PaulGi
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Joined 16 years ago
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Lithys 2012: BT - Best SuperFan Story
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! :)Lithys 2012: Tagged.com: Best New Community | Best Business ROI | Best Community Technical Integration
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!Lithys 2012: Sky Social Support - Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community Technical Integration
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.Lithys 2012: HP Enterprise Business Community - Best Social Customer Experience
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.Lithys 2012: giffgaff - Best Social Customer Experience
Company: giffgaff Entry Submitted by: Vincent Boon Head of Community (Vincent) Community: giffgaff (http://community.giffgaff.com/) Lithy Categories: Best Social Customer Experience, Best Community ROI 'giffgaff’ is an old Scottish term referring to the process of mutual giving – the perfect name for a company whose passionate and knowledgeable members are not only the front line of customer support but also a driving force in the running of the company itself. In fact, our tag line is ‘The mobile network run by you’. We don’t do large call centres and we don’t do big budget advertising. Instead, we rely on our growing user-generated pool of knowledge that is our community, where people get help fast and where customer debate and discussions helps us shape and grow the business. And using this community-based model saves costs and ensures giffgaff is outperforming month-after-month across a wide variety of metrics, from traffic to active members. Our customers are so helpful we do not need a traditional customer service centre, but use our community support forums instead. Saving us the cost and overheads of traditional CS. Although giffgaff saves a lot of costs by not having a traditional customer service model, the quality of service is still a high priority, which is reflected in a recent customer satisfaction survey, where our members rated our customer service 9/10 and our Net Promoter score was 73% (in context, according to the NPS website, Google rates as 73% and Apple as 74%). giffgaff's Community Health Index is 877, which puts giffgaff as a leader when compared to all communities globally serviced by Lithium. We are seeing these types of results through a combination of programmes we run here with the community, which ensures that any question asked on the community is answered within 90 seconds on average. But not only does our community help by answering peoples specific questions, we can see 8% of all page views going directly to an accepted solution, guaranteeing a great many call deflections. With our highly-engaged community, we create a huge volume of content, which gets picked up in search engines, driving more and more traffic to our site. So much so, that we can see 30% of all organic traffic going straight into our community and finding answers to questions they didn’t even know they had! Of course, just like any other business we look at the retention rates in our business and are able to see the following amazing results over a running twelve month period: People who’ve received payback are 52% more likely to stay with the network People who’ve activated a friend are 35% more likely to stay with the network People who’ve posted on the forum are 31% more likely to stay with the network People with more than 5 page views are 41% more likely to stay with the network Through our community we use a 'member get member' program, which enables people to bring new customers to our business and we are extremely successful with this, ensuring our existing members bring in much more than 25% of our total new customers. There are as many people who participate in ‘member get member’ activity on our forums as there are not. However, those people who are involved on our forums are twice as likely to bring on a friend. Our members are helping us out with marketing, sales, development, creating anything from marketing materials, to handing out our product to developing mobile applications for us. In terms of developing the business we use a dedicated Ideas Board, with over 6,000 ideas and more than 50,000 comments and on average an implementation of 1 idea every 3 days. giffgaff's mutual model paves the way for a new generation of social brands, which provide real consumer value through embracing the passions and skills of their membership communities, whilst growing an army of loyal advocates in the process. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as we enjoy all the various great things we do with our community. Without them, giffgaff would be nowhere.Lithys 2012: A1 Telekom Austria - Best SuperFan Story
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'.Lithys 2012: Autodesk - Best Community ROI
Company: Autodesk Entry Submitted by: Brian Kling Program Manager, Community & Social Media (bkling) Community: Autodesk Discussion Groups (http://forums.autodesk.com) Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI, Best Community Technical Implementation Autodesk has actually had online “discussion groups” for more than 15 years – remember Compuserve?! In June of 2010 we migrated to the Lithium platform. Because we already have a well-established community, our focus has been on optimizing our Support and Service participation, getting our organization participate in a sustained manner and to evangelize to our internal business groups how much value this thriving community provides. The Technology Integration Angle One of our major efforts achieved last year was to answer the question “how do you keep a community open to all customers, but yet provide an enhanced level of customer service to those customers that have paid for an annual Subscription Contract?” Our solution was to integrate the Lithium platform with our CRM platform (Salesforce). The key components are: Identify Subscription Customers – this was achieved when we migrated, but using our own SSO and authenticating against our CRM for Subscription Entitlement. Internally we can see who has an entitlement, and even what level they are on, and a proper role is auto-assigned. This authentication occurs every time at login. Offer enhanced service – this boiled down to four escalation methods: Automated “No Reply” - A question authored by a Subscription Customer is monitored; if no first Reply is received after 24 hours, a linked case is created in Salesforce and routed to the appropriate support queue. Automated “No Solution” – A question authored by a Subscription Customer that has no further Replies for 48 hours and no Accepted Solutions marked will be escalated into Salesforce to determine if help is needed. An email is sent to customer asking if they need our help, if yes, then case is routed to appropriate support queue. Manual by Author – Premium level Subscription customers have a “Need an Answer” button on any new question they author. They can escalate prior to the automated options above. Manual by Autodesk - Autodesk staff can escalate any forum thread into Salesforce, for either internal collaboration, large file transfer, sensitive information, product defect tracking, Content Creation flagging, etc. The ROI angle Proving some ROI to your executive staff is an important part of a Community Strategy. Not all ROI’s are easy to measure, and every community really has multiple ROI’s, not just on cost, but also brand awareness, advocacy, etc. This example is just one of the many possible facets. Our communities are mostly based on technical support questions related to our many design products. Customers paying for Subscription Contracts are welcome to come and participate in our online community, but they also have the right to come directly to our Support staff through Salesforce. As you can imagine, the cost of a technical, 1:1 interaction is vastly higher than that of a peer-to-peer interaction in an online community. For us, the calculated cost difference is 1000x – yes, one that’s one thousand! Through SSO we can easily identify which customers posting in our online community have Subscription contracts. We also regularly survey our customers and ask if their issue was resolved in the community. For Subscription Customers, if they had a resolution, we then ask them if they would have turned to us for 1:1 support if they hadn’t found their answer in the community. Here is a perfect opportunity to measure how many of these customers achieve a resolution to their issues without needing to come to us on a 1:1 interaction, which is a direct cost savings calculation. For our community, in 2011 our calculated cost savings was $6.8M dollars. This is not all about saving costs, because for lower severity issues that are common to many users, these questions are best served in a public forum where all can then find and benefit from the answers provided. Further, typically answers come faster from this vast group of community experts, who also know our products better than we do; they use them in the trenches each and every day, in many ways we can’t anticipate or model! For both angles At Autodesk we use Net Promoter Score (NPS) as a common indicator of customer perceived value in our interactions with them. In Product Support, we measure this in our 1:1 transactions, online communities as well as customer interactions through our partners worldwide. Our NPS score for online communities has reached or even at times surpassed the NPS for our Silver Subscription 1:1 transactions and our partner transactions, which proves that customers do assess a high value to their online experience.Lithys 2012: HP Consumer Support - Best Business ROI
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.Lithys 2012: HP Consumer Support - Best Global Implementation
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!Lithys 2012: Webroot - Best New Community
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."
