Innovation in Leveraging Social Support for Support Excellence

Overview: What You Did

Provide an overview of your social support program(s) at a high level. Details can include, but are not limited to, any or all of the following:

• Business challenges that led to the introduction of social support
• Enabling technology selection and/or development
• How the program was introduced to employees and/or customers; how are customers encouraged to adopt social channels?
• Social staffing model, i.e., how many fulltime employees are used for social support, and how are they screened and trained?
• Partnering with Marketing, Sales, and Development to create a social strategy
• Insights gained from social media monitoring/listening, and changes to products or processes made because of these insights
• Improvements to employee productivity and assisted support deflection with online communities
• Roadblocks or challenges faced, and how you overcame them Lessons learned. What would you do differently next time? What can others learn from your journey?

Business Impact: How This Innovation Has Helped Your Company

Describe how your innovative use of social support has impacted business outcomes for your company. Provide supporting evidence*, such as:

• Improved customer engagement, CSAT, loyalty, customer effort scores, etc.
• Customer adoption of social programs, i.e., growth of community size and engagement levels
• Cost savings from less expensive channels and online community self-service
• Processes or products improved due to insights gained from social media monitoring

Customer Impact: How This Innovation Has Helped Your Customers

Detail how your innovative use of social support has positively impacted your customers. Provide supporting evidence*, such as:

• Improvements to products and/or services based on social input from customers
• Improvements to customer satisfaction, customer effort and/or loyalty scores
• Metrics related to customer adoption of social media support or online communities
• Improved customer engagement, including customer moderators and “power users”
• Customer testimonials

Judging Criteria

Your application will be judged on the following criteria:

• The Pacesetter Factor of Your Application: Is your application based on a compelling “best practice” and/or is it truly “innovative” in today’s technology industry?
• Business Impact: How has this helped your company?
• Customer Impact: How has this helped your customers?
• The Cohesiveness of Your Application: Is there a single, end-to-end narrative that is easy to follow and supported by good examples and/or data? (i.e., business challenges, inception, creation, implementation, adoption, measurement, expansion, process, results, lessons learned, future projections)
• The Effectiveness of Your Metrics: Do the metrics that you included adequately support the story that you are telling and are they organized and presented well?