Company: HP 

Categories: Best Community Story or Anecdote

Entered by: Dani Weinstein (Dani)

Community Name: HP Support Community

URL: hp.com/supportforum

Get to know Erico...

Retired from the US Coast Guard, Erico is a US expatriate living in the Netherlands. During his Coast Guard career, Erico participated in many rescue missions around the world...

A hardware genius, Erico personally owns 6 personal computers and 2 monitors.  As a sideline, he operates a small PC repair shop.  He notes that it’s a way of keeping his skills sharp and staying in touch...

Erico and the HP Forums...Erico is “addicted” to the forums.  Spending many hours conversing with HP users around the world, he loves helping others, and...

HP loves having Erico as an true fan and valued enthusiast.

As a treat, the HP team got to meet Erico and say thank you personally - from L-R: HP EMEA Leads Sabrina Grollier and Wendy Schippers, Erico and Global HP Lead, Dani Weinstein.

Company: HP

Categories: Best Community Business Integration

Entered by: Dani Weinstein (Dani)

Community Name: HP Support Community

URL: hp.com/supportforum

Seven HP Consumer Support Forums were launched between November 2008 and February 2010. HP Consumer Support Forums are available in seven languages and in more than 200 countries. Collectively these forums have grown exponentially and continue to grow significantly well in to their third year of operation.

HP customers have shown that online channels are a preferred method for finding answers to questions about HP products. To date, more than 20 million customers have resolved their issues via the HP Consumer Support Forum.

The HP Consumer Support Forum is easy to navigate, and visitors now have access to more than 600,000 forum posts on a myriad of technology topics. Discussion boards are broken out by topic area, such as Notebooks, Desktops and Printers, and offer search capabilities and advanced features like bookmarks, RSS feeds and rich multimedia.

HP also actively monitors the forum to identify common support issues and gain customer feedback and insights. This customer input is then used to improve future products and support. HP’s online service and support offerings include the HP Total Care Ambassador Program and a dedicated HP support video channel.

The HP Consumer Support Forum also features dedicated Expert Days where more than 100 experts across the globe spend 24 hours answering tech questions. HP will host the next Meet the Experts event from April 26 at noon ET to April 27 at noon ET. As part of a continued initiative to provide superior customer support, HP has added seamless mobile functionality to the HP Consumer Support Forum.

The HP Mobile Consumer Support Forum may be accessed anywhere, anytime from any mobile device – no app download required. Visitors can browse content, post questions and even assist other customers all while on the go.

Finally the HP Support Forums were recognized in Nov 2010 with a prestigious Groundswell award. The HP Consumer Support Forum is a free global interactive community where HP customers connect online with one another and exchange insights, tips and answers to each other’s questions.

The forum received the accolades in the award category of International Business to Consumer: Supporting. “We’re thrilled by the diversity and quality of the entries in this year’s International Forrester Groundswell Awards,” said Nate Elliott, principal analyst at Forrester. “With consumers worldwide embracing social technologies, the Groundswell is now global. The finalists and winners we’ve recognized – including local efforts on four continents and a number of truly global programs – are among the leaders in using social tools to reach and serve their customers.”

2010 Awards for the HP Consumer Support Community

• • 2010 TSIA STAR Award for Best Online Community
• • 2010, 2009, 2008 TSIA Excellence In Service Operations
• • 2010 Forrester Groundswell Award for Social Technologies (Groundswell Award Press Release)
• • 2010 Mashable Award Finalist
• • TSIA Hall of Fame Life Time Achievement
• • 2010 Hay Group Top 20 Best Companies for Leadership

If you are a Lithium customer and you have a great story to tell, you're proud of the impact your community is making, or if it has changed the game for your company, let us know about it. The first ever Social CRM Excellence Awards are open. Find out more and enter now!

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Category: Best New Community

Community: Jigsaw

Launch Date: September 29, 2009

Submitted by: Jigsaw Community Marketing Manager Communitygal

As a leading provider of business information and data services that is uniquely crowd sourced by a global community of over 1 million business to business (BtoB) contacts, Jigsaw needed a community platform that provided members with better tools to interact with each other. In September 2009, Jigsaw launched the Lithium community platform and in the spirit of community sourcing--a premise on which the company is founded--allowed its members to nominate and select its own name. "The Corner" is both a reference to the corner piece of a jigsaw puzzle and a double entendre for where people go to hang out and talk.

The Corner deserves to win the Best New Community category because it is Lithium's first BtoB business information community and has been enthusiastically embraced by both Jigsaw members and management.

Jigsaw's community members visit The Corner to not just discuss Jigsaw usage and find answers to their questions but also to discuss BtoB topics such as innovative sales strategies, trade prospecting information on companies, and much more. Additionally, The Corner has been an instrumental part of Jigsaw's feedback and customer support systems. Since inception of the Lithium platform, Jigsaw has already implemented 13 product ideas that were submitted by members in the Member Idea Exchange board.

The Corner has been steadily growing in popularity. Page views for the community increased by 355% after launching the Lithium platform compared to the previous message board; unique visitors have also increased by 612%.

Jigsaw also noticed that its members were eager to help each other get the most out of the site. So much so that they've recently started moving its support assets to The Corner as they feel  this would be the right first point of contact for getting help. If other members can't resolve an issue, it goes onto the support team. This shift parallels Jigsaw's philosophy toward community sourcing solutions.

The Corner has become a vital and dynamic part of the Jigsaw community and as such, Jigsaw is investing in making it better. The next month will see a new and improved homepage for The Corner that will have a more organized look with tabs and snapshots. New employee blogs are also slated to go up soon, and the next initiative is to create a top sales books board where members submit and vote for their favorite sales books.

Company: HP

Categories: Best Community ROI

Entered by: Dani Weinstein (Dani)

Community Name: HP Support Community

URL: hp.com/supportforum

Highlights:

• Exponential growth in page views across 7 language Forums
• Averaging more that 65% year over year growth in forum visits 
• Global visits are approaching 20% of HP Customer Care Web Site 
• More than 20 million customers found solutions from 600,000+ posts
• Steady increases in problem resolution and call deflection rates

English launched Nov. 2008                              

www.hp.com/supportforum

m.hp.com/supportforum

Spanish launched March 2009

www.hp.com/foro

Simplified Chinese launched April 2009

www.hp.com.cn/get-answers

French launched June 2009

www.hp.com/assistance

Portuguese (Brazil) Sept 2009

www.hp.com.br/forum

Portuguese (Portugal)

www.hp.pt/forum

Korean Launched Nov 2009

www.hp.co.kr/hpcommunity

German Launched Feb 2010

www.hp.com/kundenforum

Company: Research in Motion

Categories: Most Innovative Social Customer Program

Entered by: Kerri Birtch (kerrib), Social Support Planning Team

Community Name: Blackberry Support Community Forums 

URL: supportforums.blackberry.com

In the three years since the launch of the BlackBerry Support Community Forums, our overall support community has grown exponentially, particularly in past year as our organization has rolled out even more avenues to assist with social support. 

Our approach to social support has a focus on empowering our customers and offering the tools they need to find a solution to their query.

This is done in a variety of ways including:

• Maintaining strong ties with our Super User members on the Forums;
• integrating our Developer Support Forums and Resource Centre into the platform;
• interacting via Twitter to provide links to Knowledge Base articles or YouTube videos,
• and continually providing connections to the BlackBerry Help blog and the BlackBerry Developer blog.  

By ensuring that all resources are easily accessible to users and directing them to the correct resources, we are able to cultivate a support community that is not limited to just the Forums, but one that is based on strong, networked ties, allowing our customers to get social support from the channel they are most comfort with.  

Our newly launched site redesign will assist in enhancing this network as we have created more prominent connections to all of our social support channels. New features of the redesign include a more clear break down of support categories to allow users to easily navigate to their area of interest, a real time blog and Twitter feed which is customized to that specific support area, (Developers Support Forums feed has the Developer Blog, Business Support has the @BlackBerry4Biz Twitter account etc.), as well as a dedicated section where users can find links to all of our other BlackBerry communities. 

With our commitment to empowering users and creating social support channels to assist them, we are able to provide our customers with timely responses, reliable support information and some friendly interactions along the way. 

Company: AT&T

Categories: Best Community ROI

Entered by: Becky Woodworth (beckyww)

Community Name: AT&T Community

URL: forums.att.com

Partnership – That’s the reason the return on investment for AT&T’s community has increased so dramatically.

In late October, 2010, AT&T and Lithium partnered to refine, polish and consolidate three different communities birthed at different times for different purposes from different AT&T business units. Our Wireless, DSL & Internet and U-verse communities operated largely independently without shared authentication, common design or similar structure.

After fixing “the outside” of AT&T forums in October, 2010, we then leveraged our Lithium partnership to address “the inside” in February, 2011.

Following Lithium’s advice on best practices, we analyzed months of customer data, board content, etc, to totally overhaul our community organization, categories and navigation.

The community likes the changes, and we like the ROI.

The ROI results to date include:

• A steady increase in Board Replies since initial 2010 consolidation – in fact, an average of 310 vs. 164 Board Replies daily 

Our members are more engaged – answering more questions – deflecting more calls.

• A 16% increase in call shed savings January 2010 – January 2011 
• A 14% increase in call shed savings February 2010 – February 2011 
• A 14% increase in call shed savings March 2010 – March 2011 

The mission of AT&T is to connect people with their world, everywhere they live and work, and do it better than anyone else. We believe our community is a growing contributor in fulfilling that mission.

Company: Verizon Residential

Categories: Best Community Business Integration 

Entered by: Becky Carroll (beckyc)

Community Name: Verizon 

URL: community.verizon.com

Verizon has always used our community forums as a main area of customer insight. Our nearly 90,000 members have been actively sharing their opinions on Verizon products and services for the past three years. 

Our goal at Verizon is to go beyond simply gathering customer opinions. We want to collaborate with our customers, so we launched the Verizon Idea Exchange in July 2010 with three main objectives:

• Identify new product and service enhancement opportunities
• Facilitate customer-driven product/service enhancements or new products/services
• Enhance the Verizon brand as establishing innovative ways to engage with and serve customers  

Open Innovation

The excitement from our customers around the Idea Exchange started almost immediately. Customers quickly began submitting suggestions for our products and services. In return, the product managers for our main product areas have become fully engaged with the Idea Exchange, especially around our flagship product FiOS. The FiOS managers now review customer-submitted ideas weekly as part of their business processes, are more engaged with the Verizon Community as a valuable resource, and are interacting with customers on an almost-daily basis.

The Verizon Community and the Idea Exchange has helped change the way the FiOS product team does business—starting with incorporating customer feedback into our latest FiOS release, 1.9 Interactive Media Guide for set top boxes. 

Giving the Community a Sneak Peek

Our FiOS product director was so energized by the power of the direct collaboration he and his team had been doing with customers that he created a new program, Sneak Peek. The 1.9 Sneak Peek offered customers in designated areas a preview of our latest Interactive Media Guide (IMG 1.9) for set top boxes in exchange for their feedback. The program not only provided another opportunity to connect customers directly with Verizon product managers, but it also utilized our forums members as a private study group to provide feedback on this new product. Members of the Verizon engineering team spent time interacting with customer in this private forum discussion around the upcoming release, and our forums members were thrilled to be given this opportunity to share their thoughts with them.

“I would like to extend my thanks to the engineering team and Verizon for the opportunity they have afforded us in beta testing the new IMG and especially the programming team for all their hard word and attention to our ramblings. Being an engineer (for more years than I care to admit) I really appreciate the hard work and the difficulty of the task for something as complex as the firmware.”

Keyboards, customer and Verizon Community Leader

“I also have to give a big thanks to the Verizon’s Engineering and Programming team for working with us in the beta testing. This was a complex task to write and rewrite all the software and firmware… keep us in mind for the next beta. Great job, Verizon! Thanks! ”

johnf2, customer and regular Community contributor

Customers Directly Impact the Product

In fact, through the Idea Exchange, the 1.9 Sneak Peek, and the Verizon Community at large, a staggering 70-80 percent of what was put into the IMG 1.9 release was tweaked, suggested, or refined by our customers. 

Here are just a few of the customer suggestions from the Idea Exchange that were included in the 1.9 IMG release:

• The ability to extend a current DVR recording by an extra 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour or 2 hours after the previously-established end time.
• Improved remote DVR management  from the Web (myverizon.com), mobile (DVR manager apps for Blackberry, Android, Apple, Palm and Windows Mobile platforms), and other STBs in the home.
• Improvements to DVR series managements and rescheduling logic that allow the DVR to better handle duplicate recordings.

Going forward, the FiOS product management team is also giving the community team access to their test track business customers, a FiOS business focus group. We’re working with the FiOS product management team on ways to integrate this focus group into similar product tie-ins on the Verizon Community, similar to the 1.9 Sneak Peek, so we can continue the close collaboration and customer insight.

A True Engagement Community
One of the most exciting areas has been the way programs such as the Idea Exchange and the Sneak Peek have increased levels of engagement with the Verizon Community. When the Idea Exchange first launched, our Community Leaders (CLs) grabbed onto it and started moderating the ideas, letting us know when they saw duplicates or customer questions needing attention. This was not a role we asked them to play, but they picked it up on their own as this new customer insight mechanism gained momentum.

In addition, we have been seeing a lot of community “newbies” move from being lurkers to registered community members. Since our original community is a peer-to-peer support community, these customers may not have felt that they had anything to contribute to those technical discussions. However, anyone can contribute an idea, comment on another customer’s idea, or simply leave a vote. This has really helped fuel community growth and interest across our customer base.

Results

Since launch at the end of July 2010, we have seen the following results:

• Over 1400 ideas submitted 
• Over 200 ideas are “in progress” throughout Verizon
• Already, 16 ideas have been implemented by the Verizon product teams

Additionally, the Idea Exchange itself has been rapidly growing:

• 107% growth in comments
• 403% growth in votes
• 555% growth in visitors

In summary, the Verizon Community has now become fully engrained in our product management processes. It has helped Verizon get closer to the customer, gain insights to help us take action, look for issues needing attention (early detection), and improve customer retention. We are truly changing the way we do business as a result of direct customer feedback from the Verizon Community!

Company: HP

Categories: Best Community Business Integration 

Entered by: Margaret Nugent (manugent)

Community Name: Enterprise Business Community | HP Online Forum 

URL: h30499.www3.hp.com/

HP Enterprise Business group consolidated 11 existing communities from HP.com legacy and external proprietary platforms to bring them together on one platform.

By consolidating our discussion forums to a single unified platform, we will be able to bring our community members new features and capabilities beyond what our legacy forums could provide. This also included combining our English and local language communities to the single instance.

Company: National Instruments

Categories: Best Community Business Integration

Entered by: Laura Feeney (Laura)

Community Name: NI Discussion Forums

URL: forums.ni.com

National Instruments (NI) transforms the way engineers and scientists around the world design and deploy systems. Often deemed the "Home Depot for Engineers," NI offers a wide variety of hardware and software products to empower technology leaders working on applications ranging from LEGO MINDSTORMS® NXT® software to hardware for the CERN supercollider.

At National Instruments, we understand the importance of embracing our lead users and other customers when developing new product features for our flagship software platform, NI LabVIEW. While social innovation has been a hot topic among technology companies recently, we truly embrace this notion of co-innovation and have built user feedback into the development process. The LabVIEW Idea Exchange on our website (powered by Lithium) has been instrumental in our success.

Customer Loyalty Survey Data

As we began to think about building co-innovation into our LabVIEW development process, we knew we needed to gather more information about our community, because we intended for community members to be part of the process. We began by evaluating our community. We specifically wanted to embrace the audience of innovators and evangelists in our community, and to find these innovators and evangelists we used customer loyalty survey information.

The survey showed that 41 percent of NI customers are “active” NI community users. Additionally, the more active the customer is with the NI community, the more loyalty they are meaning they are:

1. likely to recommend to a colleague,
2. repeat purchase the same product or
3. or purchase new products.

This data, shown in the following graphs, emphasized the need for NI to embrace these customers for software development.

Objective

One of our key social business objectives is to embrace our customers when developing new versions of LabVIEW. Using cutting-edge social technologies, we want to not only listen to their feedback but also incorporate it into our products. Because no industry represents more than 15 percent of our revenue, it is imperative that we gather feedback from various areas to prioritize new features and connect with lead users as we enter emerging markets or new vertical industries.

Strategies and Technologies

After evaluating our audience and objectives, we came up with the following strategies:

• Make it easy for NI customers to share, discuss and vote on new software features

• Obtain feedback from lead users as we enter new markets 

• Encourage customers to share their feedback in the community-driven software development areas

• Launch customer-driven software developments at NIWeek 2010 

• Integrate these ideas with traditional marketing 

The LabVIEW Idea Exchange was born out of the need to implement the above strategies. Going beyond the typical beta program, it is one area of our website where the online community can interact directly with NI R&D and provide candid feedback about our products. We then work to incorporate their feedback into our products as much as possible, which results in increased customer satisfaction because they see that we pay close attention to their needs and suggestions.  

We promoted the Idea Exchange on the NI home page.In the LabVIEW Idea Exchange , LabVIEW users can submit and vote on features covering topics such as user interface enhancements, performance improvements, computation capabilities, and hardware integration. Since August 2009, more than 2000 ideas have been submitted for consideration in future versions of LabVIEW. In August 2010, the newest version of LabVIEW launched with 14 new ideas incorporated into the product. This video shows some of the users whose ideas were incorporated. 

The LabVIEW Idea Exchange includes ideas straight from customers interested in helping NI develop the next version of LabVIEW.

In today’s social environment many companies are interested in what their customers are saying, but do not know how to best gather this information. The most innovative characteristic of our activities is that we not only used social technology to listen to our customers, but we also incorporated their feedback directly into our products and gave them immediate access to our R&D team. Many companies are afraid of what their customers might say about their products, but by making co-innovation an important step in the product development cycle, we have been able to work with our customers to create better and more technical products.

Results

Overall, the LabVIEW Idea Exchange has been a great success. One important measure is that it has decreased the number of customer complaints. Before the Idea Exchange existed, customers requested new features for the product by emailing a private database maintained by R&D, and if users had a complaint they often posted it to their own blogs. By launching an open, public idea board for users to share their feedback, we gave our customers a voice that they did not have before in the development of our software.

We have also seen an increase in our own productivity because we no longer have to guess on the priority of new software features. Now our community does the initial prioritization of these new features followed by our R&D team.

Some specific metrics follow:

• 2,400 Ideas submitted across several software product lines (initial goal first year goal was 500)

• More than 47,800 votes on product ideas

• 9,470 customer comments on ideas

• More than 45,400 unique visitors to the Idea Exchange, for a total of 99,100 visits

 • LabVIEW 2010 included 14 new features from the Idea Exchange

 • The LabVIEW 2011 beta (the new version will release in August) includes 13 new features from the Idea Exchange

Company: Silverpop

Categories: Best Community Business Integration 

Entered by: Karen Marchione (kmarchione)

Community Name: Silverpop Online Community

URL: community.silverpop.com

Launched: May 3, 2011

When Silverpop began searching for a Community Forum solution, many of the key requirements during the vendor selection were system integration related. Silverpop chose Lithium primarily by being able to meet those requirements better than any of their competitors we evaluated.

Silverpop was able to leverage Lithium’s Single Sign-On Solution (PHP) to allow for easy integration with our custom Customer Support portal. Using the Single Sign-On Solution provided by Lithium, Silverpop’s Customer Community was developed in a way that makes it easily accessible to our customers via our Customer Support Portal and direct URL all using their same login credentials.

Single Sign on functionality is a huge benefit to our customers in that they don’t need to manage/maintain multiple user name/password logins when doing business with Silverpop, which has also fueled the adoption of our private customer community by more than 50% of our customer base.

Another key integration feature offered by Lithium and leveraged by Silverpop is their REST API tool set. Silverpop uses the REST API to pass customer data/information between the Community and our existing external systems such as Salesforce.com. For example, Silverpop was able to better and more accurately use Lithium reporting & metric tools by passing client specific data from Salesforce.com into the client’s user profile in Lithium. And thanks to Lithium we finally have a means for effectively managing all the great product ideas we receive from our customers in our Idea Exchange.

Using Lithium’s rest API, we are able to collect all of the Ideas submitted by our customers through our Customer Community and export needed data for further review and analysis. This export and review process has become a key part of our release planning cycle as it allows us to group the data in a variety of ways (by feature, status, customer, kudos, etc) and quickly identify candidates for a release.

Silverpop has additional plans this year to leverage Lithium’s API integration for the following:

• Build our own custom Twitter feed/functionality into our Customer Community. 
• Build out a more robust integration with Salesforce.com for customer support case utilization. 
• Build a custom integration with our QlikView Business Intelligence system to import relevant customer KPI’s.

Company: BSkyB

Categories: Best New Community (Launched after June 1, 2010)

Entered by: Stephen Marshall (stephenmarshall)

Community Name: Sky Help Forum

URL: helpforum.sky.com

Launched: 25 October, 2010

Sky Support Forum launched on 25th October 2010 with the aim of creating an engaging and active community for Sky customers to connect and support each other with Sky products and services.

A team of dedicated Sky Experts is also at disposal when queries are a little too complex to be resolved by peers. Even with very limited promotional activities, the community has been growing steadily and we have exceeded 16,000 registered members in less than 6 months.

We have 5 established superusers who have consistently been helping members with their questions and technical issues, and supported by the team of Sky Experts.

The forum is also linked to Sky’s online Help Centre to support our customers journey online and there are a range of video tutorials on a variety of useful guides such as how to programme your remote control or set up your wireless router.

Examples where we have used pictures to guide the customer through their journey:

The forum has been positively received by our users and every day there is a constant flow of activity on the forum and we are averaging 67,000 page views per day, over 1,500 posts per week and as mentioned above, we have over 16,000 registered users since launch.

A recent post by a forum user below:

“I think we should congratulate sky on setting up a forum, where on the whole they are likley to get a lot of flack. I for one was very dubious that we would get answers, especially those actually admitting some things are wrong. We did get answers and it appears we have got a fix. Result.”

Other results include:

• Over 2,000 Accepted Solutions to date
• Averaging 700 new registrations per week
• CHI (Community Health Index) Score of 638