2022 Customer Awards: Alteryx - Best-in-Class: Community

Company: Alteryx

Company background: The Alteryx Analytics Automation Platform delivers end-to-end automation of analytics, machine learning, and data science processes that accelerate digital transformation.

Contact: Trey Waddell

Title: Senior Manager, Community Development & Operations

Related URLs: https://community.alteryx.com/?category.id=external

Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community

1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community? Do you use your community for support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.? Has the community charter evolved in any way since launch?

At Alteryx, we believe that Analytics is for All! Focused on customer enablement and success, the Alteryx Community was launched in 2015 and has created an ecosystem with robust programming where everyone – from analytics and data science experts to students and career changers – can thrive.  

To support our growing community at scale, we’ve strategically aligned community programming and initiatives across the different phases of the customer life-cycle. This methodology has helped the team remain focused on what will truly drive engagement and deliver value to the business.  

Everything we do, and have done, in Alteryx Community can be mapped to a stage in the customer lifecycle. Pre-2020, we focused almost exclusively on post-sale alignment. In the years since, we’ve made significant investments to enable the discovery of Community across all stages of our customer’s journey.  

Look at our journey from day one. You can see how we’ve expanded our offerings over time and start to get an idea of how we’ve built programming around the customer journey – while always maintaining a priority focus on the content and programs designed to drive product adoption and empower our members to take the lead. 

Our content program is full of wickedly cool, engaging content including our Podcasts (two!) that focus on Data Science and Analytics culture and have been heard over 170,000 times by listeners around the globe. We consistently spotlight our Community members on our podcasts and blogs, produce video content that enables Alteryx knowledge and encourages active Community membership. 

The Alteryx Academy available on the Community is a go-to for our users looking to upskill through interactive lessons and our Certification program that has granted over 313,000 Alteryx Core Certifications helping users around the world advance their careers. 

2. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen. Did you get executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was your process to gain this buy-in? How have you achieved cross functional support, added stake-holders and increased organizational adoption?

Much of the success of the Alteryx community can be contributed to support from the top-down. Both our previous and current CEOs have always been huge believers in what we do – and have provided us with limitless opportunities to be creative in how we support and engage with our customers.  

By providing continuous transparency into the success of our enablement programming, we’ve been able to sustain this stakeholder buy-in and have positioned the Alteryx Community as a cornerstone of our business. 

To be clear, while executive buy-in is imperative to the success of a community, in tandem, the investment we’ve made in the people running the community has been key to our success. Carefully curating new hires with true community experience who also are a great culture fit has led Alteryx to have an award-winning community team that leverages individual strengths and experiences to continue to take the community to the next level. 

We now have best-in-class Community Management expertise, an in-house platform and operations team, and focused program owners, which allows our Community to always be evolving and at the cutting- edge of implementing customer- focused improvements, time saving integrations, and innovative programming that other communities aspire to emulate. 

In late 2021, the team undertook an ambitious goal to integrate the end-to-end user groups experience within the Alteryx Community. Instead of purchasing a new events platform, we chose to build a true self-service experience directly on Khoros, combining the power of Group Hubs and Events.  

Alteryx User Groups are independent volunteer organizations created for users, run by users and supported by Alteryx. Prior to introducing Khoros events and migrating to Group Hubs, the online engagement and event hosting responsibilities were siloed across disparate platforms. The solution we implemented– solved this challenge by creating a one-stop shop for our volunteers to manage the end-to-end user group experience. 

Today, user group leaders have a single place to collaborate with their local communities AND host their local community events.  

From an operational perspective, in order to ensure we maintained the required tracking mechanics – we built an integration with Salesforce, that allows us to sync Registration and Attendee data in real-time, for further analysis and business insight. 

Last but not least, because Events are now hosted natively on Community, the robust engagement mechanics available (posts, likes, comments, RSVP buttons) are helping us tap into an entirely new audience – bringing what was once siloed offline into the online community fold. In fact we had our second highest quarter in history, much of which can be contributed to our User Groups and Events programming. 

At Alteryx, we take every opportunity to ensure Community has a seat at the table and our wins are highlighted across all departments which has enabled successful cross-functional relationships, thereby increasing organizational adoption and creating Community advocates throughout the company. Alteryx employees are a part of our member base, and it’s our job to empower everyone to lead through community.  

3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.