Author Details
- Name: Jason Hill
- Title: Online Community Manager
- Company: Bunnings
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Bunnings is Australia and New Zealand's leading retailer of home improvement and lifestyle products, and a major supplier to project builders, commercial tradespeople and the housing industry.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
Our Bunnings Workshop online community provides inspiration for new home improvement projects and help and support to finish them. Thousands of customers get ideas and advice from our friendly and encouraging community every day. The Bunnings Workshop team includes three resident D.I.Y. experts sharing advice, and a community manager. The community supports our goal to deliver the best customer experience whether in-store or online.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Home improvement projects are challenging for many of our customers. People need ideas and ongoing support. Our research found most households had many unfinished projects and there was a perception that D.I.Y. was difficult. However, it is always inspiring to see how others are transforming their homes, and it's often more powerful to see someone just like you finish a project compared to watching an expert. It's also valuable to get product recommendations and project advice from peers.
On Workshop, many community members share their knowledge and experiences to assist others, while Bunnings team members also share advice to help ensure every question gets answered and thousands of customers get the ideas and advice they need every day.
Bunnings Workshop communityBunnings Workshop community
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 challenge was how to build awareness of the community without spending money on advertising. Our team and our community were sharing helpful advice and inspiring projects on the site every day, but as activity on the site grew our annual member surveys suggested it was also becoming more challenging for the community to find what they needed. We decided to utilise blog and knowledge base functionality and take all the best advice, ideas and projects that community members were sharing and turn them into articles that were more easily findable, accessible, promotable and digestible compared to lengthy forum discussions. We also worked every day to ensure all forum discussions had SEO friendly titles.
This work has led to an enormous jump in organic search traffic to the community and a massive increase in community pageviews. Visits from organic search in the past 12 months were 167% higher year-on-year. Pageviews were also 97% higher year-on-year. Our team does not publish a huge number of articles (441 in the past 12 months) yet these articles are providing wildly popular with the community, representing 25% of all community pageviews in the past 12 months. Our content strategy of taking the best content from discussions and featuring it in articles to hero our members and the best content they are sharing has been very successful.
Bunnings Workshop pageviews since launch
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Our content strategy, focus on improving SEO and our commitment to delivering outstanding customer service on the community has driven enormous community growth in the past 12 months. Over 80% of traffic to the community is now from organic search, and the value of organic traffic to the site in the past 12 months has increased 167% year-on-year. The sales impact of the community has also grown significantly in the past year. Online sales directly from visits from our community was 98% higher year-on-year. This huge growth is despite a reduction in the size of the community team 12 months ago.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Community customer satisfaction is very pleasing. In the past 12 months, our community recorded a higher NPS than all other Bunnings digital channels.
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 Care tool has been important in ensuring that 100% of all D.I.Y. questions asked on the Bunnings Workshop community in the past 12 months were answered and that our NPS continues to grow. Meanwhile, TKB and Blog functionality in the Khoros Communities offering has allowed the Workshop team to be able to quickly and easily take the best content from our discussion boards and turn it into valuable articles for our community members. It is also quick and easy for our team to edit discussion titles to ensure they have SEO-friendly keywords, helping to drive our massive increase in organic search traffic to the community.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Khoros has remained a supportive partner of our community program. Our Khoros customer success manager is particularly proactive and always keen to demonstrate how Khoros tools can be harnessed to help grow the community, improve customer service and deliver on business objectives.