Company: Samsung Electronics Contact: Shane Bjorkman Title: Digital CX Manager Related URLs: www.samsung.com/uk/community Who is Samsung Electronics? Samsung Electronics is one of the global leaders in the consumer electronics Industry. Through continuous innovation and discovery, we are aiming to open up new possibilities for people everywhere to improve our everyday lives by transforming the world of consumer electronics. In the pursuit of digital excellence, we are continuously looking for dynamic tools to help our growing customer base get the best out of their products with the least possible effort for them. Our Digital Customer Experience We knew early on that our customers tended to be relatively tech savvy people with a preference for digital channels to find the information they needed to use our products to their potential. We also came to understand that our customers enjoyed content which was visual, interactive and engaging, and were looking for a platform to both find solutions as well as give solutions to help others using Samsung devices. With this in mind, we realized that Samsung required a platform to formalize its pre-existing community of users within Europe, and so the Samsung Community in Europe was born. With our goals to improve customer loyalty and advocacy through customer engagement and satisfaction while listening to our customers Ideas to innovate and create business efficiencies, we have managed to build a thriving & engaging Community over the past 20 months. Building out the European Samsung Community We initially launched Samsung Community in 7 languages (English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Dutch), with a further 3 languages (Portuguese, Czech, Hungarian) since, and have managed to achieve the following results: We started our journey with an understanding of our customers and the formulation of our community value proposition. We wanted our community to be a place where our customers felt cared for, where they could share freely, and help co-create alongside us in a conversational and playful, yet meaningful, way to them with our most common taglines being 'Join the Conversation' and 'We are Listening'. To achieve this, and ensure we delivered on our promises, we implemented a number of initiatives aimed at listening to our customers when both responding to their questions, and when developing and enhancing the platform. Two of these initiatives were the 'platform redesign enhancement' and 'research & development team's integration': After nine months of constructive (and some not!) feedback from users and superusers, we initiated a platform UX / UI redesign with an emphasis on mobile device responsiveness and surfacing of relevant contents to customer (particularly accepted solutions). During our first Superuser Event, held at the IFA International Tradeshow in Berlin in September 2017, we ran an ideation workshop with our 30 most active Superusers across Europe to get feedback on the proposed redesign of the Community (including the Engagement Modules: Videos, Blogs, Contests, TKB, Ideation, Photo's). Our superusers are vital in engaging with us, providing suggestions in the review stages of redesign, suggesting 61 ideas & enhancements, with us managing to implement 34 of these ideas for launch 3 weeks later and the remaining ideas placed into our development roadmap. Samsung Community Superuser Event @ IFA Berlin 2017 The ideas generated during the Superuser event varied from developing a sticky navigation bar, the look and feel of video homepage and customized widgets (to help Superusers) to smaller details such as disabling auto video pop-up, GNB icon spacing, and even updating the Emoji’s on Community (which has been appreciated by our users so far). After the redesign, we immediately saw improvements in our traffic to the platform, particularly from mobile devices and of accepted solutions specifically: Making sure we are listening on Samsung Community Operationally, we started to find our users posting highly technical questions and valuable product enhancement suggestions. We felt that to deliver on our promise to listen, we required the support of our product research & development teams in Europe and Korea so we took advantage of the community’s private internal board functionalities. In this way, we could open up direct channel of communication between our Community Managers, responsible for the day-to-day customer management, and the teams with expert knowledge of the products and their development. Over the past year since launching, we have improved the speed with which we can respond to our customers highly technical questions and also take their voice on ideas and implement or re-implement key features to our products missed by some customers when a new mobile device OS is released on their devices. Generating awareness of Samsung Community Of course, these initiatives didn't explain the growth of our Community. It was the hard work and dedication of our local Community Management teams in promoting the benefits of Community to other departments in the business. To do this it was vital to ensure the Samsung Community could be utilized across business functions by shifting our strategy from one focused primarily on support to one focused on engagement (using forums with videos, blogs, contests, and so on). Once the business understood the benefits of Community to purchasers (pre- & post), we could start to more fully integrate Community in our .Com, Campaigns, and Application. As Samsung Community grows, it's relevance within the business continued to grow. Although the Community was always visible on the 'support' side of .com, it seldom surfaced on the 'product/marketing' side until its strategic use in supporting launch promotion and pre-/post-sales questions (unboxing, live streams, preference polls, featured topics, Superuser reviews etc.) was seen. With this launch potential, Samsung Community was seen as a more integral part of the businesses digital landscape and could be advertised more on .com product pages, global navigation bars, and so on. On occasion, Community would be added on the .Com homepage, usually valued space reserved for product promotion. In terms of campaigns, these could be run by local subsidiaries in line with their local calendars and based off recommended branded toolkits for email and social from European teams. We felt it was important to provide room for subsidiaries to create their own localized campaigns for greater impact. As we started launching new engagement modules (i.e. videos & blogs) we found marketing teams linking to our videos or blogs at specific points in the campaign lifecycles. The next step was to integrate Samsung Community into our Samsung Members Application (for all countries using these languages). Samsung Community was seen as a unique and valuable engagement feature for the Members App so was given prime visibility on the app home screen in the navigation pane for ease of access to Community. Samsung Community being integrated into the Samsung Members App was a big win for both with Samsung Members being the primary mobile application to access Samsung benefits and services (help contents, diagnostics, chat & messenger, and so on). This is helping us drive traffic between the Samsung Community & Samsung Members platforms (17% ↑ Views) while improving interaction & engagement on Community with Members spending more time on Community than regular users on average. Building a collaborative relationship between Community & Members teams has also had other added benefits for Community users such as invitations to Android Beta Testing for mobile devices. Throughout our entire journey with Community over the past 2 years, we've consistently been looking at the Samsung Community CHI Score as it's a fantastic tool at identifying which area of Community needs attention. Through initiatives in 1H'18, CHI has now passed the 800 mark.
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