Vincent Boon, an award-winning community manager, spoke at Community Conference 2014 in Copenhagen on April 3rd about how to create a thriving community. Community Conference is organised by Seismonaut. www.communityconference.dk

1. How to create an award-winning community
@VincentBoon

2. Where we came from
• Founded 2009
• Revolutionary MVNO
• World-Leading Community
• Founded 2012
• Community Management
• Managing Telefonica
Communities globally

3. Transforming Business with Online
communities
Transforming the relationship between
customers and Brands
To shape the Future of Businesses
across the World

4. xxx
BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS
BETWEENYOUR COMPANY AND
YOUR CUSTOMERS

5. We empower customers
A classic support forum:
High FTE involvement, struggles during traffic peaks
By effectively managing the community and applying the right processes,
we’ve developed a cheap, highly scalable and efficient channel.
Peer-to-peer communities:
Little FTE involvement, customers solve the majority of
questions
??
!!!
FTEs Customers Company Empowered
Customers
Customers
!!! ??

6. Why DON’T we use Social Media sites like: ?
• No ownership of platform
• Likes ‡ Purchases or Brand loyalty
• Less engagement
• Competition with other Brands
• No search engine
• No MGM, Knowledge Base or Ideas Platform
• Not fit for customer support

7. Online Community Benefits
Increase Sales
Improve Customer service
Product/Service Development
Brand advocacy
Marketing & PR
Market Research
COSTS
SALES

8. The Philosophy Which Underpins a Great Community
1. Mutuality
2. Member Involvement
3. The collective good
4. Simple
5. Respect
6. Feedback
7. Ideas

9. Mapping Community Relationships
Relationship mapping helps us to:
• Virally spread information in the community
• Understand who the key influencers are
• Manage sentiment during service issues
• Effectively manage relationships between
members
The amount of community relations per active member is
critical to the success and health of the community.

10. Relationship Map of Super-users

11. Profiling Expertise & Interests
By profiling expertise and interests, we
are able to:
• Connect people with similar interests
• Manage effective support and advice.
• Further develop our members’ expertise
• Get members involved
Services
PAYM
Broadband
O2 Wallet
TU Go
Others…
Products
iOS
Android
Windows
Blackberry
Otherareas
Help
Discussions
Feedback
Off-topic
As a result of effective profiling, we’ve been able to:
• Create user generated self serve guides
• Develop a 13-fold increase in discussions & feedback
• Get far higher engagement on specific events
• Create applications, marketing material, etc.
A thriving community needs a team facilitating
conversations between members with similar interests.

12. Managing Member Lifecycles
We get customers involved by:
• Engaging with members and build
personal relationships
• Having scheduled interactions with each
member, specific to each engagement
stage
• Tracking interaction rates between stages
and encourage participation
• Managing churn to gain a deeper
understanding of improvement areas
Readers
Contributors
Helpers
Time
EngagementLevel
Customers want to help out, but they don’t always know
how. Show how fulfilling it can be and they will.

13. Monitoring Service Levels
Our analysis shows that:
• 53-65% of all questions are resolved, at no cost to
the business
• Up to 82% gets partly resolved and benefits from
community input
• Only 18% of all questions are directly deflected to
customer support
To increase the self helpfulness of the community,
you can:
• Run community demand analysis to help tweak
your contact strategy
• Analyse the not and partly resolved categories to
create additional self help content and improve
processes
Fully
Resolved;
53%
Ongoing/
unknown,
12%
Partly
resolved;
17%
Not
resolved;
18%
Community Service Levels
These results are highly scalable as any increase in size
of the community, increases the amount of contributors

14. 100% visits
Knowledge
Base
22.4%
Email an agent
0.3%
Community
77.1%
Post in
community
0.2%
Search &
Browse behaviour
Average response time
2hrs (8am – 6pm)
Average response time
Below 3 minutes (24/7)
Best Practice

15. A Quick Comparison of Communities
Within a Similar Industry
1146
215
220
463
891
145
7
2174
653
957
1505
1279
101
24
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500
EE (296 threads)
O2 (1089 threads)
BT (1639 threads)
Vodafone (1653 threads)
Virgin (2676 threads)
Sky (11446 threads)
giffgaff (11810 threads)
Response and resolution times, sorted by # threads per month
Resolution time (min) Response time (min)
12
100
100
21
22
2
12
FTEs:

16. 37%
Call deflections
In 6 Months
provided 7.229
Customer solutions
4.5 Millions
Solution views
£291K
Savings

17. 44,813 4,692SolutionsPosts
1,227,472Minutes online
927,515
Page views
All of this from a 11 members
(Activity from 1/6/2012 – present)
Impressive Combined Super User Activity

18. 3.282
ideas submitted
31.813 customer
comments on ideas
4.6 Million visitors
to the Idea Exchange
More than 20 apps created
by the community
Without the Ideas Board, we wouldn’t have:
• Gigabags
• Blackberry App
• Coverage map
• Twitter integration
• Giffgaff surveys
• Auto Top up
• Goodybags
• Christmas party 2011
• Topping up via vouchers
• Sim in a box
• Phone Apps in various guises
• Giffgaff T-Shirts
• Mobile Version of the community
• Mini Statements
• Splash Page for service Outages
• Forgotten username feature
And many more………

19. User Generated
Content
Members create many guides
and videos

20. • People connect on the go and it’s our community
that leads the way and supports that
• With well over 20 different mobile applications
created
• And downloads of these applications running into
the 100.000’s

21. Memoman 5000 promotional leaflets
Community lead projects

22. Adamf referral brochure
Community lead projects

23. Did You Know.. (visual comparisons) by joshaw
Community lead projects

24. Community lead projects

25. Goodybag stand by adamf
Community lead projects

27. Over 100.000 Micro SIMs total and 8000 Nano SIMs per month send

28. The Output is Real Commercial Benefits
giffgaff results:
Customer Service
• Customer Care saving of 50% vs traditional methods
• CSAT = 79. NPS = +70
• Churn reduction
• 31% Reduction in 12mth churn (Posting once in forum)
• 41% Reduction in 12mth churn (Reading more than 5 pages)
• 52% Reduction in 12mth churn (Receiving any Payback)
• Reduced CPA
• SuperUsers activate an average of 40 other paying customers
• Any forum participation doubles your likelihood to activate a
friend
• Overall referrals from customers > 25% of all acquisition

29. Three Key Goals to Make a Community
Work for the Business
• Signposting
• Full integration in CRM program and the communications throughout a customers lifecycle
• Deflections from all channels
• Internal awareness
1. Raising Community Awareness
• Regular & varied incentives
• Forum as discussion platform
• Accessibility
2. Increasing Activity & Participation
• Defining key metrics /targets
• Understanding what’s important to the business (call deflections, increased sales,
engagement, extension of the brand, product development, etc.)
3. Quantifying Business Benefits
The more you integrate your community into your
business processes, the more value you get out

30. Vincent Boon – Chief Community Officer
@VincentBoon