Company: SAP Concur Company background: SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense, and invoice management solutions. The SAP Concur Community was first launched in March 2018. Contact: Severine Egerton + Beshoy Maoud Title: Director, SAP Concur Community + SAP Concur Site Manager Related URLs: https://community.concur.com/  Kudos Category: Partners for Life 1. Describe your partnership with Khoros. Tell us about which Khoros teams you partner with (e.g. Strategic Services, Professional Services, Customer Success, etc.) and the outcomes you were hoping to drive. Back in 2019, we piloted a new ongoing consultancy model with Khoros whereby Khoros provided SAP Concur with a dedicated Web Engineer, an App Engineer and a QA resource managed by a Project Manager for a fixed number of hours on a weekly basis. In exchange for the work this team provided, a pre-agreed number of Success Service Points were debited from our account on a quarterly basis. The work was planned and prioritized by us and implemented by our Khoros Professional Services team. After the launch of our rebranded community website, we first piloted the new model for a few months on relatively small UI and UX tasks. As the new model proved to be successful, we decided to extend it to larger customization projects in 2020. Two main projects were born from this collaboration in 2021/22. A brief description of these projects and their intended outcomes are below: 1. Our main goal with our first initiative – the Profile Meter project – was to encourage existing members to verify their email address and provide additional information, such as their country alongside their marketing preferences, before being awarded a badge for their efforts. This process helped us identify members that automatically qualified for a personalized experience on our site. 2. Our main goal with our second initiative – the On-Demand Translation project – was to adapt to our increasing customer base which, though primarily English speakers at first, saw an increase in the number of posts from non-English languages. Rather than creating a localized version of our site, we aimed to integrate our own API based machine translation tool – the SAP Translation Hub. 2. How have your Khoros partners helped you shape your strategy and align your people and processes? For our Profile Meter project, we initially brainstormed ideas with our Khoros Web Engineer who researched how other communities had solved a similar problem and what solutions were available to us within the constraints of the platform. Armed with this research insight, we then engaged with our internal Design/UX team to scope a solution. Tasks were discussed, then logged in our Khoros Jira instance. The work was then executed and tested by our dedicated Khoros Professional Services team. A productive collaboration between our two teams meant that the delivered solution exceeded the initial scope. Khoros’ assistance with our On-Demand Translation project was also instrumental. We partnered with our dedicated Khoros Professional Services team to integrate SAP Translation Hub in our Dev environment to evaluate the compatibility of the service with the Khoros platform. Once we received confirmation that the proof of concept was successful, we implemented the translation service within our Product Forum and Group Hub Forum sections. Our Web Engineer developed an easy means for our Site Manager to add and remove a language from the translation dropdown menu. In addition, she devised a way to display or hide the Translation feature depending on the type of Group Hub it is displayed in, and a main switch to turn on/off the translation feature across the entire site should it ever be needed.  The SAP Translation Hub service is currently in UAT and is forecasted to go live on the SAP Concur Community in July 2022. The next step for us will be to evaluate how customers respond to the new feature in our Forum sections before extending it to our Blog sections. 3. What successes have you experienced because of your partnership with Khoros? How are you better able to deliver your strategic priorities and deliver value back to your business? Please include metrics if possible. From a business point of view, the partnership with Khoros means that we are able to consistently deliver against our feature roadmap. We have released over 30 new or enhanced features since the start of the year. From a resource point of view, it means that we do not require internal resources to develop and test site enhancements. This represents significant savings for our organization and allows our small team to focus on engaging with our customers and serving the best possible user experience to them. Early data shows that within 3 months of launching our Profile Meter feature, nearly 2,000 members of our community have now completed their profile and earned a new badge for their efforts. <Supporting visuals: Please include any supporting visuals/graphics into your above answers. Insert them into your text copy, so we’re clear on desired positioning of the graphics. We will accept videos for this entry. All videos must be submitted as publicly viewable links on YouTube or Vimeo.> ... View more

Company: SAP Concur Company background: SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense and invoice management solutions. Contact: Beshoy Maoud and Severine Egerton Title: Site Manager and Project Manager Related URLs: https://community.concur.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 primary objective of the SAP Concur community is to serve as a peer-to-peer channel for SAP Concur customers in the United States and around the world. The community facilitates conversations focused on SAP Concur products, industry insights and support content. After monitoring our most searched and consumed content, and evaluating customer feedback from the Khoros survey we understood that an increasing number of customers were looking for support and that the support section on our community site wasn't meeting their needs so we decided to revamp and enhance this section. 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? We improved our existing support content from a list of a dozen Q&As to over 50+ labeled and filterable blog articles, see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. Improved Support and FAQs section: https://community.concur.com/t5/Support-and-FAQs/bg-p/Support We then raised the visibility of this improved section before allowing extra traffic from our main .com website and our online products to be redirected to this new custom blog template, see Fig. 3 and Fig. 4.   We work with our internal stakeholders to create a quarterly feature roadmap to include the features related to our improved support section. This roadmap is sub-divided into eight focus areas including Content, Engagement, User Experience, Automation, etc.  To deliver this roadmap, we work closely with our dedicated Khoros Success Services team. Our team consists of a Project Manager, a Web Engineer and a QA Engineer. We meet with them on a weekly basis to review ticket status and plan releases. 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. Since June 2020, customers looking for support from our online products are now invited to visit a dedicated section of the community to self-serve for support-related frequently asked questions and product how-tos. The results for 2020, especially during the second half of the year, have surpassed our expectations. Our traffic saw a 46% increase compared to 2019 (unique visits). Registrations grew by 55%, posts growth rate improved by 10% and overall, the community was 31% more responsive in 2020. Our community has now become our organization's main repository for support content and product how-tos and is also the primary channel for customers to engage with each other. ... View more

Company: SAP Concur Company background: SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense and invoice management solutions. Contact: Beshoy Maoud and Severine Egerton Title: Site Manager and Project Manager Related URLs: https://community.concur.com/  Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On 1. How did your team shift your existing strategy to better engage customers during a crisis? Due to the COVID crisis SAP Concur major in-person customer events had to become virtual events. We leveraged the community to promote these virtual events via custom banners and introduced the Announcements component to highlight dedicated blog posts, see Fig. 1. To increase engagement, we enabled and customized the Polls component as well as the Forum Threaded Replies feature to allow for easy readability and scannability in long forum threads and for Ask Me Anything sessions. We also migrated our Legacy Groups to Group Hubs to offer a richer experience to our group members by having dedicated forums and blogs under one location and to let them connect more easily with other members in the same industry or country. Once the migration was complete, we started expanding our group program and launched several new groups including a dedicated group to support our virtual events to replace in-person networking, see Fig. 2. 2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis? The addition of several new groups on our community prompted us to re-think the way we grant members access to groups. To reduce the burden of inviting and allowing new members to a group, we decided to automate the process to free up the time of our site manager and our group owners. This also positively improved our members' experience by providing them quicker access into their groups. Our solution relies on connecting Khoros to our CRM to match members'  industry and country information, then a Role is assigned which in turn offers our community members a tailored experience on the site including direct admission to a dedicated group when members next sign in, see Fig. 3 and Fig. 4. 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? As our community carries on growing it is important for our organization to focus on automation. The most critical indicator has been our ability to free up internal resources from having to perform mundane tasks to let them focus on engaging more with our customers. Posts growth rate improved by 10% MoM, and overall the community was 31% more responsive in 2020 over 2019 even with the loss of one of our community managers. ... View more

Company: SAP Concur Company background: SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense and invoice management solutions. Contact: Beshoy Maoud and Severine Egerton Title: Site Manager and Project Manager Related URLs: https://community.concur.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. Throughout 2020 we have displayed the Khoros Survey to all SAP Concur community visitors that browse the site for more than 3 minutes, see Fig. 1. From this survey we have been able to not only gather quantitative and qualitative data from our visitors, we have also been able to calculate our customers' satisfaction (Net Promoter Score) and our support resolution savings using the Khoros/Forrester Support Deflection Formula, see Fig.2. The data gathered helped us paint a more refined profile of our visitors. It gave us more insight into our customers’ needs and wants and also confirmed that our community site offers value to our existing customers and prospects together with making significant cost saving for our organization. Some of the features that were inspired by our customers through the Khoros survey include: product forum re-structure, revamping our support area and clarifying how to join a group or how to reset a password. 2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change? Knowing what our existing customers and prospects are looking for helped us refine the existing community content and curate missing content. We leveraged this data to also redesign our home page and site navigation, and highlight the content customers are most looking for instead of what we assumed they were looking for. An additional benefit of this change was the conversion of some reluctant contributors to active contributors and promoters of the community. Our content contributors appreciate the ease of creating and uploading new support or product related content and reach out to thousands of customers 24/7. 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). Khoros/Forrester Support Deflection Formula shows that in 2020 our community was responsible for saving our organization over 1 million dollars in support costs and we are on track to exceed that amount in 2021. Going forward we are curating additional support content and will carry on using the Promoted Search feature to match specific search keywords to newly added content to deflect even more support queries. ... View more