Author Details:
- Name: Annabel Becerra-Chavez
- Title: Sr. Program Manager
- Company: Instacart
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
We are Instacart, a leading online grocery platform in the U.S. committed to reshaping how people shop for groceries. Instacart's mission is to create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together.
At Instacart, our Community Team plays a crucial role in fostering a vibrant and supportive environment for our shoppers. We strive to build and maintain a cohesive community where our shoppers feel valued, informed, and engaged. This sense of belonging and recognition is integral to our company as we believe in the importance of our shoppers' voices being heard and their contributions celebrated. Together, we work towards a common goal of providing an exceptional service that makes grocery shopping effortless and enjoyable for everyone involved.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
Our Community Team at Instacart plays a pivotal role in supporting the company's goals of retaining and celebrating top shoppers. We achieve this by fostering an inclusive, informative ecosystem for our shoppers. By building and maintaining strong relationships within our community, we ensure that our shoppers feel supported, valued, and connected. This not only enhances their satisfaction and loyalty but also empowers them to provide exceptional service, directly aligning with our company's objective of making grocery shopping effortless and more enjoyable for our customers. Our team fosters a community of support and information sharing between–both between Instacart and shoppers as well as shopper-to-shopper. This connectedness enhances shopper engagement, reduces churn, and increases the overall effectiveness of our service by helping shoppers grow and learn.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
Instacart’s “Shop Talk” community was established in 2018 with the goal of providing shoppers with a place to connect, and for teams at Instacart to interact with shoppers and gather their feedback. There was an opportunity at that time to better understand the needs of our shopper community. Rather than just engaging on social media or asking for shopper feedback via surveys, we wanted to develop a space where internal teams could truly connect with and learn from shoppers. We also wanted a space for shoppers to engage with one another to help build a sense of belonging and camaraderie amongst peers.
Through the years, this platform has effectively bridged the communication gap between shoppers and internal teams, ensuring that their feedback directly influences our operational and product strategies. It has also enabled shoppers to learn from one another. Over time, our aim has been to transform this platform into a vibrant, informative hub where shoppers feel their voices are not only heard but are integral to shaping our community and business strategies.
In 2023, we took a strategic step to be among the first to transition from Khoros Classic to Aurora, Khoros’ latest community platform. Aurora’s simple and user-friendly interface facilitated a seamless upgrade and enabled us to swiftly customize our site and continually update it—an essential feature for our mobile-centric shoppers. This upgrade marked a significant enhancement over Khoros Classic, which, while robust, lacked the agility and ease of quick updates that Aurora offers. Moreover, leveraging Aurora's innovative features like Ideation & Events, their plug-and-play UI, and the enhanced ability to make changes to community settings easily has been transformative. These advancements not only foster a stronger sense of belonging among our community members but also enhance our feedback mechanisms, allowing us to gather and implement shopper insights more efficiently and make tangible impacts on their experiences and contributions.
These strategic enhancements facilitated by the Khoros Aurora platform have not only empowered our community but also bolstered our commitment to making Instacart a responsive and shopper-centric company.
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, our team faced significant challenges with our site, which was then powered by Khoros Classic. Shoppers often found the platform clunky and difficult to navigate, a problem that was becoming a critical barrier to improving both shopper engagement and interaction. This issue largely stemmed from inherent limitations within our team's ability to receive engineering and design support, which significantly delayed our ability to implement essential UI/UX enhancements.
Recognizing the opportunity to enhance both the usability and aesthetics of our platform, we decided to migrate to Khoros' newer Aurora platform, celebrated for its simplified and intuitive user interface. This migration and subsequent overhaul were spearheaded by our internal Community team, which took full advantage of Aurora's advanced, user-friendly capabilities. With this strategic move, we launched a comprehensive redesign of our "Shop Talk" UI/UX, aiming to elevate the overall shopper experience dramatically.
This initiative was incredibly transformative. Post-redesign, we observed a 33% increase in page views and a 5% uplift in page views per visitor. These significant improvements in metrics demonstrated enhanced user interaction and satisfaction, confirming the effectiveness of the new design. Furthermore, the simplification of the platform's navigation and usability did not just enhance the current user experience but was also strategically planned to support scalable enhancements in the future.
As we look forward, we anticipate these changes will yield long-term benefits, such as sustained shopper growth, improved shopper retention, and enhanced integration of shopper feedback into our ongoing platform improvements. These advancements will ensure that the Shop Talk community remains a robust and dynamic platform. This project not only exemplified our commitment to responsive and shopper-centric design but also underscored our dedication to continuously evolving our community platform to meet and anticipate the needs of our shoppers.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
- Cost Efficiency: Aurora’s improved site usability has reduced the need for extensive engineering and design support, leading to cost savings in technical resources
- Improve Shopper Quality: Shoppers ability to find educational content easier can lead to reduce costs associated with operational inefficiencies and customer satisfaction measures
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
- Increased User Engagement: The transition to the Khoros Aurora platform led to a 33% increase in page views and a 5% uplift in page views per visitor, indicating higher engagement and interaction among the community of Instacart shoppers that use the platform.
- Enhanced User Experience: The simplified and intuitive interface of Aurora improved user navigation, resulting in an increase in click-through rates. This improvement likely contributed to better user retention.
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 offered advanced customization capabilities that aligned seamlessly with our brand identity, allowing us to maintain a consistent and recognizable platform experience. Its analytics and reporting features provided precise measurements of community engagement and impact, which were crucial for strategic decision-making. Additionally, the platform’s flexibility enabled quick adaptations to evolving needs, further supported by Khoros's strong customer service and ability to integrate new features at scale. These factors, combined with the innovative tools provided by the Aurora platform, set Khoros apart as an invaluable partner in achieving our community goals.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Working with Khoros has been greatly facilitated by their responsiveness and support. The team’s ability to swiftly escalate issues and present potential solutions has been critical in addressing challenges efficiently. Moreover, the easy-to-use interface and proactive onboarding guidance helped our team transition smoothly to the Aurora platform, empowering us to enhance our community’s functionality and engagement without lengthy delays or resource constraints.