Company: Palo Alto Networks
Company background: Palo Alto Networks is the world’s cybersecurity leader. We innovate to outpace cyberthreats, so organizations can embrace technology with confidence. We provide next-generation cybersecurity to thousands of customers globally, across all sectors. Our best-in-class cybersecurity platforms and services are backed by industry-leading threat intelligence and strengthened by state-of-the-art AI and automation. Whether deploying our products to enable the Zero Trust Enterprise, responding to a security incident, or partnering to deliver better security outcomes through a world-class partner ecosystem, we’re committed to helping ensure each day is safer than the one before. It’s what makes us the cybersecurity partner of choice.
Contact: Cheryl Rasmussen
Title: Community Manager
Related URLs: https://live.paloaltonetworks.com, https://live.paloaltonetworks.com/t5/cloud-ngfw-help-center/ct-p/Cloud_NGFW
Kudos Category: Partners for Life
1. Describe your partnership with Khoros. Tell us about which Khoros teams you partner with (e.g. Strategic Services, Professional Services, Customer Success, etc) and the outcomes you were hoping to drive.
Palo Alto Networks’ LIVEcommunity partnered with Khoros Customer Success to bring in the Khoros Business Value Team for an audit of our community. This included a current state readout and tuneup assessment, customer and internal stakeholder usability interviews, and detailed recommendations focused across Strategy, UX, Technology and Community Admin. We also engaged with the Khoros Professional Services team to develop and execute a 12-month roadmap of improvements for an elevated customer experience. This journey further enhanced our digital initiatives, leading to a community Customer Experience (CX) refresh in April 2021. The end result has been successful in providing our customers with a simplified user experience, enhanced self-service support, and increased engagement.
Here are some screenshots of LIVEcommunity before and after the CX Refresh:
BEFORE
AFTER
We didn’t stop at the new look and functionality provided by the CX refresh. Palo Alto Networks’ LIVEcommunity continued to collaborate with Professional Services and Customer Success teams to strategize, customize and implement new customer-tailored offerings.
Thanks to this partnership between LIVEcommunity and Khoros, we successfully launched a new tier-based digital support model integrated with Care moderation capabilities and workflows (the Cloud NGFW for AWS Help Center). This innovative community-forward customer support flow is a scalable solution that will continue to provide customers with enhanced digital experiences and resources. It streamlines workflows for specific use-cases and service offerings, allowing for public and private messaging capabilities within Khoros Care. It puts self-help resources and peer-to-peer engagement at our customers’ fingertips. This crucial collaboration is in the spirit of providing customers with the most value from their products, and Palo Alto Networks’ mission to protect our digital way of life.
2. How have your Khoros partners helped you shape your strategy and align your people and processes?
Khoros recommendations have been vital in determining our original 12-month strategic roadmap. Below is a list of tangible changes we’ve adopted and outcomes we can pinpoint as the result of Khoros’ strategic guidance.
The LIVEcommunity roadmap aligned people and processes based on Khoros’ recommendations, including to:
- Adopt a training plan for new community team members to successfully onboard
- Create a strategic approach towards incremental community enhancements through FY22 goal planning
- Implement Palo Alto Networks-approved and expert-approved discussion post icons, shown below:
- Build strategies for community event promotional activities
- Introduce an improved and streamlined Content Workflow Automation process for all community users and moderators
- Implement product associations feature to enhance content organization and search optimization (example below)
Building upon those improvements and successes in our digital strategy, the most remarkable success of our continued collaboration with Professional Services is the establishment of the Cloud NGFW for AWS Help Center in March 2022.
This new community-forward service delivery model is a monumental step in aligning our business strategies with real-world support.
3. What successes have you experienced because of your partnership with Khoros? How are you better able to deliver your strategic priorities and deliver value back to your business? Please include metrics if possible.
Under the guidance of Khoros’ Customer Success and Professional Services teams, the CX Refresh vastly improved our homepage experience. LIVEcommunity added several new dynamic components to the homepage, including community and user stats (signs of life), an events calendar, and a trending conversations activity feed.
Our usability was enhanced by:
- Putting Global Search front-and-center
- Adding image-based guided navigation
- Improving wayfinding by surfacing content with fewer clicks
- Enhancing visual representation of data; and a simplified footer
- Removing cumbersome content nesting and unnecessary widgets
- Upgrading the LIVEcommunity codebase by removing unused code
YoY key metrics that illustrate the success of this collaboration include:
- Member entrances increased by 10%
- 15% increase in discussion posts, while overall replies also grew
- Improved active engagement, with a 20% increase in Kudos given
- Increase of gamification, specifically around first-discussion badges awarded
LIVEcommunity’s enhanced experience and capabilities have led to a 15% reduction in web support cases in the past year—equating to more than $18 million in cost savings for Palo Alto Networks.
Adding upon this foundation, we continue to partner with Khoros as we drive towards our innovative intent-based customer support experience, where the community actively addresses common case drivers and allows customers to better self-serve.
