Company: Schneider Electric
Company background: Schneider’s purpose is to empower all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability for all. At Schneider, we call this Life Is On.
We believe access to energy and digital is a basic human right. Our generation is facing a tectonic shift in energy transition and industrial revolution catalyzed by accelerated digitization in a more electric world. Electricity is the most efficient and best vector for decarbonization; combined with circular economy approach, we will achieve climate-positive impact as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Our mission is to be your digital partner for Sustainability and Efficiency. We drive digital transformation by integrating world-leading process and energy technologies to realize the full efficiency and sustainability opportunities for your business. We provide end-point to cloud integration connecting products, controls, software and services. We enable lifecycle solutions from design and build to operate and maintain phases through a digital twin. We deliver capabilities to transform from site-to-site to an integrated company management. Our integrated solutions are built with safety, reliability and cybersecurity for your homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure and industries.
We are advocates of open standards and partnership ecosystems to unleash the infinite possibilities of a global, innovative community that is passionate about our shared Meaningful Purpose, Inclusive and Empowered values. We are the most local of global companies; our unmatched proximity to you, enables us to better understand, anticipate and adapt with agility to support your business continuity with high ethical standards in everything we do.
The energy industry is a highly complex and very large ecosystem that is also continuously reinventing itself. Schneider Electric’s core purpose is to create a new digital way to engage with everyone more frequently and openly. We are now spearheading the digital transformation of the energy industry, working to make sure energy is digitized, reliable, safe, and green. Schneider Electric’s goals is to broaden our audience and boost engagement by creating a network that would connect all our key stakeholders and focus on our customers. When we realized that we couldn’t grow our customer support resources to keep pace with the increasing size and complexity of our end markets, we decided to build a Khoros Community.
Contact: Jean-Philippe BONNAFOUX
Title: Global Vice President - Customer Online Communities
Related URLs: https://community.se.com/, https://assets.khoros.com/content/case-studies/Schneider-Electric-Case-Study.pdf?mtime=20200408102812&focal=none&_ga=2.166414974.1767629810.1587738425-2069119364.1585142446
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how?
Schneider Electric Community drives business value in 2 ways:
By empowering customers to solve their business problems while reducing cost-to-serve for Schneider Electric technical support teams. We leverage self serve and light assisted peer to peer support in forums and knowledge bases to achieve this goal.
By delivering a great brand experience through editorial, educational and technical content enabling customers throughout their pre-sales and post-sales journeys. The outcome for our Marketing teams is influence over sales leads and opportunities.
In the early days of our Community, we primarily focused on providing a technical support channel for our customers and agents. We are now extending our mission to extracting customers insights and generating revenue opportunities.
2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved?
Schneider Electric seek to empower all players of our ecosystem and capture our collective knowledge to enable a smooth and satisfactory customer journey. The peer-to-peer and expert support that our Community offers generates a lot of brand engagement from customers and partners. Khoros Community allows us to turn customer needs and questions into business opportunities by accelerating the digital collaboration across our industry.
First, we incubated our Communities within our Schneider Electric Digital division to leverage our technology and technical support resources and bootstrap our initiative. Following our early success and accelerated growth since 2019, we are now sponsored by our Chief Marketing Officer with the intent to foster our brand, extract customers insights and generate revenue opportunities.
We managed to gather momentum and endorsements within our organization by showing clear measurable outcomes – our Community ability to solve customer problems and to influence brand experience. Our early adopters now help spread the word and bring other line of businesses or country organization to our platform, which helps drive consumption and content generation across forums and knowledge bases.
3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible.
In 2022, our 2M Community users consumed 2M solutions enabling up to E28M savings for Schneider: we deflect customer case creation and reduce our technical agent workload. From a customer standpoint, we drive a very direct and simple journey in order to improve our customer experience: it takes a user less than 3 minutes to reach a Community solution from a Google search.
In 2022 as well, we captured 6M minutes of our online users mind share – combined time spent by all Community users viewing, interacting or creating content within our Schneider Electric Community. We also increased the stickiness of our relationship with users by reaching over 100K members in June this year. Through that online sales presence, we estimate that our Sales and Marketing capacities is increased by the equivalent of 550 FTEs.
Khoros has been a great partner enabling this customer value creation by providing a platform easy to use for customers and easy to develop for our technology teams. We also work with our partner Grazitti to constantly improve our user experience and take advantage of the latest features develop by Khoros.
Special Thanks: NA
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