Aussies dominate Social Customer Excellence Awards

Beating a field of 60 entries from 11 different countries around the world, two iconic Australian brands have won awards for their use of social media as a customer engagement tool in San Francisco early this morning.

Competing at Lithium’s ‘Lithy’ awards, which recognise the best uses of its platform in the past year, Telstra and Fox Sports both took away gongs beating some of the world’s biggest brands in the process.

Telstra won the digital strategy leader award while Fox Sports took out the most creative launch and beat Google’s launch of Google Glass in the process.

The Lithys were held as part of Lithium's customer conference LiNC held in San Francsico this week, where more than 700 people from around the world came to learn more about the company's social community mananagement software. Stay tuned for much more to come from the conference in the coming week.

Telstra won for its use of community support to address its long-standing customer satisfaction rating, which was 66% in 2011 when the industry average was 68%.

Telstra launched its CrowdSupport community, which allows customers to seek answers to questions about Telstra products and services, not only from Telstra staff across the 39,000 strong organisation, but from other customers as well.

In 2013 over a quarter of the Australian population visited CrowdSupport (6 Million) to find information around Telstra’s products and services.

“As a Telecommunications company we know how significant it is for Australians to connect with each other, and we know that our role in connecting Australians needs to be one step ahead of the change in behaviour. Therefore Telstra’s goal is to create a brilliant connected future for all Australians.

“One of the amazing things the Lithium platform has allowed us to do is not only let us having a conversation with our customers but allowed our customers to have conversations with each other,” Telstra’s award submission stated.

“CrowdSupport has helped us provide service to customers in a one to many channel and has helped build advocacy. By having customers answer each other’s questions we are able to assist more customers by being able to scale the customer service offered . . .

“We are using the Lithium platform to achieve our company purpose; by connecting people in connected channels. Telstra now has a community where the conversation starts with the community – this is at the very core of our DNA and our purpose. Every time we need to have a meaningful conversation with our customers about anything we can do it within CrowdSupport.

Telstra’s full submission can be found here and makes for fascinating reading.

Fox Sports meanwhile won the award for the most creative launch of its ‘The Crowd’ community site, which has the lofty goal of being the destination for conversations about sports in Australia.

“The integrated campaign launched with more than 14 different creative executions across more than 30 touch points, resulting in the most successful digital product launch for Fox Sports in the past five years. The immediate community vibrancy has exceeded all KPIs, including more than 2000 posts in the first six weeks,” its submission stated.

Fox Sports full submission can be fund here and again serves as useful blueprint for how to do social properly.

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