Company: MicroStrategy

Entry submitted by: Daphne Tan (Market Engagement Manager)

Lithy Category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction

Our customer satisfaction initiatives

MicroStrategy provides business intelligence solutions by empowering organizations to make sense of large data volumes, get answers to their toughest business questions, and build beautiful data visualizations. Our community offers users, partners, and customers a platform for peer-to-peer support at any time across the globe. In 2014, we only had about 300 active users. Today with our Lithium-powered community, we have about 17,000 active users and 63,000 registrants.

At the end of 2014, we had just transitioned from our forums to the Lithium. Our challenge in 2015 was to make the community one of the channels through which our customers felt connected and supported. Prior to our transition to Lithium, our forums lacked ease of use and did not facilitate conversation or collaboration. We did not know how vast the MicroStrategy user network was or could be.

Additionally, our tech support staff was overwhelmed, not having enough hands or minutes in the day to troubleshoot the same basic questions over and over. Time and energy was not going to the cases and questions that mattered and there needed to be better management of tech support resources. We wanted to make our technical notes and solutions searchable, so that any user could google something and find his/her answer right away.

Within the overarching goal of facilitating a greater customer care were underlying objectives of gaining user trust and developing a stronger online presence. We hoped the community would better resonate with our customers than the forums did and offer them a space for industry connections to form. Anything that could offer users and customers a sign of life or suggest potential engagement was a clear need.

Ultimately, we wanted to make 2015 the year of the customer: we wanted our customer service to keep pace with our most dynamic product release that became generally available that summer.

Improving technical customer support & reducing support costs

In particular, we wanted to improve technical customer support and reduce support costs through the community. Improving upon technical customer support by transforming the online customer experience would ultimately reinforce Microstrategy's engagement strategy across the organization.

Every community post and response became a touchpoint for us, making our organization ever more personable and approachable. For an enterprise technology organization as large as ours, it is crucial to ensure that users know that on the other side of the community, MicroStrategy indeed is listening. The community reoriented our customer service methods by giving us an opportunity to leverage social listening.

By partnering with Lithium, we were able to launch a vibrant community that improved responsiveness and support costs through increased user engagement. Support now operates at a much larger scale.

MicroStrategy’s use of the community began and continues to be about meeting the needs of customers. We place the community on the forefront, prioritizing it as a channel through which customers can vocalize their thoughts and needs. Every single MicroStrategy customer uses our community. With the help of Lithium, we are able to bring the online and offline interactions with MicroStrategy into one seamless experience and change the way others view our customer care organization.

Our metrics

Lithium’s data-driven approach to community through Value Analytics allows us to measure the results of our community implementation and the overall impact it has had on our business. The survey pop-up gave us an opportunity and mechanism to measure customer satisfaction (CSAT) and call deflection.

Our indirect call deflection satisfaction data shows that 61% are satisfied or very satisfied with their overall experience on our community. 85% of those visiting our community are seeking information, 72% of them actually find what they’re looking for, and 23% are likely to contact MicroStrategy if their question wasn’t answered through the community.

Our Value Analytics data further shows a 15% increase in case deflections since we rolled out our community, proving that our community helps reduce the volume of customer cases. To calculate case deflection, we created our own formula where we use accepted solutions and a factor of solution views. This has enabled us to show our executives the value from the support side of our community.

At our annual conference in Miami, we’ve been able to get a better sense of where the community stands among our users. We brought together a number of our community superusers physically in the same location for the first time ever. All in all, users are satisfied and more well-connected with MicroStrategy with Lithium’s platform and incorporation of gamification. They feel more valued and connected with not just MicroStrategy, but one another.

Lithys 2016: MicroStrategy - Excellence in Customer Satisfaction