Company: SuccessFactors
Entry submitted by: Danielle Beeken (dbeeken) Global Director, Customer Adoption Marketing
Community: SuccessFactors Community (community.successfactors.com)
Lithy category: Marketing Champion
SuccessFactors provides the leading cloud-based SuccessFactors HCM Suite, which comprises solutions that are complete, beautiful, and flexible, and which can help you optimize your workforce today and prepare it for tomorrow. SuccessFactors solutions are supported by a global partner ecosystem and the experience and commitment of SAP. Our solutions are innovative, but we also deliver process expertise and best practices insights from serving our broad and diverse customer base. Today, with more than 4,000 customers and 27 million subscription seats, we serve organizations of all sizes, from the large enterprises to small businesses, across more than 60 industries, in more than 177 countries, and in 37 languages.
It’s time to love work again! This motto is at the heart of our business. SuccessFactors, an SAP company, provides workforce management software designed to support the employee lifecycle, from recruit to retire. Our customers support over 20 million workers in 177 countries, making SuccessFactors Human Capital Management (HCM) software one of the most adopted cloud-based solutions in the world. Our customers have a vision and vast goals to attract the best talent, align their workforce, optimize employee performance and gain workforce insight to make strategic decisions about their business.
Like any world-class technology company SuccessFactors develops applications that are relevant to our consumers. However, we understand that having great products is not enough. Without customer support built into the core of our business we would not be considered the leader in our industry. Lithium’s online community platform has played a significant role in helping us provide true support to our customers. Our Customer Community is a competitive differentiator and an important part of our marketing strategy. It is the gateway to fully realizing the value of our products and services and as marketers we shout this fact from the rooftops.
In our Community we bring together customers, product and support experts, industry thought leaders and implementation partners from around the world. The knowledge exchanged in our Community is an indispensable resource for both new and established customers.
Our Community is a hub for training, implementation resources, documentation, events, and user group interaction. Members stay informed on new features, product updates, and news on HR trends and predictions. This is the place where product-enhancement ideas are shared and discussed with our product managers, providing critical feedback for advancing our products to new levels of innovation and business efficiencies.
Our Community is 34,000 + strong and growing by an average of 1,300 new members each month. Not only is the Community growing in members but in time spent online. Per month page views range between 200,000 and 300,000 and we see approximately 360 new ideas shared and over 2500 kudo clicks.
We’ve found that customers who engage in the Community have increased success and longevity with SuccessFactors. When customers find what they need, have their issues resolved, and get their questions answered, they are happy and eager to help others. It’s a win-win for everyone.
In addition to Lithium’s impact on our support and customer adoption marketing efforts it is also a valuable vehicle for education and brand awareness. Multiple marketing campaigns pump fresh content into our Community, which drives engagement and new membership. We’ve had remarkable success with our one and only “open” board that showcases our amazing thought leadership to the world. The “Did You Know” campaign has allowed end user customers to find the community destination doubling daily registration and adding valuable content with 100’s of posts with 1,000,000’s of page views. Did You Know? has a committed following of loyal influencers that use Lithium’s social share functionality to spread awareness and meaningful content to their communities.
Our team is also using Lithium to educate and influence our parent company’s on-premise HR customers to move to our cloud-based technology. Moving to the Cloud from an on-premise solution can be an intimidating transition. There are many roads to success when taking on this endeavor. Our “Welcome to the Cloud” marketing campaign invited our SAP HR family to join our Community and learn more about the advantages of cloud-based technology. Without In addition to valuable content, entry into our exclusive Community facilitates peer to peer conversation which expedites learning and reference inquiries. Our membership has increased by 8% since this campaign began in January, 2015 and we anticipate sales revenue to follow this uptake in interest from our on-premise customers.
Online engagement is a privilege of our time but our Community also supports in-person experiences for our customers. Customer champions and super users are hosting “live” engagements that promote knowledge sharing across the SuccessFactors’ customer community. Each event focuses on effective talent management process design and deployment. VIP engagements are complimentary and exclusive to SuccessFactors customers as part of their current investment with our technology. Thanks to Lithium’s interactivity customers learn about these events and participate in conversations before and after the “live” session to further enrich their experience.
Finally we want to bring attention to our customer excellence awards program. Our community hosts the SuccessConnect HR Excellence Awards annually. This program drives customers to tell their success story in their own voice and generates an exceptional amount of engagement through live voting. We use Lithium’s kudos click to cast votes. Thousands of votes were counted for our 2014 awards. The winners received a free pass to our SuccessConnect conference and an awards reception with leaders from our executive team. This is one of our favorite customer marketing opportunities because we get to uncover compelling customer stories and references and recognize and celebrate our customer’s accomplishments.
