Company: Google Cloud
Company background: Google Cloud accelerates every organization’s ability to digitally transform its business. We deliver enterprise-grade solutions that leverage Google’s cutting-edge technology – all on the cleanest cloud in the industry. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted partner to enable growth and solve their most critical business problems.
Contact: Andrew Biernat
Title: Lead, Google Cloud Customer Community
Related URLs: http://www.googlecloudcommunity.com
Kudos Category: Rookie of the Year
1. Describe your company and your organization.
Google Cloud helps millions of organizations empower their employees, serve their customers, and build what’s next for their businesses with innovative technology created in—and for—the cloud. Our products are engineered for security, reliability, and scalability, running the full stack from infrastructure to applications to devices and hardware.
Our teams are on a mission to help customers apply our technologies to create success - and we see Community at the heart of this mission.
When Google was only a few years old, “Ten things we know to be true” was written, with the first truth being, “Focus on the user and all else will follow.” We firmly believe this still holds true, and is the guiding principle for how we build, engage, and support the Google Cloud Community.
As a combined effort across various Google Cloud teams, customers, and partners, the Google Cloud Community provides a trusted home for our users to find answers, share ideas, grow skills, and build meaningful connections with each other and Googlers. From providing support and expert advice, to implementing customer feature ideas, engaging in live meetups and learning challenges, sharing the latest company and product updates, and creating a fun and engaging place to be, we’re all hands on deck to provide the best experience possible for our users.
2. Why did you choose to invest in Khoros and what was your experience before making the switch from a previous solution or investing in new technology.
Google Cloud has experienced fantastic growth in recent years in both our customer base and in the rate at which we deliver new products and features. But the technology alone isn’t enough to help our customers reach their goals - it’s also about providing the resources, skills, and support they need to get there.
We needed a platform and a true partner that could support where Google Cloud is today and in the future - with the ability to grow, adapt, and expand alongside the needs of our business and most importantly, our customers.
Khoros provided the solution we needed. Where our legacy solution previously limited us in our ability to unite disparate community sites, deep dive into granular analytics, streamline moderation, enable single sign-on, organize content, and quickly and continuously make platform improvements based on user feedback, Khoros enables us to do all this and more.
In addition to the capabilities just mentioned, Khoros allows us to customize the look, feel, and functionality of the site to align with the Google Cloud brand and the unique needs of our customers - meaning community is seamlessly integrated into the holistic customer experience. Although there are several other reasons for us choosing Khoros, a final reason to mention is the strategic guidance and recommendations the Khoros team can provide based on their experience in enterprise communities for nearly 20 years.
3. What were your goals when investing in Khoros technology and what successes have you already experienced because of the investment? Were you able to gain traction faster than expected? Please include metrics if possible.
With our investment in Khoros, we set out to completely revamp what existed before into a world-class customer community experience. With this, we had a few primary objectives: 1) unite a number of disparate community sites into one central community hub, 2) increase community membership, engagement, and satisfaction, and 3) grow our Community team to support new initiatives and programs, which were previously inaccessible to us due to limited platform functionality and support.
We can proudly say that in just one year, we’ve successfully migrated three previously separated community sites (Cloud Connect, Apigee, and AppSheet), including 20,000 users, into one. Our membership has grown on average 22.8% month-over-month, growing to a total of 53,700 members (as of May 13, 2022). In terms of engagement, we’ve reached 144,000 average unique monthly active users, including 4,300 average monthly posts, 12,500 total accepted solutions, and more than 6,000 product feature ideas.
The community is set to reach 1 million+ solution views in the first year resulting in significant support cost savings and which is anticipated to grow substantially in year 2.
We’ve launched various new initiatives and areas of the Community to support our customers, including a live Office Hours event series reaching more than 21,000 viewers in its latest session, a formalized process for customers to submit and vote on feature ideas to make Google Workspace solutions even better, an entire sub-community dedicated to the best practices outlined in the Google Cloud Architecture Framework, private spaces for customers under NDA to stay informed and up-to-date with product roadmaps, and much more.
Teams across Google Cloud - including Product, Learning, Developer Relations, Marketing, Customer Success and Support - are thrilled with the new Community platform and programs, and are committed to partnering with us to build a community-led customer experience. With the huge growth and success the Google Cloud Community has achieved so far, we’ve grown our team to more than twice the size to reach even loftier goals we have for the future - all to provide our members with the best experience possible.
Khoros Care has helped us elevate our strategy around time to respond rate and user retention. We are on a mission to make sure customers are getting their questions answered in a timely manner, and how to make sure customers continue to stay involved with the Google Cloud Community.
The ability to create dashboards at the forum level has been a game changer. Our Community Managers rely heavily on the ability to track unanswered questions. Not only do the dashboards provide a streamlined view of unanswered questions, this allows us to quickly surface the unanswered questions to our Support and Product teams so customers can get the answers they need.
We have also created tags in Khoros Care that alerts us when a customer posts for the first time in the community. This has helped us build out a Direct Message strategy to new customers so we can provide them with the tools they need to successfully navigate the community. It has helped with retention so customers return and stay up-to-date on exciting news, events, and programs!