including the development phases.     Initiated into the agile software method, the RED Community is part of the brand ecosystem, adopting their codes and fitting perfectly with the global website (design, UX and UI), from desktop and mobile devices.   However these 6 weeks did not reduce our ambitions since we realized a lot of advanced customizations to meet specific needs. For example, the development of a second home page corresponding to a dedicated part of the mutual aid and assistance. We will approach this below.   A COMPLETELY CUSTOM RESEARCH We deemed it essential that the Community have a space where exchanges are extremely dense to enable all users to easily access the search function. Thus it appears on the whole Community pages. We even chose to rearrange this whole function and especially the search results pages.     Therefore we have simplified this experience for our customers by adapting the existing filters: by content type (FAQ, Forum), by date, by solution and an instinctive user search.     We also modified the results display by optimizing the search engine and allowing a better visual identification of the contents.     A CUSTOM FAQ FROM END TO END We have completely redesigned the FAQ organization keeping in mind two things: The users are used to the search engine and dislike browsing the content in order to find what they want. The brands are often unable to maintain over time the FAQ with a coherent hierarchical organization.   Therefore, all our FAQs appear in an unique and same category. However, we wished to keep a classification of them into 2 thematics, by diverting the Tags and Labels functionalities: Tags: corresponding to the product type (Mobile, xDSL, Fiber) Labels: the key moments of our Customer Journey (Ex: “choisir red” = “Choose Red’).   Thanks to this organization, a same FAQ concern one or several products and/or one or several moments of the Customer Journey. Moreover, all the filters act on this unique page. In sum, the classification and duplicate contents issues no longer arise. Only the relevance of the articles has to be managed over time.     Let’s scrutinize an article more in detail. Once again, we concentrated on our customers' expectations: obtaining the searched information quickly and efficiently.   So we focused all relevant information on a given subject and have implemented paragraph anchors to easily find the desired information: Browsing on the article color the part of read summary Browsing over the other parts is done by clicking on this summary, without loading. An experience that our customers desire.   LITHIUM TO MANAGE TUMBLR In order to strengthen our digital anchor and maximize the bridges between the Community and social networks, we chose to couple Tumblr to Lithium. The RED Lab homepage dynamically loads from the Tumblr REST API the latest published messages. Their numbers are adjusted accorded to 2 criteria: For the animation needs, the Community Managers are able to make this number vary. The number of messages adapt itself to the user device. For example, on a desktop, the user will have four posts while on a tablet, there will be only 3 messages.   The “Aujourd’hui” page is the integral Tumblr, perfectly integrated into the Community environment (header, menus, footer, etc.).     AN INNOVATIVE BOARD ORGANIZATION Our community structure is based on the Customer Journey. So we follow the concern of our customers without creating complexity for our users. They identify more easily where to post their messages and the overall boards perception is richer for readers.     A BOLD GAMIFICATION At the heart of the aid section of the community, we insist on putting forward the “solutions” and the “Likes”. Indeed, each connected user has their own pad which emphasizes its status and its progress in the community.     These graphic elements are found repeatedly in our interface.   RESULTS ACHIEVED These elements allow us to have an engaged community, innovative, simple and clear and thanks to a fully responsive interface.   The results at 1 month: 5,000 engaged members 8 Super Users whose contributions represent more than 30% of discussions The RED community management team represent less than 5% of the discussions, meaning 95% of discussions stem from members

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

Company:  Digi Telecommunications Entry submitted by: Lee Yang Ching (Associate - Community Manager) Community: Digi Community Lithy category:  Marketing Champion   Digi is a leading mobile communications company providing a comprehensive range of affordable, convenient and easy to use wireless services to simplify and enrich the lives of its customers.   Our unique promotion and goal    Digi is one of Malaysia’s leading telecommunications providers who is dedicated in providing innovative and wholesome user experiences. In 2015, we launched Community, Malaysia’s first people-powered hub that serves as a platform for Digi users, new and existing, to get answers to any and all of their questions.       To further help customers take charge and easily manage their accounts, we also provided customers with the MyDigi app. Customers could check their usage, pay their bills, and even buy additional subscriptions or credit reloads.   Both platforms were created to empower our customers and also provide them with a more seamless experience with Digi. However, one key challenge faced was that not many customers were aware of these platforms and thus not utilizing its unique features.   Hence, our keys goals were to: Teach users how to use Community and increase usage of ‘Kudos’ (the Like button) Increase membership and engagement on Community Awareness of the MyDigi app and its functions   The MyDigi Contest   As Malaysia’s first people-powered hub, we wanted to educate our customers that they were empowered to contribute and further shape the experiences of other Digi users. Hence, we came up with a strategy to help us achieve all 3 key goals at one go; the MyDigi contest.   We ran the contest via a blogpost on Community and incorporated attractive prizes, 30 Lenovo A369i smartphones to hook audiences and spark interest to participate in the contest.     Upon getting their attention through the awesome prizes, we then asked a question other telco service providers rarely asked:   "As a Digi customer, I would like to have <insert feature/idea/answer here> in the MyDigi app because <reason>.”   We kept the participation mechanics within 3 simple steps:     To sustain interest and encourage more creative submissions, we gave away 2 smartphones daily to the Top 2 entries of the day. Winners were selected based on the most creative and relevant, and also received the highest number of Kudos (Like button).   This tactic helped to ensure that participants submitted quality entries whilst empowering other Community members to give an entry they liked a “Kudo”, a key feature of Community that encouraged honest and helpful contributions to other users.   In order to comment or Kudo an entry, users needed to sign into our Community which helped boost new membership and engagement on Community. This tactic also helped to educate users on how Community works and experience the empowerment they have on this people-powered hub.   Through this contest we also managed to increase awareness and functionalities of the MyDigi app as users had reason to download and experience the app to share their suggestions on how the app could be better.   Our results   We received 83 entries from Digi users who had great ideas on improving the MyDigi app Community page views increased by 5% during contest period. User Growth from Jan – Feb (during the contest) was double the average monthly growth at 20% (average 10%) Blog page views leap by 76% more views with the contest blog post itself received over 5,300 views (average view 121) (making up 49% of total blog post views), and received 86 Kudos (86 times more than the average of 1 Kudo per post) for all the comments. Overall in 2015, we grew to have an average of 75K monthly unique visitors by the end of the year, with page views averaging at about 185K per month.   We successfully increased membership and engagement on Community through a simple strategy that inadvertently taught users how to use community and Kudos, whilst creating awareness about the MyDigi app and its functions.  

Company:  Orange Espagne SAU Entry submitted by: Santiago Martín Martín (Social Support Manager) Community: Orange Community Lithy category:  Total Community All Star    Spain is the second market in importance for Orange Group, one of the most prominent telecom companies in the world, with more than 263 million clients during 2015.   Through different brands – Orange itself, newly acquired Jazztel, amena and Simyo, we have the trust of more than 19 million clients in Spain making daily use of our fixed and mobile services as well as TV.   Our road to Lithium   Two years ago, Orange Spain took the decision to take a big step in the social support of our customers. Lithium applications were a key enabler and platform for the execution of this new strategy on our two brands: Orange and Amena and newly on Jazztel. We decided to put in place a new social customer support model, mainly in Facebook and Twitter, focusing on customer satisfaction, resolution and response time.   LSW has helped us to build this new model and to get the highest performance of our support and comms teams. We have made extensive usage of tagging, queuing and reporting facilities of the application, getting the better efficiency of our agents who only have to be focused in solving our customer request and incidents.   On the other hand, we put a big focus in our superusers cultivation program, in fact we have used extensively gamification facilities of the Lithium community to get our superusers to create a big amount of solutions to other customers' issues.   During the last two years, our main business goal has been call deflection.     The benefits of us having both a community and LSW    Community is the link between our social strategy and the website. Users are creators of many content that complement help & support contents. All our social marketing and customer support in other media is always referencing and linking community content.   Our results   With our Lithium-powered community, we reached 500k monthly visits, a 40% increase in the last year. Mainly, these visits are coming to communities to solve any doubts or problems. We have found that 27% of visitors surveyed say that they get their problem solved in their visit, so we are consistently saving costs around 500k euros per year. Regarding social media (Facebook and Twitter), we are very proud of achieving our goals of response time and customer satisfaction: we answer 91% of posts in our SLA time (1 hours), and we achieved 90% of customer satisfaction in these interactions.  

Company: Verizon Residential Categories: Best Community Business Integration  Entered by: Becky Carroll (beckyc) Community Name: Verizon  URL: community.verizon.com   Verizon has always used our community forums as a main area of customer insight. Our nearly 90,000 members have been actively sharing their opinions on Verizon products and services for the past three years.    Our goal at Verizon is to go beyond simply gathering customer opinions. We want to collaborate with our customers, so we launched the Verizon Idea Exchange in July 2010 with three main objectives:     Identify new product and service enhancement opportunities Facilitate customer-driven product/service enhancements or new products/services Enhance the Verizon brand as establishing innovative ways to engage with and serve customers       Open Innovation   The excitement from our customers around the Idea Exchange started almost immediately. Customers quickly began submitting suggestions for our products and services. In return, the product managers for our main product areas have become fully engaged with the Idea Exchange, especially around our flagship product FiOS. The FiOS managers now review customer-submitted ideas weekly as part of their business processes, are more engaged with the Verizon Community as a valuable resource, and are interacting with customers on an almost-daily basis.   The Verizon Community and the Idea Exchange has helped change the way the FiOS product team does business—starting with incorporating customer feedback into our latest FiOS release, 1.9 Interactive Media Guide for set top boxes.      Giving the Community a Sneak Peek Our FiOS product director was so energized by the power of the direct collaboration he and his team had been doing with customers that he created a new program, Sneak Peek. The 1.9 Sneak Peek offered customers in designated areas a preview of our latest Interactive Media Guide (IMG 1.9) for set top boxes in exchange for their feedback. The program not only provided another opportunity to connect customers directly with Verizon product managers, but it also utilized our forums members as a private study group to provide feedback on this new product. Members of the Verizon engineering team spent time interacting with customer in this private forum discussion around the upcoming release, and our forums members were thrilled to be given this opportunity to share their thoughts with them.   “I would like to extend my thanks to the engineering team and Verizon for the opportunity they have afforded us in beta testing the new IMG and especially the programming team for all their hard word and attention to our ramblings. Being an engineer (for more years than I care to admit) I really appreciate the hard work and the difficulty of the task for something as complex as the firmware.” Keyboards, customer and Verizon Community Leader “I also have to give a big thanks to the Verizon’s Engineering and Programming team for working with us in the beta testing. This was a complex task to write and rewrite all the software and firmware… keep us in mind for the next beta. Great job, Verizon! Thanks! :)” johnf2, customer and regular Community contributor   Customers Directly Impact the Product In fact, through the Idea Exchange, the 1.9 Sneak Peek, and the Verizon Community at large, a staggering 70-80 percent of what was put into the IMG 1.9 release was tweaked, suggested, or refined by our customers.    Here are just a few of the customer suggestions from the Idea Exchange that were included in the 1.9 IMG release:   The ability to extend a current DVR recording by an extra 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours after the previously-established end time. Improved remote DVR management  from the Web (myverizon.com), mobile (DVR manager apps for Blackberry, Android, Apple, Palm and Windows Mobile platforms), and other STBs in the home. Improvements to DVR series managements and rescheduling logic that allow the DVR to better handle duplicate recordings.   Going forward, the FiOS product management team is also giving the community team access to their test track business customers, a FiOS business focus group. We’re working with the FiOS product management team on ways to integrate this focus group into similar product tie-ins on the Verizon Community, similar to the 1.9 Sneak Peek, so we can continue the close collaboration and customer insight. A True Engagement Community One of the most exciting areas has been the way programs such as the Idea Exchange and the Sneak Peek have increased levels of engagement with the Verizon Community. When the Idea Exchange first launched, our Community Leaders (CLs) grabbed onto it and started moderating the ideas, letting us know when they saw duplicates or customer questions needing attention. This was not a role we asked them to play, but they picked it up on their own as this new customer insight mechanism gained momentum. In addition, we have been seeing a lot of community “newbies” move from being lurkers to registered community members. Since our original community is a peer-to-peer support community, these customers may not have felt that they had anything to contribute to those technical discussions. However, anyone can contribute an idea, comment on another customer’s idea, or simply leave a vote. This has really helped fuel community growth and interest across our customer base. Results Since launch at the end of July 2010, we have seen the following results:   Over 1400 ideas submitted  Over 200 ideas are “in progress” throughout Verizon Already, 16 ideas have been implemented by the Verizon product teams Additionally, the Idea Exchange itself has been rapidly growing:   107% growth in comments 403% growth in votes 555% growth in visitors In summary, the Verizon Community has now become fully engrained in our product management processes. It has helped Verizon get closer to the customer, gain insights to help us take action, look for issues needing attention (early detection), and improve customer retention. We are truly changing the way we do business as a result of direct customer feedback from the Verizon Community!  

Company: HP Entry submitted by: Tyna Chua (tyna_c) Social Media Manager Community: HP Support Forum (h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy category: Best Social Support Program _______________________________________________   The award-winning HP Consumer Support Forums – the cornerstone of HP’s social support efforts – are a global interactive community where HP customers connect online with one another to exchange insights, tips and answers to each other's questions.   Boasting traffic of two visits every second in 2012, the HP Consumer Support Forums have hit some remarkable milestones which demonstrate their reach, impact and growth:   With a notable 48% increase in Forum questions, the community handled this growth effectively, showing a 17% improvement in reply rate.  We are showing continued improvement in reply rates, with the last three months showing an increase of 27%. An impressive 80% increase in page views of Accepted Solutions. Accepted Solutions are viewed 1,500 times on average, enabling others to benefit from a solution provided by the community to the original post-er. (Data is based on 2012 compared to 2011).   Drivers of Success   At the heart of HP’s Social Support Program are the following:   I.  Community Engagement HP’s social care community would not be as successful as it is today if it weren’t for our volunteer "HP Experts" – employees and customers who donate their time to the Forums to answer HP customer questions.These Experts are the life blood of HP’s Forums, and their active participation directly influences the vibrancy and vitality of the seven HP Forum communities.   So how do we energize and motivate our Experts to keep participating in our Forums?  We continue to develop our HP Expert Program, which includes:   Our annual Social Support Summit, bringing together hundreds of our top Forum contributors from around the world with one thing in common: a passion to help others through social tools.   In its second year, the Summit this March in Orlando, FL attracted 200 attendees speaking more than seven languages: English, French, German, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese.   Worldwide expert meet ups:  Meet-ups bring together global and regional HP employees and local volunteers for informal social gatherings to exchange ideas and solutions. Contests:  HP introduced a gaming challenge for top contributors to respond to threads on the least active Forum boards. Expert Days: 24-hour Expert "marathons” on specific topics designed to accelerate solutions to customer issues. Improving Expert efficiency with an Unanswered Questions Widget: A widget displaying unanswered Forum posts allows HP Experts fast and easy access to neglected posts, resulting in faster response times and more satisfied customers. Product Loan Program: Provides Experts the opportunity to have the most popular HP products in their homes so they can better help customers asking product-specific questions.  Product Briefing Series:  Provide training on new HP products and technologies, giving Experts up-to-date knowledge to help customers in the Forums.  We conducted seven Product Briefings in 2012, with more planned in 2013.  These initiatives helped contribute to the following results (Data is based on 2012 compared to 2011):                                 II. Customer Experience Because the great majority of our Forum visitors are “observers,” we have placed due emphasis on improving the user interface by making it easier for visitors to ask a question or search the Forums.  In partnership with Lithium, we have launched several customer experience improvements that increase visibility to the “ask” feature and improve search results layout.   Preliminary data shows that the changes yield positive results, increasing Forum search by 66% globally (week after release average vs. week prior to release average).  In the pipeline are changes to simplify registration and encourage customer feedback.   III.  Monitoring and Harvesting We currently harvest our Forum conversations and provide frequent, regular feedback to the business units for product improvement or service/support quality. Funneling customer feedback from Forums to business units results in improvements such as creation of patches by our software development team or updates to content on our website.Additionally, every month, we provide the business units with a list of top viewed threads that have not been solved by the community so they can further investigate and provide guidance.   IV. Investments Our Forums are a key component of our overall support strategy, and this is evident in our investment priorities, including: improving our tools and making enhancements to the Forums experience recruiting top talent to add to our army of Experts and advocates investing in our volunteer base and dedicated agents that help assist our customers Social media as a channel for customer support continues to grow in importance to HP and its customers.  Our Forum activity remains far-reaching, providing support throughout several regions and languages.   Quick Timeline HP's Consumer Support Forums available since 2009 Quarterly Expert Days across seven languages commenced 2009 Expert meet ups commenced 2010 Inaugural Social Support Summit occurred March 2012 One billion Page Views milestone in November 2012        

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

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

Company: Elisa Entry submitted by: Noora Halme (Noora) Community Manager Community: Elisa Palsta (palsta.elisa.fi) Community: Saunalahti Palsta (palsta.saunalahti.fi) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Saunalahti and Elisa had separate discussion/help forums for several years, original launches dating back to 2005 and 2009. That makes a total of ten years of conversations and community bonding! When we decided to bring our community to the next level and moved the old forums over to the Lithium platform, we had few things to consider design-wise:   We wanted to keep our community clear and simple, easy to navigate, visually new but similar to what our users were used to. With a decade of history with little or none design changes, we couldn’t risk losing our members due to a radical change from classic and simple design to something very cutting edge. Our current Scandinavian design reflects the minimal taste of our Finnish users. The whole web presence of Elisa and Saunalahti is being renewed during 2013, and we wanted to be the first ones to take the changes into account. Elisa is a pioneer of support communities among Finnish telecom companies, and as a community, we wanted to be pioneers also internally. We were excited about the great new features that could guide our users to the most relevant and helpful content. We wanted to present kudos, solutions, subscriptions and bookmarks on our forum pages in a way that would make it possible for all of our users to find relevant content easily. Our goal is to be easy to approach and intuitive. Two brands, one community. We have one community, but two separate brands. Elisa provides IPTV-services, e-books and home security systems and Saunalahti focuses on mobile and broadband services and our customers are interested in different things depending on their products and services. We want to be there to help and to listen on both brands, forum pages have to be similar, but still provide relevant content for all types of customers. This was no easy task, but we managed to do it!   Our main focus is to provide a safe and friendly environment to our customers to ask questions about our products and services - we're essentially a support forum, a challenger to traditional customer support via telephone and e-mail. The community is a natural part of our customer care for us and - more importantly - to our customers.   We have had loads of good feedback from our clear colors, simple navigation, simplicity and the visual similarity of our two forums that form one community. The usability of our forums has been much praised: even though the radical decrease of different boards, from 30 to 11 on Saunalahti and 23 to nine on Elisa, was frowned upon at first, our members soon begun to appreciate the simplicity. Bringing the kudoed posts and solutions to the forum pages has also been a much-appreciated feature. We have had an amazing growth on our community members, and what is most important, the amount of visits and the average time spent online!   Our much praised avatar collection is one of my favorite parts as well. We use clear coloring to separate our staff and even super users from other community members, we see this as an important factor that helps our new users to find the most trustworthy content. After all we have a whopping community of 50 000 members! Our basic set of avatars consists of 20 characters including these ladies and gentlemen:                           We added a bunch of new at the end of 2012, including few moustached-up versions for movember (they were a hit!):                           And don't tell anyone, but we still have few more in store:   Maybe we'll add few special ones for nose day and pink ribbon?   We have a long lasting tradition of choosing a member of the year, they are rewarded with a crowned version of the avatars and our superusers have their own avatar collection with a small starred banner:                           Finally, here are our staff members. Orange is for admin (that would be me), green for moderators and blue for other staff. Our moderators also requested a special avatar for movember and we have a grey one for the moderators, who have already moved on:               Now that the first year of the new community has passed, we want to keep on rolling! Some of our users are very active on other communities around the web and they're constantly driving us towards better usability. Our plans for 2013 include, but are surely not limited to: Ideas exchange! We’re implementing Ideas in few weeks. Our users have been wishing for “Ideas-smithy” (that would be Ideapaja in Finnish) for a long time and now we’re ready for it! The design will be even more simple than the one on our forum pages’ and we’re ready to listen the voice of our users on what they want to see and how they want to use the “smithy”.                                                 Banner rotation! New banner pictures for spring, 1st of may, autumn and perhaps also gay pride? User designed banners? Sky's the limit! Speech bubble -logo and branding aren't going anywhere, but now that we have a good grounding, we can let loose a bit. Product-specific designs, new backgrounds for new product launches. Even better visual integration to product pages of Elisa and Saunalahti. We'll be incorporating a new navigation bar (currently marked with a grey bar on top of the community pages) that will allow our customers to easily navigate between our product pages, help pages, forums and self services.

Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best New Community ___________________________________________________________________   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan.   Joe is also community-based. It means that the community is at the heart of its business model and allows for very lean operation when it comes to customer support.   Obviously it is easier to achieve this result when it's in your DNA right from the start rather than switching from a regular business model to a cooperative one.   That being said, it might have failed and we could have been flooded with support requests from angry users dying to find an answer to their legitimate questions. Fortunately this has not happened, in fact it's quite the opposite since with a satisfaction rate of 92% and an NPS score of 44 just two months after the start of our operations, our customers seems to be quite happy with their customer experience.   Let's dive into some numbers. There are 3 ways to find an answer with Joe :   1) Search the community. Chances are your question has already been asked, but also already answered. With 80K searches since the community started, this seems to be the preferred and most effective way to find your answer.   2) Open a topic : 3K new topics have been opened in the Help sections of the community (I voluntarily left out the "Café" section dedicated to off- topic discussions).   3) Fill out a support form : 2.5K have been opened so far. These are treated by our support agents via a dedicated channel and depending on the difficulty, are escalated to Level 3 support.                                           So how much have we saved ?   Again this is hard to tell since we have no prior comparison point. What we can say however is this :   We have to first make an assumption on the efficiency of the search tool. Let's say, that only 10% of searches guides the customer to the answer he is looking for (we think it is a conservative number when we look at the search terms that are most used). If we assume this hypothesis to be true, that's 8K support "cases" (10% of 80,000 searches) that would get solved without any further interaction with either the community or our support staff.                                                     All in all, this would mean that, out of the 13.5K support cases that you get if you add up 10% of the search to new topics and support forms, only 18.5% of those cases incur a direct cost for Joe (the support staff). That would be quite a compelling result in our opinion and truth is that we have not been forced to hire more support agents so those figure seems to be spot on.      Of course you should take into considerations all the efforts and staff needed to make sure that the community is indeed active and effective but in the long run, it will be more effective to have a few community managers rather than line up support agents that solve cases one by one.   One last takeaway. The community can handle the first level of support effectively because our system is simple and transparent. We don't have the burden of legacy IT or aging tariff plans. That allows the community, in most cases, to know the answers. We have worked a lot to have a simple process and make most information available directly to the customer via self-service. The best way to cut costs on support costs is to take away the root cause of calls.  

Company: Joe Mobile Entry submitted by: Laurent Partouche (lpartouche) Community Manager Community: Joe Community (communaute.joemobile.fr) Lithy category: Best Community Design ___________________________________________________________________   Joe is a new kind of Mobile operator. Real-time, full control over your budget, Joe allows you to finally take control of your phone plan thanks to a web app called the cockpit that is accessible on any smartphone.   The community is at the heart of Joe Mobile's website because it is very much the key to its success and its low-cost business model.   It was clear from the beginning that Joe's community should take center stage in our otherwise very lean website. Hence on Joe's homepage the community link sits in the header's navigation bar, a search field module appears in the middle just above the latest conversations module, and the blog finally rests on the lower right side, just above the fold.   The customer is welcomed via its pseudo and a ticker that notifies him of any unread messages.   You just can't miss that Joe is serious about being a community-based service. But that's not enough. Joe's business model lies on the fact that the community should be in charge of the first-level consumer support. We don't have any call centers, just a limited number of agents that use a form-based tool to deal with the most complicated requests.   For this to work, you need to organize the community space so that the customer, who often comes here for the first time, knows instantly what he is supposed to do to find the answer he is looking for. We have worked hard on the design to ensure that a newbie would find his way. This is how it's done :   First, a mega huge search bar People are very used to searching the google way, it's just the same with Joe. Chances are your question has already been asked…and answered already so Search should be your first stop.   A  horizontal community nav bar This design moves away from the commonly accepted best practices for new communities. However, knowing that it could be risky, we decided to go along with this horizontal design that clearly separate the section for prospective customers, who mostly have questions about our services and how to join, from the section for current customers who need help when activating their number or a more technical issue related to phone or the network.   A cozy place to chat Joe's community is about support, about people helping each other out. But rather than using the Q&A style module that could have been well suited for this purpose, we went along with a regular board design. This choice allows for longer discussions between members sometimes long after the correct answer has been given and validated since we never close subjects. We also dedicated a space, the Café Joe, for pure off-topic discussions and where new users can introduce themselves to the community.   This design is a success! With 30,000 searches per month and 17,000 posts for 1400 new topics, the community is thriving.   All section are very well balanced and we mad sure that "approved solutions" would be very visible both in the live search bar and the posts to be as precise as possible for anyone having a question about Joe.                           We just added The Facebook integration for the community again using the Facebook studio tools provided by lithium. This allows to open the community to a broader audience whilst retaining the same design principles that have worked for us so far.   Good design is key to a successful website. It is even more important when you service depends on the efficiency of the community. Forums can be messy and overloaded, a well-thought design is critical to give customers both a feeling of liveliness that brings a more emotional touch to your operation but also a efficient tool to very rapidly answer any question.                                                            

Company: Webroot Entry submitted by: Jim Murray (jmurray) Community Specialist Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight _____________________________________________   TripleHelix (Daniel) is Webroot's biggest fan. He came to Webroot via one of our acquisitions, Prevx, back in 2011. On the old Prevx forum, over the course of about nine years, TripleHelix accumulated over 9,000 posts. When Webroot acquired Prevx, we embraced their core technology and made it our own. Accordingly, TripleHelix embraced us in a big Canadian bear-hug and never let go.   In only the single year the Webroot Community has been around, he’s already got 1,300 posts – putting him at over 10,000 posts just on our official forums. And not only is he the most active member of our forums - he actively travels the internet seeking out other security-related forums at which to talk about Webroot. Wilders, NeoWin, DSLReports - you name it - TripleHelix probably has an account there.   TripleHelix doesn't miss a single day on the forum. Each and every day, like clockwork, he signs in and stays on the forum almost the entire day. When someone replies on his threads, he almost immediately chimes in with a response. He contributes more forum content than anyone else, particularly to our Security News section.      TripleHelix is like a Security News machine who constantly churns out security-related news stories at a pace of a couple of valuable stories per day. He also keeps us up to speed on anything that is coming down the pike from Microsoft, Adobe, Java or any other companies that routinely participate in Patch Tuesday. Patch Tuesday is TripleHelix Tuesday at Webroot.   He isn't just a news-specific contributor though. One of the best things about Daniel is that he will help other users solves their problems. With 93 accepted solutions under his belt (3.5x more than the next closest member), he rivals even our official technical support helpers on the forum in his skill, ability, willingness, and availability to solve problems. It's no wonder he is sometimes mistaken for official Webroot tech support. Other forum members love him too, which is shown by his collection of 700+ kudos.     The real icing on the cake with TripleHelix is that he isn't just a Webroot superfan. He's also a Microsoft superfan. What a great combination! One day, Daniel even volunteered to take a bunch of free Webroot trials and branded pens to the next Microsoft convention he attended. We never would have even thought of asking him to do that on our own, but he thought of it himself and will be doing it in April. Daniel is like a magical, traveling Webroot billboard that offers free tech support with a little bit of Santa Claus thrown in for good measure.   Speaking of Santa Claus, one of my favorite TripleHelix stories involves our company Christmas party. On the day we had the party, the entire social media department was going to be off to enjoy some free dinner and beverages. As a rule, we advise it's probably not a good idea to come back to work right after the party. In advance of the party, which was held during otherwise staffed hours, I happened to notice that TripleHelix was online, as usual. I let him know the party was about to start and that the Community would be unstaffed for a couple of hours. He volunteered to hold down the fort while we were off enjoying some holiday cheer. True to his word, during that time, he made a series of useful posts. When I returned after the party was over to check in and make sure there weren't any fires to put out, I saw the posts, and TripleHelix saw that I was online. He sent me the following message:      Flash-forward about a week, TripleHelix was posting on Christmas Day helping users who received the gift of Webroot for Christmas and had immediately installed it. There has never been a more hardcore superfan on the internet than TripleHelix, which is why he deserves this award!  

Company: Telefonica Movistar  Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez (UT04546) Community Manager Community: Comunidad Movistar (comunidad.movistar.es)  Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 21 countries. As of December 2014, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 341 million.   Our customer satisfaction initiatives in 2014 were CSI, NPS, Recommendations/Referrals, Noise, Average Response Time and CHI.   As such, our overall objectives have been to increase the CSI, visits, call deflection and commercial leads. See our Social ROI Titan entry for more results on visits and call deflection. In terms of our customer satisfaction initiatives, we focused on CSI, NPS, Recommendations/Referrals, Noise, Average Response Time, and CHI. All areas of our company have their own objectives that are aligned with the overarching company goals.   Improving online customer service was the most critical customer issue that we looked to solve with our Lithium Total Community implementation.   Here are the results of our top customer satisfaction initiatives: CSI: Every time a user/customer receives attention from one of our moderators, we send him/her a link to our online survey asking to evaluate the help received (this applies to cases that need to be solved by official Movistar staff in terms of needing to check the customer information in our systems). We received a stable 9 throughout 2014 and this year. We assisted 120,000 customers in 2014, and in 2015 our moderators have already helped more than 24,000 customers. NPS: In that same survey, we ask the user if he would recommend our help/attention to his friends and family. We are pleased to receive 99% positive answers. Recommendations: As a result of the excellent help that we provide our community, we receive a lot of posts praising our work. And most importantly, we have many examples of users in external forums, referring other users/customers to our community when asking for help and acknowledging us as the best channel to get help from Movistar.   http://www.gsmspain.com/foros/h967593_Operadores-Movistar_CONSEJO-Comunidad-Movistar-1004-609.html   http://www.adslzone.net/postt324695.html   http://bandaancha.eu/foros/velozinter-1709626#r2336025 http://bandaancha.eu/foros/desactivar-casilla-mensajes-1689431#r2132517 Noise: As a part of our strategy, we receive reports from our market research team in which they evaluate the noise about Movistar on the Internet. In this report, we evaluate the amount of noise and the tonality of the noise (positive, negative, neutral). Since the Community was launched, we are still the leading Telco company that receives the most mentions. Furthermore, we are the one in the telco sector that receives the most positive tonality in part due of the influence of the community (1.3M monthly visits).   Average Response Time: 6 hours, which is a significant reduction from our 2013 average response time of 14 hours. LSW: We have recently started using Lithium Social Web (LSW) as a part of our strategy to improve our customer satisfaction and achieve even better results with response time. CHI 785: We have achieved a stable 780-785 CHI.   In addition to the above achievements, we have relocated our call centers in Spain (instead of outsourcing). We are also focusing on increasing the servicing to 70% in online channels in order to avoid expenses to our call center.  

Company: Telefonica Movistar  Entry submitted by: Emilio Rodriguez Menendez ( Community Manager) Community: Comunidad Movistar   Lithy category: Marketing Champion   Telefónica is one of the world leading integrated operators in the telecommunications sector, providing communication, information and entertainment solutions, with presence in Europe and Latin America. It operates in 21 countries. As of December 2015, Telefónica’s total number of customers amounted to 322 million.   Our community objective   Our community amounts to 1.6 million visitors on average every month, and our blog itself ( Movisfera ) gets near 200k visits every month. We launched the blog 2 years ago with the goal to create a destination for our users, a place where they could write their own thoughts and content, and a forum with an abundance of help content useful for a Movistar customer, a technology fan, or a regular user. By mid 2015, we became aware that the blog wasn´t fulfilling our goals. 90% of the content was Movistar staff generated and full of commercial articles, so it was  time to turn around the situation and get back to our objective of creating a true community.   Launching our collaborators program   We decided to give our users more leadership/relevance, so we launched our collaborator program publicly. We asked our users to join the blog staff and help others with their content published in the blog.   We also decided to add new, regular content to the blog in the form of help-oriented content called "Tip/trick of the week" and "Our recommendation of the week" which have become quite popular between our visitors and readers.   We were able to get 10 regular collaborators (those who have written at least one article per month ) to contribute. Additionally we created a new section in the blog called "User corner" and identified each and every single users article/post with a label that showed the post was non Movistar generated.        By the end of 2015, we celebrated our annual event with users and super users. We awarded the blog collaborator of the year (the person who had created the most content and achieved the most visits) with a trophy and a special gift.      Continued  success with the collaborators program   By March 2016, the regular blog collaborators grew significantly. They have published more than 80 articles which have received (on an average of more than 3,000 visits per post) nearly 400,000 visits in less than one year. Especially popular have been the user j3gallo posts about cinema with thousands of visits and social shares.   https://comunidad.movistar.es/t5/user/viewprofilepage/user-id/45   https://comunidad.movistar.es/t5/Movisfera/El-mejor-cine-de-este-oto%C3%B1o-estrenos-de-octubre-pr%C3%B3ximamente-en/ba-p/2650953   The reach of their content has also been spread through our social networks’ official pages (Facebook and Twitter) in which we have shared their content with huge success within our followers (as shown in the following examples):       Results of the collaborators program   To summarize, the goals we have achieved with this project: Blog visits and views have increased by 150% since May 2015 We’ve garnered more than 10 regular collaborators The blog perception has drastically changed for the better-- from commercial content to user-generated content