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 Base and 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.