One final entry into the upcoming Forrester Groundswell awards, graciously shared here for the benefit of our members!
Please welcome to the blog Thierry Hay-Sabourin, Senior Manager of eCommerce for Future Shop, as he describes how the Future Shop customer community helps the company's online channel, Futureshop.ca, extend the company's brand promise of trusted, personalized service:
Future Shop is Canada's largest retailer and e-tailer of consumer electronics. With over 141 stores from coast-to-coast and over $3.7 billion in annual revenue, Future Shop is dedicated to providing customers with expert technology advice both in stores and online.
Canada's #1 Technology Community
Future Shop's overall goal is to deliver trusted, personalized service with the customer in mind. The company's online channel, Futureshop.ca, strives to extend the company's brand promise with its mandate "to deliver an expert guided experience for customers that creates loyalty, trust, and customers for life."
Futureshop.ca is executing on its mandate with a Lithium-powered online community called the Future Shop Community Forum whose motto is "Connect, Share, Learn." The Future Shop customer community is Canada's #1 community of technology and consumer electronics enthusiasts. With over 110,000 members and 190,000 posts to date, the community is thriving with a four-fold growth in traffic over the last year. Best Buy, Future Shop's parent company, recognized the forward-thinking nature and success of the community with the company's $1 million Chairman's Innovation Award.
Future Shop’s Tech Blog has also been critical to providing customers with the latest news, reviews, how-to’s and commentary from Future Shop’s expert blog team. Updated daily, each article is fed to Twitter (@FS_Connect) where bloggers and their followers retweet the most interesting posts.
Future Shop's community is available in both English and French, has 14 key discussion categories ranging from home theatre to home office to appliances, with some boards boasting over 15,000 posts to date. The community's main target audience is consumers, but the site also serves merchants and vendors who are able to gather direct customer feedback, and in-store Product Experts. Not only can Product Experts increase their personal brand equity by helping customers online, they also have an opportunity to improve their product knowledge and learn from customers and each other. Future Shop encourages them to log-in to the community from kiosks on the store floor.
As proof of the community's importance and support within the organization, several hundred recipients including Future Shop's top management receive a weekly report that includes key activity statistics and highlights issues and hot topics. With its high degree of visibility, the community is quickly becoming a go-to vehicle for departments across Future Shop to accomplish business goals:
Customer Support: The community helped build a self-service knowledge base that customers tap into to find answers to product information questions, helping them make more informed purchase decisions and get post-purchase support.
Marketing: Marketing not only amplifies promotions through the community, but also reaches out to the community as a key source of product input and feedback. For example, the project manager of a new marketing program tapped the community to suggest program features and names. The community also enhances Future Shop's brand image of expertise.
Corporate Communications: Corporate communications uses the community to keep its finger on the pulse of Future Shop customer sentiment. Should an issue bubble up in the community, it can be investigated, addressed, and de-escalated in a matter of hours.
Recruiting: Recruiting reaches out to the community, a natural pool of Future Shop sales talent, to bolster holiday season and general recruiting efforts. An engaged contributor in the French community was hired through this system in large part due to his participation in the community - which impressed his manager a great deal.
Keys to Success: Innovation and Promotion
With its community, Futureshop.ca took an innovative approach to extending the Future Shop brand promise of personalized service and product expertise online. The company paired its customer community with a virtual product expert - an avatar named Aaron or Fred, depending on whether you prefer English or French - who serves as a user-friendly gateway to and promoter of the community for new users.
Aaron (or Fred) lives on the Futureshop.ca homepage, and encourages users to "Ask an Expert" if they have a technology-related question. The avatar helps users find answers by scanning conversation threads and highlighting relevant information, and if the user doesn't find the answer they're looking for, they can ask Aaron to post their question to the appropriate discussion board in the community. This facilitated approach to new user engagement has contributed significantly to the community's growth and popularity.
Future Shop actually began to build momentum for its community right out of the gate by executing a well-planned launch. In addition to garnering coverage by print and online media and key blog sites, Future Shop enticed users to visit the community by inviting them to an online debate between well-known technology experts. Future Shop continues to promote the community with strong visibility on the homepage and by syndicating to key department pages a "Hot Threads" widget that highlights relevant discussions.
Bringing the Community to Life
Future Shop prides itself on being on the leading edge of innovation, a spirit which helped bring the community to life. That said, the idea of a customer community, let alone pairing it with a virtual product expert avatar, wasn't instantly embraced internally. I, along with my colleague Robert Pearson, Vice President of e-Commerce for Future Shop, had to scrape resources together from a number of different areas, navigate around roadblocks, constantly communicate with internal influencers, and convince a lot of nay-sayers that this was the right direction to take. In the end, the project not only got completed, it won the support of the entire organization.
Managing a Thriving Community
Because of the prominent role the community plays in the success of Future Shop, the company leverages moderation services from Lithium to augment their team. Active moderation ensures that Future Shop always has its hand on the pulse of community sentiment and is never in the position of playing catch-up on what's going on in the community.
In addition to oversight by a Future Shop community manager and Lithium moderators, the community benefits tremendously from a key group of highly engaged community members, or superusers, who are frequent contributors to discussions. These superusers volunteer their time to participate in a welcoming committee for new members, create their own widgets and tools that benefit the community (e.g. a widget that displays a user's posts broken down by discussion category), and provide feedback on proposed site enhancements. Future Shop recognizes its superusers with "Kudos King or Queen" contests, gift cards, and simple thank-yous.
Thank you Thierry for coming here and sharing your community with ours!
Be sure to visit the Future Shop community when you get a chance to see for yourselves: http://www.futureshop.ca/marketing/community/default.asp?langid=EN&logon=&langid=EN
Note: updated 9/2 to include the Future Shop blog and correct some of the numbers quoted.
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