Another of our stellar customers is entering as a candidate in the upcoming Forrester Groundswell awards!

A warm welcome to Barry Paperno, Consumer Operations Manager at FICO and Community Manager of the myFICO Online Customer Community, as he describes how their community is thriving and delivering benefits to both consumers and myFICO:

myFICO is the consumer division of FICO, the company that created the FICO credit score that lenders use. myFICO offers informative credit products that help people achieve and protect their overall financial health. Through myFICO.com and FICO associates, over 23 million FICO scores have been sold to U.S. consumers since the company launched its consumer service in March of 2001.

Challenges

While myFICO's products give consumers valuable information about their credit, government regulations restrict myFICO in the  types of information it can provide customers. While the company can tell consumers what their FICO credit score is, and what the main factors are affecting the score, the organization cannot give advice for how to improve the score. The FICO scoring elements are so interconnected that even when an explanation of the score is given, it may not be clear how or why the score is as high or low as it is.

As a result of the situation, myFICO had to deal with a high volume of calls focused on questions representatives were not allowed or were unable to provide a simple answer for. In addition to creating a dissatisfying customer experience, this often led to long calls where the representative tried to explain the limitations to the customer.

Solution

To better address its customers' needs and to leverage the passion, knowledge, and experience of its customer network , in March 2007 myFICO launched an online customer community powered by Lithium Technologies where consumers can share information and address specific questions or comments posed by other consumers.

myFICO's community has over 300,000 registered members, with 10,000 new users registering every month. And with 20,000 posts and 400,000 searches every month, the community is a thriving meeting ground for those passionate about, worried about, or curious about all things credit. Discussion categories on the community range from bouncing back from credit problems, to FICO scoring and myFICO product feedback, to specific types of credit such as mortgages and student loans.

A critical requirement for myFICO was integrating the community with RightNow Service, the company's contact center solution. myFICO intuitively understood that it needed to connect its traditional CRM system with this new social approach to customer relationship management. As a result of the integration, the community offers customers integrated search results across the community and RightNow knowledge base, and customer service agents using RightNow Service can pull up forum posts, logins, and stats based on the user's phone number and e-mail address, giving them a 360-degree view of a customer's activity.

Results

The myFICO community is a stellar example of the cross-departmental business benefits of deploying social technologies. Though myFICO launched the community to be a complementary support channel for customers, Marketing and Sales have also realized benefits from the company's customer network discussing its products and services in an open forum. Key metrics that illustrate the value the myFICO community has created include:

Lowering support call volume and length: The community contributed significantly to overall customer service inquiries declining over the last year by 1% (vs. 23% growth the year prior). myFICO also directs about 10% of callers to the community for more detailed user-to-user help, helping to decrease myFICO's average support call length.

 

Attracting new customers: Community URLs have grown to account for 39% of all myFICO.com traffic from search engines, significantly helping FICO achieve its Web marketing goals.

 

Driving sales: The community helps FICO achieve its sales goals in two ways -  the average spend of a customer jumps 66% after they join the myFICO community, and  13% of all myFICO online sales involve viewing a community page.

 

Enhancing the customer experience: Facilitating user access to helpful educational content and advice helps myFICO deliver a satisfying customer experience, a key component of the company's strategy to attract new customers and enhance the loyalty of existing customers.

Thanks Barry, and good luck to you and your team! Be sure to visit the myFICO community to check it out for yourself: http://ficoforums.myfico.com/fico/

Community success can mean quite a few things, but the biggest gains almost always occur when the needs of the company and the needs of the users overlap. Whether the community focus is on support, promotion or innovation, both users and the organization stand to benefit.

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Mark Hopkins, Social Media Project Manager and community manager for the Lenovo Community - and known around these parts as Mark_Hopkins. I've been fortunate enough to interact with Mark a number of times over the last couple years, from the launch of the Lenovo community on the Lithium platform almost 2 years ago, and then more recently here on the Lithosphere community. An extremely active mind and a self-effacing personality, Mark has worked tirelessly to build the Lenovo Community into a place connecting customers to customers, Lenovo engineers, and even Lenovo partners to increase the quality of the customer experience with Lenovo products and the Lenovo brand.

Just a few examples:

• Following the launch of a new W500 model laptop in late 2008, some customers were having difficulty in accessing the graphic acceleration features under some CAD packages, and were confused by how the video drivers reported the graphic processor model. Lenovo engineers and engineers from the graphic processor supplier interacted directly with customers on the community to come up with a solution within weeks, instead of months.
• Customer feedback collected in the community concerning the sunset of the popular Lenovo ThinkVantage System Update application in April, 2009 was a significant factor in the investment and relaunch of the application in late May.
• One skilled and enthusiastic customer wrote a fan control application for a popular netbook computer, shared the application in the forum, gathered usability and bug feedback from his peers and provided several updates. The application allowed members to fine tune the operation of the cooling fan on their netbook.

More to the point for Lenovo as a business, the messages marked as solutions in the community have been viewed over 3.74 million times since the feature was enabled in April 2008. In fact, a recent Forrester case study of the Lenovo community noted a 20% decline in the rate of call volume comparative 2007 to 2008 time periods in the US - and that's when normalized for the install base under warranty.

The key to their amazing success? Mark has this to say:

"Our community works because it's a collaboration...between the company and our most enthusiastic customers."

Mark and his colleagues at the Lenovo Community make it their mission to get to know their community, and especially the superusers who power the results listed above. By focusing on helping his members be successful, Mark ensures they will continue to return and fuel the business success Lenovo needs as well.

One such superuser in the Lenovo Community is Jane Loyless, who is also an administrator over on http://forum.thinkpads.com. According to Mark, Jane has logged over 5K hours in their community since it launched, and is currently the lead volunteer moderator at the Lenovo Community (she's also active helping others on the Lithosphere as well - you may recognize her as jloyless here). Before launching Lenovo's own community, Mark reached out to already active users around Lenovo products in the social web to ask for their support and lend his own. 

Both Mark and Jane were gracious enough to answer a few questions for us here about how they have accomplished so much in the Lenovo Community:

ScottD (to Mark): How did you get started with the Lenovo Community?

Mark_Hopkins: After monitoring the blogosphere for substantive discussions about Lenovo and some of the major product brands like ThinkPad, we noted that the majority of the content originated in several forums. Passive viewing only took us so far and we wanted to learn more, be able to ask questions, and offer guidance. We approached Bill Morrow, the owner of forum.thinkpads.com to see how we could get involved. Bill, and his moderation team welcomed us, pointed out some of the broader topics being discussed, and fostered the relationship building.

ScottD (to Jane): How did you get started at your own community at Thinkpads.com?

jloyless: In the mid-90's when I got my first ThinkPad (a 755CE), I joined the TP Mailing List and IBM's TP forum on CompuServe to learn about it and to get help with a few problems. As IBM was winding down their participation at CS and setting up their own forum, Bill Morrow decided to provide a user-to-user support forum at thinkpads.com to complement his TP reseller business. The ThinkPad forum (TPF) and the mailing list became homes for the CS TP refugees and grew rapidly as word spread. When the forum got too busy to handle himself, Bill invited James Maugham, me and a couple of others to help him moderate the forum. Eventually, James and I became admins there as well.

ScottD: Why did you reach out to Jane and others prior to launch?

Mark_Hopkins: We knew they had more than 5 years of experience under their belts running the kind of community we were looking for, so they were the ideal guides and coaches to have onboard to help us make the right choices, and craft balanced policies. We also wanted to be sure that the two communities could coexist in a constructive way - that we weren't seen as a disruptive force.

jloyless: In mid-2006, we got an e-mail from Mark asking how he and the team from Lenovo could help. After some lively discussion internally about whether we were letting the fox into the hen house, we decided to accept his offer on a trial basis. It didn't take long for Mark and his co-workers to become valued contributors, and over the next year or so, he and a few others from Lenovo regularly visited TPF, helped us resolve issues, passed along tips and just spent the time getting to know us and the community.

ScottD: What were your first thoughts when you heard about the Lenovo community? What made you decide to participate?

jloyless: Our first thoughts?  Hmmmm.... probably not printable here!  ;-)  It was a little scary because, even though TPF is mostly a hobby forum for Bill now, we were afraid it would suck all our traffic away.

Mark's openness and invitation to include us in the planning and implementation made a difference to me, though, and as I told Bill and James, the train was leaving the station whether we were on it or not.

Having dealt with Mark for nearly a year at that point, I assumed Lenovo's forum would be successful unlike IBM's earlier failed attempt, and I intended to be on the train. Mark followed through with his promises and actively involved us by getting and, most importantly, listening to our advice on everything from boards needed to community guidelines to who to invite in for the soft launch.  And even now he continues to visit TPF to check in with us there to see if he can help.

ScottD (to Mark): Did you have some initial concerns? How close were they to what actually happened?

Mark_Hopkins: I worried that we might have too much overlap, that we would not grow membership because another mature community already existed. I was nervous for the first week after launch, but quickly realized my concerns were unfounded. We grew faster than expectations, and as our product portfolio expanded, so did the scope of our community.

ScottD: How soon were you able to see benefits from the relationship with these superusers?

Mark_Hopkins: Oh, from day 1. Having a seasoned moderation team managing the day to day affairs and helping to get the word out, was invaluable in that it let us focus more of our time on the content, finding answers to some of the broader concerns. As the team grew in size, and diversity, the value has expanded. Some of our moderators speak more than one language and participate in multiple communities. They act as nodes in a human network, expanding our collective awareness, understanding, and ultimately, influence into other spheres.

ScottD: How did the company letting the customers be the moderators affect participation?

jloyless: I think it helped because we were familiar faces to the ThinkPad community whether they were coming from one of the forums, the mailing list, or the Usenet groups. It was a sign that Lenovo was going to fit into and cooperate with the existing communities rather than trying to supplanting them which went a long way towards minimizing territorial hostility. It also helped because, at least in the beginning, we knew a lot of the members coming in and could identify our initial superusers. Now, it's a fluid network of communities, and core groups of members float back and forth between their "home" forums and Lenovo's.

ScottD: What do we see as possible future steps for collaboration?

Mark_Hopkins: I think there are a lot of potential opportunities for collaboration - certainly languages, social platforms, and technological elements and features of the community itself, and of course, we are always looking for ways to incorporate feedback into our products and services.

ScottD: Why do you think the superusers, the Gurus and other active members of the community keep coming back?

jloyless: I think it's two-fold. First, most of us started out looking for help ourselves, and we know what it's like to not understand why our computer isn't working. It feels good to have someone come back and say "that fixed it!"!

Second, that close working relationship that Mark built with us has continued even after the forum launch, and as new superusers develop, they're included in our "Guru" group and in many of the conversations.

Some of them have gone on to become moderators as well giving us a volunteer moderator team that spans the world. As a result of being included from the start, we feel like we have a strong stake in the forum that keeps us coming back every day, and Mark continues to foster that connection daily by asking for our advice and opinions and making sure we know that we're being heard. We don't always get what we want, but they are listening.

Something that Mark said just before the forum launched was about wondering what would happen if he threw the customers the keys and that he was about to find out. I think he found success for the forum by doing just that, and speaking for the mod team, it's rewarding to watch the forum grow up and to be part of its success.

ScottD: Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge and experiences with us Mark and Jane!

If you would like to check out the Lenovo Community for yourself, go to http://forums.lenovo.com!

Right on the heels of last week's news from Redfin on their community success comes the announcement that two more of Lithium's customers have been recognized for their accomplishments: Robert Pearson of Future Shop and Maryellen Abreu of iRobot have both been named Customer Champions by 1to1 Magazine!

Future Shop and iRobot were 2 of the 3 companies specifically recognized for their engagement in social media efforts (the 3rd being Wells Fargo), and their vibrant communites are a testament to their strong commitment to the value of customer relationships. Here's how they are realizing that value:

• iRobot successfully built relationships with superusers on their community, the Robot Lords, and through community feedback they were able to develop a whole new line of products and a new product version specifically for developers.
• Future Shop relies on its community to provide peer support and a "continuous feedback loop to improve the customer experience," according to the 1to1 article. Our recent case study with Future Shop illustrates a whole range of areas that Future Shop's community helps their business, from Customer Support, to Marketing, to Corporate Communications and Recruitment.

It's great to see these champions at iRobot and Future Shop getting some much deserved recognition, and I feel personally very fortunate to count leaders such as these as customers!

Congratulations Maryellen and Robert, and to their entire teams who helped make it happen!

Photo by edwin.11