Company: Upwork Company background: Upwork is the world’s work marketplace that connects businesses with independent talent. We serve everyone from one-person startups to 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and freelancers to work together in new ways that unlock their potential. Our talent community earned over $2.3 billion on Upwork in 2020 across more than 10,000 skills, including website and app development, creative and design, customer support, finance and accounting, consulting, and operations. Our company’s mission is to create economic opportunities so people have better lives. Contact: Valeria Kochubei Title: Community Team Lead Related URLs: https://community.upwork.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it in the last year? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.) What is the purpose of your community? As a customer-first organization, providing great Digital CX has always been a top priority. Since 2014, Khoros technologies has been the foundation of our customer-centric approach and has been a critical tool in helping us work towards achieving our mission of creating economic opportunities so people have better lives. We utilize Khoros Social Media Management and the Khoros community to listen to our customers, expand our offerings to address unmet needs, and put our customers at the core of the decision-making process. Our community platform and social channels are valuable mechanisms for customers to connect with one another and interact with Upwork teams in ways that contribute to their professional growth and success. The forums are used to foster learning; it’s a place where social and collaborative relationships, that can otherwise be difficult to come by for freelancers and clients who often work in solitary workspaces, are built within our community ecosystem. Having this digital CX focus allows us to communicate effectively and directly with our customers and advocates. We are able to prominently position key product, policy, feature and other changes to a large customer audience and quickly respond to customer questions. Digital CX enables multi-disciplinary teams to highlight tips, best practices and help content, thereby aiding in case deflection for our customer support teams. 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? Insights gained from Community help drive our Product team and business owners to engage and enable us to apply a unified approach to serving and understanding our customer needs and sentiments. There is extreme value in collecting insights from our community and social channels and using this information to drive our product roadmap and inform team processes. In turn, our customers feel more empowered, supported, valued and connected to a network of meaningful working relationships - ideally boosting value across our customer base. 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. We maintain a very vibrant and active community with metrics that continue to trend upward year over year. Our pageviews increased by 48% and our overall visits increased by 68% from 2019 to 2020. In 2020, our engagement levels, based on Khoros analytics, were: 334,704 Active Community Users 160,000+ Community Posts 10.5+ Million Community Pageviews 3.6+ million Visits with 2.1+ million logged by Unique Visitors
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