Sabre Holdings, a tech company that helps travel brands automate their business, offers a private, Facebook-like community in which customers can interact with one another and with Sabre’s subject-matter experts.
Customers were using the community, but it wasn’t getting the internal support from employees sought by the company; they saw it as “just more work” on top of their daily tasks. That’s when Lorie Robinson, Susan Via and their team at Sabre stepped in and launched a program that led to 23 teams using the portal and an increase of more than 200% in content production — all in only three months.
At our recent BlogWell in New York, Robinson and Via walked the audience through how they did it.
- Make it a competition. The pair engineered a contest that rewarded departments that completed specific tasks. This led to friendly competition, team camaraderie and a much better community experience for customers.
- Make it easier to get started. The competition broke Sabre’s hefty community-management guidelines down into small, manageable chunks that teams could explore and use each month. The response from employees went from, “Oh, you’re giving us more work” to, “Oh this interesting. We’ll try it.”
- Build on your success. With lessons learned from this experiment, the team is rolling out a certification program that borrows a lot of concepts from the competition.
Watch their case study.