Company: Autodesk
Entry submitted by: Lois Townsend (loisT) Director, Social Media and Community
Community: Autodesk Community (Forums.autodesk.com)
Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction
Autodesk, Inc., is a leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software. Customers across the manufacturing, architecture, building, construction, and media and entertainment industries—including the last 19 Academy Award winners for Best Visual Effects—use Autodesk software to design, visualize, and simulate their ideas before they're ever built or created. From blockbuster visual effects and buildings that create their own energy to electric cars and the batteries that power them, the work of our 3D software customers is everywhere you look.
Since its introduction of AutoCAD software in 1982, Autodesk continues to develop the broadest portfolio of state-of-the-art 3D software for global markets. Through our apps for iPhone, iPad, iPod, and Android, we're also making design technology accessible to professional designers as well as amateur designers, homeowners, students, and casual creators. Whether it's a kid looking to build a new contraption, a seasoned pro sketching out a great new idea, or someone who just wants to amp up their creative output, we're taking technology originally built for movie studios, automakers, and architectural firms, and making it available to anyone who wants to create and share their ideas with the world.
Our 2014 customer satisfaction initiatives
Deliver Autodesk Help: rapid, relevant and networked service, support and learning for every customer while creating a culture of “customer first” engagement and curiosity within the Global Customer Service Organization
The most important customer issue we were looking to solve with our Lithium implementation
Scalability. With a very large portfolio of products (150+), constant flow of acquisitions, emerging space in the consumer market, and increased access, our traditional support and feedback mechanisms no longer match our transformational business goals, nor are they able to keep up with the rapid customer base growth.
Lithium has provided us with an avenue to meet these challenges by providing a true peer-to-peer community space that scales, where customers ask technical and subject matter related questions, share suggestions and answers, support overall product mastery, and collaborate on future product and service enhancement suggestions all in real time. The forums reduce the need for direct one-on-one support and IdeaStations allow for open and transparent customer feedback mechanisms for customer-driven product enhancements.
The Autodesk community is growing at an accelerated pace. In 2014:
- The community redesign completed in late 2013 greatly impacted our customers' ability to help themselves as well as each other; accelerated collaboration and innovation with our products & services; enabled easy content creation, curation and distribution; all the while extending customer relationships each other, and Autodesk as a whole.
- Accepted solutions increased 37%
- The accepted solution to topic ratio increased 13%.
- Community membership increased by 30% to surpass 2 million registered members
- Community Visits increased 34% to 27.3 million annually
- We launched close to 50 new forums, blogs and IdeaStations
- 3,924 new ideas generated represent a 67% increase
- 80,345 new forum conversations were started
- We implemented a training module and highlighted community best practices, driving home a “customer first” principle and saw employee engagement increase 47% over the last 6 months
With the continued growth and clear objectives for creating a customer first experience, a revamped community CSAT survey was launched in August of 2014 with the goal to measure the success and satisfaction of our visitors, dive into the types of problems members are trying to solve, and identify opportunities to provide a better experience. Since then:
- 3,500+ recipients have completed the survey.
- Key customer pain points have been identified, e.g. timeliness to get answers. Resulting Action: an employee outreach pilot program was launched where various community SFDC escalation times have been reduced by 80% to increase our response time for subscription customers.
- CSAT for participants who identified a successful visit averaged 79%.
- Our CHI score has seen a steady increase, and is currently at 775.
In a recent study of AutoCAD users centered on support and learning resources, the ease of finding and relevancy of information for the Autodesk Community exceeded all other resources including direct 1-1 support and in product help.
