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2023 Customer Awards: American Automobile Association - Best-in-Class: Social
Company: American Automobile Association Company background: Established in 1902 by nine motor clubs with fewer than 1,500 members, today AAA provides more than 63 million members with automotive, travel, insurance and financial services through its federation of 32 motor clubs and more than 1,000 branch offices across North America. For more than 115 years, AAA has been a leader and advocate for safe mobility. Contact: Veronica Anjelica Duarte McCants Title: Social Media Senior Partner Related URLs: https://newsroom.aaa.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Social 1. Tell us how you are using Khoros’ Social Media Management capabilities (moderation, publishing, listening, etc.). Please include a full list and be as specific as possible. AAA uses the Khoros Social Media Management platform across our federation. Our organization has a unique structure made up of clubs that are located across the United States and Canada. Our association also has multiple business lines for member services including roadside assistance, foundation for safety and research, financial services, travel, automotive, insurance, and more. Due to this, it is vital that our federation has one Saas platform that all clubs and business lines have access to. AAA uses Khoros Marketing for publishing social media content, sharing content across clubs/business lines, analytics, and paid ad management. Khoros Care is used for member relations moderation. It helps us triage member relations issues to the correct clubs and get members solutions faster. The national office and one of our clubs is currently piloting Talkwalker for in depth social media listening. 2. Share your goals and key strategies with these capabilities and how Khoros Social Media Management helps drive success for you. AAA’s goals are to increase brand engagement, build a larger and more diverse Millennial following, and uphold our commitment to members by providing solutions. AAA uses Khoros to engage with our consumers across social channels and analyze results to sharpen our marketing strategy. AAA uses Khoros Marketing for publishing, approvals, and analytics. Khoros Care is used to respond to consumers and members across social media, routing conversations to the right clubs as needed. Khoros’ governance and collaboration features allow over 30 clubs and business lines to use one unified SMM platform. The structure of initiatives, approvals, and governance features allows the both National team and individual clubs to collaborate effectively in one, unified platform. 3. What specific results did you achieve by optimizing your social strategies with Khoros? Did you seize new revenue stream opportunities, serve customers better, protect your brand and/or grow your business (increased subscribers, engagement, awareness, etc.), grow revenue, reduce costs, or a combination of these things?. Please include quantifiable metrics where possible. Using the Khoros platform, AAA has seen the following results: • Increased Millennial followers by 24% from 2022 to 2023 • Handled 13,660 conversations in Care (+4%) while decreasing average response handle time by 10.2%. • 28% engagement rate • Engaged 15% more conversations with Khoros Care • Created $11.2M in Earned Media Value in 2022 We are able to run association-wide analytics and review in order to update our content strategy at the national office in order to ensure we have a more cohesive voice across all of our AAA accounts (clubs and national). Due to this, our new content strategy is all centered on a monthly theme that each post will fit into regardless of business line. This has helped with the growth in some of our key KPIs, Millennial followers, engagement rate, and handle time. • Using Khoros Marketing, we were also able to review accounts and look at our performance KPI’s (engagement). We began having conversations last year about the amount of social media accounts we had (per club) and how large our footprint on social was. After many conversations about the continued evolution of platform algorithms, our clubs are now working to start merging their accounts on platforms (going from regional accounts to one club account per platform). This will help with our efforts to increase our KPI’s and help our members navigate to our social media accounts easier. <Supporting visuals: Please include any supporting visuals/graphics into your above answers. Insert them into your text copy, so we’re clear on desired positioning of the graphics. We will accept videos for this entry. All videos must be submitted as publicly viewable links on YouTube or Vimeo.> Special Thanks: Jordan Cribb Case Study Opt-In: Yes2023 Customer Awards: Bell - Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service
Company: Bell Company background: Bell is Canada’s largest communications provider, connecting millions of customers throughout the country on our powerful wireless and fibre networks, and delivering compelling content to national and local audiences on our leading TV, radio and digital platforms. Our team of more than 50,000 reflects the diversity of the Canadian population and includes employees living and working in communities of all sizes across every province and territory. Contact: Imad Daoud Title: Sr Manager, Digital Support Related URLs: Bell.ca, forum.Bell.ca, facebook.com/BellCanada,twitter.com/bell_support Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service 1. What challenges did your organization face that required a digital strategy? Provide details on the issues you were trying to resolve or the goals you were trying to achieve. (e.g. reducing handle time, improving CSAT, reducing per-interaction costs, revenue growth, cost savings, etc.) COVID public health measures were disruptive to Bell’s contact centres ability to handle an influx of calls while managing the implementation of a massive work from home process. This left Bell searching for customer support alternatives and the peer-to-peer model secured our ability to provide users with a digital customer support option that is not agent dependent. It was clear that Bell needed a Digital First strategy with the following objectives; Reduce agent contact dependency Increase digital adoption & engagement Provide additional channels of Digital Support Improve customer satisfaction rating Maintain a simple digital management process By utilizing the Khoros Care platform, Bell was able to manage and moderate various social media platform such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the Community Forums. The ability for agents to manage multi-channel communications with customers in a one-stop-shop has allowed Bell to minimize operational costs while maintaining a high-quality level of digital customer support. Khoros Care is currently being used by more than 30 agents who handle customer inquiries and comments, as well as moderate different social media platforms at a reduced cost per contact. 2. Which Khoros elements did you implement as part of your digital solutions? Include details on the channels or tools you added and how your solution was unique and innovative. Khoros Care Khoros Social Media Khoros Community Forums Unified Analytics (Khoros & Internal database) Federated Search RSS Feeds App integration in the MyBell app Service interruption alerts Bell & Khoros digital assets together to better serve customers Bell connected its Community's TKB/How-To’s and Solutions to Khoros Care that enables the agents to search and select related or helpful topics and articles to Social Media customers. In July of 2023 we added Blogs to the Bell Community. The content focused on helpful and related information about new tools, events and marketing opportunities relevant to the Community user. Collaborating with Brand and Marketing they were able to leverage the Blog for social campaigns. Building upon the success of those small campaigns, the Bell Community connected with the Fraud & Security team to author and publish 6 fraud prevention blogs that were featured in a Connected Newsletter to our customer base. Linking multiple digital assets has proven to be a success with the first week as 14% of all Community Page View were attributed to those articles. Community & Social keeping Bell customers informed Bell has also started utilizing its Community platform to send out notifications regarding service interruptions. The simple and quick process to publish and update content using the Khoros platform solves the problem of timely, complicated and expensive procedure needed its main site. This helps effectively communicate with and provide a platform for those who are or may be affected. Our process involves providing frequent updates and utilizing solutions that highlight ETAs and restoration progress. The positive outcome of this initiative has allowed us to further innovate by using the Community platform to host two hidden microsites. These microsites specifically support Outage/Service Interruption Alerts specifically for Bell Aliant and MTS customers. In mid-2022 a competitor’s nationwide internet and cellular outage affected over 12 million Canadian (25% of Canada). This included emergency services, electronic sales transactions, public transportation, government services and many other day-to-day operations. The inability to communicate left many users unaware of the situation and without regular updates. As a result, Bell has incorporated an outage plan, which includes transparent communication and updates for major service interruption that in part utilizes the Community Forum as a main source of information to impacted users. Since the Forums are hosted on the Khoros platform and would not be impacted by a company outage, it serves as a perfect contingency plan to keep the customers up to date. Working with Khoros, Bell is currently looking to build on and improve the current outage process to deliver enhanced features and functionalities that will better automate the outage communication. Bells One-Stop-Shop with Khoros Care Bells business structure was previously divided among various platforms, making it challenging to have a unified perspective and a single point of contact. However, thanks to the implementation of Khoros Care, we successfully migrated all of our Bell Media social entries onto one platform. This move not only reduced costs but also provided greater visibility and improved metrics. The transition to Khoros Care enabled us to identify gaps in our engagement rate within Bell Media, prompting us to develop a strategy to handle complex conversations more effectively. As a result, our engagement rate skyrocketed from 5% to an impressive 37% within a couple of months. Khoros in the MyBell App Bell has made significant advancements in its self-serve account management and self-repair diagnostic tools in the MyBell app, aiming to minimize the number of calls received by our customer care center while providing the best digital customer service. To ensure that our customers are aware of these useful tools, we employed social strategies such as coupling content on Facebook carousel and having moderators invite our customers to take advantage of these resources. By empowering our customers to take control of their accounts and services, we put them in the driver's seat. This approach has proven successful in increasing customer awareness and promoting self-serve, ultimately benefiting both our customers and our company. Community Forums with the Bell MBM app, encompasses: Single Sign On capabilities from the app for easy access and instant interaction capabilities (removing barrier to entry) Community RSS feed incorporation into digital assets serving as targeted and relevant entry points Contact-Us pathing focusing on Community support for agent contact alternative Personalized tiles linking to topic specific community content Community content integration with social communication and eChat (agent & bot) In-App Community Forum Federated search Content syndication in various digital assets 3. What quantifiable results were achieved? Please include key success metrics. (e.g. revenue growth, cost reduction, CSAT, call deflection, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.) With the help of Khoros, Bell was able to increase not only the traffic to its social media platforms (over 580K posts annually) but also other internal digital assets. YoY community user login and total posts increased over 800% with many of Bell customers relying on the Social/Forums for help and choosing the platforms as one of their primary sources for self-servable support with a satisfaction score of 83%. The one-to-many support model has proven to be invaluable to our customers and delivered a 23% improvement in same day contact rate compared to traditional digital support channels. The Community was able to deflect over 300,000 agent contacts annually and continues to deliver cost reduction and lower CHURN benefits due to a 40% resolution rate in 2023 (46% YOY improvement) resulting in a 3.5X ROI. The MyBell app has recently revamped the support section to incorporate Community Forums along with other features and functionalities. This helped Bell to receive the Peoples Voice Webby award in 2023. Being recognized by users as the “People’s Voice” Winner reaffirms the benefits of our commitment to provide our customers with the best Digital experience, which includes a vibrant community and strong social presence. Special Thanks: Luke Wolters, Rob Delbello Case Study Opt-In: Yes2023 Customer Awards: Fortinet - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: Fortinet Company background: Fortinet have been using Khoros for Communities since 2021, after combining multiple support channels into one source of customer knowledge. Contact: Kate McMillan Title: Senior Service Technology Manager Related URLs: community.fortinet.com Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? Our main objectives were to amalgamate support knowledge into one place, make it easier for our customers to self-serve support, and provide a place for collaboration and discussion for our growing customer base. By combining support knowledge from multiple silos into a single location, customers know where to find what they're looking for and get the answers they need. We've evolved to be an extremely Knowledge Base heavy platform - although the Forum remains strong too. With a large number of Fortinet support engineers globally, we're able to harvest a wealth of complex technical knowledge and our aim is to get that knowledge customer-ready as soon as possible so that the maximum number of customers can benefit from it. The Knowledge Base has become a living, breathing part of what we do daily, and our team of Technical Writers are both detail-focused and enthusiastic about getting as much knowledge 'out there' as possible. 2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved? We have had a huge amount of support and buy-in from across the business. Working with Khoros through the Community workshops really helped to clarify where we wanted to get to, and we used this story to gain support for our journey from across Fortinet. We continue to work with all of our global support locations to promote the value of Community, of reusing knowledge, and of encouraging customers to search for answers. If our customers can quickly find solutions to their issues because someone has asked a question before, everyone wins. 3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. We have created a single destination for support knowledge for our customers - . visitor numbers are beyond our expectations (30 million page views and counting), and we have seen significant growth in the 18 months since the Community launched. Our Knowledge Base has grown by over 40% and we're seeing stabilising case numbers alongside rapid growth across the business, demonstrating the role that these articles play in helping our customers to help themselves. We've also seen a 45% increase in member logins year on year, which is a great indicator of the work we're doing to encourage participation, peer to peer conversations and active sharing within Community. By gamifying the knowledge creation process, we've been able to engage engineers and encourage the capture of reusable knowledge within community. Our 'First Birthday' badge among various initiatives has helped to keep fresh knowledge on the platform and promote the knowledge-centered culture we're striving for.
2023 Customer Awards: Palo Alto Networks - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: Palo Alto Networks Company background: Palo Alto Networks is the world’s cybersecurity leader. We innovate to outpace cyberthreats, so organizations can embrace technology with confidence. We provide next-generation cybersecurity to thousands of customers globally, across all sectors. Our best-in-class cybersecurity platforms and services are backed by industry-leading threat intelligence and strengthened by state-of-the-art AI and automation. Whether deploying our products to enable the Zero Trust Enterprise, responding to a security incident, or partnering to deliver better security outcomes through a world-class partner ecosystem, we’re committed to helping ensure each day is safer than the one before. It’s what makes us the cybersecurity partner of choice. Contact: Jerilyn Forsythe Title: Community Program Manager Related URLs: https://live.paloaltonetworks.com, Member Testimonials, PANCast, Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? Since its inception in 2015, LIVEcommunity has evolved into a global digital hub that brings together IT and cybersecurity professionals from all corners of the world. Originally designed as a platform for Palo Alto Networks customers to post questions and find answers. Today, community is the first line of support for customers — a one-stop-shop for peer-to-peer support, critical resources, customer journey guides, and self-help materials for Palo Alto Networks products and services. LIVEcommunity has become a monumental asset for driving marketing awareness, customer success, and specialized support. Evolution of Our Community Charter: Driving Customer Success, User Experience and Localization Our community charter has undergone a significant transformation, expanding beyond its original focus — on call deflection. Building on the success in reducing support calls, the charter now encompasses key areas such as product adoption, localization for strategic markets, and a reinforced commitment to customer engagement. In 2020, we embarked on an exciting UX overhaul guided by Khoros best practices, which marked the beginning of our community CX charter evolution. This journey further enhanced our digital initiatives, leading to a community Customer Experience (CX) refresh in April 2021. The result has been successful in providing our customers with a simplified user experience, enhanced self-service support, and increased engagement. Throughout the following year, we deepened our partnership with Khoros Professional Services team — collaborating to strategize, customize and implement new customer-tailored offerings. This led to the successful launch of a new tier-based digital support model integrated with CARE moderation capabilities and workflows. Taking another leap forward, this year we introduced a game-changing Robust Entitlement model on LIVEcommunity. This innovative approach grants exclusive access to tailored, customer-only content based on individual support levels tied to their login credentials. This model empowers customers throughout their product adoption and deployment journeys, ensuring their product adoption success and driving forward the Palo Alto Networks mission to protect our digital way of life. Expanding our horizons and deepening our commitment to inclusivity, we have launched additional translation microsites to cater to non-English speaking users. These microsites currently include Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, and a revamped Japanese native language site, with Korean soon to follow. This expansion demonstrates our unwavering commitment to serve our global customer base at its core and better cater to employees, partners, and customers in the Asia-Pacific region. With more than 30,000 unique visitors the past year, it further validates the effectiveness of our approach in providing valuable resources and support in their native languages. Customer engagement is pivotal for our community's evolution. Our efforts to gather member sentiment have expanded through various channels. These include conducting one-on-one feedback sessions, member input on an industry-standard UX survey, a Member Testimonial series featuring video interviews, customer involvement in more than 30 early access and beta programs through group hubs, and the launch of a podcast and episode ideas forum. These enhancements build upon the progress achieved in previous years. Looking forward, we are confident that by leveraging our valuable partnership with Khoros, listening to member input and following industry best practices, our community will continue to evolve and fortify LIVEcommunity as a best-in-class community. 2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved? Unlocking the Power of Community: From Buy-in to Cross-Functional Collaboration To bring the LIVEcommunity to life and gain buy-in, we implemented a comprehensive approach that involved collaboration, global involvement, and alignment with various internal teams. Our strategy focuses on creating useful, actionable, and expert-written content, which is the core of LIVEcommunity. First, we fostered collaboration by partnering with marketing, critical response, customer support, product, and partner teams. This collaborative effort allowed us to build a robust knowledge base that covers a wide range of topics pertinent to our customers and partners. In the past 12 months alone, more than 700 expert-produced videos were added to our Knowledge Base resources for customers, propelling ourLIVEcommunity YouTube channelto more than 3.7 million views and 30,000-plus subscribers. By aligning with business, marketing, and product initiatives, we partner with our stakeholders to ensure all resources remain relevant and technically accurate. We also synchronize our editorial calendar with new product releases and feature updates to provide timely and relevant information to our users. Furthermore, we recognized the importance of security and threat intelligence by establishing a partnership with Unit 42, Palo Alto Networks' Threat Intelligence & Response team. This collaboration guarantees our customers are promptly informed about the latest vulnerability playbooks and patches, keeping them protected against emerging cybersecurity threats. We also partnered with the Palo Alto Networks critical response team, which led to the introduction of a Customer Advisories widget that is prominently displayed on every LIVEcommunity page, regardless of the user's entry point. This feature ensures that critical customer advisories are easily accessible, enhancing user awareness and proactive response to potential risks. Our community team has demonstrated exceptional collaboration with Palo Alto Networks Product Managers to elevate our community and enhance the customer experience. One significant initiative was the introduction of Quarterly Stakeholder Roundtables in early 2023. These recorded sessions serve as a platform to unveil new community features and UX improvements, share the latest customer feedback, and train stakeholders on community best practices. To further enable collaboration with our stakeholders, we also introduced a brand-new Stakeholder Knowledge Hub. Notable outcomes from this initiative include the implementation of a streamlined content auditing process, the provision of comprehensive best practices and how-to guides for discussion moderators, and the introduction of an admin feature that offers precise information on member subscriptions within their respective areas. In collaboration with our Customer Success and product teams, we have created Customer Journey Guides tailored to the post-sales lifecycle journey. These guides provide actionable steps for customers from Kickoff to Deployment and Adoption. Furthermore, we were excited to announce the launch of PANCast, an official Palo Alto Networks podcast that delivers valuable insights that our customers can leverage for their benefit. This is illustrative of a significant evolution in the internal conversation about community: Rather than the community team reaching out to stakeholders, they now proactively seek collaboration with the community. This shift signifies a new fulcrum point, positioning the community as a primary digital support line for customers. It emphasizes the recognition of community's vital role within the organization and its growing importance as a platform for customer empowerment. By implementing these processes and partnerships, we have not only gained business and stakeholder buy-in, but also secured cross-functional support. Our emphasis on delivering valuable content, promoting collaboration, and aligning with organizational initiatives has resulted in a thriving and resourceful environment for Palo Alto Networks customers and partners. This foundation of connectedness sets the stage for even greater achievements, propelling the collective success of both Palo Alto Networks and our esteemed customers. Together, we are poised to unlock remarkable possibilities and drive continued growth and innovation. 3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. The combined outcomes of these efforts reflected tangible results, including improved customer experience, increased innovation and cost savings for Palo Alto Networks. In the past year, we’ve implemented cutting-edge Khoros features to engage our community members in exciting new ways. For example, we launched Nominated Discussions in fall 2022, which transform Accepted Solutions into searchable, shareable articles within our integrated knowledge base. As a key aspect of our solutions approach, we rely on our Cyber Elite experts, our exceptional super-users, to contribute answers, build our library of Accepted Solutions, and drive Nominated Discussions. Additionally, we collaborated with Khoros Professional Services to introduce the Audit Date Stamp, instantly keeping readers informed about the latest updates to articles for enhanced technical accuracy. This feature further strengthens trust and establishes our community's voice of authority. Transforming Results with Khoros: Tangible Positive Outcomes and Quantifiable Success in the Past Year 49%increase in new member registrations 27% growth in unique visitors and page views 28% growth in Accepted Solutions and 29% growth in Accepted Solutions Views (more than 3.1 million) 97% average response rate in our most active forum, General Discussions 71% of posts replied to by fellow customers and partners — evidence of strong peer-to-peer engagement 21% increase in badges awarded to members — including a29.5% increase in first-time discussions, 17.5% increase in first replies, and 16.5% increase in first accepted solutions 26% increase in Kudos given YoY By aligning with industry measures defined by TSIA and Forrester, we worked with Rob Parrish (our amazing Khoros CSM!) to conduct a comprehensive analysis to accurately gauge cost savings. Our focus was on Unique Member Visits to pages featuring accepted solutions within the community. The results for 2022 were truly remarkable, with 38% of our members reporting successful support outcomes through their interactions with LIVEcommunity. This marked a significant increase from the previous year's 25%. These numbers translate to several million dollars in annual savings for Palo Alto Networks, showcasing the tangible impact and undeniable value our community brings to both our members and our organization. These accomplishments underscore our commitment to continuous improvement and provide a solid foundation for future growth and innovation. By aligning our charter with the needs of our users, we have fostered a thriving best-in-class community environment that encourages active participation, knowledge sharing, and problem-solving. Special Thanks: Robert Parrish Case Study Opt-In: Yes
2023 Customer Awards: BT - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: BT Company background: British multinational telecommunications holding company. Contact: Jennifer Tierney Title: Content Designer Related URLs: https://business.forums.bt.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? Our priority is customer engagement and support. From a solely customer supported community we’ve evolved it into a learning hub where admins and moderators publish regular blogs, learning content (how to guides) and help articles. Thanks to the growth in engagement, our community is now being integrated into Help and we’re adding a customer user research panel. 2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved? Through dedicated and passionate people who worked with Khoros to build a benefits case, which was presented to senior management to give it a priority in help and support. This resulted in moderator resource from our social team. We then gained greater focus working with Khoros on a redesign that launched in 2022 and our community gained momentum through communications. 3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. Our community has become a trusted place by our members. In the last year, our CHI has increased by 9% and we’ve seen a 17% call deflection into our customer service teams as well as reducing overall Digital Contact Rates by 0.2%. In the last year, total visits have increased by 34.26%, our new sign ups have increased by 106.47%, page views by 40.46% and blog visits by 67.53%. Our overall Enterprise Support Net Promoter Score has also improved. <Supporting visuals: Please include any supporting visuals/graphics into your above answers. Insert them into your text copy, so we’re clear on desired positioning of the graphics. We will accept videos for this entry. All videos must be submitted as publicly viewable links on YouTube or Vimeo.> Special Thanks: N/A Case Study Opt-In: Yes2023 Customer Awards: Zoom - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: Zoom Company background: Zoom is an all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform that makes connecting easier, more immersive, and more dynamic for businesses and individuals. Zoom technology puts people at the center, enabling meaningful connections, facilitating modern collaboration, and driving human innovation through solutions like team chat, phone, meetings, omnichannel cloud contact center, smart recordings, whiteboard, and more, in one offering. Contact: Briuana Green Title: Community Moderator Related URLs: https://community.zoom.com/, https://zoom.us/, https://support.zoom.us/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? In 2020 when the global pandemic hit, Zoom's usage exponentially increased. Customers wanted an online support forum available 24/7. In March 2021, the Zoom Community team was brought on to build Zoom’s online self-service support forum. Leveraging the use of the Khoros Community and Care technologies,the team deployed the Zoom Community within five months, in August 2021. In less than two years since its launch, the Zoom Community has provided a wealth of knowledge to all global Zoom users. The community has grown to include over 250,000 community members, more than 100,000 posts, 20 million page views, and 10 million visits. The Community’s primary purpose is made up of the below three foundational pillars: The Zoom Community provides users with a place to find answers, seek support, and receive guidance from fellow Zoom subject matter experts. Users can explore our product forums to find trending topics, pre-existing solutions, and creative use cases. Community members can feel empowered with worldwide support to connect with like-minded individuals, enhance their knowledge, and discover innovative solutions. Contributions are provided from our diverse group of devoted Zoom Community Champions, Zoom Partners, Zoom Employees, and fellow Zoom users who are passionate about Zoom’s brand and products. How the Zoom Community charter has evolved: Since its launch in 2021, the Zoom Community has undergone a remarkable evolution marked by exponential year-over-year growth, exceptional collaborative discussions, industry accolades, and the influential Zoom Community Champion Program. Year-Over-Year Growth As the Zoom Community closely approaches its two-year anniversary, the substantial amount of growth that has taken place in such a short amount of time is unmatched. In reflecting back on this past year, the year-over-year growth has significantly increased across our key success metrics: Awards and Recognition: Over the past year, the remarkable evolution and expansion of the Zoom Community has brought us immense pride as we garnered recognition from our industry peers for the success of this vibrant space. It stands as a testament to our commitment to fostering connections and creating an unparalleled experience for our users worldwide. The Zoom Community was honored to receive the 2022 Khoros Kudos Award in the Keep Calm and Carry On category. We were also a finalist in the Rookie of the Year category. Alexis Brown, Senior Manager of Global Community at Zoom, was recognized for our efforts as the recipient of the 2023 CMX Award for Executive Leader of a Community Team. Community Champion Program: The Zoom Community Champion Program was created to recognize and celebrate our most exceptional community members who have made significant contributions and demonstrated outstanding leadership within the community. The Zoom Community Champion Program was open to employees in June 2021 and began welcoming customers and partners in August 2022. Today, our Community Champions are a diverse group of 150+ Zoom customers, Zoom employees, and Zoom partners who work collaboratively to deliver happiness throughout the community. Their dedication and contributions are reflected through the impact they have made just in the number of replies and solutions provided alone. By providing valuable solutions and sharing product expertise and success stories, champions are delivering an unparalleled community experience that keeps our customers coming back. To the Community team, it is important that we acknowledge, honor, and celebrate the impactful contributions that our Community Champions make. We provide our champions with: Digital rewards such as yearly badges Digital certifications to show off on their social channels An invitation to our exclusive monthly Community Champion calls, where they get to meet directly with the Zoom Community team and Zoom employee champions A Zoom Community branded “welcome” gift (and we like to throw in quarterly surprise and delight gifts as well 😉) Access to our private Community Champion forum and Zoom Chat Champion Chat Channels Collaborative Discussions The Zoom Community started as a self-service support channel for customers to seek support. While this still remains its primary foundational use case, the quality of collaborative discussions and questions we are seeing in the community supported by the number of solutions has exceeded expectations. Not only are we seeing what we expected to occur in such a place - support-related questions and answers, but the level of passion for our products, shared unique use cases, and the exchange of expert knowledge is what has really helped evolve our community. Zoom has prided itself in prioritizing happiness for our customers. As the Zoom Community approaches its two-year milestone, it has not only experienced exceptional growth in numbers, but has also exceeded expectations in terms of the quality of discussions, knowledge sharing, and customer support solutions. The community thrives by providing invaluable insights and expertise, bringing happiness to our customers worldwide, and being recognized for its impact by leaders in the community industry. 2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved? Delivering happiness is at the core foundation of our business. Bringing to life an online community that provides helpful solutions to our customers has been continuously supported by Zoom’s senior leadership and global teams. When Zoom experienced astronomical growth in 2020 due to the globalpandemic, there was a greater need for more reliance on self-service. At the time, there was no dedicated online community for global Zoom users to receive free, 24/7 support. To better serve the needs of the ever-growing customer base and aid in their happiness with using Zoom, the Zoom Community was born. The business understands the key impact of the community. The more conversations with helpful solutions, the more people can benefit from viewing these posts and finding the answer they are looking for. In turn, more support deflection can occur, freeing up our live agents to assist with high severity issues and premier accounts. While the heartbeat of the Zoom Community is reflected through the questions asked and answers received, the adoption of cross-functional support has expanded our use cases and programs within the forum. Collaboration across several organizations including marketing, customer success, product management, customer support, and engineering have all taken a seat at the table to engage in the community and take key learnings from the wealth of discussions. The combination of seeing the direct impact of support deflection, insightful trends, and the purest form of happiness delivered, the community has continued to be supported by the business. 3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. Prior to the launch of the Zoom Community, many Zoom users did not have the ability to seek self-service support aside from Zoom’s knowledge base. Because of the Zoom Community, users have direct access to support from actual Zoom users and Zoom employees. The results generated by the Zoom Communityhave been phenomenal and far-reaching. The Zoom Community is accomplishing what we hoped it would do, which is allowing customers to freely exchange their wealth of knowledge through community discussions. Over the past year, we have seen an improvement in key metrics, such as an increase in views, which indicates that community users are finding the solutions that initially encouraged them to seek support in the community. Thus, the need to create new discussions is diminished. Zoom Community users can browse through the different columns in our Recent Activity feed to stay up-to-date on the latest trending posts and posts that already have an accepted solution. One of the most useful things about community platforms is that posts continue to live on. For example, a solution that was posted in 2021 will continue to benefit users in 2023 and beyond who have a similar question to the original poster. Zoom was drawn to Khoros by its outstanding features and scalability, which perfectly catered to larger user bases such as Zoom’s. The Zoom Community team utilizes Khoros Communities and Khoros Care, and they have been particularly instrumental in the success of the community. The user-friendly interface, extensive integrations, powerful gamification, and advanced analytics offered by Khoros Communities help us keep users coming back. In essence, Khoros Communities proved to be the best-in-class solution that Zoom needed to efficiently scale our community at a rapid pace. Furthermore, Khoros Care has allowed our community team to effectively moderate the thousands of discussions happening in the community every month and ensure customers are satisfied with the help they receive in the Zoom Community. Special Thanks: N/A Case Study Opt-In: Yes2023 Customer Awards: PowerSchool - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: PowerSchool Company background: As the leading provider of cloud-based software in K-12 education, we connect students, teachers, administrators, and parents with the shared goal of improving student outcomes. Our mission is to power the education ecosystem with unified technology that helps educators and students realize their full potential in their own way. From the office to the classroom to the home, we help schools and districts efficiently manage state reporting and related compliance, special education, finance, human resources, talent, enrollment, attendance, funding, learning, instruction, grading, assessments, and analytics–all in one unified platform. Contact: Jamie Harmon Title: Supervisor, Community Support Related URLs: https://help.powerschool.com/, https://help.powerschool.com/t5/Getting-Started/Getting-Started-on-PowerSchool-Community/ba-p/28101, https://help.powerschool.com/t5/PowerSchool-Ideas-Portal/ct-p/PowerSchool-Ideas-Portal, https://help.powerschool.com/t5/All-Events/ct-p/All_Events, https://help.powerschool.com/t5/Enrollment-Family-Support/ct-p/PowerSchoolRegistration, https://help.powerschool.com/t5/Results/bd-p/Search_Results#!/search?searchString=&from=0&sortby=_score&orderBy=desc&pageNo=1&aggregations=%255B%255D&uid=1d51bdaf-8ad5-11eb-8d9a-0242ac120002&resultsPerPage=10&exactPhrase=&withOneOrMore=&withoutTheWords=&pageSize=10&sid=1644956814923791&language=en&mergeSources, https://help.powerschool.com/t5/PowerSchool-Mentors/ct-p/PowerSchool_Mentors Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? PowerSchool offers a variety of products to support the needs of school administrators, office staff, educators, families, and applicants. The goal of the community is to provide a unified support portal for all our products, offering opportunities for both self-help and direct support features. 2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved? Our PowerSchool Community was built as a unified site to support all of our products. Since the start of our community, we have collaborated with leaders and teams across PowerSchool. We worked together on various initiatives, communications, training, and office hours to ensure we had awareness. 3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. As a direct result of our focus on enhancing the customer experience, we experienced an increase in community engagement and self-help resources. Our search success rate has increased to 93%. We have maintained a 96% CSAT and grown our super user program, PowerSchool Mentors. Special Thanks: NA Case Study Opt-In: Yes2023 Customer Awards: Qlik - Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service
Company: Qlik Company background: Qlik helps enterprises around the world move faster, work smarter, and lead the way forward with an end-to-end solution for getting value out of data. Our Active Intelligence Platform® is the only one on the market that allows for open-ended, curiosity-driven exploration, giving everyone – at any skill level – the ability to make real discoveries that lead to real outcomes and transformative changes. Contact: Suzanne Macaluso Title: Sr. Advisor, Digital Platforms Related URLs: https://community.qlik.com/, https://community.qlik.com/t5/Events-Webinars/bd-p/qlik-events-webinars, https://community.qlik.com/t5/Qlik-Gallery/bg-p/qlik-gallery, https://community.qlik.com/t5/Support/ct-p/qlikSupport?launchChat=1, https://community.qlik.com/t5/About-Ideation/ct-p/qlik-aboutideation, https://community.qlik.com/t5/Blogs/ct-p/qlik-community-blogs Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Digital Customer Service 1. What challenges did your organization face that required a digital strategy? Provide details on the issues you were trying to resolve or the goals you were trying to achieve. (e.g. reducing handle time, improving CSAT, reducing per-interaction costs, revenue growth, cost savings, etc.) Our challenge was ensuring all our customers, partners, prospects, educators, students, and data lovers had a place where they could collaborate with each other and with Qlik 24x7. We wanted to provide a place where we could help people solve problems, learn, and self-serve. 2. Which Khoros elements did you implement as part of your digital solutions? Include details on the channels or tools you added and how your solution was unique and innovative. The only way to solve our challenge was to have a digital platform, a "Community." So, at the end of 2018, we re-launched the Qlik Community, powered by Khoros. Today, our Qlik Community supports our vast Analytics and Data Integration portfolio. 3. What quantifiable results were achieved? Please include key success metrics. (e.g. revenue growth, cost reduction, CSAT, call deflection, agent efficiency, response speed, resolution rate, etc.) The team at Qlik effectively measures and showcases tangible business return on investment (ROI) by evaluating key metrics such as Community growth through new member registrations, active user percentage, engagement percentage, and overall traffic. Special Thanks: Hope Parker Case Study Opt-In: Yes
2023 Customer Awards: Alteryx - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: Alteryx Company background: Alteryx provides the leading Analytics Automation Platform. We enable everyone to deliver breakthrough outcomes with analytics automation. Contact: Leandra Naranjo Title: Community Program Operations Manager Related URLs: https://community.alteryx.com https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Certification/bd-p/product-certification https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Launch-Pad-Resources/tkb-p/onboarding https://community.alteryx.com/t5/Alteryx-IO/ct-p/alteryx-io Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? The Maveryx Community (formerly Alteryx Community) partnered with Khoros to launch as a support community in 2015 to provide users with quick access to customer support and product documentation via knowledge articles, forums, and blogs. Over the years, it has matured to encompass learning enablement through certification and academy, global user groups and events, developer-centric spaces, and more. Today, The Maveryx Community is the destination for more than 400,000 Alteryx users to launch and grow their analytics careers together. As the Community has grown in reach and impact, leadership saw the need to further integrate Community into the full customer lifecycle, providing greater value at scale to customers and potential customers. While this has occurred somewhat organically throughout the years, we’ve taken a more intentional approach over the past two years by focusing on identifying, expanding, and improving the most impactful programs. In tandem with this, we continued to listen to Community members’ needs and focus on enhancing Community from a functionality standpoint. The culmination of cementing Community into the customer lifecycle was brought to life with our rebrand to the Maveryx Community in May 2023. This re-brand brings Maveryx together in a new way, under a shared identity: one they can own, celebrate and champion their companies, families, and communities. The Khoros platform gave us the ability and agility to make all community updates quickly via the settings list editor and custom content. We launched our re-branded assets in one concerted effort within the larger company at our in-person user conference. Program focus in 2022/23: Academy and Certification – Developed and implemented custom pages for Certification that enabled the launch of 12 new certifications in 2022 & 2023. Leveraged the AWS / Khoros integration to award certification badges in Community Alteryx Academy Alteryx Certification Customer Onboarding (Launch Pad) Developed and implemented a custom page to host Alteryx onboarding lessons, enabling users to learn platform basics at the beginning of the customer lif cycle. Leveraged Khoros / Rustici integration to host onboarding lessons and track user progress and award badges as onboarding is completed Onboarding (Launch Pad) Alteryx IO As the Alteryx customer base grows, so has the use of plugins and extensions. In the past year alone, more than 70 new extensions have been created using an SDK. The users of these tools, highly technical engineers, deserve and demand a community where they too can learn, share knowledge, and access resources, hence the creation of Alteryx IO in Community. Alteryx IO Developed and plan to launch Dark Mode in July 2023 with the support of a 3rd party vendor, Hinterlands. Dark mode is also one of the most requested features in our Value Analytics survey and compliments the recent release of dark mode in our product. 2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved? Alteryx is a mature, well-resourced Community that has benefited from ongoing support at the executive level since its inception. However, we were able to supercharge our support when we could tell the story of the Community using data. Lucky for us, data is our specialty. With 400k+ members, it was easy to gain cross-functional buy-in when we asked teams how we could partner with them to serve and enable them to meet customers’ needs. In addition to showing our impact with data, we re-structured where the Community team sits within the larger Company. Over the years, we’ve sat under Marketing and Strategy, but we found our Goldilocks fit with the Customer Success team in 2022. Finding the right fit has been critical in ensuring we have leaders who understand the value of Community, how we can grow, and advocating for the resources we need to align ourselves with the customer lifecycle. User Experience Enhancements: Archival of low-engagement boards to strategically focus on high-impact programs Trifacta migration: Alteryx acquired Trifacta in 2022. It was critical for us to welcome former Trifacta users to the Maveryx Community and retain the helpful content from the Trifacta Community Migrated approximately 9k users Completed in partnership with the Khoros migration team User Group enablement via Zoom integration: Leaders have more autonomy with the Zoom integration since they can now fully manage virtual meetings. The favorites carousel on the profile page allows users to showcase their favorite content on the Community 3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. Alteryx has seen great success through the use of our Khoros Community. In 2022-2023, we migrated our Trifacta Community, had a Maveryx re-brand that reflected the integration of Community into the customer lifecycle on a wider scale, launched Alteryx IO, removed and consolidated unused boards, invested in education and certification, and developed and implemented some pretty awesome new features along the way! As a result, we now have more data-driven development and focus more on the Community programs that deliver the most value to users. Below are some results that we were able to achieve with Khoros that we’re pretty proud of! Customer Experience/Customer Satisfaction In 2022, we found that customers who are also Community members have an NPS score 9 points higher than those who are not members of the Community. Increased our CSAT score by 3% in 2023 2022 CSAT score: 77% 2023 CSAT score (to date): 80% Community Growth With more than 400k members as of 2023, the Maveryx Community continues to show strong growth as we focus on welcoming folks to the Community during the onboarding process: Total community visits continue to climb: Community Engagement Users who have earned certifications via Community have exploded: In 2022, we saw a 158% YoY increase in earned certifications As of June 2023, we nearly surpassed the total number of earned certifications in 2022. Engagement metrics in our Designer discussion forum have never looked better! Alteryx Designer is our flagship product, and this board is where users go to get quick answers from fellow members. Notable engagement metrics for Jan - June 2023: 36 hours - average time to first solution 4,441 new topics 4,112 total number of first replies Special Thanks: Kasha Taylor Case Study Opt-In: Yes2023 Customer Awards: SMARTY - Holistic Customer and Digital Engagement
Company: SMARTY Company background: SMARTY is the SIM-only network that is on a mission to put trust back in the mobile industry, by doing things properly. With SMARTY, customers don’t need to worry about a hefty bill or nasty surprises at the end of the month – it’s just simple, honest mobile. Great value, simple plans, transparent pricing and flexible 1-month plans come as standard. Launched in 2017, SMARTY is powered by Three’s strong and reliable 4G and 5G network to deliver super-fast speeds for browsing, streaming, gaming, downloading, emailing, and more. SMARTY was recently named Which? Recommended Provider for the third year in a row thanks to its commitment to its customers – all 800k (as of April 2023) and counting! With SMARTY there’s no contract and no tie in; customers can pause or cancel their plan at any time. SMARTY is committed to no price increases, and will not introduce RPI annual prices, and SMARTY will not reintroduce roaming fees in Europe, meaning customers travelling to EU destinations can use their mobile data (up to 12GB), calls and texts on the same deal as they have in the UK, with no hidden charges. Contact: Yulian Kozachok Title: Community Manager Related URLs: https://community.smarty.co.uk/ Kudos Category: Holistic Customer and Digital Engagement 1. Tell us about your integration or unification strategy for connecting multiple CX teams and/or tools with the Khoros solutions. Community SMARTY had always considered the prospect of offering a Community as a way for customers to share knowledge and ideas, give peer to peer support and access 24x7 help. In March 2021 we started an invite only customer Community (The Forum) to gain real time feedback to best aid our app development. The Community worked. Not only helping us deliver the best app in the right way for our customer, but it also gave us a fresh perspective into our customer’s mind and opened a unique opportunity for brand and customer to engage. In Dec 2021, we decided to partner with the industry leader in online Community’s: Khoros. Our goal was to deliver the ultimate SMARTY Community space with our customer at its heart. Khoros Care Besides Community platform, SMARTY'S award-winning customer excellence team, took the decision in June 2021 to integrate with Khoros Care. Prior to launching Khoros Care, the customer excellence team managed Facebook and Twitter within their native platforms, this didn't allow us to track and monitor customer engagement effectively, Khoros Care allowed us to do that by supplying us with the tools to review analytical insight to further improve our customer journey from start to finish. 2. What specific impact has having a more holistic solution had on your customer and employee experiences? What were the benefits? Community We committed to delivering the very best Community experience with Single Sign On and responsive design that would perform well on desktop and mobile devices. As a result, our new Community is head and shoulders above our previous forums. With the help of Khoros Professional Services we were able to deliver Single Sign On and enabled our customers to login with their existing SMARTY accounts. We have launched and signposted the community within the SMARTY app right from the start, this has improved our customers journey and experience. While our community was built with support in mind, we have grown significantly in a very short time, and were able evolve our proposition further. We are seeing a lot of engagement in our Off Topic area, run regular ‘open discussion’ topics and held a very popular community prize draw. At the moment we are looking forward to introducing a Superuser program in order to recognise our most active and helpful community members. Our next step would be an Ideation area that would assist us with product innovation and gathering valuable input from our customers. Khoros Care Integrating multiple social channels into a single solution platform has given our customer excellence team the edge in monitoring and managing all communication with our customers. Being able to review and analyse all the interactions within the same platform was a great practical opportunity to enhance our customers experience further. 3. What specific business outcomes and successes have resulted from the improved customer and employee experiences you have seen using Khoros? Please include quantifiable metrics where possible. Community Launched only 6 month ago, our community is doing exceptionally well: We have over 24K registered Community members, and we average over 20K monthly Active Users. Our Traffic has been growing at a steady pace and we are well above 100k Page views every month now. Community Responsiveness (Avg. Time to a first Response) has seen a dramatic improvement since we launched. and is below 6 Hours now (14-17 Hours in Jan). Great to see that our Community is helping people to make their decision. Conversion rate to store is at 1.6% Working with Khoros PS, we have improved our Community Activity component with several options to feature posts, images and direct users to Accepted Solutions. Our Accepted Solutions Views went up by 70%! Khoros helped us to benchmark our performance against European telco’s Communities and we rank first in Acquisition and Engagement across many benchmarking KPI’s. Khoros Care The results of introducing Khoros Care were immediate, our SLA response rate went form 24 hours to just 2 hours, maintaining an average of a 95% success rate - recently we have embedded Instagram into Khoros Care and this has also been a huge success as well. Since switching to Khoros Care our customer excellence team has won Customer Service Team of the Year at the prestigious UK National Contact Centre Awards in 2022. Special Thanks: Jon Henshall Case Study Opt-In: Yes
