Company: VMware Inc.
Company background: VMware Inc is a 10billion dollar company that provides system software for the datacenter. From inception in 1998, VMware has been focused on virtualization software for the datacenter, originally focusing on OS and the hypervisor, but growing into network, storage and security solutions. VMware employees 18 thousand employees and has a global footprint.
Contact: Eric Nielsen
Title: Sr. Director Social Media & Communities
Related URLs: communities.vmware.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?
VMware launched a community at the formation of the company in the early 2000s to be the primary model for L1 customer support. As the company grew VMware realized the value of influence marketing and the value the community had on the sales process, which is now a significant community objective.
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?
VMware has a executive review process that allocates funding to large infrastructure projects. The 3 billion dollar revenue impact the community effects played a significant role in investing in Khoros and the community platform and the adjacent programs. It is now accepted that a modern software company needs a vibrant community platform, and Khoros is a best of breed solution.
In the last year, we have also re-vamped the community UI to be a first class citizen of VMware's overall web properties. The VMware community destination is now as beautiful as the rest of the .com experience. Newly designed experience for those who have not registered allows them to watch a video highlighting the community benefits. At the same time we have enabled a new logged in experience that allows community members to bookmark their favorite pages and sub-communities. A unique implementation of our community is our use of GroupHub's as joinable sub-communities that we refer to as coffee houses. With improved front pages for the coffee houses, members can join, see and engage with one another to help accelerate solutions for which they have a passion or need to implement.
Our new UI has really brought home the individual coffee houses and their members and allows BU's to assign community resources to each of these areas.
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.
We engage with our community members, and have 200 - 300 new threads per day. Nearly 50% of our customers use the platform on a yearly basis to get answers and share what they have built. This results in a robust environment to help future customers feel good about choosing VMware.
The VMware branding group is extremely happy with our experience and we showcase the new fresh look of communities.vmware.com. At the same time VMware is transitioning to a SaaS solution company and we are learning how to use the community to scale and encourage consumption based sales. The community will play a larger and larger role in enabling consumption of our SaaS products going forward. The new UI has helped re-position VMware as a friendlier easier to consume SaaS company.
Here are some screenshots of the community
Non-logged in Page:
Logged In Page
Coffee House Member Page.
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