Company: SAP Concur
Company background: SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense and invoice management solutions.
Contact: Beshoy Maoud and Severine Egerton
Title: Site Manager and Project Manager
Related URLs: https://community.concur.com/
Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On
1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis?
Due to the COVID crisis SAP Concur major in-person customer events had to become virtual events. We leveraged the community to promote these virtual events via custom banners and introduced the Announcements component to highlight dedicated blog posts, see Fig. 1. To increase engagement, we enabled and customized the Polls component as well as the Forum Threaded Replies feature to allow for easy readability and scannability in long forum threads and for Ask Me Anything sessions.
We also migrated our Legacy Groups to Group Hubs to offer a richer experience to our group members by having dedicated forums and blogs under one location and to let them connect more easily with other members in the same industry or country. Once the migration was complete, we started expanding our group program and launched several new groups including a dedicated group to support our virtual events to replace in-person networking, see Fig. 2.
2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?
The addition of several new groups on our community prompted us to re-think the way we grant members access to groups. To reduce the burden of inviting and allowing new members to a group, we decided to automate the process to free up the time of our site manager and our group owners. This also positively improved our members' experience by providing them quicker access into their groups.
Our solution relies on connecting Khoros to our CRM to match members' industry and country information, then a Role is assigned which in turn offers our community members a tailored experience on the site including direct admission to a dedicated group when members next sign in, see Fig. 3 and Fig. 4.
3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?
As our community carries on growing it is important for our organization to focus on automation. The most critical indicator has been our ability to free up internal resources from having to perform mundane tasks to let them focus on engaging more with our customers. Posts growth rate improved by 10% MoM, and overall the community was 31% more responsive in 2020 over 2019 even with the loss of one of our community managers.
