Company: Fortinet
Company background: Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. Fortinet empowers its customers with intelligent, seamless protection across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network—today and into the future. Only the Fortinet Security Fabric architecture can deliver security without compromise to address the most critical security challenges, whether in networked, application, cloud, or mobile environments. Fortinet ranks number one in the most security appliances shipped worldwide and more than 500,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses.
Contact: Hannah Tiffin
Title: Project (Client Services) Manager
Related URLs: https://community.fortinet.com
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community? Do you use your community for support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.? Has the community charter evolved in any way since launch?
Fortinet noticed a trend of increasing support tickets and repetitive L1 queries. Users were juggling between repositories to find pertinent information. Keeping customer-centricity and support success at the core, Fortinet decided to build a dedicated customer Community with federated search. After careful evaluation, the management chose Khoros and SearchUnify for the job. The main reason? Khoros is an enterprise-grade platform that offers the scalability to handle the current and future needs of the Fortinet user base—customers, and employees, including support and sales teams. Also, it blends well with SearchUnify for a unified view of all helpful content. Leveraging the power of the combination, Fortinet witnessed an immediate growth in its Community user base and observed that the users continue to adopt the Community as the ‘go-to’ platform for support, over the previous platform.
2. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen. Did you get executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was your process to gain this buy-in? How have you achieved cross functional support, added stake-holders and increased organizational adoption?
Launching a new Community has been instrumental in changing the way we interact with our Fortinet customers. As more customers wish to self-serve, we needed a more robust platform that supported this type of engagement model. In launching with Khoros and SearchUnify it gave us the opportunity to present a very rich platform to support those who wish to self-serve. As change in any organization can prove a challenge, a compelling case was presented with a data-driven approach. This was to ensure that executive buy-in was achieved to help drive change throughout the organization. It was found that a lot of tickets could’ve been solved by the self-help content, however, the lack of search engines was luring the customers away. The Khoros workshop helped to showcase the wealth of opportunities the Community could achieve. On top of that, integrating SearchUnify’s search bar and looking at analytical reports from its insights engine would further help with decision-making. The stakeholders were then convinced and able to see the value that the new Community would bring.
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.
With the brand-new Community in place, Fortinet witnessed an increase in customer interactions on the Community and over 10 million page views in November 2021-May 2022-less than 6 months since launch. Granular reports like Searches with No Results and Content Gap Analysis helped ingrain and monitor an effective culture of creating and sharing knowledge. In fact, Fortinet has seen significant contributions to self-serve resources with 10% growth in the size of KBs since launch.
Moreover, in less than 6 months, immediate results were seen in that nearly 50% of the time, users were able to find the results they were looking for on the first search.
In December 2021, less than 30 days after launch, a security incident occurred at Fortinet requiring an urgent release of a KB and forum post; this received over 30,000 views in 4 days-helping ensure that customers were able to self-solve and have the information they required without raising a support ticket; this firmly solidified the power of the platform.
Fortinet's support leaders are determined to scale Community engagement, curtail escalations, and ride the crest to continued Community success with Khoros and SearchUnify in 2022 and beyond!
