@JoeC and @DaveEv led three energetic and thought-provoking roundtable discussions in the afternoon of LiNC Local London.  Fueled by the inspirational sessions about digital customer experience in the morning, attendees were ready to roll up their sleeves and get tips from Lithium experts and from one another.       The first roundtable was all about social engagement in good and bad times. @DaveEv set the context on why this is critical and shared a few examples on brands that have done well to manage a social crisis (such as Lithium customers TalkTalk and Southwest Airlines), but also those that missed the mark.      With the help of @ClaudiusH and @AndyK, attendees broke into small groups to discuss this topic further. The key takeaways and best practices mentioned include: Use social as an early warning system to determine the severity of an issue. Whether it’s related to a network outage, product launch or executive messaging, the most important factor is to be as transparent as possible, be quick to respond, and be a trustworthy source of updates. For brands that have launched a community, many reiterated the value of tapping into your super fans to help with engaging in conversations. In many cases, this goes much farther in demonstrating that your brand is listening and taking action. A single destination to drive engagement from multiple channels to a single POV and messaging will help avoid conflicting answers and minimize duplicative work by your team.   The next roundtable centered on breaking down siloes between marketing + customer service. @JoeC kicked off the discussion to get everyone grounded in the fact that siloes go beyond just organizational – considerations also need to be made around channel, process, data and metrics. Brands have seen time and time again that even with a support-driven community, your customers are shopping or making purchase decisions based on the engagement and content shared by peers.  This teed up the conversation around how to align your marketing and service counterparts to work together to leverage this valuable engagement.  A few tips were shared to tackle this challenge: Get C-suite support to align on a key set of metrics that both marketing and service can be held accountable for. Compile and share results from pilots or trials for which you’ve attempted to bring the two organizations together. In some cases, external factors that require your organization to adhere to compliance and new regulations can serve as a good forcing function to drive this collaboration. Lastly, we ended the afternoon breakout session with a roundtable on the evolution of community and social media management.  Remember the early days? It was considered the ‘Wild West’ of industry professions without a formal job description or clearly defined roles. A lot has changed and the group debated on the growth of these professions and some key skill sets including: Always maintain the “human” element in communication styles and tone. Technical skills are becoming more critical as it is now extremely valuable to code and/or manage data to drive deeper insights. Stay cool under pressure and be willing to accept and adapt to change as there will always be surprises! Thanks to all who participated in these insightful roundtables!     ... View more

Company: Vodafone Espana  Entry submitted by: Zaira Pérez (Zperezp) Specialist, Self Management Channel Community: Foro Vodafone (http://foro.vodafone.es) Lithy category: Support Savings MVP     Vodafone Spain's aim is to provide best in class service to our customers with innovative and great value added offers and products. Vodafone Spain eForum Community serves the needs for those customers after product acquisition in order to provide a great experience and exploitation of their devices & acquired services.    Lithium provides Vodafone Spain the channel to enable direct communication with customers in order to satisfy their queries and incident resolution. At the same time, we provide customers with a Knowledge Center with loads of Tutorials and tips to engage and improve their mobile devices and DSL connection.   Vodafone Spain Heroes promotes both users as a support channel and new useful content creation. Those interactions and new content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. Furthermore, this Programme enables users to feel they are in a comfortable community where they may ask their questions and uncertainties, because many of the questions are either addressed or fully resolved by users on an equal level.     Since the Programme started back in November 2013, “Vodafone Heroes Programme” participants drove over 10k new interactions within the Vodafone Spain. In addition, over 25 contestants actively help out other users.  A great amount of kudos and new accepted solutions have been originated from those answers and users keep on recommending the Programme to their friends. As a result of the Vodafone Heroes Programme, we managed to deflect call volume by over 1.6m total calls. In addition, we enhanced our Net Promoter Score (NPS) by an average of 5 NPS points YoY and unassisted resolution rate increased by 10.2%.   More about Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme   Our Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is focused on acquisition of new Community Members and Moderators outside the company employees to enable a real 2.0. approach.  Vodafone Spain Heroes is created with the intention to enable a Community where users can compete to get new badges and powers while helping each other solve their queries.   This gamification programme not only encourages greater customer/user participation but also promotes new useful content creation. Those new interactions and content also engage user self-management and product knowledge. This enables great Community growth for Vodafone Spain eForum users as a support channel to get helpful and resolute answers providing internal KPIs a real boost.   Vodafone Spain Heroes Programme is closely monitored on a weekly basis by the Spain Community Managers who provide Heroes with guidance and one-to-one follow up on their adventure. The Programme includes 3 role categories (Vodafone Hero Apprentice, Vodafone Hero and Vodafone SuperHero) and 4 power badges (speed, wisdom, aim and creation) that allow users to possess different strengths.     Programme is based on nomination of weekly winners for each power badge providing users with exclusive benefits and privileges as they get Points of Power along with their nominations. Benefits are also related with fame and pride such as allowing users to moderate or ban other users as well as collaborating on official content creation published within Vodafone sites. There is a Points of Power catalogue accessible to the users once they enter the programme where users can redeem and select their desired prizes. Offer range is very wide not only offering goods but also “benefits” and events participation or pride recognition.   Any Vodafone Spain eForum registered user is eligible to participate in the Heroes Programme. Users need to pass the initial challenge to get their first “hero Apprentice” badge and from then, new badges unlocked will move users up in the scale of roles. Once a user reaches to unlock the 4 badges, they are appointed Vodafone Superheroes.   At Vodafone, we truly think we deserve to become Lithys winners as this Programme has evolved and demonstrated the value of the Vodafone eForum community, resulting in support savings through call deflection.    ... View more