Author Details:
- Name: K Lundstrum
- Title: Community Manager
- Company: Instructure
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
Instructure is the innovative education technology company behind Canvas, the world’s most popular learning management system and developing Ed-cosystem. As a company, we seek to elevate student success, amplify the power of teaching, and inspire everyone to learn together. Our Community team is at the heart of it all, driving vision and strategy in content, engagement, and innovation within the Instructure Community, a Khoros community. We’re dedicated to ensuring our users and over 2.2 million Community members have access to a wealth of knowledge, self-support resources, and peer collaboration. Through the Community, we empower educators, administrators, and students to discover solutions, share best practices, and access valuable resources—all while fostering a vibrant environment for learning and growth.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
Our role is at the core of Instructure’s mission—empowering users to be more self-sufficient and providing scalable, effective customer support through our online community. By fostering peer-to-peer problem solving and collaborating with internal teams to share best practices, we’re committed to enhancing teaching and learning. Our efforts drive impact at scale, ensuring that millions of users can quickly find the solutions they need, reducing reliance on traditional support channels, and creating a more efficient, dynamic support experience across the entire Instructure Ed-cosystem!
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
The Instructure Community, one of the first of its kind and now nearing its 15th year, has grown and evolved across three platforms while staying true to its inception: to capture the energy, excitement, and learning of InstructureCon, our annual conference, and keep it alive year-round online—it's the ultimate perpetual unconference! Built for our diverse user base of educators, administrators, IT professionals, and students, the Community offers quick, easy access to a wealth of resources, tips, and troubleshooting. It's more than just support; it’s a vibrant, multi-faceted self-service hub where users can tap into content created by both Instructure employees and their peers.
Today, powered by Khoros, the Community continues to thrive as a scalable solution, enabling our 2.2 million members and millions more visitors to find answers fast. The collaborative spirit of peer-to-peer support and self-service empowers users to solve problems on their own, while also reducing the demand on traditional support channels. In fact, we’ve seen a clear link between increased page views and a decreased need for direct Support assistance.
The impact of this self-service success is huge! At scale, it means significant case avoidance for our first-line support agents, saving the company money every quarter while freeing up our teams to tackle more complex, time-consuming cases. It’s a win-win that fuels both efficiency and innovation for everyone involved!
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.
This year, the challenge we set out to solve was scaling the Instructure Community to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth through acquisitions and new product development. As Instructure’s Ed-cosystem continues to expand, so does the need for consistent, efficient, and scalable support across our entire product suite. With each new product added to the portfolio, the demand for quick access to resources, self-service tools, and peer collaboration grows—making the role of the Community more critical than ever.
To meet this challenge, we focused on applying the proven strategies that have made the Instructure Community so successful to the broader Ed-cosystem. Our goal was simple: extend the Community's power and reach to support every corner of Instructure’s expanding portfolio. By integrating new products and user groups into the existing Community framework, we could provide a unified, scalable self-service platform that empowers users to find solutions across the entire product line, reducing strain on traditional support channels.
While we’re beginning to expand the impact of the Community, the journey is just getting started. Customers are gradually discovering the wealth of resources available, and engagement is steadily building. As users explore and start tapping into the peer-to-peer support and self-service options, we expect the benefits to unfold over time. The true scale of savings through case avoidance will become more apparent as more members engage with the platform. By applying the same proven strategies that made Canvas LMS successful, we’re laying the foundation for a future where the Community plays a pivotal role in reducing support demands and creating a scalable experience across all of Instructure’s products.
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Thanks to our commitment to fostering an environment of innovation, we’ve experienced an incredible 3% membership growth quarter over quarter! This growth isn’t just numbers on a page; it’s a testament to the needs this Community meets. New members are joining us, excited to be part of a vibrant ecosystem that prioritizes learning, advocacy, and thought leadership. We’re not just a community; we’re a movement!
Our strategy to create “connection voracity” has truly paid off. We’re thrilled to report that 69% of our visitors found exactly what they were looking for! This means our resources are hitting the mark, empowering our users to engage deeply and meaningfully with our content. And it doesn’t stop there—an astounding 87% of our users rated our guides as helpful. This is more than just a number; it reflects our dedication to providing valuable insights that empower our users to thrive. When our members feel supported and informed, they become our greatest advocates, spreading the word about the invaluable solutions Instructure provides, and resources available within our community!
We’ve become the ultimate source for self-enablement and self-support for every Instructure Ed-cosystem user. The results speak volumes: a staggering 95% accepted solution rate in our Q&A sessions, with a remarkable 72% solution view rate! Users are not just seeking help; they are finding it! This high level of engagement shows that our community is a reliable hub where answers are at their fingertips. Plus, with an impressive 26:1 unique visitors-to-support case ratio, we’re efficiently serving our users while deflecting an average of 1 million support tickets quarterly. This operational efficiency means we can focus even more on enhancing user experiences.
When we look at these outcomes, it’s clear that addressing our strategic challenges has driven significant value. We’re not just keeping up; we’re leading the way! The synergy between our innovative offerings, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency creates a powerful narrative of success. We’re building a legacy that will resonate for years to come—a community that champions self-empowerment, fosters meaningful connections, and continually sets the standard for excellence.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Please see the previous question.
By fostering self-service through our Khoros Community, we’ve consistently seen significant value in key metrics. Over the past year, our contact deflection rate held steady at 26 visits to 1 support case, and we estimate that that deflects an average 1 million quarterly support tickets. Additionally, the solution rate within the Community has averaged over 95%, as more users are solving problems through peer-to-peer discussions.
These outcomes highlight the success of our strategy in leveraging self-service principles to improve overall customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and increase engagement—scalable community success.
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 platform is a powerhouse that supercharges our self-support initiatives! With its advanced features—like custom discussion filters, seamless knowledge base integration, and robust analytics tracking—we’re not just making strides; we’re leaping toward success! These incredible tools empower us to cultivate a vibrant community that thrives on member contributions while giving us the data-driven insights we need to continually refine and elevate our approach.
But that’s not all! The ability to personalize user experiences, automate content moderation, and segment content for specific audiences has been an absolute game-changer, driving scalable solutions that make our community truly shine! And let’s talk about integration—thanks to Khoros seamlessly connecting with Instructure’s existing tools and resources, we’ve created an effortless user experience that encourages enthusiastic participation and engagement from our members like never before!
Together, we’re not just building a community; we’re igniting a movement where every member feels empowered, valued, and excited to contribute.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
Please see the previous question.
The combination of an intuitive platform, robust analytics, and the ability to easily scale our initiatives has positioned us to continuously evolve the Instructure Community, delivering immediate and long-term value to our users and our business as we optimize content delivery, create more targeted resources, and improve the overall self-service experience.