Khoros Kudos 2024
The Khoros Kudos Awards celebrate Khoros customers innovating, improving, and scaling social media marketing, digital and social customer service, online brand communities, and the use of AI.
Recent Content
Videotron
Author Details: Name: Julian Durand Burgoyne Title: Sr. Manager, Digital Engagement and Social Media Company: Videotron Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Videotron is a Canadian telecommunications leader. A wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and wireless telephone services. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? My team handles digital engagement and social media both for customer service and technical support. We handle all things digital in the customer service space for Videotron. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Over the years we deployed a strategy of serving the customer on the channel of their choosing. We deployed capabilities with Khoros to enable us to do just that. Secure forms helped us authenticate customers and allowed us to serve them on a broader range of channels previously inaccessible. We previously had no contact entry point on our support website. The initial reason behind this being we wanted to promote self-service to avoid costs. However, after deploying support on so many channels it didn’t make sense to keep our support site without a way to contact us. We expected that adding messaging capabilities on that section of our website would drive significant volumes that we were maybe not ready to handle. We decided it was time for us to try automation, which we always were skeptical of. This skepticism stemmed from expecting our customer base to hate having to speak to a bot. We were skeptical of traditional bots, since customer service is our DNA and we found bots to be a bit too cold and non-personal. Additionally, accuracy of the GenAI was also a concern, though all of this was dispelled with the POC. Videotron being a leader in customer service satisfaction when we launched automation we wanted to do it right. So, we partnered with Khoros to test in one fell swoop, brand messenger, Flow and the new Helix AI capabilities. In a few months we built and trained a virtual assistant with knowledge of our entire support website that leverages Helix Generative AI capabilities to answer customers in a fluid, in depth and personalized way. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. It allowed us to launch a new major contact point, driving new volumes in Khoros Care, while also deflecting contacts that could be answered without a current support site for the type of customer that didn’t want to search the site and would’ve contacted us. We have doubled our incoming volume within Khoros Care. We achieved for the first time parity with our live chat and conversations incoming within Care. Around a third of the volume coming into our bot doesn’t end up to an agent. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The new entry point brought 50% new conversations from what we had before launching it, which is roughly 12,000 new conversations per month. However, thanks to the automation in that channel, 56% of those conversations never make it to an agent. Some of it we think goes to another channel, based on issue type that cannot be resolved by bot, but still didn't go through to a handover. Real estimated deflection is around 80% of that 56%, so roughly a third of all incoming volume in the bot. 36% of all incoming volume from our support site is deflected. 36% of incoming volume on the entry point in our support site is the bot. The 20% difference is from the customers choosing to not stay for the asynchronous messaging in Brand Messenger and choosing to call us or use our live chat. Conversations that make it to an agent are on average 22% faster than similar private conversations on our other Khoros Care channels. So even when a handoff is necessary the information gathered with the virtual assistant helps the agent handle the situation faster. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We were expecting agents to be apprehensive of AI, but it wasn't the case. They welcomed the help provided by the bot. It helped us find gaps or issues that flew under the radar, having lots of volume being tagged by AI Insights. It also helped us establish a better process where the web teams broadcast changes done to the website since it now can conflict with the bot knowledge. What differentiated the Khoros AI solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Flow was easy to learn and allowed us our very small project team of 2, to deploy, modify, and iterate on our AI project. It’s a great too allowing us to quickly find bugs and issues and fix them without needing code knowledge or any internal IT resources that can have an impact somewhere else. Generative AI can be a complex matter, but Khoros’ team was instrumental in allowing us to deliver a working prototype that passed all of our test in order to be client facing. Once the GenAI part was working, building the actual bot in Flow around it was easy to do. Flow is very user friendly the no code – low code approach works wonders in enabling users to build what they envision without the need to involved a big team of developers. We love the fact that the GenAI works as a part of flow and that we can build around it. That allows to be more focused and handhold the end user when needed and leverage the GenAI when it is the time to do so. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Not only is the technology great and easy to use, but Khoros’ accessibility as a partner, ease of communication and collaboration stands out as a defining facilitating factor what we managed to deliver. We always greatly appreciated Khoros for their quick and accessible support and in project like these it makes a world of difference having access to the right people at the right moment. Khoros’ team took the time to guide us and train us at our own pace enabling us to be able to quickly get a grip on Flow thus allowing us to work even better with the team assisting us in building the solution.SAS Institute
Author Details: Name: Chris Hemedinger Title: Director of SAS User Engagement Company: SAS Institute Tell us about you, your company, and your team? About me: I'm a technology enthusiast who believes in the power of community to drive technology success, learning, and connections. As Director of SAS User Engagement, I lead a talented 12-member team that looks after the SAS Support Community and many other programs that benefit users of SAS® software and SAS. About SAS: SAS, based in Cary, N.C., is a software company with roots in academia. Founded at N.C. State University in 1976, SAS has grown to become the leader in business analytics software and services and the world’s largest privately held software company. Co-founder Jim Goodnight remains at the helm as CEO and more than 80,000 business, government, and university sites in more than 140 countries rely on SAS® software. We make it easier for more people to use powerful analytics every day, to shorten the path from data to insight – and to inspire bold new discoveries that drive progress. The result: analytics that breaks down barriers, fuels ambition, and gets results. We give our customers THE POWER TO KNOW®. About my team: The SAS User Engagement team manages key programs of outreach to SAS users, including our online support communities, expert webinars, user group events, blogs, a technical newsletter, a developer engagement program and more. All of these programs have a home in our hosted Khoros community platform. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? By providing a forum for discussion and support, we increase our customers’ ability to self-serve in finding answers to their technical questions and challenges. This improves customer satisfaction and saves on support costs, two metrics that are supported by data we collect. We also use the community platform to support other strategic programs at SAS, such as our annual SAS Hackathon, our SAS Customer Recognition Awards, our Ask the Expert webinar series and more. The community also provides operational support for support initiatives such as hotfix notices and syndicated content directly into the user experience for our product offerings. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our best-in-class community plays a vital role in expressing SAS’ customer-centric ethos built over five decades. Key turning points in our story: Long before SAS spun out of NCSU in 1976, as our three co-founders wrote the first lines of SAS code, they welcomed input from an enthusiastic nascent community of SAS users. Our first users conference, which drew 300+ attendees, further baked customer-centricity into our culture and products. Online user collaboration sprouted in 1986 when SAS users connected via the SAS-L email listserve. In the late 2000s, we launched a SAS community on Jive, followed in 2015 with the migration to Khoros. The latter move was in line with our customer-centric ethos and users' growing preference for peer-to-peer and self-service support. It marked a significant uptick in investment. We tripled community-management staff to grow engagement, curate content and enlist employee and customer experts to improve the quality and number of solved topics. The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted business as usual. In-person events, the prevalent way of connecting with our customers for many years, were off the table. This presented an opportunity to reimagine how to serve and engage our customers online at higher levels. Collaborating with our counterparts in global marketing, research and development, sales, and technical support, we leveled up our digital capabilities to that end. Our Khoros-hosted SAS Support Community became – and remains – an indispensable hub for many programs that engage, equip, and encourage SAS software users. Social-distancing protocols receded, and in-person events resumed, but the digital pivot equipped us with a strong, agile platform that continues to grow and evolve. Today, communities.sas.com is the largest digital gathering of SAS users with more than 330,000 members. In the past year, nearly 10,000 topics were published (nearly 2,800 questions solved) and there were 8.4 million visits, with 15 million page views. 80+ special-interest groups give members additional ways to connect. SAS employees share their expertise through more than 7,000 knowledge base articles. User-engagement programs, such as SAS Analytics Explorers, SAS Inner Circle and the SAS Developer portal serve and delight our most ardent SAS fans. Recently we began syndicating community content within popular new products, SAS® Intelligent Decisioning and SAS® Model Manager. Varied programs, two goals: 1) Shrink the distance between customers and the answers they need to win with SAS (community health); 2) Increase customer satisfaction and lower support costs (community success). What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Our Khoros community platform is at the heart of the overall success of our user-engagement program. It’s more than just a website, having grown far beyond its beginnings as a home for technical discussions. This makes it difficult to pinpoint just one win. In the past year, innovative use of Khoros’ bulk data APIs has enabled us to gain insights to shape strategic decisions for how we engage with community members—particularly new community members and new SAS users. The challenge: faster, deeper engagement with SAS users, especially new community members. The opportunity: greater customer loyalty evidenced by higher net promoter scores among community members and more engagement by new members. This includes a space for new users to receive enhanced moderation. Overall, our community boasts an average “first reply” time of just about 400 minutes. In our special “New Users” board, a designated “safe space” for new-user questions, 72% of first replies come within 2 hours, and over 92% come within 12 hours. Teams involved: our counterparts in marketing, product management, R&D, and technical support. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The SAS Support Community delivers significant value throughout the customer experience. Having grown beyond is customer-support roots, today it also drives customer satisfaction (according to net-promoter scores), brand awareness (for example, as the digital home of the popular SAS Hackathon), and increasingly is a leading source of information on new solutions and innovation (exemplified by community content syndicated in SAS solutions.) It has become the hub of SAS expertise online and complements other channels such as GitHub and YouTube. Overall community health and success metrics: 1,000% SAS Community ROI based on deflected technical support tracks (calculated with Value Analytics data and standard ROI formula.) New members: 14K+ YTD Page views: 12 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 15+ million) Visits: 7 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 8 million) New topics: 5K+ YTD Solved topics often garner more than half of total topic views. 84% of topics receive a reply within 24 hours 74% rate of successful searches, proof that SAS users are finding the help they need What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Efforts to engage new members in particular have paid off. We started with a stretch goal of 20% engagement (defined by “liking” posts, publishing topics and replies, etc., within 90 days of registering.) Our email onboarding campaign sends a “welcome” email to new members soon after they register. The email acquaints them with best practices and invites them to connect with fellow members, share their expertise and level up by earning ranks and badges. Two weeks later, emails are sent to those who have asked a question encouraging them to mark a reply as a solution and to those who have yet to post a topic. Additional campaigns invite members to attend webinars, play SAS Bowl Trivia, participate in the SAS Hackathon, and engage with SAS in myriad other ways. In the past year, our Khoros platform has delivered more than 1.5 million emails, garnering a 17.5% open rate and a 14% click-to-open rate. This consistent, proactive outreach, enabled by our Khoros platform, has driven these and other key metrics: SAS User Community Net Promoter Score rose 11% in 2024 over 2023 30% of new members engaged within three months of joining What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? As a global leader in data and AI, SAS is all about transforming a world of data into trusted decisions. That’s reflected in the way we run our community program. The abundance of data, analyzed with SAS® software, enables us to send targeted emails to boost engagement, gain invaluable insight into prevalent topics, content worthy of promoting in other channels, opportunities to delight customers, and much more. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Khoros platform enables us to make high-impact data-driven campaigns and decisions. The admin console makes it easy for community managers to manage content, the site’s structure and look and feel, and set permissions for members. There are easy-to-use mechanisms to include code in posts and upload animations, images, and video. There are APIs for everything and abundant data to analyze with SAS software. We make full use of our platform’s discussion styles—blogs, events, forums, contests, events, group hubs, ideas, and TKBs. Looking ahead, by being able to syndicate community content directly into our own software solutions, we anticipate further expanding use of communities.sas.com as an operational hub and a way to showcase GenAI capabilities.Dynatrace
Author Details: Name: Malgorzata Murawska Title: Community Manager Company: Dynatrace Tell us about you, your company, and your team? In the Community team, we often compare ourselves to the Power Rangers. Besides supervising the forum, each team member has tasks tailored to their experience and unique superpowers that enrich our work. We're proud to have such a unique team, thanks to the diverse perspectives, talents, and incredible people behind them. Maciej is an experienced and passionate product owner who makes sure the Community runs smoothly. Ana is a natural leader, excelling in team management. Agata is an expert in marketing, networking, and cross-team cooperation. Iza can translate any data and numbers into insightful conclusions. Michał is a talented UI designer and a meticulous Product Ideas manager. And there’s me – I joined three months ago and I love it already. As for my role, I find great joy in content creation and project management. Despite our differences, we share a common passion: helping people. We’re the right people in the right place, as the work culture at Dynatrace supports openness, curiosity, authenticity, and providing meaningful answers. All Dynatracers share and are driven by these values, so it’s no wonder our product—Dynatrace—is an excellent tool that makes customers' lives easier. With deep observability, intelligence, and automation, Dynatrace modernizes and optimizes cloud operations and simply ensures the software works perfectly. The Dynatrace platform leverages AI to anticipate future behaviors, deliver precise answers and intelligent automation, automatically provide recommendations, create suggested workflows or dashboards, and let people use natural language to explore, solve, and complete tasks. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Community Team is vital when it comes to bridging the gap between our company and customers. Our Community isn’t just a platform for knowledge sharing; it’s a vivid space where individuals come together to solve problems, share insights, and build lasting relationships, often meeting in person. We prioritize making self-service easy for our visitors, ensuring they can quickly find resources to address their needs. By creating an environment where our guests feel heard, we facilitate valuable connections between them and product development teams. This allows us to gather insights into their needs, ideas, and real-life use cases, which in return improves Dynatrace offerings. Our efforts directly align with Dynatrace's core values: Innovate with Passion, Engage with Purpose, and Win with Integrity. By creating diverse content that appeals to a broad audience, we support critical company goals, such as enhancing our Go-To-Market strategy. Collaborating closely with marketing, sales, customer success managers, and developers, we increase visibility and access to expert support, ultimately enriching the customer experience. This approach not only reinforces the Community’s value but also advances Dynatrace’s mission to provide exceptional solutions to clients. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Community is a platform that brings experts, clients, and partners together around our product. One of its incredible advantages is that it collaborates with many departments across the organization, including product managers, engineers, developers, technical experts, sales, documentation, marketing, etc. The Community is designed to enable Dynatrace users to share knowledge, tips, and tricks while also allowing them to solve their problems in real time. A vital aspect of the Community is the feedback channel and a space where clients can propose product improvements and new solutions. This allows the product to better meet users' expectations by fostering dialogue. The Community also addresses challenges such as empowering users to troubleshoot independently, facilitating cross-department collaboration, improving post-purchase customer experience, and driving continuous product enhancement based on user input. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. The Dynatrace Community is a highly dynamic organization, constantly generating new ideas and implementing those that improve our work. Recently, we collaborated with several product managers and key decision-makers within a range of departments - R&D, Documentation, Developers, Product, Support - to enhance the overall customer experience and satisfaction. Our main objective was to simplify one of the core reasons the Community is so valuable—self-service and problem-solving, increase CSAT, and to deflect chat conversations and number of raised tickets. The reason behind it was the challenge of scattered problem solutions located in different, non-related resources. That's why we created a Troubleshooting Forum where users can share use cases, detailing their problems and providing solutions. These posts are usually well-received, generating a lot of views, engagement, and gratitude from the Community members. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Community's success is mostly measured in bounced support tickets, increased page views (the most popular posts have around 300,000 views!), likes and comments given. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Besides increased values mentioned above, our actions result in Increased customer adoption, Shorter onboarding time for new features, Increased Customer advocacy. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros Communities solution played a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals for the year. Our objectives included increasing the number of active users, posts, and page views, enhancing customer experience and support through effective product idea management, and creating engaging content. Additionally, we wanted to establish groups where users with shared interests could connect and ensure that self-service and problem-solving were quick and easy. Khoros, a standout multi-faceted platform, enabled all of these by providing a robust and flexible platform that allowed us to manage and grow our Community efficiently. The ability to create specialized groups, facilitate content sharing, and offer seamless self-service solutions helped us meet these goals. However, we couldn’t have achieved this without the promotion of the Community and strong collaboration with other teams, who played a key role in increasing visibility and engagement within the Community. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The Khoros Communities solution provided a powerful and flexible platform for effectively managing and growing our Community. A key feature is the Product Idea Forum, vital for maintaining client communication, gathering feedback, and continuously improving our product. Additionally, we really appreciate the ability to create specialized groups, enabling users with shared interests to connect and boosting participation. The platform also simplified content sharing, allowing us to create engaging materials that resonated with our audience. Its self-service capabilities made issue resolution quick and easy.Sisense
Author Details: Name: David Raynor Title: Senior Community Manager Company: Sisense Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I joined Sisense as a Technical Account Manager in November 2022, started with the Community team in December 2023 as a Developer Liaison, and took over as Community Manager in January 2024. Sisense is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform that helps businesses gather, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources. It's designed to help businesses make informed decisions by providing a user-friendly interface for data exploration and reporting. We are a two-person Community team. Jackie Cordell and I handle the day-to-day operations of the community, identify and execute community projects and events, and report on community metrics. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Sisense Community strives to empower members to find solutions through continued learning and collaboration. We showcase best practices, interesting use cases, and top users. The Sisense Community helps users to implement Sisense more effectively and efficiently. That supports Sisense's goals of customer retention and expansion. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Sisense Community was underperforming, with low participation and shrinking growth. Internal teams were not confident in the community experience and hesitated to recommend it to their customers. Customer retention and growth were suffering as customers were not able to quickly find answers for their questions and solve problems. Community is an integral part of improving those metrics. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. When I started the community, we were focused on engaging directly with the community to rebuild trust with our users. Responding to posts in a timely and closing the loop were the first actions we took to prove that we are dedicated to creating an active and engaged forum. The result is that engagement is up across the board, growing by 100% - 300% YoY. Internal engagement has also increased, with technical resources participating in the community by answering forum posts, creating Knowledge Base articles, and promoting the community to their customers. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Customer retention and revenue growth are lagging indicators of Community engagement, so we have not been able to quantify the ROI yet. However, as Community engagement continues to grow we expect to see reduced churn and increased expansion. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We focus on user engagement. We want to see our current users engaging more, asking questions, providing solutions, viewing KB docs and Blogs, and generally being more active and engaged. As we create ways to tie community engagement with increased customer lifetime value, reduced support costs, and reduced churn, those will become important ROI markers for us. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Our Customer Success team has been very engaged and helpful in moving us toward our goals. Their support team has been quick to respond to tickets, and I appreciate the Khoros Forums also. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The ability to send an email escalation when a post has not been responded to has been very helpful, as has the assistance of the CS team to help us monitor our KPIs.Hutchison 3G UK Limited (SMARTY)
Author Details: Name: Yulian Kozachok Title: CX Platform Lead Company: Hutchison 3G UK Limited (SMARTY) Tell us about you, your company, and your team? SMARTY is the SIM-only network on a mission to put the trust back into the mobile industry, by doing things differently. SMARTY believes there’s a better way to do things; great value, simple plans, transparent pricing and flexible monthly SIMs. Customers don’t need to worry about a hefty bill or nasty surprises at the end of the month – it’s simple, honest mobile. With a focus on the customer, SMARTY offers EU roaming up to 12GB and unlimited calls and texts with every plan. Customers can pause, change, or cancel monthly without long contracts tying them down for years. SMARTY is powered by Three Ireland's strong and reliable 4G and 5G network, which delivers super-fast speeds for all your mobile needs. SMARTY was recently named Which? Recommended Provider for the fourth year in a row thanks to its commitment to its customers – all 1 million + (as of October 2024) and counting! How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The CX team specialises in creating a customer experience strategy that provides our audience with an engaging community and peer-to-peer support whenever needed. As a CX Platform Lead, I take care of the community, ensuring that it’s a reliable source of information for customers, allowing users to support one another while fielding engaging discussions. We also run multiple competitions on the platform to boost engagement and provide incentives for being a part of the community. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The SMARTY Community platform is a place where customers can share knowledge and ideas, give peer-to-peer support and access 24/7 help. As our customer base grows, we are looking to gain more of their valuable insights through real-time feedback. The Khoros Community platform is a fantastic asset that enables us to listen to our customers, explore analytics, and understand our customers on a deeper level. We also know that our customers love to self-serve, rather than spend time trying to reach an agent. The community content management enabled us to tag, review and edit content quickly, so users can easily find solutions to any problems they face. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Our goal for this year was to boost our Registrations, Engagement and improve community Resolution Rate. Community platform provides an excellent outlet to present customer-centric content to our base. We kicked 2024 off with a SMARTY Community 1st Anniversary Prize draw. “Let us know about your favourite bargain”. This was an instant success aligning well with SMARTY’s mission to provide great service at bargain prices. In July we have launched “Win Big This Summer” - our most successful activity so far. A segment of our new The Travel One newsletter, this event was a culmination of work and collaboration between Marketing, PR, Comms and CX teams within the business. To boost our community Resolution Rate, we have introduced a Help Video section in our forums and utilised custom content components to feature most wanted content when necessary. For example, Roaming and device settings during the summer months. In addition, we have launched and Ideation area where we invite our customers to share their suggestions and feedback about current features. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. There is a great value of having our community platform as there are many advantages over other social media channels. Besides providing self-service and decreasing the costs, we can use the community to engage with our base, gather insight, run tests and ideation. Great to see that our Community is helping people to make their purchasing decision. Conversion rate to store is between 1.6 - 2%. Retain – despite being no obligation SIM package only deals provider, we are seeing customers who have participated in multiple community events in the past 18 months, and we are looking forward to introducing a Superuser program. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Approaching our 2nd year, we believe our community is doing well, we have doubled almost in every metric and continue to grow: We have over 90K registered Community members already, and we average at 60K Unique Visits monthly. Our Traffic has been growing at a steady pace and we are well above 150k Page views every month now. Community Responsiveness is around 8hr mark. We have seen a 7% improvement in our Resolution Rate year to date. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros community platform provides a necessary toolbox to deliver our vision for Customer Experience. Currently we are sandbox testing Khoros Aurora platform and are excited about this powerful new tool that will help us to better manage our community and create more engaging customer experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have hadseveral customisation requests and Khoros PS were able to provide the solution swiftly. Our Customer Success team in Khoros provides support that we require. Atlas Community forum, and various community meetups and webinars Khoros is organising are particularly helpful to get an additional insight, share and learn from other community players.Fortinet
Author Details: Name: Kate McMillan Title: Service Technology Manager Company: Fortinet Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I’m part of the Community team for Fortinet. Founded more than 20 years ago in Sunnyvale, California, Fortinet continues to be a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our portfolio of over 50 enterprise-grade products is the largest integrated offering available, delivering proven cybersecurity everywhere you need it. More than 755,000 customers trust Fortinet solutions, which are among the most deployed, most patented, and most validated in the industry. Our team works as part of the support side of the business, building the Fortinet Community which provides a single source of support knowledge and community for our customers and our worldwide partner network. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Fortinet’s mission is ‘Securing people, devices, and data everywhere’. Our aim is to provide customers with the information they need at the time they need it, facilitating quick solutions with minimal customer effort. We build community-based solutions which put the customer first, connecting our users with the most relevant content from our wide network of product experts, allowing them to keep their people, devices and data secure. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We created the Fortinet Community in 2021, bringing together multiple disparate systems to provide our customers with a single place to find answers, collaborate and share ideas. Since that time, we have grown to a community of 125,000 registered members globally with 41 million page views per year and 6.5 million unique visitors. We put the community in place for various groups across the Fortinet ecosystem: our customers, support teams, partners and distributors, sales and sales engineers make use of the Community on a daily basis. The Community was intended to solve the challenge of providing information and answers to Fortinet’s extensive customer base on the range of 50+ leading security products we provide. As the largest installed base of network firewalls in the industry, we are serving a vast audience. We also needed to scale this wealth of expert knowledge so that it could be made available to as many people as possible, 24/7. We wanted to enable our teams who interact with our customers in chat to have a seamless and consistent experience. We also wanted this experience to take advantage of our existing knowledge base to reduce time to resolution and set the stage for more advanced interactions with Generative AI capabilities. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Major Win: Community Powered Knowledge Since the launch of Community in 2021, we have seen three years of growth in terms of the content provided, membership numbers and engagement with the Community platform. One of our goals of the program is the promotion of centralized and reusable knowledge within our support ecosystem. With over 50 products in the security arena, Fortinet is constantly evolving, and we want to make sure the wealth of knowledge and technical expertise within our organization is available for customers to find when they need help. The Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program at Fortinet aims to do just that; we operate on the KCS principle that “all of us are smarter than one of us” and we work to capture that knowledge so that it can be reused to help our customers again and again. We work hand in hand with colleagues globally including TAC Support teams, Advanced Support, Sales Engineers and Specialists to capture knowledge and craft it into knowledge articles, which live on the Community. These are constantly evolving as our engineers update these articles to ensure they remain relevant and up to date. By leveraging a federated search engine (SearchUnify) alongside Khoros we can combine all our support data in Community – including additional content sources such as our documentation, websites, video content, and leading FortiGuard library so that customers find an answer from one unified UI. The KCS education program is strongly interlinked with the Community platform as well. With regular newsletters, training sessions and constant feedback loops we are working to build and extend this knowledge sharing culture. The win for Fortinet here is the ability to develop content at scale and Khoros helps us do this with a unified publishing engine. Our customers and partners have also been empowered with the ability to suggest article edits and submit new article ideas so we can work with our community to develop content based on their input. The change in perspective for our engineering teams has been massive as we shift the mindset towards capturing knowledge and creating articles. We work closely with this audience, running frequent communications, feedback sessions and providing incentives to show appreciation for strong contributions. Monthly newsletters call out our top contributors to both the Knowledge Baseand Forum, with rewards and recognition for those who are going above and beyond to help us grow Community. When we see team members embracing the KCS principles, their teammates can nominate them to receive a ‘KCS Champion’ award, to highlight their contributions and continue to build awareness of their achievements and the program. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We have been seeing a steady upward trend in the quantity of high-quality articles being produced to create knowledge on the community platform. We have seen a 179% YoY increase in the number of Knowledge Articles created by our internal experts. We are also seeing a huge increase in the number of Knowledge Articles being updated on the Community. This is valuable because it keeps our body of knowledge up to date, therefore both our engineer and customer audiences have a reliable, well-maintained library of information to access when they need to find an answer. Updates to Knowledge Base articles have increased 211% YoY. In addition, we have been able to scale support at operationally efficient levels while the business expands year over year. The number of members registering with the site is up 357% YoY, and member entrances have increased by 310% YoY. We also see increased participation across our global network in the support organization with teams from all regions contributing to our hub of Fortinet knowledge on the Khoros platform. Another positive outcome is the rate at which our Knowledge Articles are attached to support cases. Attaching an article to a support case – i.e., signaling that the article was used to help the case - helps us track how frequently articles are being used to solve our customer issues, and measure knowledge reuse across the support organization. Our attach rate has increased by 155% since we have started monitoring this KPI. We have built a network of KCS ‘coaches’ globally, who work within our support teams, promoting the benefits of creating reusable knowledge and guiding our teams as we continue to navigate the huge shift towards these principles. As with any successful KCS Program, strong buy in and support from senior leadership has also played a huge part in the success of the program: “A solid knowledge platform is a critical step to being able to satisfy customers' ever growing need to help themselves to solve problems quickly and efficiently; answering once and offsetting those same questions that come from all corners of our global customer base. Fortinet Community has absolutely excelled in standing up as a go-to resource in which we at Fortinet and customers alike can trust, knowing that if there are answers they can be found quickly. This is a key enabler to allowing us more time for thorough research and resolution of the tougher cases, so hats off and big thanks to the Community team in providing the launchpad for the next step in the journey - knowledge-centered customer support.” - Dave Monery, Global VP Support A further business outcome we have seen is improvement in the customer experience on Community. Through the Khoros Value Analytics survey, we can maintain a constant feedback loop with customers, providing an opportunity to hear about their experiences: “Awesome articles that help new community members. As a new member, it can be very confusing to navigate the world of Fortinet so these support articles can be helpful.” “The Forum has a certain quality of loyalty and 'family vibe' while being professional at the same time which I've never encountered elsewhere.” Catering to a huge range of customers with vastly varying backgrounds and technical expertise means we are constantly striving for a balance between supporting our customers who are getting started with Fortinet and those who have many years of experience with our product set. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased self-service success rate Our self-service success rate (i.e. the number of customers who can find what they are looking for when they come to the Community) has improved since the introduction of the KCS Program and our investment in the Community. The Self-Service Success reported by our customers has increased steadily from an average of 62% in H1 2023 to 71% in H1 2024. We are on track for 77% for Q3 2024. We continue to implement further measures to make content as easy to find as possible, including eliminating duplicate content and analyzing search data to improve findability. We also measure CSAT on Community, and we have seen a steady increase here as well. Hand in hand with seeing more self-service, we see fewer tickets per customer. Despite rapid growth in the business, our ticket volumes are stable, representing a reduced support cost and ability to deliver a support experience that consistently delivers high Customer Satisfaction scores. Khoros Chat implementation The success of Community has led us to implement Khoros Chat, to extend the reuse of knowledge and create a seamless experience for customers, where agent knowledge and community content can dovetail to build positive outcomes. This allows us to bring automation to our customers as they seek support; the interlinking of Chat with our Community is a perfect opportunity to suggest Community content, such as Knowledge articles and relevant forum threads. Increased collaboration across teams within Fortinet We work closely with colleagues in the Documentation department, and cross-promote content between the ‘Doc site’ (docs.fortinet.com) and Community. Although these are different categories of information, there are clear links between the two. We have identified useful articles relevant to documents and useful documents relevant to articles. Creating cross-links between these two information sources enables us to further improve the experience for our customers and get them the information they need as quickly as possible. The Marketing team also work closely with the Community team; from SEO and optimizing our content for findability, to ‘getting started’ initiatives aimed at creating a smooth journey for customers who are just beginning their Fortinet experience. We also collaborate with teams across the business to build dedicated ‘Group Pages’ on Community where there is a special interest or business need. These groups bring people together to solve problems and share knowledge in specific areas, such as Professional Services and Advanced Support. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The platform’s ability to create custom workflows We have been able to create workflows which fit our needs around submitting articles, review steps and publishing due to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. We can easily manage roles and permissions to allow processes to work efficiently for each user type. This has been important as our needs are constantly evolving through our adoption of KCS methods. Khoros APIs for custom reporting and analytics By integrating our Tableau reporting tools via Khoros APIs we have combined critical Community and Knowledge metrics with our people and case related data to create insightful and actionable views of our activities. This visibility allows us to track our performance across all teams and regions and helps us measure the impact of the Community and our Self-Service initiatives. Ability to scale and platform stability We have seen massive amounts of growth in the Fortinet community over the last three years. The Khoros Community platform has been able to handle more than 20M visits per year with minimal services interruptions. Since our knowledge base is housed on the Fortinet community, these attributes are critical to our success in delivering support every day to our customers. Seamless integration with Khoros Chat Rolling out Khoros Chat to work alongside Community enhances our ability to provide world class support at enterprise level. Our agents have a complete view of the wealth of information available to them in Community, combined with a feature rich chat platform, allowing us to best serve our customer base, solve issues and feed back into the knowledge loop we are forming. Ability to merge other Communities post-acquisition Khoros has enabled us to merge other communities with the Fortinet Community as Fortinet continues to grow as a business. As we acquire other organizations, we can integrate their content with our own, building customized Group pages and functionality where required, to extend their own customer experience and facilitate a smooth transition thanks to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have worked with Khoros to build a strong community, increase our membership numbers and create a single source of troubleshooting knowledge for our customers to learn, share and collaborate on. By expanding our Khoros product set to include live chat, we have brought further support options to our customer base, to get them the help they need as quickly as possible. The Khoros CSM team have helped us work towards our knowledge reuse goals, and the flexibility of Khoros credits has allowed us to complete additional projects including a Data Deep Dive to better understand our audience and how they are using community. The ability of the Khoros platform to scale with us as we grow to millions of page views and high volumes of content has been instrumental to our success with the KCS program so far. KCS and the reuse of knowledge from our collective experience will continue to be front and center of our community strategy moving forwards. This will feed into maintaining our KPIs, engaging with our users and promoting the value of Community. Most importantly, our knowledge base is serving as the foundation for multiple upcoming Generative AI offerings for our customers and our teams. We will continue to: Strive to provide the best possible experience for our customers on community and ensure they can find what they are looking for. Work with our support teams to provide high quality, relevant content to help them solve issues quickly. Collaborate with different areas of the Business internally to innovate and create new Community experiences. Recognize and reward our super user community who go above and beyond to support our peers. Ensure everyone can be a part of engaging with community and feel the benefits. In 2025 we will continue to develop our community offering with further custom group pages, expansion of our super user offering, and further promotion of the amazing things achieved by the Community team. Generative AI will play a major role for Fortinet and Khoros as we look to take advantage of some of the new capabilities of the platform including Agent Assist AI and our own Gen AI technologies working together to provide an even more seamless agent and customer experience.USPS
Author Details: Name: Mary Beth Levin Title: Manager, Social Media Strategy and Analytics Company: USPS Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I have two teams under my tent: social intelligence and publishing. The publishing team manages content on our 18 accounts on six different platforms. It also manages the ZONE, the first (and so far only) social media ambassador program in the federal government. The social intelligence team takes a 360-degree look at what is being said about us on social and traditional media. Its purpose is brand protection, crisis mitigation, and a better customer experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our goal is to do good and do better. Unlike many other programs which are based in marketing, we are fortunate to be based in communications in a center of excellence model. This means we are a servant with many masters: HQ communications, field communications, operations, HR, government relations, licensing, marketing and even the Postal Inspection Service. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We wanted to map-out feedback coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We also needed to protect customer privacy. When looking at concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites, we noted specific “customer service hotspots”. We also noted that the types of concerns varied by location. At its very heart, USPS is about logistics. We swim in data. At times we drown in data. With social media, this is yet another set of information competing for people’s time and attention. We needed to provide information in a way that was accessible and compelling to people who are already super busy. Our objective was to make things better for everyone: customers and employees. And we needed to recognize that not everyone loves pie charts and bar graphs. Social listening software has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on). This is why social listening software will map-out to cities and states and can do so for a limited percentage of social media mentions (about one-third for those platforms which allow access). Listening software will pull in product reviews, but not location reviews. And there is the issue of integrating data from various sources. USPS uses POS surveys, but these have limitations: they only capture the retail experience, tend to focus on extreme experiences, can’t include photos/videos, and results are rarely shared= outside of a select group. The teams we involved included communications, social intelligence, social customer response, marketing, operations and government relations. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We think of social media as the world’s largest focus group. In social listening the customer is driving the agenda of the conversation, telling us what is most important. We developed an interactive heatmap to illustrate concerns coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We integrated data from 34 online review sites and our social customer response software (customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media accounts on FB and X). We incorporated our internal tracking software to show not only the destination address, but where it was last scanned (because issues can occur further upstream). In doing so, we provided a one-stop shopping experience for those wanting to know what was going on nationally and in their neighborhood. Users can select one or more postal areas, districts, zip codes, or subjects (tags). The data goes back to January, 2016 and is updated daily. Because what we were doing was so new, we had to go through an 18-month clearance process to ensure data was secure and the information users were viewing had been scrubbed of personally identifying information. We knew we were competing for time and attention. And we are cognizant of the fact that our audience is not comprised of data scientists who love excel spreadsheets. We intentionally used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. People can see a heatmap and recognize that they don’t want the area they work in to show as red! They relate to top ten lists and the personal element of customer quotes, images, and videos the dashboard can show. And seeing how they are doing relative to others and shake them out of complacency with a healthy sense of competition. Working with the unions, we selected local leaders who would give a short presentation featuring the data of that specific location. This was then tied-in to a larger conversation about social media and its role in greater accountability. The feedback received was “I’ve been working here 20 years and no one has ever explained it to me that way. This makes sense.” Employees recognized that unlike other forms of feedback, this information is publicly posted. We promised the unions that the information would never be used punitively. These first conversations discussed customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites. In response to feedback, we included online review sites. This information was emailed on a weekly basis. Information about the heatmap was provided in numerous formal presentations to leadership. Anyone with a USPS email address can access the heatmap. For those using the heatmap, there are weekly office hours, an ops manual, and individual tutorials. Online reviews are shared weekly to those on the ground. Area newsletters share the info monthly. District newsletters highlight results in their localities. There have been close to 100 articles for internal audiences. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Results include the following: Sharing the info in short meetings lead to a 54% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And 18% decrease in ECC (calls to the 800-number) Specifically: 31% decrease in WIMP (Where Is My Package) 51% decrease in certified exception 85% decrease in WMM (Where Is My Mail) These changes were stat sig. Sharing the review info via weekly emails led to a 35% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And a 17% increase in online review scores. Since USPS spends $58 per ECC and $4 per SCR case, the savings can be significant. We have applied for a patent. Completed the one-year preliminary application and filed the final application. The heatmap received external validation: Featured case study by the Social Intelligence Lab Presented at the SocialMedia.Org Board Meeting Presented at the Ragan and PR Daily Social Media Conference 2024 PR News 2024 Digital Awards winner for two categories: Social Listening and Employee Engagement The Postal Regulatory Commission “applauded the Postal Service for using social listening to determine what people are saying about its brand and services on social media. The social media heat map is an effective tool for visualizing customer comments and categorizing them by concern and geographic area.” It is not often that we receive praise from this entity. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We found additional nontraditional use cases: The Office of the Inspector General asked: are there passport concerns worth investigating? (Spoiler: no.) Saved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears since such investigations usually take more than a year. Government Relations – are concerns coming to congressional offices anecdotal or indicative? The heatmap has been used to investigate the location and show that the customer’s concerns were not the norm. We have now divided the heatmap into congressional districts. Proof of concept that employee engagement scores (high and low) correlate with better customer service and savings. Test effectiveness of interventions such as a manga promoting customer service approaches. A/B testing for new tracking software. No increase in tracking complaints observed, leading to expanded rollout. During natural disasters, we use it to identify local concerns (change of address, closure, theft) to inform operations and social media posts. Anticipating PR concerns: e.g. the trend line was going up in Puerto Rico because limited storage led to packages being stored outside. And then it rained. We were able to find additional storage and have a ready answer for the press (who did reach out to us). Located customer service hotspots for Operation Santa for targeted training. This program provides presents to 25K children every year. We don’t want anything to go wrong here. Determined locations for rollout of products and services such as Informed Delivery (now at 64.9M participants). Gemba (site) visits: researching before arriving and giving credit when it’s due. “Hey Erica, I saw that you got a shout-out on social media. Keep up the great work!” Personally, it is extremely gratifying to get an email from someone on the other side of the country saying, “Thank you so much for this email! We only hear from leadership when things go wrong.” It is not exclusively about improving customer service. It is about creating an environment in which good work and good people are honored. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? There were two things: The flexibility and the sophistication of the tagging system which allows one to code using Boolean or Lucene rules. LLM are still in their infancy and many software lack transparency in their accuracy. I know what I want and the terms my customers are using. When I develop the code myself, I know I’m getting exactly what I am looking for; I don’t have to spend time on learning models. Khoros cut its teeth in customer response. They know how to pull data on the backend to integrate with the new interface we created. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The team understood and appreciated our business case and wholeheartedly supported us in developing something completely new.USPS
Author Details: Name: Mary Beth Levin Title: Manager, Social Media Strategy and Analytics Company: USPS Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I have two teams under my tent: social intelligence and publishing. The publishing team manages content on our 18 accounts on six different platforms. It also manages the ZONE, the first (and so far only) social media ambassador program in the federal government. The social intelligence team takes a 360-degree look at what is being said about us on social and traditional media. Its purpose is brand protection, crisis mitigation, and a better customer experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our goal is to do good and do better. Unlike many other programs which are based in marketing, we are fortunate to be based in communications in a center of excellence model. This means we are a servant with many masters: HQ communications, field communications, operations, HR, government relations, licensing, marketing and even the Postal Inspection Service. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We wanted to map-out feedback coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We also needed to protect customer privacy. When looking at concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites, we noted specific “customer service hotspots”. We also noted that the types of concerns varied by location. At its very heart, USPS is about logistics. We swim in data. At times we drown in data. With social media, this is yet another set of information competing for people’s time and attention. We needed to provide information in a way that was accessible and compelling to people who are already super busy. Our objective was to make things better for everyone: customers and employees. And we needed to recognize that not everyone loves pie charts and bar graphs. Social listening software has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on). This is why social listening software will map-out to cities and states and can do so for a limited percentage of social media mentions (about one-third for those platforms which allow access). Listening software will pull in product reviews, but not location reviews. And there is the issue of integrating data from various sources. USPS uses POS surveys, but these have limitations: they only capture the retail experience, tend to focus on extreme experiences, can’t include photos/videos, and results are rarely shared outside of a select group. The teams we involved included communications, social intelligence, social customer response, marketing, operations and government relations. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We think of social media as the world’s largest focus group. In social listening the customer is driving the agenda of the conversation, telling us what is most important. We developed an interactive heatmap to illustrate concerns coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We integrated data from 34 online review sites and our social customer response software (customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media accounts on FB and X). We incorporated our internal tracking software to show not only the destination address, but where it was last scanned (because issues can occur further upstream). In doing so, we provided a one-stop shopping experience for those wanting to know what was going on nationally and in their neighborhood. Users can select one or more postal areas, districts, zip codes, or subjects (tags). The data goes back to January, 2016 and is updated daily. Because what we were doing was so new, we had to go through an 18-month clearance process to ensure data was secure and the information users were viewing had been scrubbed of personally identifying information. We knew we were competing for time and attention. And we are cognizant of the fact that our audience is not comprised of data scientists who love excel spreadsheets. We intentionally used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. People can see a heatmap and recognize that they don’t want the area they work in to show as red! They relate to top ten lists and the personal element of customer quotes, images, and videos the dashboard can show. And seeing how they are doing relative to others and shake them out of complacency with a healthy sense of competition. Working with the unions, we selected local leaders who would give a short presentation featuring the data of that specific location. This was then tied-in to a larger conversation about social media and its role in greater accountability. The feedback received was “I’ve been working here 20 years and no one has ever explained it to me that way. This makes sense.” Employees recognized that unlike other forms of feedback, this information is publicly posted. We promised the unions that the information would never be used punitively. These first conversations discussed customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites. In response to feedback, we included online review sites. This information was emailed on a weekly basis. Information about the heatmap was provided in numerous formal presentations to leadership. Anyone with a USPS email address can access the heatmap. For those using the heatmap, there are weekly office hours, an ops manual, and individual tutorials. Online reviews are shared weekly to those on the ground. Area newsletters share the info monthly. District newsletters highlight results in their localities. There have been close to 100 articles for internal audiences. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Results include the following: Sharing the info in short meetings lead to a 54% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And 18% decrease in ECC (calls to the 800-number) Specifically: 31% decrease in WIMP (Where Is My Package) 51% decrease in certified exception 85% decrease in WMM (Where Is My Mail) These changes were stat sig. Sharing the review info via weekly emails led to a 35% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And a 17% increase in online review scores. Since USPS spends $58 per ECC and $4 per SCR case, the savings can be significant. We have applied for a patent. Completed the one-year preliminary application and filed the final application. The heatmap received external validation: Featured case study by the Social Intelligence Lab Presented at the SocialMedia.Org Board Meeting Presented at the Ragan and PR Daily Social Media Conference 2024 PR News 2024 Digital Awards winner for two categories: Social Listening and Employee Engagement The Postal Regulatory Commission “applauded the Postal Service for using social listening to determine what people are saying about its brand and services on social media. The social media heat map is an effective tool for visualizing customer comments and categorizing them by concern and geographic area.” It is not often that we receive praise from this entity. Link to report by the Postal Regulatory Commission where USPS was recognized. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We found additional nontraditional use cases: The Office of the Inspector General asked: are there passport concerns worth investigating? (Spoiler: no.) Saved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears since such investigations usually take more than a year. Government Relations – are concerns coming to congressional offices anecdotal or indicative? The heatmap has been used to investigate the location and show that the customer’s concerns were not the norm. We have now divided the heatmap into congressional districts. Proof of concept that employee engagement scores (high and low) correlate with better customer service and savings. Test effectiveness of interventions such as a manga promoting customer service approaches. A/B testing for new tracking software. No increase in tracking complaints observed, leading to expanded rollout. During natural disasters, we use it to identify local concerns (change of address, closure, theft) to inform operations and social media posts. Anticipating PR concerns: e.g. the trend line was going up in Puerto Rico because limited storage led to packages being stored outside. And then it rained. We were able to find additional storage and have a ready answer for the press (who did reach out to us). Located customer service hotspots for Operation Santa for targeted training. This program provides presents to 25K children every year. We don’t want anything to go wrong here. Determined locations for rollout of products and services such as Informed Delivery (now at 64.9M participants). Gemba (site) visits: researching before arriving and giving credit when it’s due. “Hey Erica, I saw that you got a shout-out on social media. Keep up the great work!” Personally, it is extremely gratifying to get an email from someone on the other side of the country saying, “Thank you so much for this email! We only hear from leadership when things go wrong.” It is not exclusively about improving customer service. It is about creating an environment in which good work and good people are honored. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? There were two things: The flexibility and the sophistication of the tagging system which allows one to code using Boolean or Lucene rules. LLM are still in their infancy and many software lack transparency in their accuracy. I know what I want and the terms my customers are using. When I develop the code myself, I know I’m getting exactly what I am looking for; I don’t have to spend time on learning models. Khoros cut its teeth in customer response. They know how to pull data on the backend to integrate with the new interface we created. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The team understood and appreciated our business case and wholeheartedly supported us in developing something completely new.Medion AG
Author Details: Name: Arnd Rychel Title: Community Infrastructure Engineer Company: Medion AG Tell us about you, your company, and your team? About me: I have been working at MEDION since 2000. Since 2014, I've been in charge of the MEDION Community as Community Manager. Company: MEDION, as one of the very few companies that boasts a comprehensive portfolio of classic entertainment electronics as well as information technology products, remains in a position to respond to the demands of a digital and networked CE market with its user-friendly product range in the Project Business segment. In addition to its traditional business involving special sales promotions of consumer electronics products in Europe, MEDION also markets a complementary line of services, particularly in the areas of telecommunications, photo services, downloads and other online services. MEDION is also continuing to strengthen its brand as a symbol of products and services offering high quality and best value for money as well as excellent design. MEDION has a good presence in Germany and the entire eurozone, as well as in Scandinavia and the UK, and with the support of its retail and cooperation partners maintains very well organized and professional sales and service units in these countries. Our team: Our ‘International Knowledge Management’ team collects internal and external knowledge and makes it available both within the company and to end customers. In addition to operating instructions and downloads of drivers, our work also includes service processes and the maintenance of product databases and FAQs. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? We select and distribute knowledge in order to reduce support requests and improve self-service, among other things. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We have introduced the Community to generally relieve the entire After Sales process. The aim was to expand self-service. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Among other things, the community FAQs are integrated via API on our service homepage. We have optimised our FAQs in two main ways for this purpose. For product-specific FAQs, the name and material number are stored in the footer of the FAQ so that they can be displayed to the searching end customer in conjunction with our product database on our service homepage. On the other hand, IRIS codes are stored in the footer of general FAQs so that they can be used in conjunction with our online troubleshooter. Depending on the result, the customer can either help themselves and thus avoid sending in the device or start a repair service online, whereby all relevant data (including the IRIS codes) is transmitted to the repair service centre. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Self-service has enabled costs to be saved in the After Sales Support and repair departments. No specific key figures are available. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The (API) integration on our service homepage significantly reduces support enquiries (call, email) and repair submissions. The integration of public and internal FAQs on the intranet provides call centre agents with extensive knowledge in a structured manner. Concrete key figures are not available. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The combination of customised modules at code level (html, css, variables) is what makes the complex workflow with external systems possible in the first place. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We implement most of our customisation ourselves. However, if things get more complex or there is no OOTB solution, the teamwork with Khoros is very good and effective (example: customisation of SSO with the help of Nils Drews).Atlassian
Author Details: Name: Janice James Title: Community Manager Company: Atlassian Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Hi! I’m a community manager on the online (forum) team led by Monique van den Berg. We’re a mighty team of six tackling all the things online for Atlassian! How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The forum team is the beating heart of Atlassian community programs. We support the company goal of helping more people in our community self serve their own success journey. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Community is a native concept to Atlassian. Company founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes hosted the first local Atlassian user group meetup in 2006. Now, as a global company, Atlassian continues to unite users by centering the customer experience around its community and learning programs. Atlassian's community consists of robust learning, champion, events (ACE), and creator programs. The democratized nature of information in communities makes them a natural conduit for product-led businesses like Atlassian and a figurative safe harbor for users to freely exchange knowledge. The challenge we were looking to solve was how to successfully influence community-led growth across a global organization. To address this, Atlassian formed a team of community strategists to guide internal customers (platform and product teams) on how to effectively leverage community programs in their go-to-market strategies. Strategists work directly with product and platform teams to integrate community programs into their workflows, resulting in increased engagement (from Atlassian team members and users), an enhanced product feedback & ideation loop, and increased product/feature awareness. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Formed in early 2024, the community strategist team swiftly addressed the challenge of integrating community strategies across Atlassian's diverse portfolio of teams. The opportunity: Leverage the Khoros community platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement. The team innovated by conducting community-led growth planning workshops, bringing together teams from across the Atlassian solutions portfolio. These workshops resulted in tailored community strategies for each team, aligned with their specific KPIs. For example, the Atlassian Intelligence team focused on an end-to-end plan for the launch of Rovo and growing group membership by 125%, while the Confluence team aimed to boost Atlassian team member engagement in the forum and as speakers at their events. By facilitating collaboration, we overcame the challenge of creating cohesive community strategies that respected each product team's unique needs. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As a newly formed team driving internal enablement, we're in the early stages of our initiatives. However, in addition to the metrics already mentioned (product/feature awareness, engagement, and feedback) the team is influencing the following community and learning organization KPIs with our work in enabling community-led growth: Online community MAU Community and Proprietary events attendance Learning courses and certifications completed From our example above of Atlassian Intelligence, Rovo, and Confluence - The outcomes measured from their tailored strategies at the close of last quarter were successfully launching the Rovo product board and associated gamification challenges with strong Atlassian team member engagement, along with a 53% increase in group membership for Atlassian Intelligence KPI. With Confluence, we successfully influenced their KPIs with a 13% increase in accepted answers + a 62% increase in Atlassian Speakers at their events. An early win was the creation of a series of gamified learning initiatives within the community ecosystem for Atlassian Intelligence, Loom, and Confluence. This initiative leveraged the Khoros community to facilitate post-live event discussions within the forum. This led to increased engagement (posts, kudos) in those spaces of 6%, 12%, and 74%, respectively. Another example is we ran a month-long Jira July product love campaign, where users participated in forum activities that deepened their knowledge of Jira while showcaseing how it’s helped set their business teams up for success. This initiative contributed to a ~53% QoQ increase in posts to the Jira collection. These early wins have been crucial in demonstrating the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to wider adoption across the organization and positioning our community at the center of our product development and user engagement efforts. We expect to have more quantifiable data in the coming months as our initiatives mature. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We’re still in the early stages of gathering long-term data, however we've already observed promising progress outcomes that indicate positive trends in addressing our challenges: Diversified Community Engagement: By tactically engaging teams, we’re aiming to expand community event offerings, creating more touchpoints for user interaction and knowledge sharing. Increase in Atlassian-Hosted Events: We've seen a notable uptick in the number of Atlassian-hosted community events. This increase is expected to positively impact our CSAT and NPS scores as users benefit from more direct interactions with Atlassian experts and peers. Enhanced Internal Involvement: Atlassian team member involvement within our community ecosystem has markedly increased. This deeper engagement will empower users to resolve their questions and create on-demand knowledge as more Atlassian team members actively participate in community discussions. Structured Engagement Playbooks: We've developed comprehensive playbooks for different internal stakeholder groups on how to engage with the community. These resources are aimed at empowering more Atlassian team members to effectively reach and support community members. Broader Organizational Integration: We've observed a deeper permeation of community initiatives throughout the Atlassian organization. As more teams become equipped and utilize community channels in their workflows, we anticipate adoption of community-led growth will have significant mutually beneficial outcomes. Enhanced Internal Enablement: By tactically enabling internal teams, we're creating more 'stickiness' for community programs internally overall. Initial outcomes are laying the groundwork for the team influence on measurable improvements in key areas such as customer lifetime value, support deflection, and overall customer satisfaction. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? We can directly attribute success to the Khoros platform's ability to be enterprise-ready. While the Atlassian community does have a dedicated engineering team, many of the features and capabilities used in our work are 'out-of-the-box' functionality. Many of our tactical recommendations for community-led growth are achieved using the Khoros out-of-the-box functionality. The platform's enterprise-ready features have allowed us to easily and quickly scale community initiatives for teams across our product suite. For instance, the badge and group hub features enable community strategists to easily spin up experiments, resulting in increased traffic and engagement in those spaces. Overall, the platform enables us to provide a gamified centralized knowledge exchange, improve awareness of our portfolios capabilities, and provide a fun and rewarding user experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our partnership with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing the challenges of a community program with complex needs. Working with a platform partner capable of providing the right resources at the right time has ensured Atlassian can implement initiatives that utilize the platform effectively. We’d also like to note the training and resources made available to users. Khoros Academy and live sessions have empowered our team to maximize platform's potential. This was particularly helpful when we onboarded four community managers at once! Throughout our partnership, Khoros has consistently demonstrated its commitment to our success. The holistic support on offer from the team has been vital in addressing challenges unique to our program and helping drive our community initiatives forward. Cheers!
