Company: Upwork
Company background: Upwork is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to over 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential. Our talent community earned over $3.3 billion on Upwork in 2021 across more than 10,000 skills in categories including website & app development, creative & design, customer support, finance & accounting, consulting, and operations
Contact: Stan Gromer
Title: Director, Community
Related URLs: https://community.upwork.com/
Kudos Category: Bottom Line Savings Rock Star
1. Tell us how you are implementing Khoros’ digital engagement technologies (e.g. community and/or social media management) to meet your customer engagement/experience goals. Please highlight unique programs or campaigns, technical upgrades and/or API usage to help reach these goals.
At the start of 2022, we transitioned Social Support to our Customer Support team. This allowed to to refocus and dedicate our attention to the Community. We started to enable a lot of basic settings that had never been configured on our side - Reminders to come back and mark a solution as accepted, changing the survey prompt times to encourage more users to take the survey to get feedback on their experience, and revamping our Community to provide a more seamless experience.
We relaunched our entire Community. After years of no change, we listened to our members. We provided an easier to utilize navigation through our header and navigation tiles. An aligned styling allows you to easily get back to the start, or navigate to different areas to browse, explore, learn.
We've been having lots of fun experimenting with the bulk data API and V1/V2 APIs as we integrate all Khoros data with the rest of our business data. From providing our moderation team with easy to use dashboards that can provide them any and all data they could ever imagine to be available at their fingertips, to being able to quickly look at trends by overlapping our Upwork data on top of Community data has shifted the speed at which we can operate.
2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change or drive business impact?
Group Hubs, and the forums inside them, have been a huge change for Upwork as we rolled these out. In addition to our select Upwork forums, we now were offering users the ability to connect with those in their own Country, as well as other more specific groups such as Veterans, Moms, and Family groups.
Localization is not easy, or cheap. We like to cheat our way to doing things quicker when we can, and we've been able to do that with Group Hubs. The simple act of allowing users to speak their native language, and not being forced to use English, tremendously improved the engagement of members who otherwise never visited. We've launched over a dozen local country groups, membership limited to those living in the country. Users who otherwise never visited have found these to be a great place to connect. This funnels them into all of the other areas of Community that we have been launching.
We also launched our Upwork Academy. This is arguably priceless in terms of savings to our company. Rather than to purchase an expensive learning management system that is not in any way connected to our Community, we built one on top of Community instead. In the span of a couple months time, we built an entire Academy experience that not only provides a great experience for our members, it's a tremendous cost savings to our organization. No additional yearly fees, nothing additional to integrate, manage, or maintain. We wrote more about this here and here.
3. What are your customer care and business results in quantifiable metrics? Include support savings metrics (e.g. cost savings, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, increased agent productivity, optimizing campaigns, increasing conversion rates or CSAT, increase in digital commerce, and efficiencies gained with collaborating, publishing and reporting).
Our average time to first response in our discussion forums is under 120 minutes. Our team of moderators do an amazing job (sometimes to amazing) at ensuring our members are getting taken care of.
We average over 3 kudos per topic, with around a 20% accepted solution rate in our primary forums. Topics on average have 4 replies.
As we have revamped our Community, and enabled additional Khoros features, our NPS has been steadily rising over the past year to new highs.
Here is some information on our support deflection - We can't provide all of the sensitive information, but our savings is in the multi-millions!!
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