AaronW
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2021 Customer Awards: Anaplan - Best-in-Class: Community
Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, we enable decisive action in dynamic conditions, turning complexity into clarity and alignment, and turning change into advantage. Contact: Aaron White Title: Groups Program 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 in the last year? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.) What is the purpose of your community? The Anaplan Community exists to support, inspire, and connect Anaplan’s ecosystem of model builders and end users. While the Community has existed in some state since 2013, we measure everything off our re-launch on Khoros (then Lithium) in March 2017. As a SaaS company offering a versatile and agile business planning platform, Anaplan’s Community helps its members go further, faster with Anaplan. Anaplan is too robust a tool for company communications and internal representatives to comprehensively or successfully address all possible use cases and solutions. Fully embracing and taking advantage of the platform’s capabilities requires niche conversations with others using it in highly customized ways. It requires a Community! As such, the Anaplan Community is a differentiator for Anaplan not simply because it exists, but because of how it is used, every day, by our members to ensure greater business growth and success. Through in-depth content, robust programs, award-winning event experiences, and diverse opportunities for interaction, the Anaplan Community showcases the art of the possible as presented by its most passionate and experienced users and advocates. Beyond that, Anaplan’s vision for the Community is not simply as a space for existing customers. By design, the Community is open and transparent. We don’t gate content. We don’t solicit members or use their information for lead or demand generation. We don’t require a business email address or a customer account to join. Instead, we believe that the Anaplan ecosystem grows and the message of Anaplan spreads when everyone has full access to inspiration, education, and support. When members (or even non-members) see what Anaplan has to offer—as a platform, as a company, and as a Community—it impacts our business through influence on potential sales and expands. 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? Our Community is always evolving and growing. 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 Community team actually sits outside the rest of the organization, reporting up through our Chief Planning Officer, which gives us high levels of executive visibility and support. Instead of existing in and/or supporting a specific department, we support the entire organization through dozens of different programs using a relatively lean tech stack (documented below in what we lovingly refer to as our “Community Robot”). This is why having extremely flexible platforms (like Khoros) is key, as we are constantly going into multiple directions at the same time. Today, we have 13 team members, split broadly across three main focus areas: Content, Experience/Events, and Technology. In the last year, we completed an overhaul of the Community site-wide to (among other things) adopt our new corporate branding, deploy a global navigation across our ecosystem, and modernize the visual experience. We launched multiple new sections to support programs throughout the organization (some of which are outlined below). Our technical mad scientists continue to push out dozens of fixes and improvements each month, documented for internal eyes in a monthly release notes blog post. Out with the old… ...in with the new! 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. The results have been growth in every meaningful way. Especially during the pandemic, where we have leaned fully into virtual and online experiences as a means for connecting our members, we have seen growth across the board. Since the launch of our Community in 2017, we have seen a 547% growth in members—now over 53,000. We supported 90+ virtual events through our Community events platform (Bevy) in the last twelve months. We’ve also been able to start tying member engagement to customer spend in what we’re calling the Community Value Metric. In conversations with internal stakeholders, this has helped to articulate the impact of the Community on Anaplan’s business in millions of dollars(!), putting actual numbers to cost savings through support case deflection as well as influence on renewals and expands through events and online interactions. Additional 2020 year-end metrics (percent change relative to 2019): 151% increase in replies (4.8k to 12.2k) 126% increase in topics created (1.4k to 3.2k) 124% increase in posts (10.1k to 22.6k) 53% increase in comments (2.1k to 3.3k) 113% increase in accepted solutions 17% decrease in minutes to first reply 94% decrease in minutes to first solution 131% increase in kudos awarded (13.8k to 31.9k) 1,340% increase in badges awarded (5k to 72.4k) 47.9% increase in unique member logins (to 21,597) 56.5% increase in completed registrations (to 18,710) 10% increase in quality sessions (lasting 180+ seconds)(208.8k to 230.4k) Talent Builder In the last year, for the first time ever, we made available free 90-day trials of the Anaplan platform to non-customers. Paired with the on-demand training resources available in the Community, this offering allowed development of an in-demand skillset (Anaplan Model Builder) for everyone from potential customers to displaced workers seeking new opportunities. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we came alongside this latter group, not only offering platform access and training, but streamlined job hunting through an Available Talent board (using Khoros' Group Hubs feature) and a Career Search list—an API-powered job board that scours the internet for the latest postings seeking skilled Anaplanners. Since launching less than a year ago, more than 2,000 individuals have passed through the Anaplan Access and Anaplan Talent Builder programs with more than 1100 completions of related platform trainings. Groups After relaunching using the Group Hubs feature in early 2020, our Groups program later rebranded from User Groups to Anaplan Groups in order to be more inclusive of all Groups within the Community. In light of the pandemic, we are no longer focusing on region-specific Groups only, but now on several other types of Group, including Industry & Interest, Education, Program, and Platform. Through these changes, our Groups program membership has grown by 230% (now over 4700 members) and our number of Groups has doubled from 41 a year ago to 80+ today. Events We joke that we were doing virtual events before they were cool, but it’s true. Even before the pandemic hit, Anaplan Live! (formerly User Groups Live!) was an established virtual event brand for our Community members, with 5 fully-virtual half-day events already completed between March 2019 and March 2020. In the last year, we have now completed a sixth full Anaplan Live! event, plus four smaller Anaplan Live! Spotlight events. Additionally, with our team’s experience in successful virtual events, we provided support to our larger Marketing Events team for Anaplan’s annual (and newly virtual) DigitalCPX conference, producing more than 50% of the content, facilitating the livestream, and hosting two full days of back-to-back virtual Groups meetups for Community members as part of the event. In June 2021, Anaplan Live! and DigitalCPX are joining forces for a combined virtual event, with the Community once again producing and delivering the vast majority of the content. All of this is on top of the 80+ virtual events hosted by the Anaplan Groups program and our amazing volunteer Group Leaders, many of whom stepped up to help for the first time in the last year. Our registration-to-attendee conversion is about 60%—well above current industry averages. Other Wins We have added four people to our team: an Associate Technology Manager, a dedicated Engineer, a Community Coordinator, and an Events Program Manager. We supported a major customer in hosting their own multi-day internal virtual event for thousands of employees, specifically to help them better use the Anaplan platform. Launched customer case portal, integrated with single sign-on (Okta) and Anaplan, automating the account creation process anytime a user opens a Support ticket. Khoros functionality improvements deployed include Beta/trial of Events, TKB/Blog workflow improvements, Slack integration, updates to API-driven integrated Bevy components, content syndication for discussions, message feed/article feed capabilities, site-wide taxonomy improvements, and performance/load time improvements on large nodes. Gamification improvements to enhance Khoros' native badging, including automation of badges from different platforms, UI enhancements, and an improved leaderboard. Improved the usage and capabilities of Community accounts, making them the single source of truth for all connected experiences (Support, Academy, and Events) and laying the groundwork for personalization and gamification enhancements later this year. The Community team led Anaplan’s Women’s History Month video initiatives organization-wide and supported Anaplan’s renewed DEI efforts with blogs on Diversity in Tech, civil rights, and International Women’s Day. Recognition Our CEO highlighted some of our work this year on a call with the NYSE (https://twitter.com/NYSE/status/1288118904259096582 ) as well as on our public Q1 earnings call (https://seekingalpha.com/article/4350118-anaplan-inc-plan-ceo-frank-calderoni-on-q1-2021-results-earnings-calltranscript) (July 2020). Our Community Technology Manager, Stan Gromer, was one of only six inaugural Khoros Legendary Titans (February 2021). In the last year, the Anaplan Community has been recognized throughout the Community industry as a leader: 2021 CMX Top 3 Finalist: Support and Customer Success Community 2020 Khoros Kudos Award - First place: Top Line Growth All Star 2020 Khoros Kudos Award - Runner Up: All Ways Connected 2020 Khoros Kudos Award - Runner Up: Bottom Line Savings Rock Star 2020 Feverbee Best Online Communities: Top 10 Best Designed Community 2020 Trust Radius Tech Cares Award: Tech Cares Award - Anaplan Helps Khoros Communities Blog post: Community Experience Upgrade: Out of the Box with Project Hermes (March 16, 2021). Mentioned as one of “the most respected and successful brand communities in the world” alongside Airbnb, Google, Microsoft, eBay, Fitbit, Cisco, Sephora, and Alteryx. Khoros Communities Blog post: New Community Features - Autumn Launch Overview (November 10, 2020). Recognized for our “very successful events program” alongside Fitbit, Splunk, Atlassian, Cisco, Qlik, and Microsoft.2021 Customer Awards: Anaplan - Bottom Line Savings Rock Star
Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, we enable decisive action in dynamic conditions, turning complexity into clarity and alignment, and turning change into advantage. Contact: Aaron White Title: Groups Program 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. When Anaplan platform users need extra information or assistance, there are usually two reasons for it: there is an issue or concern about the platform itself, or there is an opportunity for them to expand their knowledge about how to use the platform. For issues and concerns, they often reach out to technical support and file a ticket. For everything else, there’s either the Anaplan Community (http://community.anaplan.com) or our static technical documentation (Anapedia, http://help.anaplan.com). In all cases, the Community steps in to provide information and solutions to users for faster results and a better long-term experience. Our Support teams are fully equipped and empowered to maintain content on the Community that actively addresses common case drivers, and regular improvements to the Support section of the Community position these potential answers in front of members in a clearly accessible way (via custom styling of a dedicated TKB), allowing them to self-serve. One example of this is our Known Issues & Workarounds page (another customized TKB). In line with Anaplan’s Openness value, we clearly call out any potential roadblocks or hurdles that arise with our regular product releases. When possible, we provide temporary measures for managing around those instead of leaving the customer to struggle alone. This also allows us to demonstrate our responsiveness to these issues, as each one is edited and marked “solved” whenever a solution is put in place. All of this is on top of our platform release notes, webinar recordings, and other details publicly accessible on the Community. 2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change? Beyond simply deflecting support tickets, the Community enables members to go further, faster with Anaplan. As a cloud-based business planning platform, Anaplan is too robust a tool for company communications and internal representatives to comprehensively or successfully address all possible use cases and solutions. Fully embracing and taking advantage of the platform’s capabilities requires niche conversations with others using it in highly customized ways. It requires a Community! Our members regularly look to each other to learn and become more proficient at using Anaplan. They create and consume expert-vetted best practices and how-to guides (more than 100 now available), consult guidance from our internal center of excellence team, and debate solutions and use cases in the forums. The Anaplan Community is by far the largest repository of content in the Anaplan ecosystem, with more than 50,000 unique articles, blogs, forum posts, ideas, trainings, and videos. Even with all of this content, we are a lean operation. We have no formal moderators (our Community polices itself, both in terms of behavior and information validation) and only a few Content Managers (who largely oversee other content-related projects rather than the content itself). Instead, we empower our members to submit content through a Content Sandbox that uses Khoros' workflow features to streamline and automate the content creation and review process that allows us to tag in experts to validate the information before publishing. In a similar process, our experts regularly recommend Forum topics for conversion to approved best practice articles or how-to guides. In all of this, we see our role as a Community team to be that of making it easier for our members to find and contribute the information, education, and support they need. In this way, we not only save money for Anaplan (by reducing the number of support tickets, customer success meetings, and bad experiences) but also help ensure a positive brand image and a customer base that is connected, enabled, and ready to expand. 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). Via the Khoros Value Analytics Survey and in line with the TSIA and Forrester calculations Khoros recommends, we calculate savings around case deflection in the following way: Visits * Seeking support % * Found information % * Would have engaged support % * Case cost For FY21 alone, we can attribute multiple millions of dollars in savings to case deflection alone. We can also point to metrics such as a 17% YoY decrease in minutes to first reply and a 94% YoY decrease in minutes to first solution as a marker for how helpful and responsive our Community is, which further underscores its value to Anaplan’s business. However, these metrics are only one type of measurement of how our Community impacts the business and (as we’re not ultimately or simply a support community) we like to look at other factors as well. As outlined above and elsewhere, the tremendous value the Anaplan Community provides is in the way we streamline and automate the work of other teams. We serve as a hub for the aggregated knowledge of our business and customer base. In the same way a single data point can be referenced multiple times by formulas throughout a spreadsheet (how’s that for a nerdy reference?), the Anaplan Community creates standardization and repeatability. Challenges that might have required multiple meetings or workshops to solve can now be managed by referencing a best practice; trainings that would once have required an on-site visit by an approved trainer can now be taken on-demand. The award-winning live events we host throughout the year provide additional value and knowledge. In all of this, using similar formulas 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 and agility 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.2021 Customer Awards: Anaplan - Top Line Growth All Star
Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, we enable decisive action in dynamic conditions, turning complexity into clarity and alignment, and turning change into advantage. Contact: Aaron White Title: Groups Program Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com Kudos Category: Top Line Growth All Star 1. What were your goals for your digital engagement platform implementation? While the Anaplan Community enjoys a high level of buy-in throughout most of the organization, the question has continued to arise: “I know there’s a lot of good stuff on the Community, but how does it impact my customer? What is the value to me?” Aside from anecdotal evidence, we haven’t fully been able to articulate that value historically, so as we made our way through FY21, we dug deep into available data so that we could provide tangible answers to that question. Some helpful context: our Community is tied via single sign-on (Okta) to several post-sale properties, one of which is our events platform (Bevy)—meaning that to attend an event we host, one must have an account and be logged in. In the same way, we don’t gate content, but we do require login to interact (comment, kudo, post, etc.). In short, the only reason to log in to the Anaplan Community is to engage somehow. 2. What were your focus areas and tactics to meet those goals? Working with Khoros Community Analytics, events data from Bevy, and our company Salesforce records, we took a close look at two specific areas of influence: events and engaged visits. Events Rather than focus on all events, we focused specifically on the effects of our large, Community-wide event series, titled Anaplan Live! This event series predates the pandemic, with five fully-virtual 3-4 hour events completed between March 2019 and March 2020. The format of the event is to bring in Anaplan experts (employees, customers, and partners alike) to focus on specific programs or platform features/functions in panel discussions and seminars that help our end users and model builders learn how to do more with Anaplan. As has now become common for virtual events, we have always offered full chat support for attendee interaction and speaker Q&A. Now well into FY22, these events continue. Since March 2020, we’ve hosted a sixth full Anaplan Live! event, four smaller (1-2 hour) Anaplan Live! Spotlight events, and have a full schedule of them on the way for the rest of the year—the next one comprises the largest segment of our annual customer mini-conference in June, now a combined event: DigitalCPX + Anaplan Live!. All of these events now take place on Bevy’s Virtual Conferences platform with the post-event experience in customized spaces within the Community itself. To evaluate the influence of these events, we aligned with our Marketing team on their influence attribution calculations, essentially looking at whether someone attended an event, whether they were connected to an opportunity in Salesforce, and whether that opportunity resulted in new or increased business with Anaplan closely following the event. Engaged Visits Similarly, we wanted to begin the process of better understanding the impact of Community activity on customer spend, so we began researching what we now call the Community Value Metric. This was an exercise in tying Community accounts to customer accounts in Salesforce, and then comparing time periods where there was login activity on those Community accounts with time periods where there was renewal or expand activity on the corresponding Salesforce accounts. 3. Tell us about the results. Please list the top-line sales revenue/ROI metrics achieved due to your digital technology. Highlight the impact to your executive leadership team and other quantifiable business results. The results were dramatic enough that we are not able to fully unpack them here, as we’ve been asked not to share certain numbers outside the company. What we discovered has kicked off a “road show” with internal stakeholders across all parts of the organization in order to begin to articulate the message about community value—which has largely been met so far with great support and approval. Events When the Anaplan Live! event series began in 2019 (then called User Groups Live!), we were able to use our events influence calculation to attribute $2.2 million of influence to our first four events collectively (leading to our winning the 2020 Khoros Kudos award for Top Line Growth All Star). As mentioned above, in 2020 we hosted two more of these events—and hurdled our previous numbers by a large margin. Using the same calculations, we can attribute more than $7.3 million of influence to just these two events, bringing the event series total to more than $9.5 million. This so far does not include the more than 80 other events our Community hosted throughout the year. Engaged Visits Even more exciting than our events numbers was the result of our research into engaged visits for our Community Value Metric. When we began looking at the business impact of customers who log in to the Community versus remaining disengaged, we found that where there was Community login activity (and thus engagement, as outlined above), customers spent (on average) 62% more as where there was no Community activity. Further, in our calculations, the YoY change from FY20 to FY21 where there was no Community activity remained flat; however, where there was Community activity, the amount of spend increased 23% from FY20 to FY21. While we fully understand there are many reasons why a customer chooses to spend what they spend, or why some of these numbers may change (or not) year over year as they’ve done, it still remains clear that a customer who engages with the Anaplan Community and its members derives significantly more value from their experience with the platform than someone who is attempting to use it alone. As this year progresses, we will continue to dive even deeper into these engaging Community behaviors at a more granular level to investigate the individual value of specific activities, such as posting in the forums or joining a Group. Given what we’ve found so far, we are very excited to see what else we can learn!2021 Customer Awards: Anaplan - Keep Calm and Carry On
Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, we enable decisive action in dynamic conditions, turning complexity into clarity and alignment, and turning change into advantage. Contact: Aaron White Title: Groups Program Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On 1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis? The COVID-19 pandemic presented us with the opportunity to truly lean into what it means to create valuable content and experiences for a global audience now living in a fully virtual world. For us, this largely meant doubling down on what we were already doing, with renewed focus and purpose. For example, we were already running a successful fully-virtual event series, known as Anaplan Live!, with five successful major events completed in the year before March 2020. Many of our Groups were already meeting virtually, or at least offering virtual options or recordings for those who couldn’t attend in-person meetups. We were already looking for ways to improve our talent ecosystem and bolster the the efforts of those looking for Anaplan experience or job opportunities. The crisis helped provide clarity of focus, which helped clear out the operational clutter and remove roadblocks. We also experienced new/renewed support across our organization for these efforts, which helped us accomplish a lot quickly—including things we had never been able to make happen until then. 2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis? We shifted in a number of areas, but some of the largest and most visible include: Talent For the first time ever, we made available free 90-day trials of the Anaplan platform to non-customers. Paired with the on-demand training resources available in the Community, this offering allowed development of an in-demand skillset (Anaplan Model Builder) for everyone from potential customers to displaced workers seeking new opportunities. In addition to platform access and training, we streamlined job hunting for members through an Available Talent board (using Khoros' Group Hubs feature) and a Career Search listing—an API-powered job board that scours the internet for the latest postings seeking skilled Anaplanners. Since launching less than a year ago, over 2,000 individuals have passed through the Anaplan Access and Anaplan Talent Builder programs with more than 1100 completions of related platform trainings. Groups Our Groups program rebranded from User Groups to Anaplan Groups in order to be more inclusive of all Groups within the Community. In light of the pandemic, we are no longer focusing on region-specific Groups only, but now on several other types of Group, including Industry & Interest, Education, Program, and Platform. Through these changes, our Groups program membership has grown by 230% (now over 4700 members) and our number of Groups has doubled from 41 a year ago to 80+ today. In line with our Talent improvements outlined above, we have more than 20 cohorts of Learners utilizing Group Hubs as a way to undertake their virtual learning journeys together in a sort of virtual classroom experience. Events For the Anaplan Live! event series, we renewed our focus on a truly engaging virtual experience. We leveraged the new Bevy Virtual Conferences platform to great success, producing another five events in the year since the pandemic started and a full schedule of events on the way for the rest of this year. Additionally, with our team’s experience, we provided support to our larger Marketing Events team for Anaplan’s annual (and newly virtual) DigitalCPX conference, producing more than 50% of the content, facilitating the livestream, and hosting two full days of back-to-back virtual Groups meetups for Community members as part of the event. In June 2021, Anaplan Live! and DigitalCPX are joining forces for a combined virtual event, with the Community once again producing and delivering the vast majority of the content. All of this is on top of the 80+ virtual events hosted by the Anaplan Groups program and our amazing volunteer Group Leaders, many of whom stepped up to help for the first time in the last year. These events have been incredibly successful in connecting our members during this time; our registration-to-attendee conversion is about 60%—well above current industry averages. 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? The metrics outlined above hint at the bigger picture for all of this, which is the value the Community has brought to our members and Anaplan as a whole during this time. We have seen incredible stories of resilience from people who pivoted their skillsets with our talent programs and found work after job loss. We have watched members increase their engagement in our forums and events and parlay that into new levels of thought leadership and career visibility. We have even been able to publish some of their stories or host them at events as a way to encourage other members during these challenging times. One incredible story from the first few months of the pandemic was our Master Anaplanner hackathon, during which our top-tier platform users generated working Anaplan models usable by front-line response workers. All of this was rolled into our larger Anaplan Helps initiative, much of which was hosted on the Community. The early work of this team of Community members is still impacting our company’s response today as our business continues to support the logistical efforts necessary for vaccine distribution and other post-pandemic planning. Through all of this, our Community remains engaged and responsive, helping where they can. Remarkably, they are doing all of this without becoming sidetracked by political discussions or disagreements over differences. They remain focused, and all without the need for any formal moderation team (that’s right, we have no moderators). Beyond the pandemic, our team has stepped up in response to the cultural shift around diversity and inclusion. We led Anaplan’s Women’s History Month video initiatives organization-wide, and we published blogs on Diversity in Tech, civil rights, and International Women’s Day that provided a platform to voices that needed to be heard. And finally, we were able to say “Thank you” to our Community for stepping up in amazing ways throughout the year. In these challenging times, although we have many success metrics, remembering the simple things like gratitude, encouragement, and supporting one another have the greatest impact in helping us all keep calm and carry on.2021 Customer Awards: Anaplan - The Accelerator
Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, we enable decisive action in dynamic conditions, turning complexity into clarity and alignment, and turning change into advantage. Contact: Aaron White Title: Groups Program Manager, Community Related URLs: https://community.anaplan.com Kudos Category: The Accelerator 1. Please describe your company and your initiative. Anaplan is a SaaS company offering a cloud-native business planning tool that is incredibly flexible and responsive and useful in a wide variety of applications. It is used globally by hundreds of top companies across many industries. Anaplan is too robust a tool for company communications and internal representatives to comprehensively or successfully address all possible use cases and solutions. Fully embracing and taking advantage of the platform’s capabilities requires niche conversations with others using it in highly customized ways. It requires a Community! To meet the many, varied needs of our customers, the Anaplan Community needs to be similarly flexible and responsive in order to help its members go further, faster with Anaplan. Our mission is to support, inspire, and connect Anaplan’s ecosystem of model builders and end users. While the Community has existed in some state since 2013, our leadership made an intentional decision in 2016 to invest a true Community. In March 2017, the re-launch of the Anaplan Community occurred on Khoros (then Lithium). Since then, we have been pushing the boundaries of what is possible as a Khoros Community. 2. What was the “before” state? What challenges did you have to overcome? In 2019, we started to hit a breaking point. We had done so much, so fast, that our Community was showing signs of instability. It wasn’t very noticeable to end users yet, but we knew that we needed 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 the code that was in our Community, much of which was custom to support our unique goals and programs. 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 Groups and events (via Bevy) more cleanly into our Community, while building out entirely new sections like our User Directory. This rebirth continued into and throughout 2020. With the onset of the pandemic, we pushed ourselves to create even more solutions for virtual events, members who were displaced from their jobs, and people who needed new ways to connect more meaningfully online. Where we had previously shared technical resources with the rest of the organization, last year we brought on board an Associate Technology Manager and an Engineer to help ensure we had the dedicated resources to keep all our plates spinning and our plans moving forward. Our technical mad scientists continue to push out dozens of fixes and improvements each month, documented for internal eyes in a monthly release notes blog post. Perhaps most importantly, we began creating processes and structures that supported the foundations we had now established rather than weakened them. We began looking for innovative ways to use existing Khoros features and leveraging API instead of developing our own from-scratch custom solutions. The goal in all of this was to enable scalability and reduce repeated or time-intensive tasks for our scrappy team, allowing us to do even more to more effectively serve our members with amazing content and experiences. 3. What were the results? Please cite qualitative and quantitative results. In the last year, we completed an overhaul of the Community site-wide to (among other things) adopt our new corporate branding, modernize the visual experience, and deploy a global navigation across our ecosystem—connecting the Community with Anaplan.com, our Learning Center, Anapedia (our technical documentation), and Anaplan Navigator (an interactive experience designed to help unpack the art of the possible with Anaplan) like never before. We launched multiple new sections to support programs throughout the organization. Additional highlights: We used Khoros' Group Hubs feature to streamline job hunting for our members through an Available Talent board. We created an API-powered Career Search that scours the internet for the latest job postings seeking skilled Anaplanners. We began site-wide taxonomy updates for content to improve searchability and filtering, and updated the default display options for Knowledge Base (and other) content—helpful for managing our Community’s 50,000+ pieces of content. We also leveraged Khoros workflow features to streamline and automate the content creation and review process that allows us to easily create new content, including tagging in experts to validate the information before publishing. We deployed a Slack integration to offer more options for notifications and preferences. We further updated our existing API-driven components that integrated Bevy events listings into the Community. We more than doubled the size and scope of our Groups program by leveraging Group Hubs to quickly scale new categories of micro-communities, allowing for more online connections across more relevant topics and events. We participated in the Beta/trial of Khoros Events in our continual effort to ensure we are providing the best options and features for our members. We made additional improvements in both styling/display and back-end code to systems for content syndication for discussions, message feed/article feed capabilities, and performance/load times on large nodes. We enhanced Khoros' native badging for improved gamification, including automation of badges from different platforms, UI enhancements, and improved leaderboards (for both Kudoed Authors and Solution Authors). Improved the usage and capabilities of Community accounts, making them the single source of truth for all connected experiences (Support, Academy, and Events) and laying the groundwork for additional personalization and gamification enhancements later this year. We also launched our customer case portal, integrated with single sign-on (Okta) and Anaplan, automating the Community account creation process anytime a user opens a Support ticket. The results? The efficiency improvements are paying off. Everything is growing as tasks or updates that used to take 15-30 minutes of work are now more or less instantaneous. Multiplied across dozens of areas throughout the Community, plus the addition of new team members, and we are now much more able to turn attention to even more meaningful improvements and program investments. We are moving at a rapid pace, but even so, we continue to conduct user research to ensure we are making the right decisions for our users, as ultimately all we do is for them. We’ve started to utilize lesser-known tools in Khoros, such as custom tags to float content to specific places or custom styling to highlight featured content in our Group Hubs (this is especially effective for the program managers of our more than 20+ rotating cohorts of Anaplan learners, who use Hubs as a way to stay connected in a sort of virtual classroom). Our Technology Manager, Stan Gromer, stays connected to the Khoros Atlas Community, keeping on top of new features and releases so that we can implement relevant ones quickly—and even determine how to push the limits of their functionality in unique ways. At the launch of Khoros Titans program, Stan was one of six inaugural Legendary Titans. The Anaplan Community was highlighted by Feverbee as one of their Top 10 Best Designed Communities in 2020. Overall, this focus on process, efficiency, and experience—for both our team and our members—has delivered amazing growth and engagement metrics YoY from 2019 to 2020, and we are excited to keep growing. 151% increase in replies (4.8k to 12.2k) 126% increase in topics created (1.4k to 3.2k) 124% increase in posts (10.1k to 22.6k) 53% increase in comments (2.1k to 3.3k) 113% increase in accepted solutions 17% decrease in minutes to first reply 94% decrease in minutes to first solution 131% increase in kudos awarded (13.8k to 31.9k) 1,340% increase in badges awarded (5k to 72.4k) 47.9% increase in unique member logins (to 21,597) 56.5% increase in completed registrations (to 18,710) 10% increase in quality sessions (lasting 180+ seconds)(208.8k to 230.4k)2021 Customer Awards: Anaplan - All-Ways Connected
Company: Anaplan Company background: At Anaplan, we enable decisive action in dynamic conditions, turning complexity into clarity and alignment, and turning change into advantage. Contact: Aaron White Title: Groups Program 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? The Anaplan Community has existed in some state since 2013, but in 2017 (thanks to investment and vision by our leadership) moved into Khoros (then Lithium) with Community becoming a critical focus within Anaplan to provide the kind of knowledge, training, support, and awareness of our platform’s potential that just wasn’t possible through company communications and conversations with internal representatives. The Anaplan Community supports dozens of different programs utilizing many different platforms, impacting our end users, partners, employees, prospects, and learners. 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 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. Our Community team actually sits outside the rest of the organization, reporting up through our Chief Planning Officer, which gives us high levels of executive visibility and support. Instead of existing in and/or supporting a specific department, we are connected to the entire organization. Our tech stack (documented below in what we lovingly refer to as our “Community Robot”) is relatively lean, which is why having extremely flexible platforms (like Khoros) is key, as we are constantly going into multiple directions at the same time. 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? Anaplan is a “Customer First” organization, and the Community is on the front lines of that strategy. Since 2019, we have used Okta for single sign-on. In the last year, we have improved the usage and capabilities of Community accounts by connecting them further to multiple post-sale experiences (Support, Academy, and Events) and making them the single source of truth. This has streamlined the experience among these properties, making additional experiences possible. Some examples: Our Anaplan Talent Builder program (our first-ever opportunity to provide 90-day access to our platform and related training to non-customers) leverages the connection between the Community and the Learning Center (Academy). Since launching less than a year ago, over 2,000 individuals have passed through the Anaplan Access and Anaplan Talent Builder programs with more than 1100 completions of related platform trainings. Our virtual events leverage SSO between Bevy and the Community, making event registration and attendance a breeze for Community members. Our registration-to-attendee conversion is about 60%—well above current industry averages. Our customer case portal connects the Support experience to the Community, streamlining the account creation process whenever someone submits a ticket and allowing them to track their cases. We also deployed a global navigation across our ecosystem—connecting the Community with Anaplan.com, our Learning Center, Anapedia (our technical documentation), and Anaplan Navigator (an interactive experience designed to help unpack the art of the possible with Anaplan) like never before, further enhancing the value of a Community account. The Anaplan Community is a differentiator for Anaplan not simply because it exists, but because of how it is used, every day, by our members to ensure greater business growth and success. Through in-depth content, robust programs, award-winning event experiences, and diverse opportunities for interaction, the Anaplan Community showcases the art of the possible as presented by its most passionate and experienced users and advocates. At this stage of our maturity, there is no segment of our business that isn’t connected to or supported in some capacity by the Community or one of its programs. On the customer side, while the Community technically remains an optional part of the post-sale experience, we are in the early stages of having data to validate the notion that customers who are engaged on the Community adopt more successfully, achieve faster time to value, and are more likely to renew or expand. 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). The value of the Anaplan Community goes beyond its ability to support existing customers in the journey with our product. Rather, we believe that the Anaplan ecosystem grows and the message of Anaplan spreads when everyone has full access to inspiration, education, and support—which is why our Community is open to everyone. When members (or even non-members) see what Anaplan has to offer—as a platform, as a company, and as a Community—it impacts our business through influence on potential sales and expands. This year, for the first time, we’ve been able to start tying member engagement to customer spend in what we’re calling the Community Value Metric. When we began looking at the business impact of customers who log in to the Community versus remaining disengaged, we found that where there was Community login activity (and thus engagement, as the only time a member is required to log in is to comment, kudo, post, etc.), customers spent (on average) 62% more as where there was no Community activity. Further, in our calculations, the YoY change from FY20 to FY21 where there was no Community activity remained flat; however, where there was Community activity, the amount of spend increased 23% from FY20 to FY21. While we fully understand there are many reasons why a customer chooses to spend what they spend, or why some of these numbers may change (or not) year over year as they’ve done, it still remains clear that a customer who engages with the Anaplan Community and its members derives significantly more value from their experience with the platform than someone who is attempting to use it alone. Through the Community being connected to all facets of our business, this impact is felt everywhere. Our Customer Success teams can consolidate their efforts by leveraging Groups and events for customer communications. Our Academy team has an expansive platform to host their growing catalog of on-demand trainings. Our Solutions teams have a ready supply of success stories and use cases to draw on. Our Product teams have a steady stream of feedback, new ideas, and beta testers from a passionate audience. Our Support teams can proactively address customer pain points through content instead of cases. Our Marketing teams have the support of a grassroots fanbase that evangelizes the platform out in the wild and a constant schedule of high quality events to supplement their own efforts. And our Sales teams are equipped with the knowledge of the Community as a powerful differentiator that has made the difference for hundreds of customers and will be there to support new ones in their journeys. As do many Communities, we still have work to do in promoting adoption of this value proposition within Anaplan itself and thus to every user, but the foundations are in place for this tremendous connectedness to drive even more success—for Anaplan and its customers.
