Author Details:
- Name: Daniel Menke
- Title: Senior Community and Customer Success Operation Manager
- Company: Alteryx
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Alteryx is the leader in analytics automation. We strive to put analytics at everyones fingertips with a no code platform. I have been a part of the world class Alteryx Community for 7 years. Starting out as a moderator I now lead a robust team of developers, engagements specialists, and program managers who make the Alteryx Community a major asset of our offerings to our customers. Our team provides learning, engagement, and connection with our customers and prospects by keeping to our mission to build a place where people come to connect, engage, and learn from one another to drive meaningful outcomes for individuals, organizations, and society at large. Our values separate us from other Community's as we are not bound by convention and understand our members needs and proactively deliver value- added experiences.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
We support our company goals by creating a world class customer experience that allows our customers to move forward in their life cycle journey with support from peers and the great Alteryx Community. Community is one of the first benefits mentioned when buying our products and has allowed 100s of thousands of users become success with our products and their careers. The Alteryx Community is a key value add and has shown to have great impact on renewals and expansions.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Our Community team implemented two solutions this year to assist our product organization: a Community-hosted Start Here page and an integration with Aha to simplify product feedback implementation.
Our flagship product developers faced a challenge with the existing splash screen in our product—it was an important place for customers to find relevant resources, but their team did not have the development time or visibility into new resources to update the page with fresh content continually. Our solution was to design a custom community “Start Here” page featuring resources from all areas of our Community, with a featured video, a new content section, and tabbed pages with evergreen resources.
Our second solution of note was our integration with the Aha platform. The product management team uses Aha to manage customer ideas for Alteryx’s products. The challenge was that we were already collecting ideas in our boards on the Community, but the feedback loop between systems was not seamless. Now, upon reaching a pre-determined “like” threshold, an idea is sent to Aha, enabling the product team to reply to comments and update statuses from within the Aha platform.
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've recently seen the value of the Start Here page for Community content promotion. Our Alteryx Community podcast, Alter Everything, has seen a stagnation in the listenership, and we’ve been looking for ways to grow the audience. Episode topics vary but often target company awareness, product adoption, and value realization. We began featuring podcast episodes at the top of the Start Here page, and so far, we’ve seen an almost 200% increase in podcast listens for featured episodes compared to non-featured episodes.
Our Aha integration has been a major win behind the scenes for our product team and our customers—here is the list of Community ideas that were integrated into our flagship product’s latest release (Alteryx Designer 24.1):
- Custom Workflow Templates
- Marketplace Add-Ons
- Workflow XML parsing
- Formula functions (3-4 ideas represented)
- Product option in Summarize
- Border resizing
- Disable individual formulas
- PowerPoint Widescreen
- IRG Filter Enhancements (2-3 ideas represented)
- Engine Compatibility Mode option in user settings
- Windows 11 support
- Officially supported tools - Make Columns, Expect Equals
- DCM Migration
- Missing Macros
The product team plans to incorporate at least nine more Community ideas into the next release later this month.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
By leveraging the Khoros framework for the Start Here page, we optimized our business resources, leveraging the Community team’s capacity and filling a gap for the product team. The Start Here page also benefits our customers: it gives our team the ability to feature user-generated content in a new way, delighting our customers and increasing loyalty to our brand.
Page views have continued to climb as more users migrate to the newest version of Designer. Since the go-live of the page in-product, the English version has received over 700K views. This effort has advanced our Alteryx Community vision: to create a leading digital experience to connect and empower analytical-minded people.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Both customer experience improvements discussed contribute to the success of the Alteryx Community. Making users feel seen (via in-product content features) and heard (via ideas implemented) increases their enthusiasm for the platform, which shines through in their willingness to share knowledge and solve problems together. Our universal in-product search (hosted by SearchUnify) also furthers the close relationship between our product and our Community, as Community results and the option to start a discussion show in the search bar in Alteryx Designer.
Our impressive 82% CSAT score highlights our Community as a leading source of customer satisfaction. The quick 35-minute response time in our Designer discussion board is a 3% decrease in time to first response YOY. Our members consistently demonstrate their commitment to helping each other succeed and view the Community as the best place to get help from their peers.
Here are a few recent unsolicited comments from our users:
“The Community is the best part of Alteryx.”
“Alteryx community is the best place to learn cool stuff about Alteryx and to share your learnings as well.”
“The community has been an essential resource to solve problems we encounter when using Alteryx.”
“Love it, this is the best software product community I have ever used over more years than I care to disclose 😊"
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’ customizability allowed for the development of the Start Here page. Quick updates to the featured content section were made possible utilizing custom content. The ease of use of the admin allows our team to be more agile in responding to requests for content features and ensures our customers see fresh and engaging content each month.
The support of international language Communities also contributed to the success of the Start Here page. Our product team set up the multiple Community page embeds so that when a user toggles their preferred language in the product, the Start Here page will pull from the corresponding in-language page. Working with our in-house developer and leaning on the collective expertise of our Khoros’ Atlas Community enabled us to provide seamless integration and support of Product team feedback initiatives. Through a direct integration with the feedback and ticket management platform, Aha, we can directly supply our product team with ideas born on the Community and ensure instantaneous feedback to the Alteryx Community on idea status and next steps. Additionally, we’ve enabled the ability to control the influx of feedback through a like threshold to ensure the most impactful and important ideas are brought directly to the forefront of our Product team’s intake.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
There were three key areas working with Khoros that enabled us to address our challenges:
- Customizability and agility: Khoros' platform allowed for the creation of the custom Start Here page, designed to bring Community resources and content directly to users in-product. The platform enables quick updates and allows us to meet the evolving needs of our product team and customers at scale.
- Seamless integration capabilities: Utilizing the robust integration capabilities enabled us to simplify the process of managing product feedback by automating the transfer of ideas and status updates to the product team.
- Leaning on the collective expertise of the Khoros team and Atlas Community: Along with our internal team’s know-how, we rely on the expert guidance of our Khoros CSM, the robust knowledge libraries in Atlas, and getting peer-to-peer feedback in Atlas discussion forms.