Olympus is a well-known company, operating in several markets. One of their important product lines is cameras.
Approximately two years ago, Olympus came to us (Actum) with an idea of building a community portal, based on Telligent Community 8.5. The main goal of the project was to gather more information about their customers by bringing people together and building a community of Olympus enthusiasts.
The project was divided into several phases and in every phase we implemented several functionalities Olympus required.
We started with phase zero (0). The plan for this phase was to implement the registration process for the users and their cameras, plus several other features. The most important was the possibility of the newsletter activation; giving users an additional six (6) months of extended warranty for all of their registered cameras. This was a great way to motivate users and bring them to the community!
The biggest challenge of this phase, from the technical point of view, was to integrate the registration process in Telligent Community with the Olympus SAP CRM. The client had a very specific request – to store one account for every user across all Olympus systems. Therefore, the users were validated with SAP and then transferred to the Telligent Community database. This task wasn´t easy and it took a lot more time than expected. But we successfully created it and learned a lot.
In phase one, we used out of the box Telligent Community media galleries to allow users to upload, share, like, rate and comment on the photos. We also customized it to make a special type of time-framed gallery – a contest, which allowed users to upload photos and win a prize.
Phase two (2) was really colorful! We implemented the forms for online repair requests and customer support, which are not part of the Telligent Community platform, but they are still based on the Telligent Community user experience (widgets). Then, we added blogs and forums as 100% Telligent Community features. Olympus was also very interested in using events, but they had some very specific requirements for this function. It was necessary to customize this feature, but the result was very interesting and the whole implementation was very useful for exploring the Telligent Community system in a deeper way.
The MyOlympus project brings many benefits to all interested parties. After almost two (2) years since phase zero (0) was activated, there are more than 200,000 registered users, which form a great foundation for improving Olympus’ marketing activities. The users have a more comfortable way to manage their products and also share their enthusiasm for photography with other’s. Additionally, Actum has many benefits from this project, especially gaining experience and learning about the Telligent Community platform. Now, we are looking forward to phase three (3)!