Company: SailPoint Technologies
Company background: SailPoint is the leader in identity security for the cloud enterprise, ensuring workers have the right access to do their job – no more, no less.
Contact: Rose Cobb
Title: Community Manager
Related URLs: SailPoint Compass Community
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?
SailPoint was at a pivotal point last year. Not quite a full year into our launch with Khoros we noticed some significant challenges. Registration errors were the most common, the SalesForce connector that was in place to handle registration, customer contact record creation and authorization was hard coded to specific SKUS that were outdated. Issues were compounded because the connector could not delineate who was a customer, partner, or prospect. What it meant was that most users who self-registered were usually provisioned incorrectly.
We also struggled with providing assets to customers through the community as well as successfully integrating a case portal. Communities can drive adoption, deliver references, foster advocates, and deflect cases. However technical issues will impede those returns. In our case, we were mired in migration issues and connectors that we struggled to find value with.
What to do? You know that saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none”? That also applies to business tools. Last year we could choose to maintain the status quo which would continue to force the platform to fulfill requirements that it was not designed for, or we could take a step back and re-evaluate. We decided to do the latter. We looked at tickets, survey responses, we listened to our training team and Customer Success Managers, and that guided us into optimizing our business tools first and then seeing what we could re-integrate over time.
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?
First, we set some core goals. We knew we wanted our community to be place for users to troubleshoot and discuss support related topics in the forum and wiki. We wanted to utilize blogs and user groups to help customers connect and thrive. Our site would also continue to host enriching documentation, as well as software, and deployed auxiliary components. Finally, the community would be a starting point into SailPoint’s ecosystem of resources like a fully optimized support portal, ideation and more.
Here is what we needed to solve:
- Case Portal issues – lack of functionality because of the integration
- Downloads – Khoros does not support large file attachments, organizations blocked applications like Box.
- Registration – Most tickets were from failed registration and incorrect user role provisioning.
- UX/UI – Overall design was outdated, not user friendly and redundant code was still lingering in the background on pages.
Once the goals were set, we developed an ambitious project plan. Concurrently the Support team was underway with decoupling the case portal connector from the community. This would allow customers to take full advantage of our support platform, and not be limited by what was available through the connector.
A developer was hired early last year to handle community updates. We started with some basic UI/UX improvements, just to bring the site up to our brand’s guidelines. He also worked on accessibility issues and cleaning up the excessive code that was brought over due to the migration. Redundant tags and in some cases, bad code, was removed from the site. This improved overall SEO and page performance.
Our internal IT team was tapped to help us solve the issue of how to host large file downloads in the community. Khoros has a max file size of 75 MB, and we couldn’t use a file share service like Box because most organizations block the usage of those types of applications. We were able to get around this limitation by hosting the files on a server with domain aliasing and including that link in our posts and custom pages to provide a seamless download experience for our users.
Domain aliasing on another server makes it easier to host large files, while still allowing users to download them from the community.
Then we kicked off a very thorough requirements gathering process, and spent weeks discussing how we could re-architect the SalesForce connector. This was an absolute need for the community. Most of our cases and customer feedback was around the issue of registration and being provisioned for the wrong access. Because of the volume of customers, we could not revert; we couldn’t just remove the connector entirely. Through SalesForce process builder, SnapLogic and a Professional Services engagement we were able to successfully implement a new connector (that was no longer hardcoded to SKUs!) which has significantly decreased the number of registration and access issue tickets.
We solved for the customer or partner issue by adding a dropdown to our registration form.
The final piece to accomplishing our goals and level setting the community was to purchase developer training so we could elevate our UX/UI. This also gives our team greater insight and control so that we can continue to fully optimize the community for all users.
The new menu is not tied to the Community Structure! This allows our team to completely customize the navigation experience.
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.
- Customers reported positive feedback after decoupling the Zendesk connector so that they could have full support portal functionality.
- Registration and access issue tickets fell by approximately 80%. Our internal teams, like our CSMs, are ecstatic that they no longer hear from customers about how challenging it was to register and access the community.
- Software download tickets fell by approximately 90%.
- Our investment in training led to a new menu design and more customizations. We have completed 153 change request tickets from May 2020 to May 2021!
TL;DR: The SailPoint community has been around for years, but last year was a crucial time for SailPoint and Khoros. Even though we migrated from the old platform in 2019, the new community was not fully realized, and the company still struggled to find value. The shift last year focused on decoupling some of the components and focusing on what Khoros could do well. We also invested in re-writing the SalesForce connector to handle authentication and authorization, as well as developer training to improve the overall UX/UI.