Qlik

Author Details:

• Name: Suzanne Macaluso
• Title: Senior Advisor, Digital Platforms
• Company: Qlik

 

Tell us about you, your company, and your team? 

Qlik® helps you use your data to solve problems, meet new objectives, and address critical business needs. My team is responsible for our Community, both front and and back end. We oversee every aspect of the platform and the overall Community program.

 

How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? 

Our role is pivotal in supporting the overall Community program, strategy, and governance, aligning with the company's strategic objectives from the front end to the back end. This alignment is crucial as it ensures our Community is a healthy, positive environment where our members can feel comfortable collaborating and brainstorming. We work across the entire organization, ensuring we are helping the business meet its needs. We are the heartbeat of Qlik.

 

Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? 

Our Community platform was initially conceived with a clear goal in mind: create a space where our customers, partners, students, and prospects could come to ask questions, find answers, and share knowledge anytime, from anywhere. This inclusive platform, open to all, also aimed to ensure our employees were actively involved, demonstrating our commitment, transparency, and the value we place on our members. It's the only platform where our members can reach us 24x7x365.

Our use case started with an initiative to support users in a one-to-many service model. The Community was instrumental in allowing our members to ask questions and facilitate answers through their peers. This enabled users to solve problems before opening a support ticket and served to educate and unite members using our solutions. We knew it could be so much more! The Community soon played a crucial role in promoting Qlik events, helping Marketing teams increase event attendance. Product managers came to us looking for a collaborative space to blog about upcoming software releases and technical information and to share information about new features and functionality. They soon realized they could help answer questions and learn from our customers and partners. Customer Success teams wanted to know if their customers were in the Community and were asking us to give demonstrations on all the aspects available in the Community to get their customers more engaged. Our Community soon became the heartbeat of Qlik, where anyone can come and collaborate on all things Qlik. They could even share the Apps they built.

This year, we also learned that because of the platform's flexibility and our structure with stakeholders, it doesn’t matter where the team managing the Community lives within an organization. Our team recently moved from Marketing to IT, and the platform demonstrated how easily adaptable it was.

 

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. 

One of our challenges was a significant increase in spam infiltrating our Community. Our goal was to prevent our members from encountering spam and having to report it. We worked closely with the Khoros team, who played a crucial role in enhancing the spam filter and educating us about the platform's capabilities, of which we were unaware. This collaboration with the Khoros moderation team and our TAM was instrumental in effectively mitigating the spam issue.

• Knowledge Sharing: Providing a platform for users to find answers and share experiences, which reduced the need for direct support.
• Engagement: Our Community encourages internal and external members to participate, fostering a strong sense of belonging and transparency. This inclusivity ensures everyone feels informed and part of the larger Qlik Solutions family.
• Event Participation: Increasing attendance at Qlik events through targeted promotion within the Community.
• Customer Feedback: Facilitating direct communication between Product Managers and users, allowing for real-time feedback and insights.

 

What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.

• Increased Engagement: 26% year-over-year growth in community engagement.
• Cost Savings: 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection.
• Membership Growth: A 32% increase in new members, indicating successful outreach and onboarding strategies.
• Qlik Events: 4.5% increase in event registrations.
• Blog Views: 66K average monthly blog views.
• Spam mitigation: Significant improvement following adjustments made to the platform.

 

Growth and engagementEvent promotion averageSpam mitigation

 

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 above led to several positive outcomes, reinforcing our confidence in the Khoros Communities solution and its ability to deliver on our goals.

1. Increased Engagement
   • 26% Year-over-Year Growth: This consistent growth in engagement indicates that users find value in the community, leading to more interactions and discussions. 
2. Membership Growth
   • 32% Increase in New Members: The community's openness and active promotion attracted more users, expanding the base of participants who can contribute and benefit from shared knowledge. 
3. Reduced Support Tickets
   • Proactive Problem Solving: The community reduced the volume of direct support inquiries by enabling users to find answers through peer support, freeing up resources for more complex issues. 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection. 
4. Enhanced Event Attendance
   • 4.5% Increase in Registrations: Promoting Qlik events through the community significantly boosted participation, leading to more successful events and greater visibility for Qlik solutions. 
5. Improved Customer Insights
   • Feedback Loop with Product Management: The collaborative space allowed product managers to receive real-time user feedback and insights, leading to better-informed product development and feature enhancements.
6. Stronger Customer Relationships
   • Increased Customer Engagement: Customer Success teams demonstrated Community benefits to clients, fostering stronger relationships and increasing customer satisfaction.
7. Employee Involvement
   • Engaged Workforce: Employee participation in the Community enhanced transparency and showed commitment to user success, building trust and a sense of community.
     
     

 

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 played a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals through several differentiating features and capabilities:

1. User-Friendly Interface
   • The intuitive design made it easy for users to navigate and engage with content, encouraging participation and reducing barriers to entry.
2. Robust Knowledge Management
   • Khoros provided tools for organizing and categorizing content, making it easy for users to find relevant information and solutions quickly.
3. Engagement Tools
   • Features like gamification, badges, and leaderboards motivated users to participate actively and contribute to discussions, fostering a sense of community.
4. Integration Capabilities
   • Seamless integration of other platforms allowed for a unified experience, facilitating user engagement across different touchpoints.
5. Analytics and Insights
   • Built-in analytics provided valuable data on user engagement, content performance, and community health, enabling us to adapt strategies based on real-time feedback.
6. Gamification
   • By utilizing the “Top Kudoed Posts” component time range under “My Profile” -> “Preferences” -> “Kudos,” we created a dynamic user interface on the Community homepage. The dynamic leaderboard component lets users effortlessly view the top engaged users within their selected time frame, motivating them to strive for peak performance across various ranges. 

 

Enabling Factors

1. Strong Community Management
   • Dedicated community moderators ensured that discussions were moderated, questions were answered, and content was continually refreshed and promoted.
2. Cross-Departmental Collaboration
   • Involvement from Marketing, Product Management, R&D, Support, and Customer Success teams ensured that community initiatives aligned with broader company goals.
3. Feedback Loops
   • Regularly soliciting user feedback helped refine community strategies and features, ensuring the platform evolved to meet the needs of our members.
4. Promotional Campaigns
   • Targeted campaigns to promote Community participation and upcoming events helped drive traffic and engagement within the platform.

 

The combination of Khoros platform-tailored features and our team's strategic efforts created an ecosystem that supported knowledge sharing and user engagement. By leveraging these strengths, we continue to improve our already thriving Community, which enhanced our members' overall experience and reinforced their loyalty to Qlik Solutions.

 

What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? 

Our experience with Khoros has given us a strong understanding of irrelevant content in our community. Collaborating with our Khoros moderation team and our TAM has been crucial in addressing our needs and challenges. They offered proactive guidance and advice, helping us navigate decisions and implement changes on the platform. Through discussions about their experiences with other communities, we gained valuable insights and best practices for managing spam and understanding its impact on moderation time. The reports provided by our Khoros team and TAM painted a clear picture that allowed us to refine our engagement model effectively. Our familiarity with Khoros’ tools for tracking engagement trends and customizing content has empowered us to tackle this challenge, keeping our users motivated and connected.