Company: Cisco Meraki
Company background: Cisco Meraki’s mission is to simplify technology so passionate people can focus on their mission. Global clients—including startups, Fortune 500s, nonprofits, airports, hospitals, schools, and many others—rely on our powerful cloud-managed networking solutions for seamless connection. Cisco Meraki helps the world spend less time on technology and more on what matters. Our current portfolio, extensible with open APIs, includes wireless, cellular gateways, switching, security, SD-WAN, intelligent network insights, endpoint management, and smart cameras. Today, Meraki has over two million active networks and over 5.7 million devices online around the world.
Contact: Caroline Sekar
Title: Community Consultant
Related URLs: https://community.meraki.com
Lithy category: Small but Mighty
1. Describe your company and your organization.
Company
Cisco Meraki’s mission is to simplify technology so passionate people can focus on their mission. Global clients—including startups, Fortune 500s, nonprofits, airports, hospitals, schools, and many others—rely on our powerful cloud-managed networking solutions for seamless connection.
Our current portfolio, extensible with open APIs, includes wireless, cellular gateways, switching, security, SD-WAN, intelligent network insights, endpoint management, and smart cameras.
Today, Meraki has over two million active networks and over 5.7 million devices online around the world.
Organization
The Meraki Community team sits within Meraki’s Training & Evangelism department (aka “T&E”). The department develops and delivers training programs to Meraki customers and partners worldwide, with a goal of increasing market adoption of Meraki.
T&E programs include CMNA, an all-day in-person training for partners, ECMS1, a virtually-delivered all-day training for networking practitioners, and, of course, the Meraki Community.
Meraki's Training & Evangelism Department
Team
The Meraki Community team is a 1.25-woman show. Meredith Whelan is the community program manager and Caroline Sekar is a 25%-time consultant.
Meredith (L) and Caroline (R) with two of our Community All-Stars (members of our VIP program)
2. Why did you choose to invest in Khoros?
We were looking for a solution that could provide continuous engagement and learning opportunities for Meraki customers and partners to complement our discrete training programs.
3. How does Khoros help you deliver results beyond what a team your size normally can do?
We’d call our use of Khoros both “Scrappy” and “Fun”. The platform enables us to accomplish a wide variety of objectives and to have fun while we’re at it.
Scrappy
Because the platform is very flexible, we have been able to use it in a wide variety of ways to deliver value to our customers, partners, and stakeholders.
- Public technical forums. The first and most obvious use of Khoros! We estimate that these forums deflect thousands of support cases per month.
- Private categories through which our product team runs beta programs for new products and features. Beta participants can read documentation and post about their experiences with the new product, creating a central place for all input about the beta program.
- Our Learning Hub presents all of our training programs in a clear and succinct way, tailored to the audience (customer, partner, employee).
- The new Project Gallery allows our members to show off their use of Meraki technology in a social-media-friendly format. We repurposed the “Contests” interaction style for this.
- Our Feature Announcements blog which describes the latest updates to Meraki’s products. This is integrated into the Meraki dashboard as well.
We have been able to create all of these things as a team of 1.25 with minimal design and development assistance.
Fun
In keeping with Meraki’s history as a somewhat irreverent startup, we put a lot of effort into creating a fun environment for our community members.
Campaigns such as our Easter Egg Scavenger Hunt, our annual Gnome in the Home competition, and our Talk Like a Pirate Day contest keep our community members coming back and feeling positive about Meraki and our community.
Meraki Gnomes dressed up for Talk Like A Pirate Day
In summary…
Khoros has enabled our little team to become increasingly integrated into how Meraki does business, and - even more importantly - to create an invaluable, ever-increasing knowledge base for current and future Meraki customers and partners.