Company: Bosch Sensortec
Company background: Bosch Sensortec is the technology leader in sensing solutions based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and dedicated to the consumer electronics world. Our success in MEMS sensors and solutions is built on a remarkable team of visionaries, strategists, techies, troubleshooters and creators driven by passion, innovation and flexibility. We are passionate about improving people’s lifestyle and well-being through the MEMS technology. We understand users’ needs and customers’ requirements. We are flexible in everything we do to globally support our customers. We make applications possible for smartphones, tablets, wearables, AR/VR, smart homes and the IoT.
Contact: Carolin Baker (Bosch Sensortec) /// Sebastian Weiss (Bosch.IO)
Title: Marketing Specialist /// Digital Business Consultant
Related URLs: https://community.bosch-sensortec.com
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.).
In the last few years, our business has changed. While the smartphone market is characterized by a relatively small number of big players and high volumes, the emerging AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) market is highly differentiated. It consists of a myriad of small and medium-sized businesses as well as start-ups. A wide spectrum of potential customers shape the industry such as low-volume manufacturers, makers, developers and partners. The mindset of our customers has changed as well. They increasingly demand complete solutions instead of single components. Plug-and-play solutions such as development boards and reference designs are increasingly expected by our customers and partners. Makers and developers require tools that are easy to handle and flexible. All along, digital tools and services need to be offered to reach a growing, increasingly diverse target group to offer a positive user experience.
With the growing and increasingly diverse market, the number of customer requests increased as well. Handling the increasing amount of questions via email was not efficient and longer response times resulted in a negative customer experience. Even more important, the exchange was only bilateral, while our vision was to provide a platform to enable an open exchange about projects and ideas among customers, makers and developers to benefit from each other.
In the beginning of 2018, we realized that we have to act and came up with the idea of the Bosch Sensortec Community: an ideation community for customers, partners, developers and makers to learn about our sensing solutions and to accelerate the development of innovative IoT applications.
The Bosch Sensortec Community provides useful information and best practice advice and allows developers to share their experience with others. The community enables us to build a direct contact to our different target groups in order to give them the best possible support and to help them in bringing their solutions to life. With the Bosch Sensortec Community, anyone can be a user, a customer or potential talent.
2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations?
The central project Digital Marketing and Sales (now Bosch.IO) supported us not only with their technical know-how, but we could also profit from their business knowledge. Therefore, we were able to set up a community competence in-house. In a strong Bosch-internal exchange, we tried to find answers to our first usability related questions. What do the users expect from our community and how can we enable the best possible user experience for our community members. With our focus on support, we decided to offer the sections “Knowledge base” and “Forum” first. When all decisions were made, we started to create our layouts in Khoros. Through our work and ideas, we also attracted attention from the Bosch Sensortec Management and after close reviews and a first stage platform, we launched our Bosch Sensortec Community in February 2019.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.
After our launch, we were very happy to see that the support through our community works. We are now having more than 1400 members and over 3700 posts. For the release day of the community, we decided to choose a special occasion and unique ways to communicate our new platform.
At the Embedded World 2019, we had the perfect chance to talk to potential users of our community, get feedback and show them at firsthand what the community has to offer. As a little goodie we also offered giveaways like developer boards, branded apples or energy drinks. The Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany, is the world-leading trade fair for embedded systems with technical experts, makers, developers, students, manufacturers and tech-enthusiasts joining from all over the world. The tradeshow provided the ideal ground to create awareness among our target group and to gain first followers right on site. The feedback during the show was very positive and we got confirmed in our idea that many customers, developers and makers can benefit of the Bosch Sensortec Community.
After less than one year, we could see the success of our community. We noticed that our views are increasing much faster than the posts, which means that a large part of our users find their answers in previous posts. Therefore, they don’t need to ask the same question again that was previously asked by another user. This also improved the user experience. Furthermore, we were happy to see that we could eliminate a flood of emails, which we received before we launched the community.
We also wanted to have a direct as well as personal feedback from our community and potential future members and attended events like exhibitions and hackathons. We wanted to know what they think about the community and which other needs the community should satisfy. One important finding was that our community members are missing a Maker Space, which we are aiming to offer soon. This Maker Space will give our users a platform to showcase their developments with our sensors and to gather feedback from other makers.
For us the community is not just a tool, it is also a way to create a direct contact to our customers and communicate on a personal base. The Bosch Sensortec Community is not just relevant for the users, it’s also a possibility for us as a company to listen to them and to work with their input on our products.
We are not at the end of our journey! We’re ready to take the next steps and are eager to develop our community to enable the users to unfold their full potential in the AIoT market!