Company: SAP Concur
Company background: SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense, and invoice management solutions. The SAP Concur Community was first launched in March 2018.
Contact: Severine Egerton + Beshoy Maoud
Title: Director, SAP Concur Community + SAP Concur Site Manager
Related URLs: https://community.concur.com/
Kudos Category: Partners for Life
1. Describe your partnership with Khoros. Tell us about which Khoros teams you partner with (e.g. Strategic Services, Professional Services, Customer Success, etc.) and the outcomes you were hoping to drive.
Back in 2019, we piloted a new ongoing consultancy model with Khoros whereby Khoros provided SAP Concur with a dedicated Web Engineer, an App Engineer and a QA resource managed by a Project Manager for a fixed number of hours on a weekly basis. In exchange for the work this team provided, a pre-agreed number of Success Service Points were debited from our account on a quarterly basis. The work was planned and prioritized by us and implemented by our Khoros Professional Services team. After the launch of our rebranded community website, we first piloted the new model for a few months on relatively small UI and UX tasks. As the new model proved to be successful, we decided to extend it to larger customization projects in 2020. Two main projects were born from this collaboration in 2021/22. A brief description of these projects and their intended outcomes are below:
1. Our main goal with our first initiative – the Profile Meter project – was to encourage existing members to verify their email address and provide additional information, such as their country alongside their marketing preferences, before being awarded a badge for their efforts. This process helped us identify members that automatically qualified for a personalized experience on our site.
2. Our main goal with our second initiative – the On-Demand Translation project – was to adapt to our increasing customer base which, though primarily English speakers at first, saw an increase in the number of posts from non-English languages. Rather than creating a localized version of our site, we aimed to integrate our own API based machine translation tool – the SAP Translation Hub.
2. How have your Khoros partners helped you shape your strategy and align your people and processes?
For our Profile Meter project, we initially brainstormed ideas with our Khoros Web Engineer who researched how other communities had solved a similar problem and what solutions were available to us within the constraints of the platform. Armed with this research insight, we then engaged with our internal Design/UX team to scope a solution. Tasks were discussed, then logged in our Khoros Jira instance. The work was then executed and tested by our dedicated Khoros Professional Services team. A productive collaboration between our two teams meant that the delivered solution exceeded the initial scope.
Khoros’ assistance with our On-Demand Translation project was also instrumental. We partnered with our dedicated Khoros Professional Services team to integrate SAP Translation Hub in our Dev environment to evaluate the compatibility of the service with the Khoros platform. Once we received confirmation that the proof of concept was successful, we implemented the translation service within our Product Forum and Group Hub Forum sections. Our Web Engineer developed an easy means for our Site Manager to add and remove a language from the translation dropdown menu. In addition, she devised a way to display or hide the Translation feature depending on the type of Group Hub it is displayed in, and a main switch to turn on/off the translation feature across the entire site should it ever be needed.
The SAP Translation Hub service is currently in UAT and is forecasted to go live on the SAP Concur Community in July 2022. The next step for us will be to evaluate how customers respond to the new feature in our Forum sections before extending it to our Blog sections.
3. What successes have you experienced because of your partnership with Khoros? How are you better able to deliver your strategic priorities and deliver value back to your business? Please include metrics if possible.
From a business point of view, the partnership with Khoros means that we are able to consistently deliver against our feature roadmap. We have released over 30 new or enhanced features since the start of the year. From a resource point of view, it means that we do not require internal resources to develop and test site enhancements. This represents significant savings for our organization and allows our small team to focus on engaging with our customers and serving the best possible user experience to them.
Early data shows that within 3 months of launching our Profile Meter feature, nearly 2,000 members of our community have now completed their profile and earned a new badge for their efforts.
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