Company: Flexera
Company background: Flexera helps organizations inform their IT with total visibility into complex hybrid ecosystems, so they can transform their IT by rightsizing across all platforms, reallocating spend, reducing risk and charting the most effective path to the cloud.
Contact: Austin Grimes
Title: Senior Community Manager
Related URLs: https://community.flexera.com
Kudos Category: Bottom Line Savings Rock Star
1. Tell us how you are implementing Khoros’ digital engagement technologies (e.g. community and/or social media management) to meet your customer engagement/experience goals. Please highlight unique programs or campaigns, technical upgrades and/or API usage to help reach these goals.
To best understand the Flexera Community, it is first essential to understand our community’s mission and vision statements.
- Our mission is to connect people who have questions about Flexera solutions with people who have answers. This is what we strive to do to be successful today.
- Our vision is to position the community as the first place that Flexera’s customers and partners choose to seek information and help. This is where we want to go tomorrow.
With our vision in mind, Flexera’s technical support department is making a critical shift to support our customers and partners by heavily investing in our self-help options for customers. Khoros’ community solution is the catalyst for this shift. We are increasingly investing in our community to improve forum activity, solution rate, knowledgebase activity, and blog activity and to increase the total self-help options available. Flexera also offers customers and partners the ability to engage directly with Flexera technical support through our case portal hosted in the community with integration to Salesforce.
Each of Flexera’s products has a community category composed of a forum, knowledgebase, and at least one blog. In each of these categories, customers and partners can access a variety of self-help options – especially in our FlexNet Manager category, where customers and partners can access a dynamic list of known issues for our product. This list is a custom integration that our community team built to automatically sync data between our Jira instance and the Khoros platform by taking advantage of an API.
The Flexera Community also serves as the access point for various other resources for our customers and partners. Community users can access Flexera’s Learning Center, exhaustive documentation about each of our products, an ideas portal for customer and partner product feedback, a portal for product download and licensing, and much more!
2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change or drive business impact?
Implementing a robust self-help community site for our customers and partners has enabled Flexera to deliver critical information and insights to our users quickly, without the need to waste valuable time calling or emailing our support team. The community has been an essential channel for Flexera in times of need, like when Flexera chronicled our response to the Apache Log4j vulnerability in extensive detail. This post got over 60,000 views from community users and continues to serve as Flexera’s source of truth for how we address any of our products affected by the vulnerability.
In the community, we launched a new super user program called the Flexera Community Champions Program which seeks to empower our community’s most active users. Though we just launched in March of 2022, we already have 7 Champions that continually contribute to the Flexera Community. Champions have helped alleviate the need for continual moderation because we empower them to moderate the community with additional “champion only” rights, like the ability to move posts, lock posts, or accept solutions.
Flexera’s technical support engineers write knowledgebase articles in the community to give customers and partners even more leverage to find solutions for their problems quickly. Support engineers can work directly with our technical writer to simplify articles so all content follows a similar style and is easily consumable by all end-users. Writing new knowledgebase articles empowers not only our customers and partners but also frees up time for our technical support department by deflecting cases with existing knowledge base content.
3. What are your customer care and business results in quantifiable metrics? Include support savings metrics (e.g. cost savings, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, increased agent productivity, optimizing campaigns, increasing conversion rates or CSAT, increase in digital commerce, and efficiencies gained with collaborating, publishing and reporting).
We have adapted the TSIA and Forrester case deflection methodology to be a better fit for our organization. Rather than looking at all unique visitors to the community, we opted to make the formula much more conservative by only factoring in authenticated visits from users that we can prove are customers or partners. We do this through automated role assignments from Salesforce by cross-referencing active entitlements on an account. All other aspects of the formula are unchanged. We calculate case deflection the following way:
Authenticated Visits * Seeking support % * Resolution rate % * Would have opened a case % * Case cost
In the last year alone, we can prove over 1.3 million dollars in savings through case deflection, giving us an overall case deflection of 31%. These gains are enormous for Flexera. They drive home the critical business value that Khoros delivers with the Flexera Community.
We can also look at the huge gains in our solution rate (the rate at which topics receive replies which are marked solutions). Between June 2021 and May 2022, our solution rate averaged at just under 46% – a massive improvement over the previous year’s 36% solution rate. More and more Flexera community users are finding solutions to their questions in our community forums to help further show how the community is a critical resource to Flexera.
Simply put: the Flexera Community, powered by Khoros technology, is a critical pillar of Flexera’s long-term strategy of customer engagement, support, and retention. We continue to see massive cost savings back to the business year after year in the form of thousands of cases deflected and immeasurable time savings for our technical support team. We will continue to double down on our self-help and community strategy in the coming years to further demonstrate the value of community and Khoros to Flexera.