Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, our mission is to make all planning for all people a reality. We believe our world is better when we connect communities of people with data to enhance decision-making in dynamic environments. It’s the Connected Planning way. Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Technology Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.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 care business goals. Please highlight unique programs, technical upgrades and/or API usage to help reach these goals. Community, alongside our help.anaplan.com (platform documentation) are the two places our end users go for help. Due to the nature of our product, when users contact actual technical support, it’s usually due to downtime/problems with the software itself, where as when they use community it’s often to learn, become more knowledge, understand best practices and more. Through a variety of different programs, we attempt to find different ways to connect with our users, the majority of which are “model builders” as we call them. In the past year, we’ve focused on finding ways to automate the boring stuff away. Through large enhancements we made at the end of 2019 as we redesigned our Community, to the integrations we have done with Khoros/Bevy to tie together the experiences, we constantly are looking for ways to remove the time sinks and repeatable tasks that our Community team does. 2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change? We relaunched our User Groups program right as Group Hubs launched. This was great for us as one of the goals with expanding our toolset to Bevy’s group platform was being able to allow our group leaders to self-serve. With group hubs, we’re able to give our leaders the ability to self-manage their space, from forums to blogs and knowledge bases. A lot of the backend administration that we were having to help group leaders manage was able to be thrown to the side, which not only helps free us up, but more importantly lets our group leaders feel more in control. With a team of ~10, there is always new content being posted in our Community, sections being edited/modified, and simply a lot going on. When we redesigned our Community, we built it with the goal of allowing any of our team to treat community like lego blocks - Nearly all sections of our community can now be created in the moment, utilizing a flexible set of components and custom content modules. We went from having hundreds of different page quilts/layouts to a single standard page quilt used the vast majority of our Community. By creating a simple yet powerful system, what may take some teams weeks of development/planning is something we can have live in production by end of day. This spring, we launched our first ever free trial of our platform as part of our 'Talent Builder' program.  A huge problem we have in the market right now is finding qualified talent that can work on our companies software. We're growing faster than the talent is, so our team took it upon ourselves to find a solution. Leveraging Community, our training platform, and a ton of manual processes, we were able to quickly spin up this training program.  We're already at hundreds of new users learning Anaplan to prove out what will likely expand to 10x this within a year. We were able to utilize the power of the Khoros platform to build out the majority of this program, launch new training guides, provide a user directory, a group hub, and more.  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, and efficiency with publishing and reporting). Looking at our Community Value ( Visits * Seeking support * found information * would have engaged * support cost) - We’re over $4 million dollars in value added based on this metric alone. Our community doesn’t like to use just this though, as we’re not a support community ultimately, we are many things to many users. We also have a content team who will work with customers, partners, and internal employees as well as take accepted solutions in Community, and turn them into Best Practices. We run Ask Me Anything sessions to help spread the word on different people, teams, and products. We host live events throughout the year that provides additional value and knowledge on top of the standard training our Academy team offers. Using a similar formula to the above, we are able to again show multi-million dollars of value associated with this work. A big bottom line impact for us but hard to quantify for our immediate team has been the flexibility we continue to gain as we better understand the Khoros platform, configure it to our own unique needs, and then the speed at which we can keep moving once we have the foundation built. As we continue to build out programs, improve our existing ones, and come up with future ideas, this speed has been critical in allowing other internal teams remove roadblocks and quickly get content out in front of our customers, all of which reduces our cost to serve. Our Talent Builder program is to early to say the exact results, but to date we have trained hundreds with little to no additional costs. The cost savings on this will be in the tens of millions as it ramps up, as we're removing the instructors, we're removing the classrooms, we're removing the need to work for one of our Partners or ourselves to get the training. We're putting as much of our training and expertise into our open Community to as our goal is to get as many trained Anaplanner's as we can. ... View more

Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, our mission is to make all planning for all people a reality. We believe our world is better when we connect communities of people with data to enhance decision-making in dynamic environments. It’s the Connected Planning way. Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Technology Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com/ Kudos Category: The Accelerator 1. Please describe your company and your initiative. In 2019, we started to hit a breaking point. We had done so much, so fast, that our Community had started to fall apart. It wasn’t very noticeable to end users yet, but we could see the writing on the wall that we need to fix our foundation before it destroyed the entire house. We decided to look at rebuilding behind the scenes to provide us a more flexible future. We went forward with throwing out nearly all of code that was in our Community, while maintaining all content. We did a top to bottom rebuild, from our navigation and page designs, to individual components giving us more flexibility with our styling. We reused existing Khoros components and elements where it best made sense, not wanting to reinvent the wheel. We integrated our other platforms such as User Groups more cleanly into our Community, while building out entirely new sections like our User Directory. 2. What was the “before” state? What challenges did you have to overcome? Our community prior (and still is somewhat) a house of cards. We support dozens of different teams/programs throughout Anaplan with bringing their content to life in Community, as well as our own Community ran programs. Historically, we would launch programs with little care given to maintaining an aligned experience, design elements, etc. Instead, users may hit very different experiences based on where their journey took them. Additionally, updating our Community was a pain. We were doing multiple deployments from stage to production a day, we were introducing new bugs often, and we couldn’t keep up with the technical debt that kept growing. Our navigation was hard coded, requiring changes to be hard coded vs. real time as they exist now. We had dozens if not hundreds of different page quilts to accommodate all the different designs/pages in Community. 3. What were the results? Please cite qualitative and quantitative results. Everything is growing. Our company, and alongside it our Community, are still very much in high-growth mode. We’ve conducted user research to ensure we are making the right decisions for our users, as ultimately all we do is for them. The biggest result though is how much we have been able to do in the past 8 months since we launched our redesign. We were able to put more control into the hands of our Community team (vs. being bottle necked by technology challenges). We built with the future in mind, allowing us to now easily integrate other platforms and tools, launch new sections at a moments notice, host live events, and more. A huge benefit to our greater team around these updates were on efficiency and removing tedious tasks. Something as simple as updating our homepage used to take 15-30 minutes of work. This is now instantaneous - Multiply that across dozens of sections in Community and the various updates we had to previously maintain, and we had a tremendous efficiency gain, which in turn allows us to work towards even more programs and content in Community. We’ve started to utilize lesser known tools in Khoros, such as custom tags to float content to our front page carousel. Instead of doing edits in code, our admin team simply flags an article to show up in a specific spot in the carousel, everything else happens automatically behind the scenes. Our 'Community Robot' (sometimes it looks like a robot anyways) - A quick visual to help see all the programs that Community hosts, and the various tools we use to bring these to life. ... View more

Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, our mission is to make all planning for all people a reality. We believe our world is better when we connect communities of people with data to enhance decision-making in dynamic environments. It’s the Connected Planning way. Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Technology Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com/ Kudos Category: All-Ways Connected 1. Tell us about your digital customer experience: When and why did digital customer experience become a focus and priority for your organization and what technology(ies) did you decide to implement to help you, and what problem(s) does it help solve? In 2017 our Community moved into Lithium/Khoros which is definitely when Community took off for us. Towards the end of last year, we made the strategic decision to rebuild the vast majority of our Community from the ground up, utilizing all we have learned to improve the experience for our users. The Anaplan Community supports dozens of different programs utilizing many different platforms, impacting our end users, partners, employees, prospects, and students. We see our community as a hub, with many spokes depending on what the user needs, from support and best practices, to training and online events, to ask me anything sessions and groups. It’s many moving parts that we do our best to put into a seamless experience to allow our users to connect in whatever way works best for them. 2. What are the benefits of having an integrated community and social media management platform for your organization? How does it improve your strategy for digital customer engagement?  End users do not care about individual departments, the different platforms, or who is doing the work. When you visit a community, none of this is on that persons mind. Many companies build like this though, putting up walls which can make the user experience challenging. Our goal has been to constantly tear down these barriers, creating a seamless experience that our users can enjoy. It’s a constant battle, but we have accomplished this in many ways: Integrating BevyLabs user group platform, allowing our groups experience to come together as one experience Users only need to register in Community When users join a Group Hub, they are simultaneously put into the Bevy group, similarly when a user wants to leave a group hub, it will remove them from both Live Events - We have been holding Live events through a combination of Vimeo, video production software, and live streaming it via our Community. We embed the live broadcast and live chat within a Group/Forum, allowing users to interact/watch real-time, while creating content that will live on forever and allow future users to continue to ask questions in the forum OKTA Single Sign-on - Launched OKTA within our Community - We leverage OKTA externally (not just for employees) - When you register and create your ‘Community Account’ it is actually giving that user access to multiple systems. We also have started to allow companies to bring their own auth - Customers/Partners can have us setup a SAML integration so their users don’t even have to register. Community Learning (our training platform) Bevy (User Groups) Certain (Event platform) Salesforce Influitive (Gamification) 3. What are your digital results? Please provide your business outcomes and results because of your digital customer experience approach in quantifiable metrics (e.g. revenue, Net Promoter Score, cost savings, brand reputation). We measure results through a variety of ways - From support deflection to NPS/Feedback to trying to understand the influence live events have had on top/bottom line. Our NSP/Feedback scores from the first half to back half have increased by an average by ~5 points. As an example of how we look to tie these experiences together - When we started hosting live events in 2019, we had to spend time trying to understand how to even measure the value from them - To do this we have looked at existing customers who have attended X events, and then bounced that against their growth/expansions (revenue) over the next year. We also have looked into prospects who have joined our sessions, and if they then become customers down the road. Through this work, we have been able to say we have ‘influenced’ multi-millions of dollars to the top/bottom line. When looking at the Community Value (Visits * support visits * seeking support found info needed * visits that would have otherwise engaged support * ticket cost) this again comes out into the multi-million dollar range. As we repeat this exercise for all the different programs we host in Community, we're able to continue to show the endless value Community can bring the company. ... View more

Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, our mission is to make all planning for all people a reality. We believe our world is better when we connect communities of people with data to enhance decision-making in dynamic environments. It’s the Connected Planning way. Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Technology Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com/t5/Anaplan-Helps/tkb-p/AnaplanHelps Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On 1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis? When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, not only did our company want to find ways to help, but so did our end users and partners. Within a matter of weeks, we were able to bring together dozens of contributors internally and externally to look at how Anaplan could help. This eventually became known as Anaplan Helps. We were able to utilize our Master Anaplanner program (Our absolutely best users on our platform) to work together within Community to create models that directly supported hospitals, government agencies, emergency personnel, and more. We were able to offer these models directly through Community. On top of this, we launched updates to our User Directory - Like many, there were impacts to companies causing those in our ecosystem to be looking for new employers. We were able to quickly build out a method to allow users to opt-in to showing up in the directory to signal they are open to jobs/roles. We’re also in the process of helping move our yearly conference to being virtual after having already moved many of our Community events to being virtual - We’re also looking at how we’ll be able to utilize new tools like content syndication to share content between our properties for this critical event (in September). 2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis? Folks dropped a lot of work in flight to quickly get this project done due to the importance it had. Simply through the fact so many people wanted to help though, it came together quickly and was painless. We did have some challenges though, which allowed us to have some fun in how we went about solving problems. For example, some of our partners are weary to give away applications to their own competitors. As such, we quickly built out an approval process by hacking this on top of group hubs - We hid the download URL beyond a closed group, which would only become exposed once the group owner (A partner) would approve your access. We ripped all other group hub functionality from these sections, it just became a way for us to quickly gate the download URL. Similarly, we had no way for users to opt into our user directory - This was something we previously managed via roles. As a quick solve/hack, we again leveraged the new Group Hub functionality in a way it was never meant to be used - By joining the ‘Group Hub’, it would act as the flag to say you should show up on our user directory. If you leave the group, you’ll stop showing up in the directory. We built out all of the Anaplan Helps section in the span of a week, including a few new components to support the apps. 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? Our CEO was on a interview this week where he actually provided a recap on a lot of this work. The part that we can’t measure is that we were able to do something, anything, to help. When Covid-19 hit, a lot of folks wanted to do something, and this allowed them. We were able to allow our end users to have a hand in working on models to help hospitals on trying to understand ICU bed availability, govt agencies understand where to put resources, etc. Supply chain and workforce management were huge changes globally, and our software and models built by the Community were able to help. Beyond that though, we had more models (apps) downloaded than at anytime in the past 3 years. This section has grown to represent over 5% of our traffic in a matter of months. It’s been a great success that we continue to update as our end users, customers, partners are finding actual value out of it which helps them, and long-term of course it helps us. These programs got call-outs by our CEO in our last earnings call; Over the last two months, our community of experts certified Master Anaplanners quickly responded by creating 17 production-ready models that can be downloaded and deployed at no cost by any Anaplan customer. These models address COVID-19 specific use cases; like hospital bed planning, PPE redistribution and FEMA-type expense tracking. We also launched a 90-day free trial and met with various non-profit organizations, governments and customers to help them address their urgent challenges related to COVID-19. We've seen increased interest in our platform with a number of app downloads up about 80% higher than the monthly average. The most visited page on our website in April was Deloitte's Dynamic Clinical Staffing Model built on the Anaplan platform.   ... View more

Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, our mission is to make all planning for all people a reality. We believe our world is better when we connect communities of people with data to enhance decision-making in dynamic environments. It’s the Connected Planning way. Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Technology Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.). The Anaplan Community was launched long ago, but in 2017 moved into Lithium/Khoros with Community becoming a critical focus within our company. Towards the end of our third year with Khoros, we made the strategic decision to rebuild the vast majority of our Community from the ground up, utilizing all we have learned to improve the experience for our users. Our Community team actually sits outside the rest of the organization, reporting up through our Chief Planning Officer. Instead of existing in and/or supporting a specific department, we support the entire organization through dozens of different programs. This is why having an extremely flexible platform is key, as we are constantly going into multiple directions at the same time. Our Community team consists of 10 people today: Community Technology (Stan, Miran), Community Content (Kayne, Yelana, Holly, Jamieson), Community Experience (Emily, Aaron, Hannah), The Boss (Fran) We also are supported by our engineering team (Matt Kuehn, John Cherba, Cody Gravdahl) who help build all the neat things we do, while also having an amazing UX resource who has designed everything in our Community (Joungkong Yang). 2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations? As noted above, we’re sitting outside the core organization which allows us to take a more holistic approach to building and maintaining our Community. We treat Community much like a product, so we work with all of our internal and external stakeholders as we look to change and grow. Our team maintains Jira (technology) and Trello (content) backlogs, build out user stories, and prioritize the work based on business/user demands. We drive adoption of our Community through a variety of ways, but also in many ways this happens organically due to so much living inside Community already. From user onboarding to product release notes, to ongoing AMA’s, groups, and live events, Community acts as the hub for knowledge and learning. As Anaplan holds events *(well… Pre-covid anyways) we would host a Community booth and encourage users to sign up for User Groups and/or look into hosting their own. We’ve also been going big on video, from creating our live events to short helpful videos, we’re trying to do it all. With that, we have created some fun/playful videos to help spread the word of Community, such as our Halloween or Christmas specials: 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. Here's our CEO just this week doing a call with NYSE where he highlights the work our Community has been doing! The results have been unbelievable. With the flexibility we built and utilizing very agile work streams, we have been able to continue to innovate at a rapid pace over the past 9-12 months. Among some of our most successful projects during this time: User Groups Relaunch with Group Hubs & Bevy integration 40+ User Groups Integrated Bevy fairly seamlessly into our Community My Events / Upcoming Events Upcoming Events / Explore User Groups User Directory Launched our user directory Displays users based on certain roles When Covid hit, we built out an opt-in process for those looking for work due to so many being impacted globally. OKTA Integration We launched OKTA as our single sign-on provider Introduced SSO experience across Community, Learning, Usergroups, and Salesforce Case Portal Launched two customers who are bringing their own SSO (Login) to our Community! Anaplan Helps Launched to help with Covid19 efforts - Anaplan models specific to helping with the response. We were able to utilize our Master Anaplanner user group to help us quickly pull together a hackathon that results in dozens of apps that were able to help. Anaplan Live In late 2019, we started hosting live events within Community, utilizing tools like Vimeo for the streaming/embedding. Have quickly become some of the largest events our company has hosted to-date Talent Builder Until just recently, we had no ability in our company to give out free trials. We fixed that! We have launched an entire training program within our Community, so that literally anybody can visit our Community, sign up to become a model builder, perform training at your own pace, and become a Certified Anaplan Model Builder. Some key metrics/wins we have seen over the past year, engagement metrics have exceeded our traffic gains, showing our existing users are becoming more sticky, interacting more, etc. 141% Forum topic growth 198% replies growth 213% accepted solution view growth 159% decrease in time to first reply 227% increase in kudos 47% increase in badges 88% increase in Comments ... View more