Company: Anaplan
Company background: At Anaplan, our mission is to make all planning for all people a reality. We believe our world is better when we connect communities of people with data to enhance decision-making in dynamic environments. It’s the Connected Planning way.
Contact: Stan Gromer
Title: Technology Manager, Community
Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com/
Kudos Category: All-Ways Connected
1. Tell us about your digital customer experience: When and why did digital customer experience become a focus and priority for your organization and what technology(ies) did you decide to implement to help you, and what problem(s) does it help solve?
In 2017 our Community moved into Lithium/Khoros which is definitely when Community took off for us. Towards the end of last year, we made the strategic decision to rebuild the vast majority of our Community from the ground up, utilizing all we have learned to improve the experience for our users.
The Anaplan Community supports dozens of different programs utilizing many different platforms, impacting our end users, partners, employees, prospects, and students. We see our community as a hub, with many spokes depending on what the user needs, from support and best practices, to training and online events, to ask me anything sessions and groups. It’s many moving parts that we do our best to put into a seamless experience to allow our users to connect in whatever way works best for them.
2. What are the benefits of having an integrated community and social media management platform for your organization? How does it improve your strategy for digital customer engagement?
End users do not care about individual departments, the different platforms, or who is doing the work. When you visit a community, none of this is on that persons mind. Many companies build like this though, putting up walls which can make the user experience challenging. Our goal has been to constantly tear down these barriers, creating a seamless experience that our users can enjoy. It’s a constant battle, but we have accomplished this in many ways:
Integrating BevyLabs user group platform, allowing our groups experience to come together as one experience
Users only need to register in Community
When users join a Group Hub, they are simultaneously put into the Bevy group, similarly when a user wants to leave a group hub, it will remove them from both
Live Events - We have been holding Live events through a combination of Vimeo, video production software, and live streaming it via our Community. We embed the live broadcast and live chat within a Group/Forum, allowing users to interact/watch real-time, while creating content that will live on forever and allow future users to continue to ask questions in the forum
OKTA Single Sign-on - Launched OKTA within our Community - We leverage OKTA externally (not just for employees) - When you register and create your ‘Community Account’ it is actually giving that user access to multiple systems. We also have started to allow companies to bring their own auth - Customers/Partners can have us setup a SAML integration so their users don’t even have to register.
Community
Learning (our training platform)
Bevy (User Groups)
Certain (Event platform)
Salesforce
Influitive (Gamification)
3. What are your digital results? Please provide your business outcomes and results because of your digital customer experience approach in quantifiable metrics (e.g. revenue, Net Promoter Score, cost savings, brand reputation).
We measure results through a variety of ways - From support deflection to NPS/Feedback to trying to understand the influence live events have had on top/bottom line. Our NSP/Feedback scores from the first half to back half have increased by an average by ~5 points.
As an example of how we look to tie these experiences together - When we started hosting live events in 2019, we had to spend time trying to understand how to even measure the value from them - To do this we have looked at existing customers who have attended X events, and then bounced that against their growth/expansions (revenue) over the next year. We also have looked into prospects who have joined our sessions, and if they then become customers down the road. Through this work, we have been able to say we have ‘influenced’ multi-millions of dollars to the top/bottom line.
When looking at the Community Value (Visits * support visits * seeking support found info needed * visits that would have otherwise engaged support * ticket cost) this again comes out into the multi-million dollar range. As we repeat this exercise for all the different programs we host in Community, we're able to continue to show the endless value Community can bring the company.