Company: PowerSchool
Company background: From the front office to the classroom to the home, PowerSchool helps schools and districts efficiently manage instruction, learning, grading, attendance, assessment, analytics, state reporting, special education, student registration, talent, finance, and HR. Today, we’re proud to be the leading provider of K-12 education application technology, supporting over 45 million students in over 80 countries.
Contact: Jbid Kissel
Title: Director of Community Support
Related URLs: https://help.powerschool.com/
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it in the last year? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.) What is the purpose of your community?
Our community was designed with the entire educational ecosystem in mind, providing help to those who need it from the back office to the classroom. Our administrators, teachers, parents, and students have come to depend on our PowerSchool experts and peer-to-peer interactions for help through our PowerSchool Community. We support over 12,000 districts and more than 45 million students, meaning that ours, needed to be a best-in-class community for District and Student success.
We set out to create one unified platform for all customers to easily access support resources, product updates, an Ideas Portal for enhancement requests, and more. PowerSchool supports over 60+ solutions and products. We continue to add more through acquisitions. This continued growth has made it even more important to have one place where our customers can connect with PowerSchool and other users to get answers to their questions in one centralized place.
We have focused on growth and innovation and have seen our community’s membership and activity increase year over year. This year we added 70,000 new members to our community. We have seen over 50% growth over last year in member logins and close to 40% growth in posts. With growth has come the need to innovate and continually improve the customer experience. With aspirations of a seamless customer journey at the forefront, we set off to redesign of our community and add integrations such as SearchUnify (supported by Graztti) for federated search, a new Case Portal, an Ideas Portal, and a Chatbot, to enhance our customers’ support experience.
As we are approaching our peak back-to-school season, with experience from previous years and with the many innovations and new enhancements we are excited to usher in an even more successful and engaged year for our community.
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?
We began our journey with a handful of our products, providing knowledge base articles, forums, and a case portal. Since our initial launch, our community has grown to include all PowerSchool products, new acquisitions, and much more resources. We have also adjusted to the ever-changing needs of schools and districts, especially over the past year with the COVID-19 pandemic. This, more than ever, reinforced our mission to provide ‘one platform’ for all. This was quite an undertaking with our portfolio of 60+ products, specific needs of each of those products, our various types of users, and support and product documentation spread across several different platforms.
With the continuous support of our Executive Leadership, we established a monthly release cadence to adopt new changes including a site-wide redesign to create a seamless experience, improved searchability and navigation, added new features such as an Ideas Portal, made enhancements to our Case Portal, expanded live agent chat, added a chatbot and more.
We achieved these changes through development, partnership with the Khoros team to customize our features to our customers’ needs and worked with partners recommended by the Khoros team. We updated our Case Portal experience, including a Helpful Resources page to help deflect cases and encourage self-help. We added more fields to our case form to capture more information, which allows our team to troubleshoot with fewer touches, improving our CSAT and resolution times. We brought our Ideas Portal to the Community, creating a unified approach to enhancement request, embedded a new chatbot to provide answers to frequently asked questions, we embarked on a full site redesign to improve navigation, and we are currently implementing federated search with the Grazitti team to improve search outcomes. This, of course, would not have been possible without the partnership and support of our customers. We invited our Community Mentors to, who are our superusers to participate in Beta Testing and customer think-tanks. We incorporated their feedback in every new feature release.
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.
As a direct result of our focus on enhancing the customer experience, we experienced the following outcomes over the past year:
- We added over 70,000 new members to our community over the last year.
- Our community is seeing over a 50% growth over last year in member logins and close to 40% growth in posts.
- We saw 2.4 million unique visitors (14% growth), 12.2 million page views (14% growth), 88,000 solution views (47% growth) this year.
- We saw 4,765 ideas added through our Ideas Portal
- We created over 700 videos over the last year to help improve our knowledge base resources.
- Our case portal usage increased by 160% over last year.
- We also achieved a CSAT of over 97% and have improved resolution times by 45.9%.
- We grew our mentor program from 34 to 70 members since October. With the help of this group, we are seeing customers responding to 50% or more of posts in our most active product forums.
This year has seen exceptional outcomes toward building our ‘One Platform.’ We will continue to focus on growing engagement, especially our Mentors program. We will continue to innovate and incorporate more integrations. We look forward to seeing our community grow as we continue to focus on the customer experience.
