Company: Webroot
Entry Submitted by: Catherine Buzzitta Community Manager (cbuzzitta)
Community: Webroot Community (community.webroot.com)
Lithy Categories: Best New Community (Launched after 1 June 2011)
Community Launch Date: 2 February 2012
Webroot is the perfect example of a company that needed a community.
We had a compelling story to tell, a revolutionary product that people wanted to talk about and a loyal army of advocates. Also, customer service and product innovation are at the crux of our business success.
Yet with so many undefined channels of communication, we struggled to have the kind of dialogue we needed to really drive our products forward and to resolve customer issues quickly.
It became clear that Webroot customers needed a place to talk to Webroot employees, ask questions, find answers, suggest ideas for our products, and stay in the loop on security industry news. And so with the help of Lithium’s team and our small project development team, we created the Webroot Community.
RESULTS:
Success! It appears that a Community is exactly what our Webroot fan base wanted!
- After an initial "sneak peek" launch on February 2, 2012 to about 20,000, we gained 30,000 page views in the first five days.
- We launched to our entire customer base on February 15th. In just over a month since our public launch, we had over 525,000 page views and over 190,000 user sessions.
- After one month, we had 770 registered users - 18% being Webroot employees. This metric is a testament to not only our early success in registrations, but also company involvement.
- We have 34 ideas in our Ideas Exchange and all are reviewed bi-monthly with our Product Team. Half of the ideas have already been scheduled to be implemented in the next quarter.
- We have 1493 posts and 681 kudos in our Community - with the most activity being in our 'Mobile for Android' forum. This showed us that our users have a lot of interest and questions about our Android app - which then spurred involvement from our mobile team in the Community.
WHAT LED TO THE SUCCESS?
- The "sneak peek" roll out was huge because our highly technical advocates. They enjoy being a part of our betas, so we leveraged that in the Community as well.
- We featured the community on Webroot’s homepage at the very top of the page, giving it easy accessibility.
- We promoted the Community on our social channels, in our email newsletter, in our product and at events.
- Webroot Employees were appropriately trained and encouraged to participate in the Community.
- We engaged with our superusers early on - PMing them and making them feel important using ranks and roles.
- We sent a friendly email out on behalf of the Community Manager asking for early feedback from select users.
- We created an "intro" video, welcoming users to the Community and explaining how to use it.
- In addition to setting up and customizing the overall architecture of the Community, we also implemented a secure SSL login to remain consistent with our security protocol. (very important to this security-savvy community)
- We continue to evolve our forums to make it easier for users to set up their accounts (e.g. “Helpful Pointers for New Members,” a new internal-use-only employee forum, and a business forum to launch alongside our new business product).
- We used the Community to cross-promote offers and sweepstakes.
In just one month, the Webroot Community developed into a knowledge resource for security-related topics and a rapid-fire response system for customer support issues. In fact, the response was so great we had to bring on additional support team members to remain dedicated to resolving customer issues on the community.
As a result, the correspondence between our support team, moderators, administrators, and users has been nothing short of impressive.
And lastly, don't take OUR word for it.
Hear what the Webroot Community has to say!
- “Any questions or suggestions about your Webroot product, this is the forum to post them. Excellent Forum.”
- “I have to say again Congrats to all of the Webroot teams from Development all the way to Support and now the Community Support Forums keep up the great work!”
- “Thank you to the Webroot support team for all of your efforts! You ALL are the BOMB!”
- “Well done. Keep up!”
- "Nice to see Webroot with its own forum and a very nice once as well..I like the forum options...Love WSA keep up the good work."