Author Details:
- Name: David Raynor
- Title: Senior Community Manager
- Company: Sisense
Tell us about you, your company, and your team?
I joined Sisense as a Technical Account Manager in November 2022, started with the Community team in December 2023 as a Developer Liaison, and took over as Community Manager in January 2024.
Sisense is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform that helps businesses gather, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources. It's designed to help businesses make informed decisions by providing a user-friendly interface for data exploration and reporting.
We are a two-person Community team. Jackie Cordell and I handle the day-to-day operations of the community, identify and execute community projects and events, and report on community metrics.
How does your role and your team support your company and its goals?
The Sisense Community strives to empower members to find solutions through continued learning and collaboration. We showcase best practices, interesting use cases, and top users. The Sisense Community helps users to implement Sisense more effectively and efficiently. That supports Sisense's goals of customer retention and expansion.
Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve?
The Sisense Community was underperforming, with low participation and shrinking growth.
Internal teams were not confident in the community experience and hesitated to recommend it to their customers. Customer retention and growth were suffering as customers were not able to quickly find answers for their questions and solve problems.
Community is an integral part of improving those metrics.
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.
When I started the community, we were focused on engaging directly with the community to rebuild trust with our users. Responding to posts in a timely and closing the loop were the first actions we took to prove that we are dedicated to creating an active and engaged forum. The result is that engagement is up across the board, growing by 100% - 300% YoY.
Internal engagement has also increased, with technical resources participating in the community by answering forum posts, creating Knowledge Base articles, and promoting the community to their customers.
Sisense Community Front PageSisense Community Customer StoriesSisense Community Help and How-To
What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
Customer retention and revenue growth are lagging indicators of Community engagement, so we have not been able to quantify the ROI yet. However, as Community engagement continues to grow we expect to see reduced churn and increased expansion.
What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change.
We focus on user engagement. We want to see our current users engaging more, asking questions, providing solutions, viewing KB docs and Blogs, and generally being more active and engaged. As we create ways to tie community engagement with increased customer lifetime value, reduced support costs, and reduced churn, those will become important ROI markers for us.
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?
Our Customer Success team has been very engaged and helpful in moving us toward our goals. Their support team has been quick to respond to tickets, and I appreciate the Khoros Forums also.
What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge?
The ability to send an email escalation when a post has not been responded to has been very helpful, as has the assistance of the CS team to help us monitor our KPIs.
