Author Details:
- Name: Christopher Canada
- Title: Community Manager
- Company: Canon USA
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
I have had the privilege of supporting our customers in various capacities throughout my career, ranging from service support to my current role as a Community Manager. Canon U.S.A. Inc., a leading provider of consumer, business and industrial imaging solutions has a rich heritage of innovation and a commitment to excellence for over half a century. I am proud to be a part of the customer service organization, where our primary goals are to learn from our customers so that we can proactively anticipate their needs and adapt to an ever-changing business environment.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
As the Community Manager within the Customer Support division at Canon U.S.A., Inc., my role is integral to supporting our company’s goal of providing best-in-class service and support. By leveraging all available tools, our community consistently delivers solutions to customers precisely when and where they need them. We also actively recognize and celebrate our super users, whose contributions help bring these solutions to the forefront, ensuring that our customers receive exceptional service at every touchpoint.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
The solution involved defining, designing, and implementing a strategy to launch a community super user group. This strategy was deployed across key teams within the Customer Support division, particularly those focused on enhancing customer engagement and support outcomes. The primary use cases included empowering top community contributors to provide peer support, fostering knowledge sharing, and accelerating problem resolution. The challenges this solution aimed to address were the need for more proactive customer support, faster issue resolution, and better engagement with our most active community members. Additionally, this group provided a platform to recognize and connect with users who advocate for our brand, further strengthening our relationship with these key supporters. By creating a super user group, we were able to bring expert-level solutions to the forefront, significantly improving the customer experience.
The charts below illustrate the positive impact of our super user engagement, showing a significant increase in the number of solutions generated per day following the launch of our private group hub. This demonstrates the effectiveness of fostering collaboration among our top contributors and highlights their critical role in driving meaningful solutions for the 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.
In the past year, one of our major wins was successfully addressing a challenge related to increasing customer engagement and contributing to call deflection. Our community super user group played a pivotal role in this effort. The challenge we faced was the need to provide more timely and accurate solutions to customers. By empowering our super users, we created a network of highly knowledgeable individuals who could assist with complex issues, thereby contributing to call deflection and extending the reach of community solutions throughout the organization. The opportunity here was not just about improving support efficiency but also about fostering a more engaged and loyal community. The Customer Support and Community Management teams collaborated closely on this initiative, leveraging the super user group to bridge gaps in coverage and provide peer-to-peer support. This approach allowed us to meet our support goals more effectively and strengthened our relationships with top contributors, who became even more invested in our brand. Overall, the implementation of the super user strategy has been a significant innovation that has enhanced our support model and contributed to our goal of delivering best-in-class service.
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 implementing our community super user group, we achieved significant business outcomes:
- Enhanced Self-Service Tools: The super user group contributed to our portfolio of self-service tools, resulting in an 8% increase in the number of solutions produced each day compared to 2023.
- Increased Community Engagement: The initiative also led to enhanced community engagement, with over 3 million solution views year-to-date in 2024 and a 15% solution-to-topic ratio, reflecting a strong alignment between community contributions and customer needs.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Addressing the challenges with our community super user group led to a key progress outcome:
Positive Influence on Conversions: The increased visibility and relevance of community-driven content positively influenced product conversions. Both organic and formal product mentions in content contributed to higher conversion rates, as customers were more engaged and informed about our offerings.
Additionally, we began capturing acquisition data to better understand customer behavior. This initiative is expected to positively impact community engagement by providing insights that help tailor our content and interactions to meet customer needs more effectively.
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. Its benefits were integral to our success:
- SEO-Optimized Content: The platform’s ability to produce SEO-optimized content significantly enhanced the visibility of our community solutions. This optimization helped drive more organic traffic to our community and knowledge base, increasing the reach and impact of the solutions we provided.
- Easy API Integration: Khoros Communities facilitated seamless API integration, which was key in promoting solutions throughout the customer journey. This integration supported federated search on our company website and allowed for timely content updates to our knowledge base, ensuring that valuable solutions were easily accessible wherever customers interacted with our brand.
In addition to these features, the support and training provided by Khoros were instrumental in maximizing the platform’s potential and ensuring effective implementation of our community strategy.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Working with Khoros enabled us to effectively address our challenges through several key aspects of the experience:
- Tailored Support and Training: Khoros provided comprehensive support and training that was crucial for our team. This guidance helped us fully understand and utilize the platform’s features, allowing us to implement best practices for community management and optimize the use of SEO and API integration capabilities.
- Flexibility and Customization: The flexibility of the Khoros platform allowed us to tailor the community experience to our specific needs. We were able to customize user roles and permissions, which empowered our super users and facilitated more effective collaboration and solution sharing.
- Integration Capabilities: The ease of integrating Khoros with our existing tools and systems was a significant advantage. This seamless integration enabled us to incorporate community solutions into our broader support infrastructure, enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of our self-service tools and knowledge base.
- Data-Driven Insights: The platform’s advanced analytics and reporting tools provided valuable insights into community engagement and content performance. These insights helped us make informed decisions and continuously improve our community strategy, addressing our need for more effective support and engagement solutions.
The analytics & reporting tools help us measure badge performance, rank up performance, solutions to topic ratio and first reply to topic ratio to name a few. This data provides insights on activity & engagement as our badges are designed to reward key behaviors including solutions authored, posts, replies and likes.
Overall, the support, customization options, integration capabilities, and data-driven insights provided by Khoros were instrumental in overcoming our challenges and achieving our community management goals.