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: Keep Calm and Carry On
1. How did your team shift your existing strategy using the Khoros platform to better engage customers during a crisis?
Upwork is very much a global company, with team members, customers, and freelancers located worldwide. When the war in Ukraine started, this had a significant impact on our organization. Our staff was located directly in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, including multiple community team membe... Internally, during the first few days of the Ukraine crisis, our teams worked quickly and efficiently to build an internal group hub to enable our teams across eastern Europe to connect with Ukraine team members to help provide aid, shelter, and transportation. We also use our internal group hub to give updates and information we were collecting about borders and Upwork-specific information to shed light on the latest policy updates in one easy-to-find space.
Externally we launched a source of truth FAQ Blog post to provide one location for all users to get the most up-to-date information on ongoing foreign policy information, Upwork updates and changes, and how Upwork supported users in impacted areas.
Next, we launched Upwork Helps - A group hub filled with resources to help those in impacted areas. We used this space to help connect all of our customers with each to help provide aid, transport, shelter, or words of support. This group hub served as our external source of truth for all Upwork policy updates and information and an amplifier of ongoing information we sourced and collected, including a database of open borders and border requirements for those fleeing Ukraine.
2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis?
This crisis helped us mobilize more efficiently internally to connect with our teams and push important information out quickly to our users. For a company like ours, we have never had to go through such an event where so many team members, customers, and freelancers, were all so tremendously impacted at once.
Being able to quickly stand up a blog and Group Hub as our central locations for information helped us deflect common support questions and provide common answers and solutions rapidly. With information changing by the hour, we needed to be able to pass this information along to our members.
In the forum, we fielded some of our heaviest traffic days in the history of our Community. From the initial surge of members needing help and questions about the platform ban, our moderation team had to respond to those fleeing for their lives while at the same time taking away the sole means many had to earn income. In some ways, we threw the rulebook out the window and had to allow our moderation team to lead with empathy in every interaction they had.
3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes?
There were plenty of positive metrics, from the number of questions we deflected from Support, to member growth and improved traffic. However, in reality, we were there to simply listen and attempt to help our members in some if not the most challenging times of their lives; it became less about metrics and more about doing all we could to help soften the impact for those impacted.
We've continued to have users in Ukraine, surrounding areas, and around the globe offering help, assistance, and support throughout the Community.
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