Case study TomTom How to set up and grow a successful international support community
2015
About TomTom TomTom is the world’s leading provider of in-car location and navigation products and services. Every day millions of people around the world depend on TomTom to make smarter decisions. TomTom designs and develops innovative products and
state-of-the-art fleet management solutions and other
services that make it easy for people to keep moving
location-based products.
towards their goals. Founded in 1991, TomTom has grown into a multinational, global brand, with 4,200
As its product suite continued to expand, TomTom
employees worldwide and selling products in over 40
realized traditional support alone was not going to
countries.
be a scalable solution for their customers - who were increasingly turning to the web for answers. TomTom
Best known for being a leader in navigation and mapping
quickly managed this challenge and capped support
products covering 119 countries and reaching more than
costs by building a rich and vibrant customer
four billion people, TomTom also creates GPS sports
community on its website filled with peer-generated
watches, the TomTom Bandit action camera as well as
solutions and active brand advocates.
‘ As social technology-based customer communities will become a standard - and strategic - component of virtually all customer engagement and marketing programs, we predict that by 2017, 80% of Fortune 500 will have an active customer community.
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TomTom community On the TomTom community customers help each other by answering questions and discussing products resulting in over 25% call reduction and a constant stream of valuable product feedback. TomTom provides a range of channels to communicate
recommendations, TomTom saw the potential to set a
with, and facilitate conversations between, its customers.
support forum up on its own website. After gathering
These channels include a corporate website, a branded
broad support within the company, focusing on clear
customer community (integrated into the site), Facebook
business objectives and defining an engagement
page, Twitter feed, YouTube channel, LinkedIn careers
strategy, the decision was made to start a hosted
group and Google+ page, all of which are managed by
customer community, which went live in 2011.
the TomTom community and social engagement teams. In the first two weeks after launch, community members Impressed by the technical knowledge in various user
already handled 20,000 cases and saved the company
forums for their products and the amount of customer
around € 50,000. The community has grown since to
advocates supporting the company with advice and
well over 200K members and 5.2M annual visits in 2014.
Objectives Provide high-quality service in multiple
Acquire valuable customer feedback to
languages and reduce support costs
improve products and drive innovation
Increase the productivity of support agents
Improve the quality of online customer
and improve customer satisfaction
service and support
Facts & figures
5 million
245,000+
410,000
visits annually (mostly via search engines like Google)
members and on average 4,000 registrations per month
comments in 70,000+ different topics
25%
30
12,000
call deflection from customer to customer support
product experts active in the community
questions answered by community members
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We engaged with inSided in 2014, while we were looking at other solutions for our community and internal support hub. We quickly found that the inSided platform was highly appealing because of the possibility of creating and managing different language communities, the cloud hosting that enabled scalability for growth and their local, friendly and experienced support. It is a good platform and very cost effective. In that regard, the inSided platform provides a great foundation for support-based ROI. Yaser Heda VP Global Customer Care TomTom
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Forums On the English, German and French TomTom communities, TomTom’s global customer base discuss products and features, find answers to their questions, offer feedback and help other customers. Most users visit the TomTom forums because they are
The forum accounts are associated with My TomTom
looking for information. Others participate because they
accounts, enabling direct access to basic customer
are interested in the topics that are being discussed, or
details from the moderation environment. This means
to help improve products and services.
a significant speed-up of the support process.
The forums are divided into categories such as ‘Maps &
In 2012, TomTom launched separate German and French
Services’, ‘Navigation on smartphones’, ‘Your Sports’
forums in addition to the current English forum. In that
and ‘Your Drive’. To increase reach, they are also
year, the forums really showed their worth as they helped
accessible on mobile devices and integrated into the
the company alleviate a crisis it faced due to a GPS leap
customer service pages of the corporate website, and
year bug. In 2014, all forums combined welcomed 5.2
the My TomTom environment. An internal support hub
million visitors and 34,245 new members, who posted a
and the CRM system are also connected to the
total of 93,057 comments in 13,951 different topics. In
community: When a customer asks about services or
2015 TomTom introduced an ‘Ask a Question board’ which
orders, employees can look up the relevant information
was responsible for an impressive 25% increase in new
using the same customer details.
topics, comments and solutions.
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Internal customer service hub In 2013 TomTom started a support community (or ‘hub’) for its employees to connect with one another, solve problems, share best practices, and provide feedback. With its internal support hub, TomTom has made
departments and information about new product and
feedback and knowledge more transparent, and
service releases. It also has a popular off-topic board
facilitated communication among its global base of
meant for strengthening mutual bonds across languages
support reps. This has helped to create a culture of
and cultures. The hub furthermore contains a blog, memo
continuous knowledge sharing between employees and
section and a connection with an internally developed
outsourced partners around the world, allowing them to
support application. And via federated search, content
work more closely than ever before.
from Oracle RightNow and the external customer community are made accessible for TomTom employees.
The hub also improved the onboarding process of new employees and has proven itself as an effective
The hub quickly became a mission-critical tool and a vital
medium to inform various groups of people in a relevant
resource in the day to day operations of TomTom’s global
and targeted way (e.g. provide information about fitness
support employees, and has changed the way important
products to fitness support agents), using forum rights
information and knowledge from all business units are
and user groups within the community.
being shared. A new and improved version of the internal hub was developed by inSided in cooperation with
The internal support hub consists of a forum covering a
TomTom using the REST API and extensive integration
wide variety of topics, including content for specific
and customization capabilities of the inSided platform.
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Migration After carrying out product comparisons with other providers in 2014, TomTom migrated its community to inSided that provided both the hosted platform and the needed expertise in growing an active and vibrant community. In only three months’ time, inSided built TomTom’s new
IDIS is able to import data like users, (sub) forums,
community. Improvements in the inSided platform
content (e.g. categories, topics, posts, comments),
include a new and modern design and a completely
meta data etc. As traffic is key for growing a community,
revamped moderation environment for the community
IDIS also takes care of all SEO related matters
team which made it easier to manage the vast amount
including the redirection of existing traffic from old to
of content and users in the community.
new URLs (on multiple content levels like forums, topics, posts, etc.).
The process followed included a requirements and design phase, technical realization, various community
For TomTom, a migration script was made to map data
management workshops, migration of content and user
from the previous community database to the inSided
data from the 230,000+ members from the old platform,
platform database. This migration script was tested
and testing by an international team of employees and
several times on test and staging environments. On
community users. For the data migration the inSided
launch day, the old platform was put offline, the
Data Import Suite (IDIS) was used. This set of tools is
migration was performed successfully and the new
based on migrations from other platforms like Lithium,
community went live. For TomTom this resulted in a
GetSatisfaction, Oracle RightNow and vBulletin,
smooth migration from the old community with limited
ensuring an easy and risk-free switch to inSided.
downtime for customers.
Why inSided? Social Business Platform Fully native, integrated platform focused on customer communities
Comprehensive customization, integration and extension capabilities
Continuously improved using agile development processes
Simple, easy to use interface that invites users to participate
Multi-channel delivery options to reach customers wherever they are
Build dynamic knowledge bases where customers can find answers to their questions
Advanced moderation environment for management of users, content and community insights
Integrates seamlessly with best-ofbreed 3rd party products (no vendor lock-in)
Enterprise SaaS
Multilingual built in
Proven services
Unlimited scalable cloud hosting (SaaS) with enterprise-grade security and comprehensive SLA
Offer different language versions per community instance (using a simple to use language editor)
Professional services (expert advice and workshops)
Deploy quickly without adding new hardware and access from any internetconnected device
Use separate community instances with individual content structures, users, moderation environments and analytics
Enjoy regular updates without large up-front license fees
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Customer participation in platform improvements and innovations
Customer support (affordable, personalized assistance) Training & certification (on-site and online courses and expert master classes)
As COO of TomTom I am really satisfied with the cooperation with inSided. Their excellent development team and project manager delivered on time, before our deadline. Agile processes combined with a professional attitude resulted in a smooth migration. inSided will help us to provide the highest levels of social support in 3 languages across multiple channels and ensure we hit our targets for our most important KPI - customer satisfaction. Clive Millington COO Consumer Division TomTom
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Community management Ever since its launch, the TomTom community experienced a steady increase in both members and user activity. TomTom aims to continue this growth by focusing on traffic, content and activation. Initial growth of the community was stimulated by
assistance of super users and integrated gamification
promotion via the corporate website, email newsletters
(reward management) functionality, this quickly resulted
and integration in the support pages. In the start-up
in a dynamic environment where customers answered
phase, employees were following the so-called ‘48 hour
each other questions with minimal intervention from
rule’, which prohibited them from answering questions in
TomTom. This helps the company to save millions on
the first 2 days after these were posted. Together with the
support costs each year.
Embedding in the organization The community is solidly embedded and widely supported within TomTom. The community manager, moderators and support staff play various roles to make sure the forums keep growing, including answering questions, structuring content, keeping track of the overall mood on the forums (for example by intervening if members violate community guidelines) and by maintaining personal relationships with super users. Community staff act as hosts or dialogue facilitators: They welcome new members, display an interest in and express their appreciation for active users, and efficiently identify customer feedback which they regularly pass on to the right department within the company.
Ditte Solsø Korsgård is TomTom’s Community
As Manager Online Support and Applications, Lorna
Manager. She is responsible for managing and
Rickett is responsible for the public and internal support
supporting the community team and platform, and
pages. She drive initiatives to increase peer-to-peer
ensure their effectiveness by providing an ongoing
support, resulting in high quality content for customer
community strategy.
and employee self-service.
As Community Analysts, Julian Lindhorst, Mikko
As Content Analyst, Sarah Thompson writes and edits
Karjalainen and William Ugarte are responsible
content for TomTom’s public support pages and internal
for encouraging and promoting involvement and
support pages for customer service reps. She ensures
engagement, and linking the feedback and innovative
everyone has accurate and up-to-date content by
customer ideas to relevant business owners through
collaborating with various departments across the
detailed and timely reporting.
company.
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Super users and gamification Super users and the use of gamification technology are for a large part responsible for the success of the TomTom community, which is run by only a small team.
Super users
Gamification
There are many experts and active users in the
TomTom implemented a gamification system, where
TomTom community, which help other members with
helpful customers are being rewarded with badges and
their questions. These customer advocates or ‘super
ranks which show their status within the community.
users’ have a keen interest in navigation technology:
Although this has no real-world value, the perceived
what it does, how it works, and the problems it solves.
benefit of elevated virtual status has proven time and
They like to share their technical knowledge with
time again to motivate people to participate. The use
each other and helping to resolve product issues.
of gamification in customer support has allowed many companies to slash their customer support costs by a
Super users generate about 26% of the total content
significant margin - at virtually no additional cost.
in the community. They furthermore create a positive atmosphere by offering constructive criticism and
Top 5 super users
Forum badges
keeping a close eye on the content and tone of the conversations, which inspires positive and respectful behavior from other forum users. Some of the super users participate over 50 hours per week in the community and have answered thousands of questions, which has saved TomTom millions in support costs by deflecting calls to its contact center. TomTom rewards their super users with ranks, badges and access to their own private section on the forum where they can talk to forum staff and TomTom employees.
I bought a new TomTom this summer, thinking it would be a safe bet. I mean, TomTom is a well known brand, and I have only heard positive things about them. The funny voices were of course also a good sales argument for me. How was I to know that the model I chose was one of the few that could not get the voices? ... My old cheap Garmin was better on all counts!
Sorry to hear about your frustrating experience... I sympathize with you. Just wanted to note that your experience is not universal by any means. I’ve lived with Garmin for 3 years, spent quite a bit of time on the various forums and researching devices, especially in Feb and Mar when I was looking for a successor to my 755t. In the end, I decided to take a chance on the [TomTom] 2535 M Live in April. The device has been, in a word, spectacular.
9 - Case study TomTom
About social support For most companies, customer service is a cornerstone to their customer experience strategies. Almost 75% of companies view the contact center as a competitive differentiator. Good customer service is hard to deliver. For most
Communities work because people have a natural
companies, it is a balancing act between the same
desire to share their knowledge, interact with other
old trade-offs: quality versus economy and customer
people, belong to a group, or a need to demonstrate
satisfaction versus labor costs. How do you make
knowledge and worth.
customers happy, increase the effectiveness of your support reps and cut costs - all at the same time?
Hosted communities allow companies to scale their customer support without having to hire additional
The answer to this question for these companies involves
staff. Used responsibly, most organizations can use
setting up online communities on their own websites to
unsourcing effectively to drastically reduce their
enable peer-to-peer support among customers. Instead
customer support costs, save time (early resolution),
of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles
receive quick feedback (e.g. for new products or in case
away, customers’ problems are answered by individuals
of bugs) and better engage their users (which become
who have bought and used the same products.
volunteers and then brand advocates).
‘ Organizations integrating communities into customer support will realize cost reductions ranging from 10 percent to 50 percent.
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We are inSided As the European leader in social business technology, inSided believes in empowering your customers in order to reduce costs, improve sales, develop better customer relationships and drive innovation. The inSided Social Business Platform powers successful communities - attracting millions of visitors - for companies like BNP Paribas, KPN, Philips, Rabobank, Sonos, T-Mobile, and TomTom. We are an experienced team with community building firmly rooted in our DNA, and constantly strive to improve our work and its ROI, and make our clients 100% satisfied. inSided is privately held with offices across Europe.
Solutions Transform your business with our social solutions for support, marketing, commerce, and insights.
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Services To gain maximum benefits and achieve true customer-centricity, social business initiatives should be an integral part of the way companies do business. Our deep expertise in community development and full-service offering help you to rapidly launch a successful community, integrate it into your channels, processes and systems, and keep it healthy, thriving and trouble-free. The result is a fast impact on your business through an effective implementation based on best practices and sound social business strategy. inSided not only delivers the technology, but can help with every step of the process.
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social business strategy, quickscan & business case, community roadmap
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