Company: CallidusCloud Entry submitted by: Lara Golden (Director of Global Community) Community: CallidusCloud Customer Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   CallidusCloud is the global leader in cloud-based sales, marketing, customer experience and learning solutions. CallidusCloud enables organizations to accelerate their lead to money process, a complete suite of solutions that identify the right leads, ensure proper territory and quota distribution, enable sales forces, automate configure price quote and contract management, simplify marketing automation, enable customer experience monitoring, create and distribute learning materials, deliver deep analytic insights, and streamline sales compensation — driving bigger deals, faster.   Our  community goals   We had three goals in launching the Community: Reduce support costs by enabling our customers to help themselves Improve customer retention by empowering our users Encourage cross-product adoption by openly sharing product information with all customers   Historically, CallidusCloud was known as a leader in the Sales Performance Management space, with an emphasis on Compensation or Incentive Management. Today, we have expanded to create a product space of our own, known as “Lead to Money”, which encompasses a suite of many products that take a sales organization from the hiring of sales professionals through sales training and enablement, marketing, configure price quote, and finally to compensation management. The time had come to encourage open sharing of knowledge as we sought to integrate multiple products into a single Lead to Money solution for all of our product experts. That meant, among other things, making a single Community with a unified search and simple ways for experts to gain cross-product knowledge.   What design elements make our community unique    When designing the new user interface, we had two big challenges. The first is that as a closed community, we needed to make the home page as welcoming as possible, so that users who did not yet have an account would feel encouraged to sign up.     The second was to find a balance between a design that was engaging and personal, while still reflecting our corporate brand and the highly technical nature of our enterprise level products. We needed to avoid looking too “slick” to the experienced consultants who use our products. Our solution was to have a banner showing the Golden Gate Bridge, reflecting our tagline as “Your gateway to CallidusCloud”, with a large search banner and large menus leading to the most commonly used content. We think we’ve succeeded in striking the perfect balance, welcoming both novice and expert users of our products and directing them on their customer journey.       How we  executed your community design   We made our vision a reality with the collaboration of many people throughout the organization. We began by getting ideas from Lithium on other communities with similar customer bases. Our next step was to talk to our customers and partners to find out what was working for them, and what wasn’t, with the out-of-the-box design.   Once we had a vision in place, the Community Manager brought the overall vision to the User Experience team, who helped come up with a plan to bring the Community experience in line with the corporate brand while keeping with the overall feel of a customer community. Our talented web designer in India brought the design to fruition, and product experts in Technical Support, Professional Services, and Education tested the design and offered suggestions or improvements and changes before the rollout of the new design.   Our metrics     2014 2015 Percent change Posts 163 1899 1065% Kudos 39 384 884% Accepted Solutions 5 182 3540%   Even as the community was embraced by our customers, one metric in particular stood out: web-based engagement versus call-based engagement. Web-based and self-service support engagement is a key part of our customer success model, as our customers are happy to be able to find solutions on their own at all hours of the day. This is particularly important for a global company providing support to customers in every time zone. Since launching the Community, CallidusCloud has seen web-based engagement skyrocket to over 90% of support issues.   Finally, but no less important, we’ve see our Customer Satisfaction survey results increase from less than 90% to over 95% from 2014 to 2015.    

Company: Best Buy Canada Category: Best new Community Entered by: Heather Magee (hmagee) URL: www.bestbuy.ca/plug-in Launched: 16 Sept 2011     Entry: Best Buy Canada’s Plug-in community features lifestyle-centric content, while continuing to produce relevant and up-to-date material that speaks to the traditional tech enthusiast. We promote content that connects people with technology that makes life fun and easy, and helps alleviate techno stress as new technology trends emerge.  Technology eZine - comparable to an online magazine model, our community landing page plays host to all of Best Buy Canada’s social media streams, while leveraging Lithium’s Rest APIs to dynamically pull the most recent content from the community. www.bestbuy.ca/plug-in Member Engagement – by featuring our most celebrated community members in our Member of the Week widget, members are recognized for their contributions and participation in the community and thanked publically by the Community Manager on a forum thread each week.  Our objective is to nurture our Super Users and frequent contributors to encourage the organic growth of our user generated content. Targeted Integration – we’ve developed and are in the midst of implementing targeted integration strategies to leverage community content on our eCommerce website www.bestbuy.ca using Lithium’s Rest APIs and other tools and features.  We’ve also integrated the mobile version of Plug-in with the Best Buy Canada iPhone app and leveraged Lithium’s Facebook Connect and Facebook Q&A applications to mobilize our Facebook fan base and integrate this group of brand advocates with our community members.  

Company: Xerox Categories: Best New Community (Launched after June 1, 2010) Entered by: Sandy Puglisi (spuglisi) Community Name: Xerox Customer Support Community URL: forum.support.xerox.com Launched: September 16, 2010 Entering the world of social support is challenging regardless of who you are, but understanding and meeting your customers’ needs in a B2B environment can add some complexities that require expert advice.  Although we’ve delivered solutions to other businesses for over 100 years, Xerox is relatively new to social media, so we needed help… and we knew it.    The Community Management Planning Workshop was incredibly helpful.  First, it brought our virtual team together, and second, it brought the expertise of the Lithium team to our project.  We had done our homework, but learned some valuable lessons during the workshop.    For example, we were headed down the path to create a product-based forum structure to match the Xerox product offerings, and learned that when starting a new community, the broader the topic, the better.  So we went with only five distinct support forums, a far cry from one per product family!   Our planning process was completed in short order, but the road to a launch date got a bit bumpy at times.     We had challenges with Single Sign On and multiple sign on (we wanted to make sure customers could easily transition from the community to other areas of Xerox.com and vice-versa).  We struggled between branding guidelines and the lack of branding guidelines (we are the first community presence at Xerox so some guidelines and policies just didn’t exist).  But we made it.   The “Best New Community” was launched in September 2010 on www.xerox.com, and in six months time, we’ve come a long way.    We have had over 53,000 unique visitors and roughly 750,000 page views.  There are over 500 topics with 1,500 posts.   We have also launched new capabilities.   We gave customers the ability to add images to their postings.  We recently integrated our corporate Twitter feed within the site and have already seen evidence of the benefit of cross-channel integration of support content.  And next month we are going mobile!   But we aren’t stopping there.. we have lots more on our roadmap. Unchartered territory has become a charter for success as we forge ahead in our new endeavor. We are excited about our growing community and the many opportunities that lie ahead.   Our partnership with Lithium and the support of our community have been, and will surely continue to be, a recipe for success.  We look forward to seeing where this adventure takes us.

Company: LandlordStation Entry submitted by: Richard Broer (richardbroer) CEO Community: The Station Community (community.landlordstation.com) Lithy category: Best New Community ________________________________________________   LandlordStation is a startup company founded in 2010 which provides web-based software apps to property managers and landlords throughout the US. Although our community (and company) are new and small, both are growing at rapid clips. More importantly, we understand and value the importance of communities and other social platforms and have made a concerted effort built them into the core of our business.   The LandlordStation Community was launched in January of 2013, as a way for our uniquely independent clientele to have a convenient and open way to communicate with each other, ask and answer questions, and generally connect to their peers in a very fragmented industry. Our goal with the community is to grow awareness of our brand in the wider property management industry and improve our traffic channels with new and unique content.     We have already begun to see a return on this investment as traffic from the community and searches for the community have grown rapidly over recent months and are already causing a noticeable difference in the cost of our traffic generation as we chip away at the percentage of our traffic that is generated by PPC and other advertising channels. We already have hundreds of excellent users (and a few budding Superusers) as well as posts that continue to receive hundreds of daily views by landlords from across the country. Our number of total post views is at 100,000 within 75 days of launch. As we continue to gain traction with both our community and company, we expect to continue to see rapid growth in our user-base with the goal of being the premier community for this industry.   Community Impact since launch: Conversion rate for purchases on our main site for traffic referred by the Community (and referrals from Community oriented social campaigns) is more than 2X the conversion rate from PPC traffic. Dramatic increase in organic Google searches for LandlordStation by name (or close variation) in Q1 2013 v. Q4 2012 suggesting a higher brand awareness driven in large part by the Community. Increase in traffic driven by real-time keywords. For example, we recently noted revenue generation from keywords based on a popular real estate news story that was referenced and linked in our Community. SEO for real-time or newsworthy keywords is an incredibly difficult thing to accomplish and we are very pleased that we are seeing this in such a young community. As illustrated in the screenshot below, we received significant traffic during this period for the keyword "landlord whipped tenant" which was the subject of a news story referenced in the community.   As we continue to grow our company and our community, we feel strongly that social is core value, not an add-on strategy. We will shortly being moving all of our customer service forums and knowledge base inside the Community as well which will increase traffic and hopefully create an even more vibrant area for our clients and our contributors.

Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Design ________________________________________________   We have almost completed the process of redesigning our digital properties look and feel. This is a huge undertaking by the business and given the importance we place on our communities’ engagement, it was only right that we chose CrowdSupport to launch the new global header. By doing so we enabled our customers to easily navigate across the platform and main website resulting in an improved overall experience.       But this is only the first step, over time we will then align all of the community pages to the new Telstra online style guide so that customers have a consistent brand feel across the entire platform and with our other physical assets.     While we’ve begun work to align the brand design on the community, we’ve also introduced new homepage customization which includes features such as: Customized categories and sub category pages User options (turn on/off elements on homepage) Custom banners area Activity feeds Feature videos   These options allow customers/members to find answers quickly while connect our regular contributors to trending community questions. We recognised the need to make it easier for our customers to search through CrowdSupport answers so our simplified tab structure allows users to either find a solution quickly or view community in a default Lithium layout offering users the choice on how they want to contribute.     We also redesigned the search interface & results layout so that an accepted solution will float to top of page so our community members receive appropriate results without much effort. Telstra has a large customer base in both consumer and business markets, so we wanted to make sure that CrowdSupport would address both segment needs. This was important because our products and services differ significantly between the two groups. To address this we developed dual community layouts & dual Lithium blogs with content developed based on the needs of each group. This has resulted in significantly increased engagement particularly across the business segment. Using the Lithium REST API we have reviewed and reworked all of the high usage areas of the community so that optimum performance is delivered from these pages to our community. In addition we will also be implementing a full redesign of CrowdSupport for mobile & tablet so that layout is aligned to the desktop experience providing consistency, regardless of device.    

Company: Sony Computer Entertainment Europe Entry Submitted by: Gareth Worsnup (gworsnup) Community Manager Community: Playstation Community  (community.eu.playstation.com) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation   SCEE Lithium Implementation   1. Playstation Network Account Integration. We have implemented integrated login/authentication on our Lithium platform with our global Playstation Network accounts. This means users can login to our Lithium forums with their Playstation Network ID’s.   2. Custom Ad Serving Technology Integration with Custom Analytics We have implemented bespoke, hierarchical, ad-serving technology across category, board and thread level views. This includes a hero image and video at the top of each board, category and thread page, a standard MPU ad placement on the right hand column on each page and custom background images. Adverts in these areas can be targeted at every level right down to specific threads.   Adverts are also cached to save load and can handle custom translations across the different language boards. In part with this, we have also implemented custom WebTrends tagging tracking the number of impressions, click-throughs and even the number of video plays right down to the percentage of the video watched. Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP (Zend), JavaScript, JQuery, Ajax, JSON, Flash, XML   3. Website Integrated Forum Skins. We have integrated many Lithium boards with 1st party game websites. Example: http://community.singstar.com/t5/SingStar/bd-p/717. In these instances, iframes are used to pull in an external website’s navigation and footer elements, while the boards are custom skinned to fit with the theme of the overarching website.   The result is a seamless experience for the user whilst traveling from the main website through to the forums. Single Sign on (cookie based) is also implemented on website integrated forums, where authentication can happens outside of Lithium, yet users are seamlessly logged in when reaching the forums.   4. Featured Boards custom component. A ‘Featured Boards’ component has been implemented across the top of all category pages. Content for the featured board’s panel is created and managed by using feeds from hidden threads managed by our central community team. This means no development is needed, and updates to the featured items can be completely managed by the SCEE community team. E.G: http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/English-Forums/ct-p/55 (See Featured Boards). Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, XML, JSON   5. Accepted Solutions component. In order to best utilise the Playstation’s support community, a custom component has been developed that surfaces recent and popular discussions (based on Kudos), in part with solved questions or accepted solutions. This content is promoted at the top of the category pages giving new and existing users a quick route to valuable community content. E.G: http://community.eu.playstation.com/t5/English-Forums/ct-p/55 (See Recent Discussions & Solved Questions). Technologies Used: HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, JQuery, XML, JSON   6. User Profile Panel & Post Info - hover-over. In order to simplify the forum design, certain information has been hidden from the main display by using hover-overs or tool-tips. User profile information can be accessed by hovering the mouse over a users profile name or avatar. This reveals user profile information, recent posts, number of posts and registered date. If a users also has a Playstation portable ID, this will be pulled and displayed automatically. Similarly, if users hover their mouse over a thread link, the views, number of posts, kudos and a small preview are also displayed. All of these hover information is cached, meaning its only loaded one time on demand then stored meaning API calls are limited. Technologies Used: Lithium API, JavaScript, JQuery, Ajax, JSON.   7. Custom Post styles - targeting admins/MPU's etc. In order to highlight posts made by Administrators, Moderators and MPU’s, we have implemented user targeting, and can target posts by specified user roles and inject specific CSS into their posts. This means that Moderator posts can for example be highlighted in blue to give a clearer indication of their status within the community. Technologies Used: JavaScript, JQuery, CSS.

Company: giffgaff Entry Submitted by: Vincent Boon Head of Community (Vincent) Community: giffgaff (http://community.giffgaff.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community ROI 'giffgaff’ is an old Scottish term referring to the process of mutual giving – the perfect name for a company whose passionate and knowledgeable members are not only the front line of customer support but also a driving force in the running of the company itself. In fact, our tag line is ‘The mobile network run by you’.   We don’t do large call centres and we don’t do big budget advertising. Instead, we rely on our growing user-generated pool of knowledge that is our community, where people get help fast and where customer debate and discussions helps us shape and grow the business. And using this community-based model saves costs and ensures giffgaff is outperforming month-after-month across a wide variety of metrics, from traffic to active members.   Our customers are so helpful we do not need a traditional customer service centre, but use our community support forums instead. Saving us the cost and overheads of traditional CS.   Although giffgaff saves a lot of costs by not having a traditional customer service model, the quality of service is still a high priority, which is reflected in a recent customer satisfaction survey, where our members rated our customer service 9/10 and our Net Promoter score was 73% (in context, according to the NPS website, Google rates as 73% and Apple as 74%).   giffgaff's Community Health Index is 877, which puts giffgaff as a leader when compared to all communities globally serviced by Lithium.   We are seeing these types of results through a combination of programmes we run here with the community, which ensures that any question asked on the community is answered within 90 seconds on average.   But not only does our community help by answering peoples specific questions, we can see 8% of all page views going directly to an accepted solution, guaranteeing a great many call deflections.   With our highly-engaged community, we create a huge volume of content, which gets picked up in search engines, driving more and more traffic to our site. So much so, that we can see 30% of all organic traffic going straight into our community and finding answers to questions they didn’t even know they had!   Of course, just like any other business we look at the retention rates in our business and are able to see the following amazing results over a running twelve month period:   People who’ve received payback are 52% more likely to stay with the network  People who’ve activated a friend are 35% more likely to stay with the network  People who’ve posted on the forum are 31% more likely to stay with the network  People with more than 5 page views are 41% more likely to stay with the network  Through our community we use a 'member get member' program, which enables people to bring new customers to our business and we are extremely successful with this, ensuring our existing members bring in much more than 25% of our total new customers.   There are as many people who participate in ‘member get member’ activity on our forums as there are not. However, those people who are involved on our forums are twice as likely to bring on a friend. Our members are helping us out with marketing, sales, development, creating anything from marketing materials, to handing out our product to developing mobile applications for us.   In terms of developing the business we use a dedicated Ideas Board, with over 6,000 ideas and more than 50,000 comments and on average an implementation of 1 idea every 3 days.   giffgaff's mutual model paves the way for a new generation of social brands, which provide real consumer value through embracing the passions and skills of their membership communities, whilst growing an army of loyal advocates in the process.   I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as we enjoy all the various great things we do with our community.   Without them, giffgaff would be nowhere.

Company: Riverbed Technologies Category: Most Innovative Social Program Entered by: Evan Marcus (emarcus) URL: community.riverbed.com   Entry:   Our program is the Performance Hall of Fame. It's an opportunity for users to come online and share graphs and stories in their own words of how our products have improved their network performance.   Everyone who enters receives a gift from Riverbed, and once a month we award a prize for the entry that has received the most kudos. The real benefit, though, comes from the visitors to the site who see real customers telling stories of how they've received hard-to-believe benefits from implementing Riverbed products.   Our salespeople regularly send prospects to the site so that they can see the benefits for themselves. A typical entry to the to the Performance Hall of Fame is below.  

Company: National Instruments Entry submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer/Forums Manager Community: NI Discussion Forums (www.ni.com/forums) Lithy category: Best Superfan Story or Insight __________________________________________________   “Are two Knights in one day better than two days in one night?” <Hint, the answer is yes.>   When the NI Discussion Forum was launched in 2004, we could not have predicted how successful it would be in fostering passionate, proficient, and accomplished advocates for National Instruments. Our super users are not only incredibly engaged, but they also constantly push the envelope and drive innovation. They are an extension of the passionate company culture we have built and strive to maintain internally at NI.   Our community members chose the ranking Knight of NI based on a shared love for the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Members who reach the 10,000-post milestone virtually receive the Knight of NI title and physically receive a shrubbery. This group has only seven members but is a respected and revered resource within our community. Collectively, the Knights have a vast wealth of knowledge. When we ask why they continue to engage in the NI Discussion Forums, we consistently receive the same response: They enjoy helping others, solving difficult problems, and sharing their knowledge to develop and empower future engineers. The Knights of NI participate because they truly recognize the value of our company, products, and industry.   We recently recognized two Knights of NI on consecutive days! Becoming a Knight does not happen every day; in fact, it does not even happen every year. However, in their race to Knighthood, these two loyal users have consistently been neck and neck for over eight years.               As a group, our Knights’ engagements make up 8 percent of our total community activity, and they receive more than 20 percent of the total kudos in the community. They frequently create quality content and have authored 12 percent of our total solutions. These numbers are extremely significant considering we have seven Knights in a community of over 200,000 users! The sheer volume of posts and solutions that the Knights provide significantly drive down support costs for our organization. We are thankful for their passion and strive to nurture their behavior through recognition, sneak previews before products releases, and direct channels to engage with NI engineers, just to name a few. The Knights lead by example and inspire fellow community members to engage to earn the greatest reward: knowledge.   There are many more examples and statistics we could mention to further sing the praises of this valued group, however one of the greatest outcomes of this recognition system is the bond our super users have built with one another. Their discussions are helpful, interesting, cutting edge, personal, and always entertaining. A great portion of the success of the NI Discussion Forums is absolutely due to these loyal SuperFans.    

Company: SuccessFactors Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Customer Marketing & Advocacy Community: SuccessFactors Customer Community (community.successfactors.com) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   Why should we win this award? “We want our customers to love work again!” To ensure that our customers have the best tools and resources to help them achieve success using our products, we launched the SuccessFactors Customer Community in April 2012. The primary goal of our community is to promote peer-to-peer engagement, but we also want people to use the platform for best practices knowledge, tips and tricks, discussion forums, blogs, new ideas, and much more.     The Challenge After launch we realized that our customers still had to access multiple systems during the day to get to our training and professional services resources. We needed to enable a single sign-on solution between our community and our SharePoint sites. We have a private community with a registration process so that only customers, partners, and employees are able to join. We have an active directory that authenticates users as they register. The two other critical resources we wanted customers to be able to access through the community were our SuccessFactors Training and SuccessFactors Professional Services. Both of these teams provide extensive knowledge and resources, but they do so on separate SharePoint sites.   The Solution Our exceptional technical implementation, which connects the Lithium community to the SharePoint sites with the click of the button, has resulted in a completely seamless community experience for our customers.  In order to achieve this technical implementation, we worked with Lithium partner Cloudsquads and a Cloudsquads partner SusQtech. This project enabled the single sign-on capabilities with a custom integration effort. The team first explored the solution, which started with the ADFS authentication issue. The technical teams then built an integration account, which provided credentials to access SharePoint. Then they developed a custom widget within Lithium that enabled easy access to the shared documents by using an iFrame housing the SharePoint sites, within which customers can download the documents. The custom-logic widget was placed on the community forums via the Lithium studio layout editor. The widget is modular and placed in the Lithium Studio Editor. A new page was created to host this service, the content is filtered by the SharePoint app, and Lithium passes whatever available fields that are specified by the integration protocol.     After clicking the button on the homepage with single sign on users are brought directly to the PS SharePoint site.     Training Page “Get Training” button     The Training SharePoint Page after you click on the “Get Training” button single sign on brings you to the Training SharePoint Page   The Outcome Customers are extremely satisfied with this seamless integrated solution. When customers and partners need information, documents, training, or other resources, the SuccessFactors Community is their one-stop shop! Once they are in the community, if they need to access the SuccessAcademy (training) or the Empower Methodology/Welcome Kits (Professional Services), they can easily access these SharePoint systems with a click of a button without logging in again. This is a huge win for us, and it creates an exceptional community experience for our customers.  

Company: Telstra Corp Entry submitted by: Yannick Pierre (Yannick_P) Digital Community Manager Community: CrowdSupport (crowdsupport.telstra.au) Lithy category: Best Community Technical Implementation ________________________________________________   With a constant demand from customers to interact with Telstra, CrowdSupport was developed to be an online social hub for customers to quickly help each other, help themselves. We wanted to be able to provide our community with the best possible answers from within Telstra as well as leveraging external content to provide rich and relevant support.     To bring this vision to life we knew we had to develop CrowdSupport as a platform that was not only visually appealing but allowed content to flow fluidly between sources and the community in a responsive method to maximise the benefit to our community. To do this we began with a World First! By integrating the Microsoft community support knowledge base into the Lithium platform we are able to pull content from the Microsoft community and display into CrowdSupport, providing richer results to our community when they are searching for answers.     In addition, by using the Lithium REST API we have integrated CrowdSupport content into other assets including the Telstra website (Telstra.com) & our Telstra 24x7 mobile and tablet apps. We’ve also developed our Live Services Portal using the Google search appliance integration to aggregate and surface community content into search results on Telstra.com. These types of integrations mean our customers can access the CrowdSupport community from a range of platforms and devices so that customers can use the community in any way that they desire.       To ensure that our customers could make the best use of these new features, we’ve increased the options available to our customers to engage through introducing a range of new enhancements to the presentation layer. We’ve enhanced the layout and design of our knowledge base so that accepted knowledgebase threads now present the most relevant information first so that our customers get the right answer fast. We’ve also integrated with the REST API to create a custom homepage that surfaces trending community interaction and statistics .         Use of Lithium Rest API to customize pages high traffic pages and optimize the user experience In terms of content upload, we’re enabling Ooyala video functionality to allow all Telstra customers to submit video content without requiring a You Tube account & we’ve integrated the Lithium contest component to better engage with our customers and encourage contribution which has proven to be a real success.                                             Later this year we will also be introducing Single Sign on for all Telstra customers which will significantly alleviate registration headaches for customers using CrowdSupport. Customer rating and reviews that will allow our customers to provide direct feedback about our products and services Use the Lithium REST API to develop the “Ask a mate Widget” which will allow customers to access relevant CrowdSupport content and ask question on product and service pages on telstra.com  

Company: Skype Entry Submitted by: Claudius Henrichs (Claudius) Community Manager Community: Skype Support Network  (community.skype.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Global Implementation The Skype Support Network, launched in June 2011, is Skype’s peer-to-peer support community and provides a direct channel for feedback and exchange between our users and product teams. What happens if you flip on all switches “Community” and put the spotlight on a previously hidden tech support forum? We did just that and turned it into a vibrant location for exchange around everything Skype. Within just over 7 months page views skyrocketed and have more than doubled. A highly engaged, dedicated user base presented with the right tools utilize them every day now to improve theirs and other’s Skype experience.   Several aspects lead to the huge success – both outside and inside the company – of this project, each itself worth highlighting.   Best Global Implementation Reflecting our truly global product we launched the community in eight languages. The landing page was designed to showcase our language communities and the latest activities and hot topics in each of those. Our visitors appreciated the fact that they could exchange in their language and within days we had Super Users covering all time zones around the world   Best Social Customer Experience Program Making the community a place you wanted to stay and return to was our primary goal. That’s why we came up with several programs that rewarded visitors. The Community News highlight weekly activity, discussions and user participation. The highlighted user and topic of the week invited users to stay while longer and engage in the conversation.   We are most proud about our #SkypeTalks live events: Questions raised simultanousy via a dedicated community board and Twitter were replied on by product managers inside Skype. This helped prioritize the next developments sprints through the insight gained and gave the user a very rewarding feedback experience. And in the end it raised awareness of our product features.   Eventually the community has helped us identify and resolve new product issues within 24 hours of launch that would normally have taken days. E.g. the community compiled a list of problematic devices with regards to video calling on Android. Based on that we were able to issue a hotfix within days after our initial release. This extended the list of supported devices and thereby consumer satisfaction.   Best New Community Already the first week after the launch in June 2011 our Community Health Index passed 600 and it’s rise has not stopped yet. We have since passed a score of 700 which put us in line with other Lithium established communities that have been developing for much longer than the 7 months we did.   But the CHI is more than just a number: It reflects that our users are on average getting a reply quicker than via our own customer service. In the majority of cases even answering their question right away providing is with a first contact resolution rate of around 70%. We now engage 3 Million users per month, growing 10% month over month since last June.   Best Community Technical Implementation Another goal of the community switch was to offer answers on new and trending support questions faster and deliver them on a more direct channel.   We achieved that by integrating helpful content (Accepted Solutions) and related topics to our existing copywriter authored knowledge base content on our Skype Support page. A category based selection logic ensures the related topics are pulled from the correct board.   It works as an additional motivational factor to our Super User: “Great to have our work surfaced to more users to get their problems solved”. Eventually this integration serves as an attractive entry point to join the community discussion with latest stats reflecting the activity taking place.   Behind the curtain we also made full use of the Single-Sign-On feature in Lithium. It is not only used for authenticating users to access with their Skype Name, but we also implemented a tight integration allowing Skype Customer Service staff to one-click quickly check back office user data for cases escalated from the community. The sleek integration ensured the feature to be attractive in everyday use.   Best Business ROI Best of all we were pleased to see a 10% reduction in our traditional support costs through reduced number of contacts that we could relate to the introduction of the new Lithium community platform. Much harder to quantify but definitely present are the revenue improvements gained from the increased customer satisfaction through the product improvements we could introduce based on the community feedback. Compared to previous methods if gathering feedback (e.g. through web based forms) the round trip time is much shorter and we can react quicker.   Best SuperFan Story or Insight In the end the whole community stands or falls with our dedicated Super Users sharing their expert knowledge and creative solutions on using our products. They have spent 1½ years online time on their community while it had not even had it’s own birthday yet. During that time they contributed 14% of all content including 38% of the very valuable accepted solutions. As a token of appreciation we highlighted five of them in our end of year awards on our Community news blog with a short interview and portrait.   Our stellar Super User goes by the nickname “TheUberOverLord”, is a self-proclaimed “White Hat” computer expert and contributed 5% of all posts since the launch. His engagement inspired several other users to become engaged and eventually Super users as well.   I want to close with inviting you all to our community and taking this opportunity to thank our community members for their passion and engagement that makes this such a success. We are entering this award as a way of saying thanks to our Super Users!

Company: Autodesk Entry Submitted by: Brian Kling  Program Manager, Community & Social Media (bkling) Community: Autodesk Discussion Groups (http://forums.autodesk.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Implementation   Autodesk has actually had online “discussion groups” for more than 15 years – remember Compuserve?!  In June of 2010 we migrated to the Lithium platform.  Because we already have a well-established community, our focus has been on optimizing our Support and Service participation, getting our organization participate in a sustained manner and to evangelize to our internal business groups how much value this thriving community provides.   The Technology Integration Angle One of our major efforts achieved last year was to answer the question “how do you keep a community open to all customers, but yet provide an enhanced level of customer service to those customers that have paid for an annual Subscription Contract?”    Our solution was to integrate the Lithium platform with our CRM platform (Salesforce).    The key components are:   Identify Subscription Customers – this was achieved when we migrated, but using our own SSO and authenticating against our CRM for Subscription Entitlement.  Internally we can see who has an entitlement, and even what level they are on, and a proper role is auto-assigned.  This authentication occurs every time at login.   Offer enhanced service – this boiled down to four escalation methods:   Automated “No Reply” - A question authored by a Subscription Customer is monitored; if no first Reply is received after 24 hours, a linked case is created in Salesforce and routed to the appropriate support queue. Automated “No Solution” – A question authored by a Subscription Customer that has no further Replies for 48 hours and no Accepted Solutions marked will be escalated into Salesforce to determine if help is needed.  An email is sent to customer asking if they need our help, if yes, then case is routed to appropriate support queue. Manual by Author – Premium level Subscription customers have a “Need an Answer” button on any new question they author.  They can escalate prior to the automated options above. Manual by Autodesk - Autodesk staff can escalate any forum thread into Salesforce, for either internal collaboration, large file transfer, sensitive information, product defect tracking, Content Creation flagging, etc.   The ROI angle Proving some ROI to your executive staff is an important part of a Community Strategy.  Not all ROI’s are easy to measure, and every community really has multiple ROI’s, not just on cost, but also brand awareness, advocacy, etc.  This example is just one of the many possible facets.   Our communities are mostly based on technical support questions related to our many design products.  Customers paying for Subscription Contracts are welcome to come and participate in our online community, but they also have the right to come directly to our Support staff through Salesforce.  As you can imagine, the cost of a technical, 1:1 interaction is vastly higher than that of a peer-to-peer interaction in an online community.  For us, the calculated cost difference is 1000x – yes, one that’s one thousand!   Through SSO we can easily identify which customers posting in our online community have Subscription contracts.  We also regularly survey our customers and ask if their issue was resolved in the community.   For Subscription Customers, if they had a resolution, we then ask them if they would have turned to us for 1:1 support if they hadn’t found their answer in the community.  Here is a perfect opportunity to measure how many of these customers achieve a resolution to their issues without needing to come to us on a 1:1 interaction, which is a direct cost savings calculation.    For our community, in 2011 our calculated cost savings was $6.8M dollars.     This is not all about saving costs, because for lower severity issues that are common to many users, these questions are best served in a public forum where all can then find and benefit from the answers provided.  Further, typically answers come faster from this vast group of community experts, who also know our products better than we do; they use them in the trenches each and every day, in many ways we can’t anticipate or model!   For both angles At Autodesk we use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a common indicator of customer perceived value in our interactions with them.  In Product Support, we measure this in our 1:1 transactions, online communities as well as customer interactions through our partners worldwide.    Our NPS score for online communities has reached or even at times surpassed the NPS for our Silver Subscription 1:1 transactions and our partner transactions, which proves that customers do assess a high value to their online experience.

Company: National Instruments Entry Submitted by: Jordan Groves (jgroves) Web Project Engineer Community: National Instruments Community  (forums.ni.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI The National Instruments Idea Exchange, which was established in June 2009, provides a quick, excellent medium of direct communication between our customers and our R&D team. Here at National Instruments, we understand the importance of integrating co-innovation into the product design and development processes.  By giving our lead users the opportunity to provide valuable feedback on our products, not only do we develop better software, but we also demonstrate to our customers that we greatly value their input.   Before the Idea Exchange was born, we first needed to determine how to best incorporate our top users into our development processes.     In order to do so, we needed to learn more about our community members.  A survey of the user base returned the following information:   55% of our customers are "active" community users There is a direct correlation between how active a customer is on the forums and how loyal he/she is to the company. This data reaffirmed our assertion that it would be well worth the effort to pull customers into the NI software development process.       With the main focus being ease of use, National Instruments utilized the Lithium community platform and revealed the new Idea Exchange in the summer of 2009.  Since then, users have submitted over 3,700 ideas – each with candid explanations of why they posted.     Our Research and Development teams monitor the board and reply directly to the customers’ requests. Over the years, the Idea Exchange has expanded to encompass eight different product boards and has received:   Over 3,700 submitted ideas (our initial goal was 500) Over 73,600 votes on ideas 14,565 customer comments Over 56,000 unique visitors Additionally, the LabVIEW 2011 Beta release included 13 new features that were suggested on the Idea Exchange.   In the end, not only did the Idea Exchange alleviate many users’ frustrations by giving them a direct connection to our developers, but it also increased our productivity, as well.  Our engineers now have an exact picture of which new features are most important to our customers.     By placing co-innovation as a cornerstone of the product development cycle, we have been able to produce better products.