Past Lithys (old format)
Check out Lithy entries from previous years.
Company: Future Shop Entry Submitted by: Laura Buchanan (LauraB) Social Community Specialist Community: Tech Yeah Community  (community.futureshop.ca) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation   Future Shop, Canada’s n... See more...
Company: Future Shop Entry Submitted by: Laura Buchanan (LauraB) Social Community Specialist Community: Tech Yeah Community  (community.futureshop.ca) Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Implementation   Future Shop, Canada’s number one retail website is owned by Best Buy Ltd and operates over 149 of stores. The Tech Yeah Community has existed for nearly 5 years and has served as a space where customers, Product Experts and vendor partners could connect about the latest in technology.   Future Shop‘s Product Experts have always played a significant role in shaping the direction of the Community, many of them have been active in the community since the day we launched.   When the Future Shop Retail Learning team approached eComm to help find a solution to make training accessible to all Product Experts regardless of their location, leveraging the Community seemed like a natural progression.   The FS-training.ca portal was intended as a one stop shop for associates to learn anytime, anywhere (Canada-wide).   What was built was a Community within a Community that serves as a hub for all of our store associates. Building fs-training.ca wasn't as simple as throwing up some boards, some significant technical hurdles were overcome to be able to host Flash and create an experience that was meaningful for our associates.   In this private community space, our PEs are able to:   read up on the latest products connect with other associates in their categories from across the country  and even more importantly, it gives them a direct line into the Retail Learning team where they’ve been able to share their ideas and connect with the Retail Learning Specialists supporting them at head office.  Registering for the Tech Yeah Community is now part of the on-boarding process for every new associate and where they come to learn and share ideas. It's also an easy transition into the public-facing community where we've seen associates jumping in to share their knowledge with our customers.   In addition to the Continuous Learning, they also have access to updated Product Knowledge, Sales Culture and Retail Process training. The site is also regularly updated with Peer to Peer Learning in the form of Videos, Tribal Knowledge Base articles, and forum discussions which allows our associates to access their training material while they’re on the go or at home.  
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Company: Data.com  Entry Submitted by: Katie Chastek (ktc) Community Manager Community: Data.com (community.jigsaw.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI The abundance and pace of changing business data has been a long-time iss... See more...
Company: Data.com  Entry Submitted by: Katie Chastek (ktc) Community Manager Community: Data.com (community.jigsaw.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI The abundance and pace of changing business data has been a long-time issue for companies who struggle to manage and keep their data clean and actionable.   With the proliferation of social data, business data management has become an increasingly important and difficult objective.   After revolutionizing CRM a decade ago, Salesforce has a history of taking on challenging industry problems. Launched last August, Salesforce’s Data.com is setting out to transform the business data industry by making data accessible in the cloud and surrounding the data assets with a strong community to provide real-time intelligence.   The Result Data.com’s 4 million member strong community launched in August and is integral to the solution’s success.   Unlike other data providers that solely rely on an algorithm to update and maintain their data assets, Data.com’s community plays an active role in maintaining data accuracy and uploading new business accounts and contacts. Ultimately, the community not only benefits from Data.com’s solution through rewards and offline events, but it also puts customers in a position to succeed.   Just how much does the community contribute? Each month, members add over a million new contacts, allowing Data.com to grow and provide quality data to marketing and sales operations. The most dedicated community members are what Data.com labels Rainmakers and Data Defenders.   Rainmakers are Data.com’s most active users who volunteer to add and update over 500+ business data contacts. In The Corner, Rainmakers join other community members in using the community to contact other users worldwide or network to share ideas, exchange tips and best practices.   In addition to the forums, there is an Idea Exchange for members to add suggestions and ideas to improve their Data.com experience.   Data Defenders are a small group of people in the Data.com community and a part of a data quality protector program who clean records and evaluate data quality. Data Defenders are essentially the quality control leaders in the community. The group flags and graveyards stale or inaccurate data and then corrects the discrepancy – allowing Data.com to have the unique approach of combining algorithm technology with human business data smarts.   Community Collaboration = Customer Success An example of the instant success of Data.com is illustrated through Clairmail, an enterprise-wide mobile banking and payments solution that needed to target new prospects, create a better experience for current customers and reduce time spent on chasing inaccurate data. With Data.com, Clairmail has increased dial effectiveness by 15%, closed 20% more deals and attributed 32% of their overall revenue from business data sourced from Data.com.   What is unique about Data.com for Clairmail is that the community responds in real-time. Clairmail has an advantage over competition with the most up-to-date account and contact information that allows them to find the right people at the right companies at the right time.   Salesforce's Data.com is already accomplishing what it set out to do: build a strong community around business data that allows customers to deliver effective sales and marketing campaigns that grow their businesses. And with over 4 million community members and growing, Data.com has been a tremendous success since launching just six months ago.
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Company: Dice Entry Submitted by: Terry Starr (tstarr) Community Manager Community: Tech Talk (techtalk.dice.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 18 January 2012   I think our Lithium Success team could s... See more...
Company: Dice Entry Submitted by: Terry Starr (tstarr) Community Manager Community: Tech Talk (techtalk.dice.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 18 January 2012   I think our Lithium Success team could speak volumes on why we should win. However, to keep it simple, after attending LiNC 2011 and seeing what was possible, Dice had a vision of where they wanted to be by 2012.   Dice's team had a vision for its tech forum.   Through perseverance, a lot of hard work and dedication, we were able to pull off an incredible transformation:    We completely redesigned and developed a new structure, including the introduction of Talent Communities which has been integrated across all of Dice.com We changed the name to: Dice tech talk. We added a number of new features such as Video, Contests, and Q&A (including Facebook) to name a few, to allow our tech audience to engage more deeply.  The structure was built around the suggested idea that "people interact by topic area, not by style of engagement."  We took this advice from Lithium to heart when trying to integrate Q&A style into a discussion board forum.  We will continue to roll out new programs throughout 2012 and beyond.  A pictures worth a thousands words - and we're hoping that Lithium will review our 2011 community vs where we are today - need we say more?   *******************************   A huge thanks goes out to all those who took on this monumental, but incredibly rewarding effort, particularly my wing-women, Clair Whitmer, Rachel Haskell-Weeks and my wing-men, Steve Butterbaugh, Mark Feffer, James Henry, Adam Fudala - and of course, Jon Wishart and the Lithium team!  
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Company: Best Buy  Entry Submitted by: Gina Debogovich (gina) Community Manager Community: Best Buy US, Best Buy Canada, Future Shop Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation Best Buy is a multi-national retailer with operations... See more...
Company: Best Buy  Entry Submitted by: Gina Debogovich (gina) Community Manager Community: Best Buy US, Best Buy Canada, Future Shop Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation Best Buy is a multi-national retailer with operations across the United States, Canada, Europe, China and Mexico and customers around the world.   In addition to the Best Buy brand, the family of brands includes Best Buy Mobile, The Carphone Warehouse, CowBoom, Future Shop, Geek Squad, Magnolia, MindShift, Pacific Sales.   All these brands leverage social media as a means to connect with current and future customers to raise awareness of their brand, to gain insights and to support customers. From specific brand Forum boards and helpful blogs to engaging on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yelp and Pinterest, social media connects with millions of customers.   To help support our global customers, Best Buy USA, Best Buy Canada and Future Shop all use the Lithium Technologies platform. Every year we help millions of customers and facilitate thousands of conversations in multiple languages (English and Spanish for Best Buy USA, and English and French for Best Buy Canada and Future Shop).   As e-commerce continues to increase, more customers will interact with brands online. We also align our blog content strategy with our other social support channels, promotional activity and product releases. For the past year, the global brands have been connecting on a monthly basis to help share out best practices for social and community management.   Our global brands help bring the knowledge from our employees, customers and superusers together on our social platforms.
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Company: BT  Entry Submitted by: Kerry Gulloch (KerryG) Community Manager Community: BTCare Community Forums (bt.com/community) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story   Our superfans are transforming our business via the BTCare Communi... See more...
Company: BT  Entry Submitted by: Kerry Gulloch (KerryG) Community Manager Community: BTCare Community Forums (bt.com/community) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story   Our superfans are transforming our business via the BTCare Community Forums. They have been instrumental in driving the growth of our community by contributing numerous solutions helping our customers, which deflects contacts from our traditional voice or email channels.   The reputation of our CLs to understand and resolve customer issues is second to none amongst their community peers (evident via the kudos and accepted solutions awarded), the mods (what they see day in day out) and other internal business stakeholders (positive feedback from product managers right up to our MD of Customer Service!).   They have been key advocates for us within the community and their desire to help us improve both the community itself and our products and services is evident in the insight they give us. They have allowed us the opportunity for some of our product teams to get closer than ever to the ‘voice of the customer’ in order to drive product improvements by attending event calls and web chats. Identifying changes we can make for the benefit of all our customers, resulting in tangible business benefits…more about that later.   Firstly, let me tell you how we got there…   Our superfan story began in November 2010 and has continued to grow and evolve since then. We think our superfans, or as we like to call them ‘Community Leaders’ are incredible. We wanted to recognise and thank some of the members who really stood out to us. Those members who embodied the ethos of our community as a positive, productive place for customers to help each other with their BT products and services. We wanted to formalise how we recognised these people and let the rest of the community know how great they were.   We did that by creating the CLP – 'Community Leader Programme'.   What is the CLP? The CLP recognises members in the community who help other members in a positive way, they each have a ‘CL’ badge against their name, and have been announced as Community Leaders by the Community Manager. Over and above this we have given some additional privileges to our CLs such as access to a private forum board where they can interact with the Community Manager and moderator team.   We have regular conference calls or online discussions with them to discuss improvements to the community, and have also arranged for BT experts to share their knowledge with them on certain products, such as BT Vision. We have continued to evolve the programme over time, getting our CLs involved in specific product trials so we can use their feedback to improve products before full rollout, and more recently we held our first ever Community Meet Up which they were a key part of.   The Community Meet Up was an opportunity to meet our CLs face to face, cement the relationships we had built, and say thanks for the hours of help they put into our community. It also allowed us to have an open, honest forum with them to get their views on the community, our products and services and collaborate on ways we can improve things. We held this session at the BT Tower in London and also had lunch at the top of the tower as part of our way of saying thanks – the CLs were delighted to get the opportunity to visit the tower which is no longer open to the public. We had some exclusive new product demo’s and our MD of customer service also joined by video link to thank the CLs for their contribution to the community.   As a result of the meetup we refreshed our community homepage, made some board structure changes and fed back suggestions to improve the mobile community experience to the Lithium team. One further change was to introduce selective moderation privileges for our CLs at their request. They now have the ability to move posts, and use this to remove Spam and posts that are in the wrong boards. This has freed up moderator time and the number of abuse reports for spam have reduced dramatically as the CLs are picking them up and quarantining them quickly.   How else has it helped transform our business? The knowledge and advice shared by our CLs has resolved a huge amount of customer problems within the community and this helps us deflect calls from our service channels. The advocacy that is driven by our CLs also helps give a balanced view of issues raised, which is a welcome voice in a support community like ours where the majority of posts are about problems. The CLs are often an objective voice of reason that other customers respond well to.   The CLs have also been invaluable to us when they have become involved in product testing or focus groups to share their views. Their feedback has helped shaped product improvements via early insight and drive further product development before a product goes live to our customer base.   For example, their comments about a change to one of our TV services was fed back to the product team who implemented an update as a result. The CLs were then invited to join the pilot version of the change to give further feedback before the update was rolled out to our customer base. A great example of their feedback making a difference to all our customers.   Here’s some feedback from one of the Programme Directors within our Customer Services function after a call we had with our CL’s:   “As an avid reader on our forums I know their benefit well for our products, but I was blown away last night on a call with our community leaders. I am so impressed that you guys have grown and nurtured people who just want to help our customers, its brilliant …. More people like this definitely make it easier to deal with BT and get quick answers…”   We also have some quite staggering statistics for contributions by the CL group, who: Have contributed 18.7% of overall posts Have authored 28% of all accepted solutions  Have received 35% of all ratings awarded  Have spent 1,038,734 minutes online in our community – almost 2 yrs solid between them and the community itself has only just had it's 2nd birthday!  More recently, the CLs have also set up on a video-calling service so they can contact each other and maintain connections and relationships via video. This is something I have also taken part in as Community Manager. The CLs have used this as a way to share more knowledge between themselves helping each other help more customers – the knock on effect of this additional knowledge sharing has a positive impact on our customers.   Finally, we also asked our CLs what they think of the programme and here’s what a couple of them had to say:   “I have enjoyed getting to know the fellow CL members better and getting good advice/information from them. I also like having a better method of communicating with yourself and the other mods again makes it a more friendly atmosphere.” – imjolly   “CL has been interesting, getting to know the small group of other CL's, mod team and Kerry. I enjoyed testing a product, and solving some functionality issues. CL is about service not status to me, and I find I get a lot out of being part of it and this community.” – AllanQuatermain   Their commitment, passion and energy for helping other members is astounding and we wouldn’t have such a successful community without them. We wanted to enter this award as another way of saying thanks to our CL guys – they’re great! 🙂
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Company: Rogers Communications Entry Submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Community Manager Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience     Our Rogers Commun... See more...
Company: Rogers Communications Entry Submitted by: Gina Mulic (ginamulic) Community Manager Community: Rogers Community Forums (communityforums.rogers.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience     Our Rogers Community Forums are still relatively new, having launched late in 2010, so much of our effort in 2011 was focused on building the community and promoting it internally.    To accelerate growth we used many cross-functional platforms. We put a note on our customers’ bills (which increased page views by more than 200%), ran banner ads on our Barker Channel (a promotional television channel for Rogers Cable customers).   We also added it to our Quick Start Menu (an interactive program guide for Rogers Cable customers), and pushed targeted SMS messages to customers’ mobile phones promoting the mobile enhancement we made to our community (which resulted in a click-through conversion rate of 2.6%).   We also incorporated badges driving to the community on our corporate blog and support pages. These combined efforts helped us to effectively double our user base over the third quarter of 2011.   With the community firmly established, we began to focus on the customer experience.   The community helped support our most successful device launch to date. With over 1,400 posts about the launch, we had many insights to share with the rest of the business to improve for next time. And it meant that, for the first time, customers could find answers they were looking for without calling in and possibly waiting on hold. Many customers were also able to answer each other’s questions.   To support the launch, we moved to a dedicated support model for the community, meaning in-house customer service representatives could address Rogers customers’ account-related questions via private message.   Our community is peer-to-peer so, as a way to engage more deeply with our customers, we launched a program called Rogers RevUp. This is a series of expert events held exclusively in the community where a product manager answers questions for a few hours or a full day. It gives customers unprecedented access to decision makers.   During our first RevUp, which was related to our Android product line-up, we saw registrations go up 42% over the daily average. The event was also well-attended by our key Android influencers, many of whom we’d been gathering feedback from over the last few years.   This was a nice way to give them real-time direct access to our product manager for Android-powered devices). Through events like RevUp and the community forums we are able to capture insights, share them internally and ultimately use this feedback to improve customer experience for Rogers customers.   On a weekly basis we create a “top five” report that is shared internally and we have created specific reporting for product teams at launch time. Employees are also invited to visit the community anytime to find out what’s being said about their own products or services. The result of this work is a more vibrant community that consistently generates answers to customer questions but more importantly, it’s a community the helps us improve our business.   ---------- Rogers is a diversified Canadian communications and media company. We are Canada's largest provider of wireless voice and data communications services and one of Canada's leading providers of cable television, high speed internet and telephony services. Through Rogers Media we are engaged in radio and television broadcasting, televised shopping, sports entertainment, magazines and trade publications, and digital media. We are publicly traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: RCI.A and RCI.B) and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RCI).   For further information about the Rogers group of companies, please visit www.rogers.com.
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Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience   We are convinced that Sephora... See more...
Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience   We are convinced that Sephora has the best SuperFans on the planet, and also the most engaged.   They spend an average of 396 minutes online a month, and purchase 10x more than our average client! They also have created their own community and support system on BeautyTalk, outside of the usual chatter about beauty and makeup.     Aside from the wildly popular user-created traveling Sephora box program, they also offer each other support during troubling times, and give advice to each other on every subject from financial issues to favorite travel destinations.   That they feel so comfortable discussing so many different types of topics with each other is really a testament to how close the super users in our community are.   Our lounge boards are some of the most popular and active boards in the community, and every time one of our users hits a “hearts” (kudos) milestone in the community, our users throw them a (virtual) party!   It’s really fantastic to see our members rewarding each other and fostering a sense of accomplishment among each other in the community.
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Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Best Social Customer Experience Progra... See more...
Company: Sephora Entry Submitted by: Candace Sims (candace_sephora) Community Manager Community: Sephora BeautyTalk (sephora.com/beautyadvice) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Best Social Customer Experience Program   Sephora consistently strives to provide the best client experience, beauty expertise and services in the industry, whether it be in our stores, online, or via mobile device. We partnered with Lithium Technologies in September 2010 to launch our online beauty community BeautyTalk with a few high level goals in mind:   To build the Sephora brand and community, To establish Sephora’s expertise in the beauty world, And to drive sales and loyalty But our main objective was simple: to create a space where our clients could get their most pressing beauty questions answered.   BeautyTalk quickly became a thriving and vibrant community, a place where beauty enthusiasts around the world could meet and share stories. But a few months into our launch, we conducted a general client survey and received some interesting results.   We learned that 65% of our clients would prefer to get beauty advice from not only their peers, but from beauty experts as well. And if there is one thing Sephora has no shortage of, it's beauty experts! In August of 2011 we launched our Ask the Experts program with the help of our Sephora PRO artistry makeup team.   Sephora PROs are our handpicked elite team of makeup artists who travel the world to work as key makeup artists at events such as New York and Paris Fashion Week, and The Sundance Film Festival. Together with our highly trained beauty advisers in our call center, 6 PRO team members make up our roster of Beauty Experts, who are online between the hours of 6 am – 9 pm everyday answering beauty questions.   I f a client asks a question in the Ask the Experts board, they are guaranteed a response from one of our beauty experts.   The Ask the Experts board immediately took off, and it is now in the Top 3 most viewed boards in the community.   We are very proud to offer our clients a point of differentiation from other beauty communities in that there is now a place where you can get beauty advice not just from your peers, but from trained experts with experience in the field.   We have also just recently launched a Live Chat program, where clients can get one on one real-time advice from experts in certain fields (past live chats participants have include skincare expert Ole Henriksen, Dr. Dennis Gross and tattoo artist and makeup guru Kat von D).   These live chats have given us a whole new way to engage with clients, and the response has been tremendous, with the chats garnering over 20,000 views each and hundreds of questions.   With our Ask the Experts program, we are bringing the knowledge of trained professionals right to the computer screens of our eager client base and providing a useful, fun and engaging social customer experience.   Feedback from our clients - What do you love about Sephora’s Ask the Experts program?   “Everyone I know turns to me for beauty advice, but it’s nice to know there's somewhere I can go when I have a question too!” - fakeasnonfiction “I love being able to research online before buying and asking the experts questions about the products. They can tell us stuff or about products we would probably never know.” - makeupobesessed “They have really detailed answers that contain pretty much everything you need!” - rockstarg    
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Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 10 October 2011 Our organization tends to be very email-centri... See more...
Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best New Community Community Launched: 10 October 2011 Our organization tends to be very email-centric, as many companies are. One of the problems we had with email was the lack of centralization, accounting, and the ability to capture and reuse knowledge.   It’s tough to search through thousands of emails to find an answer to your question. And what happens if you join a group mid-discussion? You don’t get the benefit of prior conversations.    The value of the contributions and the impact experts were making went unnoticed as the mailing lists didn't feed into the overall metrics system.   We decided to go with a community-based platform so we could auto-archive discussions and provide a rich, comprehensive and flexible reputation model. This allowed us to transition into a reusable content model. The adoption rate in our organization has been phenomenal, with many more people visiting than our original roll-out group. In fact, we've gone viral!  Word of mouth has increased our visitors to three times what we expected – and we only launched the community in October.   In order to accelerate wide adoption we have ensured that our community is not a stand-alone tool. It is seamlessly tied to the engineers' workflow and deeply integrated with our other service delivery tools.  To this end we’ve made 100+ enhancements to the basic Lithium community, based on our business needs.   The forums reputation model has helped us acknowledge contributions that would have previously gone unrecognized. Engineers who never participate in email discussions beyond asking questions are actively posting answers in the forums and helping other engineers. And they’re competing to see who can get on our leader board.   But the biggest win for our group at Cisco has been the ability to bring experts together from all areas. Engineers from across the globe are asking and answering questions for each other.   Collaboration is growing and we’re seeing instances of these conversations helping other engineers solve cases faster.   Cases that were taking months to get a resolution are getting answers on our forums within days and solving issues for our customers because of the ease of collaboration in our community.   And it’s accelerating engineer learning, too, as anyone can read documents and update their knowledge on new products and how to troubleshoot issues. And we’re seeing engineers do just that, and helping other engineers with their new skills.   "Tech Zone has been by far the best forum/resource for helping engineers that I have seen in my past 5 years of TAC experience." – Cisco TAC engineer, Anoop Saxena.
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Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Integration Cisco’s internal engineer community 'Tech Zone' was built fro... See more...
Company: Cisco Entry Submitted by: Becky Scott (lolagoetz) Tech Zone Success Manager Community: Cisco Tech Zone  Lithy Categories: Best Community Technical Integration Cisco’s internal engineer community 'Tech Zone' was built from the ground up by engineers… for engineers. The community developers are also a part of our target audience.   From the beginning we wanted an agile space where we could incorporate constant feedback and enhancements.   When our community opened for business, it came with an Idea Exchange to solicit any and all feedback from our users. Our users did not disappoint.   We started out by identifying where we want to reuse knowledge. We link open cases to posts and articles to track which content is helpful in solving a case.   We wanted search to be front and center in our workflow, so we implemented a search-before-post feature that surfaces related content – and displays the number of kudos and case links right there in the results. And we’ve used REST APIs to deeply integrate our community into our systems, such as our trouble ticketing portal, our knowledge creation strategy, and our corporate instant messaging system.   Our community is also an application development platform. In order to accelerate wide adoption we have ensured that our community is not a stand-alone tool, rather it is seamlessly tied to the engineers' workflow and seamlessly integrated with (and on an equal footing with) the other service delivery tools.  To this end we’ve made 100+ enhancements to the basic Lithium community, based on our business needs. This is where our business drives the tool instead of the tool driving the business. No limited capabilities here!   We’ve taken Lithium’s reputation system and not only incorporated it into our community, but we’ve added custom elements and added our own variables to Lithium’s already strong use of formulas for ranking.   We've built a customized leaderboard to highlight the accomplishments of our users based on our enriched reputation formulas. The result is a reputation system that effectively implements weighting factors to allow us to emphasize our organizational priorities and provides a checkpoint for our engineers.   As we see important behaviors that we want to encourage, we can build additional custom components right into the reputation. This reputation model also feeds into a rich custom metrics portal so engineers can self-evaluate their technical growth as well as arming them with tangible data for performance reviews and career development discussions.   Engineers need a quick way to preview information to see if it’s relevant to the case they are working. So we integrated a locally-grown case preview tool that allows our engineers to preview a portion of a case or bug. This has been hugely helpful in being able to find a quick answer within our community.   And we have even more awesome integrations in the works. Our engineers wanted a way to bump a thread without bumping the reply count, so we’re currently implementing a "raise hand" feature that allows a user to draw attention to a thread in progress in order to ask for additional help.     “The ability to quickly get help from experts and the ease which knowledge can be captured and re-used by others makes Tech Zone the perfect tool for us. I think we should also recognize the [Cisco] and Lithium teams for being so receptive to TAC's feedback and their willingness to tweak/ implement new features, as this is a huge part of what makes Tech Zone successful in my eyes.” – Cisco TAC engineer, Mike Robertson.
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Company: TomTom Entry Submitted by: Kenneth Refsgaard Community Manager (kendoji) Community: TomTom Discussions  (discussions.tomtom.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight When we launched TomTom Discussions on 1st M... See more...
Company: TomTom Entry Submitted by: Kenneth Refsgaard Community Manager (kendoji) Community: TomTom Discussions  (discussions.tomtom.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight When we launched TomTom Discussions on 1st March 2011 we knew that superfans would be important to the success of the community. And it didn’t take long before a few very actively engaged users emerged.   A few months after launch we created a private area for our top users, which marked the beginning of our superuser program. Since then we’ve been consistently awed by the knowledge and passion shown by these customers. We’d like to introduce a few of them.   Great Content:  In the early days of our community, one of our superusers was single-handledly responsible for 10% of the posts on the forums. The truly remarkable thing, though, is his encyclopedic knowle   dge of our products. It’s safe to say that he knows our products better than just about any of us! And we often - only half-jokingly -explain to colleagues that everything he posts should be assumed to be 100% correct.   In the year since we have been live he has authored 250 solutions and posted almost 4,000 times!   Creating that Community Spirit: Two of our superusers have been instrumental in helping us manage the community.   One thorny topic had become quite challenging to manage, when one of our superfans went on a mission to turn things around. He posted in the thread but also made great efforts reaching out in private to the most vocal troublemakers, urging them to be constructive. Most of them changed their behaviour immediately! These noble superfans have helped to maintain a friendly atmosphere on the community for everyone.   Above and Beyond: Several of our other superfans spend countless hours providing direct support to customers who are having problems.   This even goes to the extent of offering to provide help over the phone, or using Google Translate to help customers in languages that they don’t speak! And in our private area we receive a constant flow of valuable feedback from all of our superfans. This can be about product issues, website errors and much more. In fact, some of our colleagues from the product teams have learned that our private area is one of the best places to get timely and accurate product feedback, and have started monitoring it on a daily basis!   We all pay a lot of attention to the private area, and make sure that our superfans have a fast and direct line of communication to us.   There are many more examples we could mention, but possibly the greatest thing we’ve seen happen with our superfans is the warm and friendly relationship they’ve built with each other, and with us.   The private area is a board that’s full of laughter, honesty and mutual support. The bonds that our superfans have built with each other, and their relentlessly helpful and constructive discussions on the community, are infectious – they are really the ‘leaders’ of the community, and we often see new users starting to emulate their behavior (even if they started out as detractors!).   Our community is a great success, but we owe it all to our loyal superfans.    
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Company: Webroot Entry Submitted by: Catherine Buzzitta  Community Manager (cbuzzitta) Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community (Launched after 1 June 2011) Community Launch Date: 2 February... See more...
Company: Webroot Entry Submitted by: Catherine Buzzitta  Community Manager (cbuzzitta) Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community (Launched after 1 June 2011) Community Launch Date: 2 February 2012   Webroot is the perfect example of a company that needed a community. We had a compelling story to tell, a revolutionary product that people wanted to talk about and a loyal army of advocates. Also, customer service and product innovation are at the crux of our business success.   Yet with so many undefined channels of communication, we struggled to have the kind of dialogue we needed to really drive our products forward and to resolve customer issues quickly.   It became clear that Webroot customers needed a place to talk to Webroot employees, ask questions, find answers, suggest ideas for our products, and stay in the loop on security industry news. And so with the help of Lithium’s team and our small project development team, we created the Webroot Community.   RESULTS: Success! It appears that a Community is exactly what our Webroot fan base wanted!   After an initial "sneak peek" launch on February 2, 2012 to about 20,000, we gained 30,000 page views in the first five days. We launched to our entire customer base on February 15th. In just over a month since our public launch, we had over 525,000 page views and over 190,000 user sessions. After one month, we had 770 registered users - 18% being Webroot employees. This metric is a testament to not only our early success in registrations, but also company involvement. We have 34 ideas in our Ideas Exchange and all are reviewed bi-monthly with our Product Team. Half of the ideas have already been scheduled to be implemented in the next quarter. We have 1493 posts and 681 kudos in our Community - with the most activity being in our 'Mobile for Android' forum. This showed us that our users have a lot of interest and questions about our Android app - which then spurred involvement from our mobile team in the Community. WHAT LED TO THE SUCCESS? The "sneak peek" roll out was huge because our highly technical advocates. They enjoy being a part of our betas, so we leveraged that in the Community as well. We featured the community on Webroot’s homepage at the very top of the page, giving it easy accessibility. We promoted the Community on our social channels, in our email newsletter, in our product and at events. Webroot Employees were appropriately trained and encouraged to participate in the Community. We engaged with our superusers early on - PMing them and making them feel important using ranks and roles. We sent a friendly email out on behalf of the Community Manager asking for early feedback from select users. We created an "intro" video, welcoming users to the Community and explaining how to use it. In addition to setting up and customizing the overall architecture of the Community, we also implemented a secure SSL login to remain consistent with our security protocol. (very important to this security-savvy community) We continue to evolve our forums to make it easier for users to set up their accounts (e.g. “Helpful Pointers for New Members,” a new internal-use-only employee forum, and a business forum to launch alongside our new business product). We used the Community to cross-promote offers and sweepstakes.  In just one month, the Webroot Community developed into a knowledge resource for security-related topics and a rapid-fire response system for customer support issues.  In fact, the response was so great we had to bring on additional support team members to remain dedicated to resolving customer issues on the community. As a result, the correspondence between our support team, moderators, administrators, and users has been nothing short of impressive.   And lastly, don't take OUR word for it.   Hear what the Webroot Community has to say!   “Any questions or suggestions about your Webroot product, this is the forum to post them. Excellent Forum.” “I have to say again Congrats to all of the Webroot teams from Development all the way to Support and now the Community Support Forums keep up the great work!” “Thank you to the Webroot support team for all of your efforts! You ALL are the BOMB!” “Well done. Keep up!” "Nice to see Webroot with its own forum and a very nice once as well..I like the forum options...Love WSA keep up the good work."        
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Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation HP Expert Day Events come ... See more...
Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Global Implementation HP Expert Day Events come of age around the world   HP customers worldwide got their toughest questions answered by HP Experts.  Hosted on all seven HP Consumer Support language forums, Expert Days showcased HP’s commitment to our customers by engaging in real time, one-on-one, personalized conversations, sharing, and help on a global scale.     Anytime, anywhere... 14 Expert Day events were held in 2011 and early 2012 with hundreds of volunteers, known as HP Experts.  HP Experts located around the world are a valuable resource for community members, an indispensable part of the HP team, and their participation has helped build and grow HP’s community.    Gathering online for 24 hours to answer any and all questions that community members posted to the forum boards, HP Experts physically and virtually came together in various Expert Villages headquartered at HP sites around the world to confer and answer to questions as a team.    Combined with the power of the Lithium Technologies platform, HP customers could talk with experts at their convenience and in their preferred language (English, Spanish, S Chinese, French, German, Portuguese, and Korean).  So, whether you’re an English speaker in Thailand or a French speaker in the US, HP customers have the ability to access the Expert Day of their choice and get the answers they want via a personal, human, and high-quality support experience.   The numbers tell the story One key measure of the HP’s Global Expert Day program’s success is in the numbers – here are a few we’re especially proud of:   On the English language forum, Expert Day participation grew by more than 50,000 customers between the April 2011 and January 2012 events.  In January, customers from 219 countries had their questions answered during Expert Day. The September 2011 Portuguese Expert Day had 15,000 participants.  Additionally, the number of digital “thank yous” (given in the form of “kudos” on the forum) increased by more than 4000% compared to a normal day’s average. The January 2012 Chinese Consumer Support Expert Day saw a 1526% increase in number of postings over the daily average, while the January 2012 Korean Consumer Support Expert Day saw a 671% hike when compared to daily average. HP began its Expert Day programs for some key reasons: To connect with customers real-time to share and help when they need it To listen and learn from our customers as they share their HP successes and challenges To introduce first-time users to the HP community by meeting and talking live with other HP fans, friends, and experts and getting the most out of their HP products and services .   Progress toward that goal has been overwhelming worldwide:   September’s English-language Expert Day saw a 195% jump in new registrations compared to an average day. September’s German and French Expert Day resulted in more than 325% increase in each language forum’s new registrations vs. an average day. July’s Chinese-language Expert Day resulted in more than 600% more new registrations compared to an average day. Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal for HP Expert Days, and based on responses from customers around the globe, the HP Support Forum community is exceeding everyone’s expectations:     “Wow, I get responses from 2 experts so quickly, it’s almost an instant chat” – German Forums Customer, September Expert Day “I am getting to know much more knowledge. Thanks for experts solution, I know more skills on computer”- Chinese Forums Customer, July Expert Day “Wow!!!  It's working.  I can't begin to thank you enough!!! Not enough Kudos permitted to express my appreciation to you for hanging in there until you got the solution to my situation.” – English Forums Customer, September Expert Day “Fantastic…I can now go to bed (it is 10.43 p.m. here) in the knowledge that I can try that first thing tomorrow morning. Thanks once again for your considerable help - you have been very instructive and insightful and your guidance has been most appreciated.” – English Forums Customer,  January Expert Day   Thanks to our fantastic HP Experts, Expert Day events are alive and well.  Come join the conversation. We’ll see you in the forums!    
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Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight   HP Exper... See more...
Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight   HP Experts rock! What’s better than one super fan? Try 140!   In March, more than 140 HP enthusiasts (known as HP Experts) from all over the world gathered in San Francisco at the first-ever HP Social Support Summit to share best practices, explore HP technologies and build relationships.     These top contributors to HP’s award-winning Consumer Support Forums are the strongest influencers within HP’s community. Collectively, they tackle more than 50% of the problem resolution despite making up less than 1% of the forum community membership. They are the life blood of HP’s Forums, and their active participation directly influences the vibrancy and vitality of the 7 HP forums communities.     The global conference showcased the technologies, strategies, and best practices that underpin HP’s social media philosophy. Experts were invited to tour HP’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA to get a sense of HP’s history and culture.    Speakers from the top ranks of HP and Microsoft, as well as social media and customer service industry experts, treated HP Experts to informational and entertaining talks, while a motivational speaker kept energy levels high throughout the conference. Lithium’s own Chief Community Officer, Joe Cothrel, also jumped on stage for a deep dive on the specific challenges and trends that lie ahead in social media.     There was also plenty of time for fun and conversation as HP Experts joined in morning “fun runs,” collaborated with peers during group dinners, and shared ideas in the HP Oasis break room.  Last but not least, Experts were honored at an awards presentation recognizing the top forum contributors to wrap up the three-day event.    As the highest ranking forum member across all languages, DavidPK received top honors.      The Social Support Summit was a grand event for HP to recognize and reward these volunteers and say ‘Thank You’ to the people who freely give their time to help HP customers.    After the event, HP Experts shared their thoughts on the summit:   ”To do the simplest of things well, and to get a thank you means everything.”   ”This was a beautiful moment and a wonderful experience to meet all the fantastic, talented people from everywhere!” “SoMe team thank you so much for the most extraordinary adventure of my life.” …Daniel_P “Yes, thank you so very much to everyone involved in organizing and attending the S3 events!  It was a grand experience for me in both a personal and professional aspect!” …Kalt “All I can say is WOW! The forum was such a great opportunity to meet folks I have been working with here for years, to trade ideas and learn best practices. The speakers were excellent, the activities were fun and the organization and logistics were really well done.  Kudo's to all of you who made this possible.”…Bob_Headrick The HP team also is taking insights and suggestions from the HP Expert attendees straight to our product and service teams to improve our HP products and service offering. There is no shortage of ideas to share, either: HP Experts attached more than 90 ideas to the HP IDEA Wall at the general sessions.   Katie Harris, HP Summit Event Coordinator notes,”The first annual HP Social Support Summit surpassed all of our wildest expectations.  What a pleasure it was to meet our top members and thank them in person for their tremendous contributions to the HP Communities.”     To encourage ongoing dialogue with and recognition of the Expert volunteer team, HP is committed to continue its ongoing meet-up events around the world.   The meet-ups are informal face-to-face social gatherings that include HP global and regional teams and Experts. The smaller events are just another way to let the Expert teams know they are valued and important to HP and to the HP community.    When asked why they dedicate so much time to the forum, Experts’ answers are almost always unanimous: “We simply like to help and enjoy the challenge of solving issues and spreading a smile around.”    
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Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI   HP’s Consumer Support Foru... See more...
Company: HP Consumer Support Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani) Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI   HP’s Consumer Support Forums have saved the company multi-millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of man-hours and – most importantly – has helped millions of customers get the most out of their HP technology.  Now that’s ROI.    With more than 10 million technology support solutions recorded annually and more than 500 million page views since its launch, the HP Consumer Support Forums are a key resource for customers and HP alike.  When more customers find the help and solutions they need, when and where they want and expect it, the more HP delivers best-in-class support.  Community members also help HP engineers uncover product issues and improve HP technologies and products.   In 2011, three main factors led to unprecedented performance, expanded community engagement and overall vibrancy for the forums:   Global Usability Testing:  HP talked with customers around the world and observed how they used the forums.  With this info in hand, HP was able to better understand and make the forums more intuitive and useful for both first-time and seasoned users across the seven language forums     HP launched ForumVille, an online community enhancement program with the specific goal of optimizing the forum experience for all users.  Forumville significantly increased overall response rates to questions and issues, resulting in improved community interactions, Accepted Solutions and goodwill.        After applying rigorous six sigma methodology, ForumVille deployed 13 new enhancements which have been adopted and incorporated into HP’s forums experience.  Highlights include:    The HP Expert Campaign introduced a fun gaming challenge for top contributors to respond to posted threads on our least active forum boards.  This game resulted in a 75% answer rate and 50% response time reduction for the low performing boards during the 2 week period.   This was an amazing way to motivate our top posters:   “Yay!  I'm excited!  It's nice to see something like this being done after all this time”... (Kalt) “Great numbers! Lot of nice efforts there, guys. I am gonna have to give up my 'day job' to compete with all of you...” (CherylG)       The ‘Fall Cleaning’ Campaign for HP Community Managers – The goal of the event was to make many posts easier to find either by adding more keywords so it appears in the search results or by making the title of the post so self explanatory that customers can better identify it being a possible match for their issue.    The community managers introduced a new board specifically for forum first-timers.  The board includes video tutorials as well as other tips and tricks.  It continues to be one of the most widely visited boards on the forums. HP developed a new widget displaying unanswered posts throughout the forum.  The widget allows HP Experts fast and easy access to posts that need their attention most, resulting in faster response times and more satisfied customers.  HP Experts responded enthusiastically :  “Having access to the posts with no replies will also be very good. It will save those of us helping from having to check every forum”. – Old Geekster “I believe it is very useful for other member in here as well in order to monitor many forums within our expertise area more easily”. - SlomiL “Maybe it has been there a long time but I have just noticed the "Threads with no replies" on the right side of each board and I have been using that tool regularly.  This started in late September.  Don't tell me the feature has been there since the beginning of time :)” “... the single best improvement on the forum”   A new and cleaner look for the HP Support Forums:  Aligning with HP company-wide web and graphics standards, the HP Consumer Support Forums pages took on a more streamlined and colorful community look and feel.     The HP Consumer Support Forums have proven to be an unmitigated success.  In 2011, the forums reached 685 million net page views, including:   5.5M visits a month globally 40M customer solutions delivered 31,000 Accepted Solutions 100,000 Kudos 15M searches 650,000 registered customers Among Lithium's top 250 communities, HP’s English Consumer Support Community ranks:   7th among 250 top communities overall 3rd among 110 high tech hardware and software 4th out of 150 support-oriented communities 7th among 164 B2C oriented communities Lithium’s Consumer Health Index scores consistently rate the HP English Forum above 700   At the current growth rate, the forums will reach one billion page views around November 2012!        Thanks to savings the forums have enabled, HP is reinvesting those dollars in efforts to broaden and grow our social media experience across the world.  It’s HP’s commitment to our customers to be there anytime, anywhere - to listen, engage, and help.
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Company: A1 Telekom Austria Entry Submitted by: Claudia Religa Customer Interaction Manager (A1_Claudia) Community: A1 Telekom (http://www.a1community.net) Community Launch Date: 16 November 2011 Lithy Categories: Best New Community, Best ... See more...
Company: A1 Telekom Austria Entry Submitted by: Claudia Religa Customer Interaction Manager (A1_Claudia) Community: A1 Telekom (http://www.a1community.net) Community Launch Date: 16 November 2011 Lithy Categories: Best New Community, Best Social Customer Experience Program, Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Implementation The A1 Telekom Support Community - A vital community for our customers   The vision for our new state of the art support community was to build a vital community for customers, available 24/7 all over the world. We see the community as a steadily growing platform, which we develop in cooperation with our users in constant game workshops. In only 40 days the community was ready to go live after a beta test with 450 postings in just three days and 16 community members providing testimonials.    We are building the community around the needs of its members – to motivate our users to help and support the community we started an incentive program:   Users are given the opportunity to customize their profiles with special signatures. We added icons that show the status of the community member – our most active users have earned VIP ranking. Ongoing improvements and changes are communicated transparently to the community users on our community events board.   A team of employees service the community. The moderators provide support when needed and brand-new information and updates on certain topics.   We take the customer feedback seriously and use it to steadily develop our services, products and solutions.Together with our super fans we developed a brand new design for our community homepage which will be implemented shortly.   We also launched the idea module - the target of the project is to develop a new concept for simplified use of the “Mein A1” page in cooperation with the support community users.   The benefits for our customers are:   the opportunity to take part in an innovation process possible realization of user ideas to exchange thoughts and ideas with other users incentives for participating How we benefit: communication with users interaction with the support community identification of consumer needs opportunity to integrate consumers into the realization process   The project itself and the output from the workshops around “Mein A1” are continually promoted on facebook and in the community.   The new A1 support community is directly linked to our A1 blog. It was created as a platform for both community members and product managers to release product news, features and tips and tricks regarding our portfolio.   The A1 blog is a category, where we can cover a lot of successful stories for interacting with customers, e.g. our popular smartphone test reports written by our community members.                   Crossover Solutions for Customer Service Communication and Crowdsourcing To guarantee the best social brand experience we are linking different channels with each other.   www.a1.net – the Lithium newsfeed on our portal The FAQs and the company's support community are integrated via tabs onto our facebook fan page – which means: one database manages all user postings. Facebook users have access to the support community in real time to knowledge without a login.  The fictional figure “Robert Hauser” takes care of customer support on the facebook wall – behind the figure are employees from our service team, who answer user questions on any kind of topic. With 160,179 fans after starting our facebook fanpage two years ago we are ranked second in the German-speaking TELCO provider area.   By implementing our own facebook CMS, we were able to design our very own application and multimedia info sites for lotteries, promotions, company news, etc. On YouTube, we are the only provider in Austria with a branded channel. We provide short movies about our products and solutions. We also provide inhouse produced A1 video guides. The video guide with the most views ranks around 252,508 views. For sharing YouTube videos we offer our community members a share button.   Output from our A1 blog is posted on facebook.    Our Technical Implementation Deep Integration into Portal SSO The A1 community has been tightly linked to the portal SSO. While it does not require you to log in as long as you’re only browsing, logging in is a requirement for all actions like posting or replying.   To enable this integration we developed a mechanism where the Lithium server would “talk” to our SSO servers “behind the curtain” to retrieve the login data of the current user. Thanks to Lithium's ability to support different channels (web, facebook, mobile) this approach works for all of these.   Deep Integration with User Data As the community integrates with our SSO this demands that user data is maintained by the A1.net authentication systems. Thus, user data (e-mail and nickname) cannot be edited within the Lithium community but need to be managed by the A1 portal.   For this a similar mechanism to the above mentioned SSO handshake has been developed, where Lithium redirects the user to the appropriate A1.net application, and the “behind the curtains” handshake reflects any changes immediately back to the community. Again this approach works transparently for all of the available channels.   Deep Integration into A1.net look & feel The marketing requirements demand that the community should look & feel as part of the A1.net portal, the fact that it is cloud-based should not disturb the user’s perception of a common portal experience.   The HTML framework that makes up the portal look & feel had to be the foundation of the web-based channel of the community presentation. Together with Lithium we were able to link the existing A1.net framework with the flexible HTML construct that’s provided by Lithium, successfully offering our users a continuous experience. In our service box we can also embed YouTube videos from our branded channel.   Integration of Social Media Buttons Of course sharing of content is very important for a vital community. Therefore we implemented Social Media sharing buttons such as facebook Like, Google+, Twitter in user postings.     Our Business ROI Since our launch on the 16th of November, 2011 the community KPIs increased steadily. Our continous online survey proofs that we are constantly saving customer support cases (email, call, letters).   Compared to our competitors A1 has the biggest and most active community in Austria.   0   We created a short video to highlight our A1 Social Media success story since spring last year.    
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Company: A1 Telekom Austria Entry Submitted by: Claudia Religa Customer Interaction Manager (A1_Claudia) Community: A1 Telekom (http://www.a1community.net) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight     As we prepared for the ... See more...
Company: A1 Telekom Austria Entry Submitted by: Claudia Religa Customer Interaction Manager (A1_Claudia) Community: A1 Telekom (http://www.a1community.net) Lithy Categories: Best SuperFan Story or Insight     As we prepared for the launch of our A1 Support Community, we decided to run a beta test with our customers – the output was amazing! – we had 16 users who wrote 450 postings in just three days!   That was also the start of our special SuperFan story – about our community member, Simon. He joined the beta test and called our attention to small bugs that we would never have found without his support in this short time.   After the launch we organized a design game workshop to define the future of our community together with our customers. Simon didn’t miss the chance to be part of it, although it was hard work for him to get there: As he is only 15 years old he had to ask his parents for permission to join the workshop.  It’s a four hour train ride from his home to our headquarters in Vienna. His parents weren’t impressed about the idea, but finally they agreed – on one condition – he had to pay the ticket from his pocket money! When he told us his story we were really astonished and proud about the fact that we have committed Super Fans like him who care so much about our community. Without hesitating we refunded the costs for his train ticket and additionally donated a goodie bag for his dedication.   After the workshop he wrote us the following kind words:   "I just wanted to say thank you again for giving me the opportunity to join your workshop yesterday! It was a great day for me and I won't forget it for a long time. I’ve really learned a lot, such as what other users think about A1 and what suggestions they have to improve the community. I got my train back home just in time – one minute later and I would have had to spend the night in Vienna ;-)” From this time on Simon wrote 150 posts and got 56 kudos in the community. He also applied for a job at A1 and is going to support us as a trainee in his summer vacation.   Even the three week house arrest that he got after returning home from our workshop couldn’t keep him from being part of our community!   The story of Simon was spread across all the departments of our company. Everyone who heard about it was impressed by his dedication to our online community. Therefore, he is now known companywide, throughout A1 Telekom as 'Simon, the Super Fan of our hearts'.
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Company: HP Enterprise Entry Submitted by: Margaret Nugent Social Media Marketing Manager (maugent) Community: HP EBC (http://h30499.www3.hp.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Summary HP built one world-wid... See more...
Company: HP Enterprise Entry Submitted by: Margaret Nugent Social Media Marketing Manager (maugent) Community: HP EBC (http://h30499.www3.hp.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience Summary HP built one world-wide community on a single instance for all enterprise customers Executed 11 community migrations to the instance, retiring these communities on their legacy platforms To date, five languages are hosted on a single instance Mobile version is available in all languages Benefits:  Cost efficiency; more accurate data of our members (not spread over several platforms) Facts The HP Enterprise Business Community (hereafter referred to as HP EBC) was launched on January 29 th , 2010 with a single category called “BladeSystem”. Three years’ worth of content belonging to 3,500 members was migrated from a third party proprietary platform to our new Lithium instance for the initial launch. It was the first of seven migrations that took place in 2010, bringing total membership to over 200,000 Our migrations came from a combination of HP legacy sites, third party proprietary platforms and an acquisition The HP EBC has enabled us to bring all our disparate communities together on one platform and present a single holistic view of our members and their activities in detailed metrics reports Our goal for the first two years was to consolidate all the external-facing communities managed by HP Enterprise onto a single instance.   Within our first year we built five brand new categories and migrated four local language communities from our Asia-Pacific Region (APJ):   Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Japanese Korean This was the first time non-English language content had been hosted together on a single instance along with English, so it took great collaboration and partnership between HP and Lithium to make this happen.   In 2011 we completed the largest migration, with over ½ million members from an 11 year old HP support forum to our instance.  Despite the year’s notice we were given, this migration was a huge project for both HP and Lithium.  The go-live date was fixed due to HP server retirements.  Thanks to Lithium’s experience garnered from the smaller migrations completed in 2010, we were able to complete this with minimal downtime to our members. We also worked with our super-users to help facilitate the change and support while communicating the benefits of the migration.    Here is what our members said: “I’m excited about the changes coming soon. I have always enjoyed this forum, but participating at the new Consumer Forum since it opened 11/08 I have come to really appreciate the extra features it offers…hyperlinks, macros are just two that I think of instantly. Kudos is another great feature. It is very rewarding to have multiple people give kudos to a solution or tip that you provide and be able to realize how many actually benefited.  I believe everyone here will soon come to wonder how they ever did without all the extra goodies. It may take a bit of time and some adjustments, but is well worth the effort.” Cheryl G. “Thanks for the heads up about what's getting ready to happen with the forum. I'm looking forward to the new functionality. And thanks to HP for continuing to provide such a great place to share ideas and to get and receive help.” Prof Julie November, 2011 saw HP EBC launch a mobile version of the community:  http://m.hp.com/ebc in combination with a new HP.com redesign.   Learning HP Software originally launched its own instance in April 2010, with a view to migrating the software support boards from the HP legacy community (aka HP ITRC) in June 2011.  Once HP Software made the announcement of their intentions at their annual customer event, they received lot of feedback from members asking “Why?”  HP Software’s perception was that software customers were different from other enterprise members and only focused on software products.    The reality proved quite different as approximately <20% of HP Software members were active on both communities.  They were asking why HP Software had their own community, why was HP asking members to join two communities.  So HP Software listened and acted on this by migrating their instance to HP EBC.   ROI The platform has become ingrained in the way we conduct our support business, here are some examples:   HP Software Support HP Software Support uses discussion boards for members to have technical discussions on the software product portfolio with a goal to ensure a better understanding of all the features these products have to offer.   In order to provide additional value, to those customers with a valid support contract, they offer a Limited Access area that enables two-way discussion with a support expert. HP Software see this as an extra service to their support customers that results in reducing the number of deferred calls from their support center.  They have created a formula which calculates the potential number of deferred calls each month. The metric that plays an important role is the ‘number of accepted solution views’. We are reporting on this metric in all of our support forums (public and limited access forums).  Throughout 2011, HP Software saw the number of accepted solution views increase from 24,000 in January to 405,000 in December 2011 Support Call Deflection The HP EBC community provides HP a significant cost avoidance opportunity as many customers are able to resolve their support issues via the community, as opposed to contacting HP directly (via phone contacts, email, or chat).  Together with other web-based self-solve service capabilities, this is a critical success factor for HP’s support services organization.   HP Expert Days Following completion of our support forums migration to one unified community, we began to partner with the HP consumer side of the business (which was also utilizing the Lithium platform) to offer our customers a broader “Expert Day” experience.  The ‘HP Community Expert Days’ provide our community members a 24-hour period during which to interact directly with HP employees within the forums.  HP Expert Days are typically hosted once a quarter, and are a great way to create awareness of the forums for customers who may not typically choose to receive support in a social manner.  Registrations, logins, posts, and page views consistently see impressively sized increases during Expert Days: Registrations 73% Logins 73% Posts 135% Topics 127% Accepted Solutions 157% Kudos 38%   Growth The evolution and growth of the HP EBC has brought about a new requirement to bring in a limited access area to meet specific business needs with our customers (members) and our channel partners.   HP Software has introduced three Limited Access programs within the community:   1. Customer Advisory Boards (CAB) These are Advisory Boards for our top customers, who have the opportunity to meet face to face twice a year.  All meeting notes, presentations and discussions conducted are shared within this category.   2. BETA Testing program HP Software has started to conduct beta testing of the next software product versions with our beta customers within limited access categories in the HP EBC.  In the past all communications were conducted via email after the software was downloaded and installed.  Using the HP EBC has been a great success as more customers have seen the advantages of using the discussion boards versus email.    These advantages are: Increased efficiency and reduction in time to resolution Easier to share knowledge Forums are searchable, enabling customers to find solutions to issues Easier to see where customers are struggling and can put together essential webinars throughout the beta testing period. Opportunity to train customers on new features of the product, so that they can take advantage after upgrading to the new version Ongoing relationship using the forum until the release is launched and can easily train customers on new features and get their ongoing feedback 3. Practitioners Forum The Practitioners Forum provides a unique opportunity for experienced members to share their experiences and learn from other like-minded practitioners.  Outside of the discussions taking place in these forums we also conduct bi-weekly one hour round table sessions between HP product experts and members, where active participants can contribute or simply listen. Experienced members wanted a place where they could conduct discussions or have conversations with other members with the same level experience.   HP EBC is really a cluster/nest of communities – each managed by separate ‘neighborhood’ or ‘category managers’ and one overall administrator.  It is funded by seven internal cost locations within HP by internal cross charges based on proportionate page view costs.    
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Company: Sky Entry Submitted by: Stephen Marshall, Community Operations Manager (StephenMarshall) Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community Technical Integration Communi... See more...
Company: Sky Entry Submitted by: Stephen Marshall, Community Operations Manager (StephenMarshall) Community: Sky Help Forum (helpforum.sky.com) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community Technical Integration Community Launched: 25 Oct 2010 Sky’s Social Customer Support journey started with the launch of the Sky Help Forum (http://helpforum.sky.com/), on 25th October 2010. Here at Sky, service through Social Media means our customers can be confident in finding answers to their issues, from our community and staff, irrespective of the type of question or the complexity of the problem.   Since launch, our forum has grown extremely quickly. With the realisation of the potential we could unlock through Social Media customer service, we decided to extend this support to Facebook and Twitter in March 2011.    Our mission – At Sky we strive for our customers to ‘Believe in Better’ and as one of the UK’s largest broadcasting, telephone and broadband companies, we aim to lead the way in customer service.   With the help of Lithium, we are building a programme in which goes beyond the service we provide to our customers via traditional contact methods.  As well as customers still being able to contact us via telephone and email, with the introduction of our Help Forum, Facebook and Twitter channels we are also now enabling an all-round social customer experience. The customer can simply type their query on to our Help Forum, Facebook and Twitter pages and then await a response. And the power of the social community means that our super-users and other customers often solve many of the questions.     For any issues that cannot be resolved by our community, we have a team of in-house Sky experts ready to assist. Hello to quick and easy resolutions through Social Media!   Our Highlights –  30,000 registered users by June 2011 More than doubled that to 70,000 registered users  by March 2012 Over 150 new registered users each day 1 million thread views per week 144% increase in Sky service Tweets since July 2011  54% growth in Sky Facebook service interactions since July 2011 Sky social media teams’ deal with 1000-1300 total interactions each day Launched in February this year, we are the first company in the UK to offer single-use Live Customer Chat for one-to-one private case resolution We have had 90-100% customer satisfaction/resolution for our social media Live Chat service Consistently over achieving our customer satisfaction and customer resolution goals across all channels     Broadening our reach – In October 2011, we started listening to our social customers out with our branded channels. This meant that we can look to provide advice and assistance to people that mention Sky services or products within their Tweets, Facebook updates and other forum posts.    We are currently able to respond within forums that aren’t official Sky channels.  We also have the tools to monitor tweets and Facebook posts about Sky from customers, and are able to help and respond when needed.   Seeing the query through to the end – When our customers ask questions in our Help Forum or social media channels, we don’t want anything to get in the way of providing a complete end-to-end resolution.    If a customer’s query requires account sensitive information to be exchanged, our staff are happy to privately interact with that customer. But this requires a one-to-one interaction with one of our Sky staff members and isn’t something for a public area.     To solve this, we have introduced an innovative solution to deal with more sensitive social support issues.   Sky is the first company in the UK to use one time chat links which direct the customer back to the original advisor they were speaking to on the help forum, Facebook or Twitter. Once the customer has clicked the one-time link they immediately enter a private chat session so they can have a real-time confidential discussion. This ensures that the Sky team member can have access to the customer’s Sky account and share sensitive information, which wouldn’t be possible in the forum. Since we launched this private chat, customers have reported 90-100% satisfaction and resolution.    Our belief – We believe we are excellent contenders in providing the best social customer experience along with the best technical implementation.   We have a programme in place which means each individual customer will have their question answered or problem resolved. There are some customer questions and issues that require our Sky experts due to the knowledge they have and the requirement to access Sky customer accounts.   Our aim is to own the customer’s social interaction until they are satisfied with an answer or resolution.
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Company: Tagged Entry Submitted by: Matthew Savage (msavage) Community: Tagged (help.tagged.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community, Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Integration Community Launched: 26 Sept 2011   Tagg... See more...
Company: Tagged Entry Submitted by: Matthew Savage (msavage) Community: Tagged (help.tagged.com) Lithy Categories: Best New Community, Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Integration Community Launched: 26 Sept 2011   Tagged's Community, launched in late September 2011, is one of our proudest achievements of the year.   We wanted to provide our users with a venue to ask questions, crowdsource solutions, suggest ideas, report bugs and read updates about important changes to the site.   With the power of Lithium's platform and expertise, our small team of 2-3 people implemented a customized solution that supported all of those goals and integrated with a number of other systems and products.   We've organized our Community into five main areas to allow users to communicate with us and each other:   Forums- for user support and discussion FAQs- to answer popular user questions Ideas- to listen to user suggestions and potential improvements Bugs- for users to report site issues and view resolution statuses News- to broadcast information about important events and changes to our site   Integration into other systems was another key goal of this project and we've successfully leveraged Lithium to authenticate and interact with our login process, global navigation bar, games, contact form and ticketing system.   Users are logged into Lithium via SSO- all they need to do is pick a nickname and they're ready to post! They can also use our overall site nav. bar from any Lithium URL.   We've created landing pages for each of our main game titles so that players can easily access the corresponding forums, ideas, FAQs and bugs for their favorite Tagged games.   Perhaps our crowning achievement is the integration with Parature, our ticketing system. We've maintained consistent UI across on our contact form, so users have the option to jump from the Community to contact us directly. In addition, community posts that require personal support can be escalated directly to a queue in our ticketing system in 2 simple clicks! This allows our agents to respond publicly to posts or take the discussion to a private email when necessary.   This solution has vastly increased our ability to provide excellent customer support, as solutions can be provided by our agents or other members of the Community with ease.   Results: Five month in, the stats have been amazing. In the first three weeks of February, we've averaged almost 95,000 page views/day and nearly 285,000 post views/day.   Just last week, we set our Q&A app as our default Facebook page tab and saw search metrics soar exponentially as those users also harnessed the power of our expanding body of content! Most importantly, we're glad to report that our users view over 2,000 marked solutions each day!   This sustained growth each month has been great to see and we're quite excited about future plans to engage and utilize the full arsenal of our Community as we progress.   We're incredibly proud of what we've created and hope to continue building an amazing destination for our users, developers and support agents to interact!       
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