Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company:  HP Entry submitted by: Teresa Proffitt (Community Engagement Mgr.) Community: HP Support Forums Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   At HP, our vision is to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhe... See more...
Company:  HP Entry submitted by: Teresa Proffitt (Community Engagement Mgr.) Community: HP Support Forums Lithy category:  Total Community All Star   At HP, our vision is to create technology that makes life better for everyone, everywhere — every person, every organization, and every community around the globe. To invent, and to reinvent. To engineer experiences that amaze.   Road to Lithium   HP Social Support Footprint   With one printer and 1.7 PCs shipping every second, HP has a large and growing installed base of customers globally. Our Support Community is vital to the HP customer experience, and we are always looking for ways to partner with Lithium to deepen customer engagement, improve response and resolution rates, while leaving no customer behind. We believe in the vision and value of a total community; the Lithium platform and Lithium Social Web are crucial to HP’s customer support operations success.   With more than 125 million visits per year, our communities must support a large volume of diverse customers — 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Previously, it took a great deal of effort to accurately monitor our forums and social media engagement between social agents and customers. Our implementation of Lithium Social Web (LSW) has empowered our moderators and agents to engage with customers more efficiently and effectively. We are able to route issues, questions, and service events quickly to the right teams, allowing us to create a more positive customer experience and create HP fans.   We are now able to create robust dashboards with precise filtering capabilities - supporting our goals of leaving no thread unanswered, increasing customer response time and accepted solutions. The ability to see real-time engagement metrics allows us to monitor our efforts, identify gaps and understand trends. The easy to use dashboards allow us to monitor agent workloads and make resource decisions based on the volume of activity.   Strengthening our Community   HP’s Customer Support Community focuses on engaging a variety of customer inquiries. Whether seeking general information, finding specific solutions, or sharing knowledge and insights, our forums and social media channels allow users to connect directly with our agents and fellow customers to get the most from their products.   Lithium has played a pivotal role in supporting us in the following key areas: Lithium’s gamification package has educated & incented members on the types of activities we value. The gamification package has helped us move members across the engagement ladder, driving increased contributions over time. Our most engaged users are then rewarded with access to HP’s Inner Circle, a private forum where skilled employees & Experts converse. As members progress through the engagement ladder they are invited to a series of events including Expert Days, technical briefings, topic-specific Q&A sessions, global and regional meet-ups – with the intent of building an army of Super Users across the world.   Profile Page Badging   Lithium’s flexible platform allows us to enhance our community experience with custom components that showcase our expert users, top solutions, and similar topics. Using Lithium Studio, we have enhanced our community experience with a redesigned user interface that makes it easier for members to quickly access important information and for our users to share personal profiles and capabilities in a compelling format.   Home Page Redesign   The Lithium Monitor Wall showcases and tracks volume of conversations, activity, and community contributions within our social care environment. This, combined with Lithium Social Intelligence, enables us to accurately report community perspective, keep a pulse on our community, and capture our key performance indicators.   HP Social Customer Care Command Center   Our results    
Company:  TELUS Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager) Community: TELUS Neighbourhood Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, wit... See more...
Company:  TELUS Entry submitted by: Scotty Jackson (Sr. Strategy Manager) Community: TELUS Neighbourhood Lithy category:  Excellence in Customer Satisfaction   TELUS is Canada’s fastest-growing national telecommunications company, with $12.5 billion of annual revenue and 12.5 million customer connections, including 8.5 million wireless subscribers, 1.5 million residential network access lines, 1.6 million high-speed Internet subscribers and 1.0 million TELUS TV customers. TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services, including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video, and is Canada's largest healthcare IT provider.   Putting our Customers First   Our top priority since 2010 is putting our customers first. We do this by consistently delivering exceptional client experiences and winning the hearts and minds of Canadians on our journey to become a world leader when it comes to the likelihood that our customers recommend our products, services and people.   We know that listening to our customers is an integral part of our Customers First journey and that taking action based on what they say is just as important. Over the years, we’ve worked harder to identify what our customers are looking for and delivered products, services and experiences that met their expectations.   Every team member, regardless of their role, has a responsibility to put customers first, which is why we have continued to integrate a Customers First culture across the organization.   How We Executed Our Customers First Initiative   In 2015, we reimagined our social strategy, developing a new operations team focused on not just customer service and engagement, but on content development and deep communication skills. Pairing this team investment with existing LSW capability, the launch of the Tribal Knowledge Base inside our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood, and publishing capability, we have developed and implemented a virtuous cycle of customer listening, engagement, and needs fulfillment (see supporting visual).   This meant redefining and redesigning the role of social operations, its job description, and its day to day functions. We diligently tested and recruited for this newly redefined role, and have worked with the successful team members to provide them with increased levels of access to and capabilities within both LSW and our community, the TELUS Neighbourhood.   Our goal was to create a team rooted in both service and content creation excellence who could look at customer questions as unmet demand for support content, then work to meet that demand with social and crowdsourced content. In doing so, we engage and satisfy our users while saving organizational cost. Through our revamped operational team, their access to content creation, adoption of LSW publishing and campaign capability, and their access to management of and response to Ideas, Blog, and Articles (TKB) conversations, we have effectively realized that goal.   A key example of this strategy in action was our development and maintenance of a software update schedule. Upon hearing social conversation and having customer concerns expressed, we were made aware of an opportunity to more transparently share the process for and schedule around delivering software updates to mobile devices. We created a Blog post and Article that addressed these needs, and have leveraged them to great success in fielding inquiries and concerns.   A second example was the StageFright campaign. When Android customers were vulnerable to the StageFright exploit and it started gaining media attention and driving social conversations, we wanted to get in front of the questions. As such, we rapidly developed an Article about the StageFright vulnerability, leveraging content from users already posting. Customers could then be referred to this not only in social, but via our IVR when phoning in and through a mass text campaign where we promoted the Article and community to all Android device users.     Our Q1 2016 Success Results   A summary of the benefits realized in Q1 2016:   98% customer satisfaction 90% likelihood to recommend TELUS (NPS) 89% likelihood to share experience > 11,000 Twitter and Facebook conversations and over 30,000 responses sent 80% of Twitter conversations responded to in 35 minutes or less > 1,600 community posts, 90%+ community-created > 330,000 unique community visits Offsetting of over 66,000 live contacts (call, email, web chat, or store visit) $3.6M in annualized operational savings
Company: Skype Contact: Claudius Henrichs (Community Manager) Community: Skype Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Skype is for doing things together, whenever you’re apart. Skype’s text, voice and video make it sim... See more...
Company: Skype Contact: Claudius Henrichs (Community Manager) Community: Skype Community Lithy category:  Community Design of the Year   Skype is for doing things together, whenever you’re apart. Skype’s text, voice and video make it simple to share experiences with the people that matter to you, wherever they are.   With Skype, you can share a story, celebrate a birthday, learn a language, hold a meeting, work with colleagues – just about anything you need to do together every day. You can use Skype on whatever works best for you - on your phone or computer or a TV with Skype on it. It is free to start using Skype - to speak, see and instant message other people on Skype for example.   Our community goals   Since 2011 the Skype Community is the place for customers and employees to meet and exchange and learn about everything Skype. With topics ranging from technical support through ideation all the way to tips and tricks it’s the place to become a Skype expert.   Our product organization is using community insight to obtain customer lead steering for the next iterations of product and features. A vibrant global community covering 11 languages is crucial to ensure that we understand and prioritize what is driving customers, from the newly registered all the way to the 10+ year superfan. At the same time Skype Community gives customers the opportunity to learn about the people at Skype: What made us come up with a certain feature, how we built it and how we operate to deliver against our mission to be customer obsessed. Our goal for this year was to deliver all of this on an awesome mobile and more personal community experience.   Our unique design elements    Over the course of the last 12 months we have honed in on our strategy to everywhere put our community members and their content first. At the same time since our last redesign in 2014 we have been working closer with our design team to ensure the Skype Community reflects the Skype brand. Skype iconography and design elements You feel right at home at the Skype Community thanks to the familiar buttons, colors and layout elements. Particularly the orange dot as an indicator for unread conversations is what you will find across the community UI: From your personal notifications down to topic level:     Skype avatars and emoticons Everyone loves the Skype emoticons which is why we’ve replaced the Lithium profile avatar collections with a Skype one (which proved to be quite challenging with 3M+ registered accounts already having selected a Lithium avatar):     ...and we did the same for the editor emoticons:   Mobile optimized– Scroll to top & Browse menu   Our responsive design doesn’t only reshuffle widget placements on smaller screen sizes, but we have also put some thought on how you quickly browse within long topics and the community using a dynamic scroll to top and a browse menu: All conveniently placed in reach for your right thumb:       Skype Hovercards Hovercards are getting common at Lithium communities, but we’ve taken them a bit further with small tweaks that visually invite discovering them via subtle avatar zooms when moving the mouse over it. And of course they follow the Skype branding and give a nice showcase for the badge icons:     How we executed our community design   First phase: Inventory & spring cleaning We started with an inventory of all our components – stock and custom ones – per each page and applied a strict triaging following out “members and content first” rule to determine which of them were to be kept. According to that we built up the page layouts. Second phase: Airbrush & Spraypaint We started off from the plain white Lithium responsive base skin and had the developer team apply all the basic styling elements according to the Skype style guideline: Font families and sizes, buttons, boxes, colors. So we weren’t actually working off pixel perfect designs for each page, but invited our design team on to our stage server and have them identify the necessary detailed tweaks (“30px top margins above all panels!”). As an outcome to this within 2 weeks we had a solid basic styling across all primary page layouts. Third phase: Review, Optimize, Rinse & repeat We had then entered the phase of optimizing the interactions on actual devices, so we focused on model devices for each category – mobile, tablet, large screen – and gave the design the necessary fine tune in the following 3-4 weeks. We involved our super fans here to ensure that the new site worked for their everyday flow as much as for the casual visitor. And honestly: We never exited this phase and versioning wise have already reached “Responsive 1.6”    Our results   A few weeks in the new responsive design has shown the following impact: Mobile registration 23% up – across all device sizes up 12% 84% more images uploaded thanks to the new media experience 19% referrer traffic increase Subscriptions up 57% Expected 400-500K unique visitor increase monthly thanks to new responsive community unlocking option for in-client community links on mobile    
  Company:  Alteryx  Entry submitted by: Julie Hamel (Senior Community Manager) Community: Alteryx Community Lithy Category:  Marketing Champion   Alteryx is the leader in self-service data analytics. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts w... See more...
  Company:  Alteryx  Entry submitted by: Julie Hamel (Senior Community Manager) Community: Alteryx Community Lithy Category:  Marketing Champion   Alteryx is the leader in self-service data analytics. Alteryx Analytics provides analysts with the unique ability to easily prep, blend and analyze all of their data using a repeatable workflow, then deploy and share analytics at scale for deeper insights in hours, not weeks.   Our unique promotion    When we began conceptualizing the future of community at Alteryx in early 2015, we made bold investments to begin a transformation of the way that our customers and employees connect with each other, discover new solutions to complex analytical challenges, and contribute fresh ideas to the broad industry discussion. If we were going to successfully launch our new community and scale alongside our rapidly-growing business, creating an equally-bold awareness and adoption campaign was critical.   The Alteryx Community team dedicated significant resources in a short timeframe to design an aesthetic that translates well across the boundaries of digital and physical promotional efforts. The team did a fantastic job of creating a natural feel to long-time users of our products and appealing to the forthcoming generation of business analysts. This led to three major themes that define the core our campaigns: - Be part of something bigger than yourself - Take pride in sharing your knowledge - Keep exploring Below are examples of how we’ve applied that strategy to execute tactically in a number of areas. The resulting lifts in awareness, engagement, and satisfaction around community have been amazing.    Our strategy and tactics   Video - To introduce the Alteryx Community and pique interest around launch, the team employed little Dot with the blue hair in a fun and light welcome video, which later made 2015’s Top Videos from Video Brewery. It was an instant hit with Alteryx Associates, who previewed the video at a pre-launch Community 101 All-Hands meeting. Externally, the video was shared via social channels a few days prior to the launch to tease our followers and promote our launch date.     Swag – People love free stuff. To raise awareness internally, all employees were provided with community superhero mugs and notebooks, where they were encouraged to help spread the words with our partners and customers. We continue to hand these out during the new hire boot camp alongside a Community 101 session to help employees get familiarized with the community and their roles in it. We occasionally send these out to customers to thank them for their participation as well.     Gamification – We’ve made great use of Gamification through an extensive collection of badges used to welcome members on their first visit, introduce them to new features, and to recognize their affiliations & status within the global community. Community Members who were migrated from the original community received the community founders badge at launch, which triggered email notifications to let them know the new community was live and thank them for their support. The competition to collect them all is fierce!   Contests - To help generate user content and create a fun & positive atmosphere we launched the 10 Things I love About Alteryx contest where we encouraged users to share reasons they enjoy the product and share tips with other community members. The 10 best quotes were gathered to create the first ever Alteryx Community t-shirt and the winner took away a GoPro!   Hangouts - Our community launch coincided with the release of version 10.0 of Alteryx Designer, so we hosted a live event using Google Hangouts allowing the community to get up close and personal with Product Management, executives, and our Alteryx ACEs (our superusers who beta’d the product) to hear about new features.  Hangouts have become a regular part of our repertoire. Our customers love tuning in to hear the latest and interact directly with Alteryx staff and each other!     Our results   After our re-launch in September 2015, post count increased by 2000%, going from an average of 30 posts a month to 1,000+! The community received 10,000+ unique visitors who generated nearly 100,000 pageviews. Active members increased by 2,300%. Metrics continued to trend up in October, with traffic peaking on the day of our first live event as 4,000+ unique visitors stopped by the community. Since then, we have hosted live Alteryx | Hangouts on a monthly basis, which have provided a great way for us to preview what we are working on, share tips & tricks, and connect with our members to recognize them for their efforts.   All of our efforts have had a major impact internally as well. Employees have embraced the community to support customers and collaborate internally. Having hundreds of champions to support our cause is a big key to our success. Employees make up only 1.5% of our visitors, but generate nearly 44% of posts and 38% of solutions (much of that in the internal employee-only area of the site). The community as a whole has generated 14,000+ posts and 1,000+ solutions in just 6 short months. Its passion and rapid growth continue to amaze us.
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow ... See more...
Company: Cisco Contact: Becky Scott (Program Manager, Social Knowledge Management) Community: Tech Zone  Lithy category:  Support Savings MVP   Cisco is the worldwide leader in IT that helps companies seize the opportunities of tomorrow by proving that amazing things can happen when you connect the previously unconnected.   At Cisco, customers come first and an integral part of our DNA is creating long-lasting customer partnerships and working with them to identify their needs and provide solutions that support their success.   How we're implementing Community to meet our customer care business goals   At Cisco Systems, our customers and partners benefit when our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Engineers share their expertise by publishing actionable, vital knowledge as content on Cisco.com.   Our challenge was how to accelerate the knowledge expertise of over 4,000 worldwide technical support engineers while sharing critical information across a global population. We’ve leveraged Lithium to engage and motivate our TAC Engineers worldwide to seamlessly transform their knowledge and expertise into knowledge for our customers and partners.   We’ve had year over year success in building a borderless technical support community where the following are now embedded into our normal, everyday workflow: skills-based inventory skills-based routing a reputation engine interactive collaboration through gamification   Now, as a knowledge asset is consumed, the reputation of that piece of knowledge grows. Our Lithium community has helped us gain record-high support content satisfaction scores (4.5 out of 5.00), as well as through the number of views of TAC-authored articles (4.7M views of ~2,000 articles). This in turn benefits Cisco, as we’ve realized an approximate $54.2M in case deflection savings for 2015, which is more than double our $25.2M savings from 2014.   The changes we implemented due to cost reductions from community   Lithium has fundamentally changed the way Cisco creates and consumes knowledge in Technical Services.   How do we engage and motivate 4,000+ TAC Engineers globally to transform their expertise into vital knowledge that our customers and partners can use? By hosting a competition with the chance to win a 2-week work rotation at any global TAC location. We called this competition the Knowledge Champions League (KCL).   KCL is a competition where TAC engineers collaborate to create articles within Tech Zone, our internal workflow-enabled community. Articles are published to the Cisco.com support site where customers and partners can access them to self-serve and self-solve. The KCL team that creates the highest volume of most impactful content wins the grand prize.   Although only one team wins, all KCL participants realize the benefits of working collaboratively in global teams across technologies: building their network of contacts, building cultural awareness, and strengthening their collaboration skills while developing articles. Our goal was to encourage this collaboration while creating valuable content for Cisco.com.     How we constructed the KCL Competition:   Phase 1 – The Qualifying period: Each engineer must qualify as a top contributor within their Technology Space.   Phase 2 – The Games: Top contributors for each technology and site (Europe, Americas, Australia, India) were grouped into teams, each with a coach. The team that creates the highest amount of customer-impactful content wins.   Game Elements     The winning team was awarded a two-week rotation to work remotely from a Cisco Customer Support Site.   Our results       By using innovative Gamification techniques and integrating social knowledge and content publishing into TAC workflows, Cisco Services has successfully addressed the challenge of converting the intellectual capital in over 4,000 support engineers' heads into exceptional quality, reusable content. Our Knowledge Champions League efforts fostered sustainable behaviors of collaboration, teamwork and healthy competition resulting in the production of the highest quality, most impactful content our customers can use to solve some of their most complex problems.    
Company: H & R Block Entry submitted by: Jerry Green (Enterprise Community Strategist)  & Jillian Bejtlich (Community Architect)  Community: The Community & DNA Communities Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan     H&R Block is the world’... See more...
Company: H & R Block Entry submitted by: Jerry Green (Enterprise Community Strategist)  & Jillian Bejtlich (Community Architect)  Community: The Community & DNA Communities Lithy category:  Social ROI Titan     H&R Block is the world’s largest tax services provider, having prepared more than 650 million tax returns since 1955. There are approximately 12,000 company-owned and franchise retail locations in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories, and on U.S. military bases around the world.   In fiscal 2015, H&R Block prepared 24.2 million tax returns around the world - 1 in every 7 U.S. tax returns and over $50 billion in tax refunds, credits, and other government benefits. All of this is done with the dedicated help and knowledge of over 80,000 highly trained tax professionals nationwide.   Our 2015 Community goals   When H&R Block embarked on its community initiative in 2013, the client community – The Community – was founded with the intention of providing clients a welcoming space to talk about the implications of taxes year round. What happens if I buy a house or get married? How does having a baby or adopting affect my taxes?   The Community was never intended to replace or impact H&R Block’s client services, but as it grew and matured it evolved from a community of practice to a highly effective and widely utilized client self-service knowledgebase. Our clients needed a different way to access help – regardless of the time of day, complexity of the question, or how long the wait time was for phone or chat support. We delivered.   By early 2014, we had the idea that community would not only help our clients, but could help our 80,000 associates across the country as well. After conducting a successful pilot within the client community, we built a second dedicated Lithium community – DNA Communities – in June 2015.   Together, the goals for H&R Block community initiative echo the values and visions of H&R Block:   Develop an active and thriving associate community that allows associates nationwide to share knowledge, best practices, and feedback. We believe in our people. Strive to provide a frictionless client experience regardless of time of day, type of question, or product used. We take care of all clients. Augment existing client support options with an efficient, cost-effective solution that contributes to the financial success of H&R Block as a whole. We deliver for our shareholders.   Our focus areas and tactics to meet our goals   In order to build an active, sustainable, and cost effective community for both H&R Block clients and associates, we identified the following as necessary focus areas.   Make self-service behavior the default behavior for clients and associates. In order to change the behavior of both clients and associates, we made subtle modifications to the environments they were already familiar with.   In the client community, this meant changes that encouraged searching and browsing instead of posting and leaving. Changes included re-locating the search bar in a prominent location, multiple modules for timely content and shifting the forum boards further down the page.     In the associate community, we mimicked the existing intranet down to every detail associates were familiar with from the internal intranet. We also developed a customized SSO portal that automatically recognized associates by employee ID and assigned permissions based on job codes. It is an entirely frictionless experience – and far easier than searching for the right contact to e-mail.     Build a strong network of members and associates with extensive tax knowledge. In order to effectively manage the volume of posts that occur during the tax season, we recognized and supported early “super users” in The Community and continue to employ strategies to identify potential new super users to help us support a growing member base. Super users, who are largely H&R Block associates and geographically dispersed, contribute to The Community when they have excess capacity, answering member questions at all hours of the day and creating economic efficiencies, supporting all three of our primary goals.   Our results   We built an active and thriving associate community. As of April 19 th (official close to the filing season), DNA Communities has proven to be a major success in just 8 months since launch. DNA Communities has provided over $1.64 million in services with 2,487 solutions and over 152,000 successful searches.     We provide a frictionless client experience. After two subtle revisions to the community interface and an abundance of pre-season efforts, we have observed dramatic positive changes to The Community. We have more page views than ever before and an impressive increase in successful searches and super user involvement. Community sentiment continues to trend more positive with every tax season.   As of April 19 th , The Community had provided approximately $2.7 million in services with 1,742 solutions and over 262,000 successful searches (87% successful search rate since improvements).   We provide an efficient and cost-effective support solution. Everything we have accomplished has been with two dedicated community team employees, less than a dozen very dedicated and passionate super users, and over 150 employees whose jobs have been made easier by leading community efforts in their existing roles. The value of services provided by the community is far more than the cost of providing these services.   Our top six active super users have voluntarily provided the client community 807 solutions that have been viewed over 1.2 million times. On average, our top super user – a retired tax professional – provides an estimated $45,000 in services per year.   In total, the community initiative at H&R Block has provided well over an estimated $4.3 million in services in the course of four tax seasons. We look forward to many more years of successful community building and helping millions of clients, potential clients, and associates.