Company: Tealium
Company background: At Tealium, customer data is in our DNA. We have been at the forefront of delivering trusted customer data orchestration solutions to enterprises for over a decade. Tealium was started in 2008 with the promise to provide a better way for companies to collect, unify and leverage their customer data. Our products have pioneered new categories for Tag Management Systems and Customer Data Platforms.
The Customer Data Hub now encompasses tag management, an API hub, a customer data platform, and data management solutions that enable organizations to leverage real-time data for creating insight and building personalized digital experiences across every organizational team, technology, and customer touchpoint.
Contact: Kristen Meren
Title: Senior Community Manager
Related URLs:
Lithy 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.).
The Tealium Learning Center went about a year without a Community Manager back in 2018. While the community was full of current product documentation and even some great product ideas, our fundamental knowledge of our users and how we could better connect and engage them was lacking. Once we brought a dedicated Community Manager back into the mix, we were able to begin expanding upon our already robust documentation with more content and engagement with our customers.
With lots of docs in our TKBs and little user info in hand, we began operating under the motto “get the right information to the right people more quickly”. We wanted the community to become the first stop our users would make to ask questions and get relevant content before they ended up in our Support queue.
Luckily, our Search Term metrics in Community Analytics showed that community members were already having some success finding the right documentation they needed. Building our strategy knowing this, we decided to create more content, and to learn more about our users and what they want to read or engage with while doing so. To get started, we agreed all our campaigns would fall under one of the three fundamental pillars of community:
- Create Killer Content
- Drive Engagement
- Build Internal Advocacy
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?
Once we decided on the pillars for our community, each project we have taken on fits within at least one of the pillars. This helps us assess which initiatives would have the most impact, and also helps us align with the proper people to help us put the pieces in place. Additionally, we hired another Community Manager! We went from no CMs, to two seasoned SaaS CMs so we could act on the following projects:
Create Killer Content
- Created a quarterly newsletter for our community members, with all the top conversations and content from prior months (see Image A)
- Published an ongoing series of TLC Tips, or tips to help users get acquainted with the community and Khoros platform
- Created a blog and began getting internal writers to contribute (one year later, we have our first customer blog post!)
- Continued supplying the great product documentation our users have become accustomed to
Drive Engagement
- Created a series of three onboarding emails for new community users (see Image B)
- Updated Khoros notification emails to match our other communications (see Image C)
- Created a Profile Completion component with the help of Grazitti (thank you Parshant and team!), encouraging users to complete their profile, then badging users when they do so (see Image D)
- Reinvigorated our Experts program with new perks; including added attention, a logo, Expert-only polos, and an upgrade to Group Hubs (see Image E)
- Better utilized Khoros’ escalation feature to reduce minutes to first response for unanswered questions
- Totally revamped our gamification strategy with a fresh set of simple and relatable ranks, as well as new badges to encourage and nurture participation from our users
Build Internal Advocacy
- Our initiatives to create killer content and drive engagement helped us foster internal connections with our Marketing, Customer Success, Education, and Engineering teams
- We now have 11 blog posts from our own Team Tealium employees, with contributions from the four different teams mentioned above
- Engaged our CS team as we would our Experts and they agreed to decrease the time in escalations to Support for unanswered questions
- Hosted custom Lunch ‘n Learn sessions with smaller internal teams to better understand how individual teams could better use the community and its resources
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.
Because we were able to strategically grow toward our goals in engaging our customers and getting them more relevant information faster, we are now able to use the “bones” of what we did for our customers in our internal, employee-only community. Some metrics to highlight what we have done in the community over the past year:
- 6% decrease in minutes to first reply (Jan-April 2019 vs 2020)
- 42% increase in average click rate for search terms (Jan-April 2019 vs 2020)
- 45% increase in questions with answers marked as solutions (Jan-April 2019 vs 2020)
- 55% increase in unique TKB visitors (Jan-April 2019 vs 2020)
- 38% increase in unique community visitors (Jan-April 2019 vs 2020)
- TLC blog had 22 posts and almost 8,000 post views by end of year 2019
- Email campaigns all remain above industry standards:
- Onboarding emails avg open rate is 30%
- Onboarding emails avg click rate is 4%
- Newsletter avg open rate is 25%
- Newsletter avg click rate is 5%
We are beyond excited to continue on this path of connecting with our customers through content and nurturing our Experts. We are in the process of replicating many of the community features in our Employee Portal in Khoros, because of the growth we have seen. There is now buy-in from our executive team to utilize the new Employee blog, add all-company documentation to TKBs, and highlight some of our greatest employees. Hopefully, around this time next year we will be able to show some pretty stellar results on that front of the community as well.
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Image E