Josh Bernoff, senior vice president, Idea Development at Forrester and coauthor of Groundswell, announced the winners at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago last night (27th Oct). With winners across B2B and B2C categories, the awards recognize achievement in 13 categories of customer interaction via social applications.
This year’s awards are exciting for us for a couple of reasons. Of the 140+ entries, ten Lithium customers submitted entries to the prestigious industry event. Ten customers who are blazing a trail in social and community engagement, showing how they are getting real results, growth, increased sales, improved customer satisfaction and return on investment, from the platform that we hold near and dear to our hearts. ScottD highlighted all the entries in his Enterprise on the Surface post in September if you need a refresher.
Most important for us, is that one of our great customers was awarded the highest accolade in the event! Congratulations to the team at FICO for winning the ‘Business-to-Consumer (B2C) Support category’ for the work of the myFICO online consumer community. This is great recognition for them and I know the team is thrilled to be recognized for the results that they are achieving.
If you’re not familiar with the myFICO story, they are a community where consumers can post questions, find answers and share experiences around credit scoring, usage, reporting and monitoring.
The FICO Forums were launched in 2007 as an alternative customer support channel, designed to leverage the passion, knowledge and experience of myFICO’s customer network. And the results are showing. They have interaction of around 20,000 posts and 400,000 searches each month. FICO credits the online community with a significant drop in call volume and length at its customer support center, as more and more customers seek answers and support from other customers. Since establishing the FICO Forums, the company has also experienced an increase in sales of its consumer products and services attributable to community membership.
We published a case study earlier this year in conjunction with FICO highlighting all the aspects of their approach and results. If you didn’t see it, you can get it here and FICO’s entry submission to the awards is here.
Wait.. there’s more!
At this point I have to call out congratulations to two other customers: Lenovo and Juniper Networks.
Lenovo was selected as a finalist in the ‘Business to Consumer (B2C) Supporting category’ for the Lenovo Forums peer-to-peer support community. The community has yielded over 3.7 million accepted solution views since the feature was enabled in April 2008 and a recent Forrester case study of the Lenovo community noted a 20% decline in US support call rates. Congratulations to Mark and the gang. Lenovo’s original entry submission is here.
Juniper was selected as a finalist in the ‘Business to Business (B2B) Spreading category’ for their ‘Fast Track Promotion’ activities. Juniper’s J-Net online engagement/support community played a huge role in the activities of helping 14,000 new users get certified on its JUNOS Software. This award fills me with a little more pride than normal, as I used to run the Juniper team, I know them all very well, and know the hard work that went into all the activities. Well done guys! Juniper’s original entry submission is here.
At the awards presentation, Josh said “Every year the quality of business social applications goes up, and marketers become more sophisticated. This year’s winners stood out in a very competitive field; all of them demonstrate not just creative use of social technologies, but impressive, measurable results.”
We couldn’t agree more. Congratulations again to FICO for their win, to Lenovo and Juniper for their finalist positions and to all the entrants – you’re leading the way in Social CRM and community interaction.
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