Company: PTC Inc.
Company background: PTC, INC (also known as Power to Create) is a technology innovation company headquartered in the Seaport District of Boston, Massachusetts. PTC has over 6,000 employees across 80 offices in 30 countries. PTC has a 30- year heritage of innovation, inventing and investing in next generation technologies that industrial companies need to disrupt and avoid disruption. PTC has a unique combination of CAD, PLM, IoT, and AR software delivered on-prem, hybrid, and SaaS, creating a closed loop between the digital and physical worlds to transform how products are engineered, manufactured, and serviced.
Contact: Hope Parker
Title: Customer Success Manager for PTC
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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?
The PTC Community is a peer-to-peer support community which prides itself in being the central location where over 500,000 users of PTC software (CAD, PLM, IoT, and AR technologies) can ask questions and learn from PTC and industry experts. In addition to this main support driven purpose, we also have product idea boards that serve as a collection point for feature and enhancement requests from PTC customers to specific product management teams across the PTC ecosystem. While product managers are seeking trends from market research and through direct feedback mechanisms, the product idea boards provide an additional stream of product input and allow tapping into user expertise. It is the next logical step beyond tool mastery. The product ideas allow users to influence the product direction. With our extensive product portfolio and everchanging demands on product management roles, it has been difficult for PTC product managers to demonstrate responsiveness and follow through on providing status updates as community product ideas were entered or moved along the product lifecycle roadmap.
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?
Some of the challenges facing product managers included 1) a constant influx of new ideas each month creating too many ideas to reasonably react to. There was also 2) a lack of quality ideas. The ideas were submitted on a “free from” which often lacked details necessary to really know what would be helpful and provide most impact
Lastly, the third item hindering our idea process was the ability for product managers to easily navigate the community site and filter ideas to make analysis on what specific features or topics were important. We needed to better improve our UI to help with this process.
Year 2021, approximately 10% of all new conversations on the PTC Community were product ideas which required community moderator support and product manager interactions.
2022 has been a year of transforming our idea process and leveraging Khoros Care with our Khoros Community (Idea) platform to assist in the process.
Here is how we have transformed the idea process over the last year:
1. Partnership with Executive and Community Education on Product Manager Role
We have started an education campaign on what a Product Manager’s role is including leveraging a direct video ( https://community.ptc.com/t5/Welcome-How-To-s/Community-Ideas-and-Product-Managers/m-p/759128#M640 ) to community members from our Executive Vice President of Products, Kevin Wrenn followed up by specific roadmap guidance from our product segment leaders. Partnership with our executives and product leaders have elevated the attention of community product ideas in our PTC ecosystem.
2. More Focused and Quality Ideas
We are requiring search for existing ideas before new idea submission and leveraged the advisory message on all idea templates with resources on what makes an effective idea submission. We now require specific questions to be answered in the idea submission process to ensure more quality ideas (i. e. industry, stakeholder, use case information, or business value information). These questions are tailored specifically for all our diverse product segments which have different needs
3. Community Manger Follow Up using Khoros CARE
When ideas submitted by community members with missing information, the community management team will leverage Khoros CARE to request the additional information to be added by a specific timeframe. Khoros Care allows us to streamline the process in meeting our timeframes with the ability to private message directly from the Khoros Care platform and snooze conversations to allow the member to add the missing information. Khoros Care also makes it easy for keeping track of conversation activity and multiple community team members to follow up on specific ideas and even escalate to the product managers directly if necessary.
4. Community UI Improvement and Enablement for Product Managers
There was an overwhelming backlog of ideas presently in our community database. There were limited product management resources available to analyze and screen ideas that may have not received community support. Through our transparent idea archiving process ( https://community.ptc.com/t5/Welcome-How-To-s/Product-Ideas-Archiving-Policy/m-p/763583#M643 ) we have limited the ideas that need to be reviewed by product managers and have changed the UI to make analysis of ideas easier for the product managers.
Some of the UI changes include changing the label names to align with specific areas of product management responsibilities for easy notification and sorting. With help from Khoros Strategic Services, we have adjusted search to be able to filter ideas by desired label and status combinations which paved the way for some inhouse customizations. Those inhouse customizations include multi-choice filtering, ability to sort on comments, pop up previewing for ideas, and a special panel only viewable by the product team. This special panel provides information on voters including breakdown of voter company domains to better analyze demand across PTC customer base.
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.
The results so far after two quarters: 52% of eligible ideas (those in a transitory status such as new idea, clarification needed, or acknowledged…etc) from backlog have been archived. Freeing up our product managers to focus on more current or ideas with most community support.