Entry submitted by: Lara Golden (Director of Global Community)
Community: CallidusCloud Customer Community
Lithy category: Community Design of the Year
CallidusCloud is the global leader in cloud-based sales, marketing, customer experience and learning solutions. CallidusCloud enables organizations to accelerate their lead to money process, a complete suite of solutions that identify the right leads, ensure proper territory and quota distribution, enable sales forces, automate configure price quote and contract management, simplify marketing automation, enable customer experience monitoring, create and distribute learning materials, deliver deep analytic insights, and streamline sales compensation — driving bigger deals, faster.
Our community goals
We had three goals in launching the Community:
- Reduce support costs by enabling our customers to help themselves
- Improve customer retention by empowering our users
- Encourage cross-product adoption by openly sharing product information with all customers
Historically, CallidusCloud was known as a leader in the Sales Performance Management space, with an emphasis on Compensation or Incentive Management. Today, we have expanded to create a product space of our own, known as “Lead to Money”, which encompasses a suite of many products that take a sales organization from the hiring of sales professionals through sales training and enablement, marketing, configure price quote, and finally to compensation management. The time had come to encourage open sharing of knowledge as we sought to integrate multiple products into a single Lead to Money solution for all of our product experts. That meant, among other things, making a single Community with a unified search and simple ways for experts to gain cross-product knowledge.
What design elements make our community unique
When designing the new user interface, we had two big challenges. The first is that as a closed community, we needed to make the home page as welcoming as possible, so that users who did not yet have an account would feel encouraged to sign up.
The second was to find a balance between a design that was engaging and personal, while still reflecting our corporate brand and the highly technical nature of our enterprise level products. We needed to avoid looking too “slick” to the experienced consultants who use our products. Our solution was to have a banner showing the Golden Gate Bridge, reflecting our tagline as “Your gateway to CallidusCloud”, with a large search banner and large menus leading to the most commonly used content. We think we’ve succeeded in striking the perfect balance, welcoming both novice and expert users of our products and directing them on their customer journey.
How we executed your community design
We made our vision a reality with the collaboration of many people throughout the organization. We began by getting ideas from Lithium on other communities with similar customer bases. Our next step was to talk to our customers and partners to find out what was working for them, and what wasn’t, with the out-of-the-box design.
Once we had a vision in place, the Community Manager brought the overall vision to the User Experience team, who helped come up with a plan to bring the Community experience in line with the corporate brand while keeping with the overall feel of a customer community. Our talented web designer in India brought the design to fruition, and product experts in Technical Support, Professional Services, and Education tested the design and offered suggestions or improvements and changes before the rollout of the new design.
Our metrics
|
2014 |
2015 |
Percent change |
|
Posts |
163 |
1899 |
1065% |
|
Kudos |
39 |
384 |
884% |
|
Accepted Solutions |
5 |
182 |
3540% |
Even as the community was embraced by our customers, one metric in particular stood out: web-based engagement versus call-based engagement. Web-based and self-service support engagement is a key part of our customer success model, as our customers are happy to be able to find solutions on their own at all hours of the day. This is particularly important for a global company providing support to customers in every time zone. Since launching the Community, CallidusCloud has seen web-based engagement skyrocket to over 90% of support issues.
Finally, but no less important, we’ve see our Customer Satisfaction survey results increase from less than 90% to over 95% from 2014 to 2015.
