Zoom
Author Details: Name: Briuana Green Title: Senior Community Manager Name: Alexis Brown Title: Senior Manager, Global Community and Social Media Company: Zoom Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Zoom is an all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform, to make connecting easier, more immersive, and dynamic for both businesses and individuals. Zoom operates by putting customers first and enabling meaningful connections and facilitating modern collaboration. With solutions like Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Phone, Zoom Clips, Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Docs, and more all in one offering, we help drive human innovation and deliver exceptional results for our users. The Zoom Community team is part of the Digital Customer Support organization, dedicated to delivering customer satisfaction and resolution through various digital platforms, those including the Zoom community, knowledge base, chatbot, and support web experience. By offering 24/7 online support, we enable accessible resolutions for our customers. Since joining Zoom in 2021, the Community team is proud to continuously make a positive impact on both our customers and our internal teams. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Zoom Community team fosters a healthy, welcoming environment where users are encouraged to seek digital support first. It offers a space for end users to collaborate and find solutions alongside fellow Zoom users. As a company, we are committed to delivering innovative technology and exceptional user experiences. Providing the support customers need to succeed with our products is a top priority, and the Zoom Community is one of many avenues for users to seek help, share knowledge, and collaborate. This positive and supportive online community compliments Zoom's overarching mission of one platform delivering limitless human connection. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Zoom Community was created to meet the needs of Zoom users worldwide, offering a dynamic online forum where individuals can ask questions, find solutions, and collaborate with peers. In response to growing demand for 24/7 online support, the Zoom Community team was established in March 2021. By August of the same year, the community officially launched, and has since expanded to over 371,000 members, 173,000 posts, 39 million page views, and 24 million visits. As a key resource for Zoom users, the community works in tandem with Zoom's digital support tools, including the knowledge base and chatbot. This forum empowers users to self-serve by either searching for answers or asking new questions, receiving guidance from experts. It fosters connections among users, helping them expand their knowledge, exchange ideas, and discover innovative solutions. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Over the past year, the Zoom Community has evolved into a key destination for Zoom users, offering valuable updates on product launches, feature solutions, upcoming webinars, and service statuses. With a wide array of content shared within the community, we've seen significant improvements, innovations, and strengthened partnerships. Here are some of the key initiatives driving this growth. SEO Optimization: A major success for our community has been the effectiveness of our SEO optimization efforts, significantly boosting our visibility. Our threads now consistently rank higher in Google search results, making it easier for users to find Zoom-related solutions. This enhanced visibility allows for faster issue resolution, improving the overall user experience and attracting a broader audience, further establishing our community as a crucial support resource. Voice of the Customer (VoC): The community plays a vital role in collecting and conveying customer feedback to internal teams. By prioritizing the voice of the customer, we can address trending topics, resolve identified bugs, and fill content gaps, helping us maintain exceptional customer satisfaction. Knowledge Base (KB): The community helps us uncover knowledge gaps in our self-service resources. By monitoring frequently asked questions, we can identify areas for improvement in our knowledge base, ensuring users find the information they need more easily and escalating issues when necessary. Customer Success Forum and On-Demand Learning: This year, we expanded the community to include more collaborative spaces like the Customer Success Forum, Customer Success Events, and On-Demand Learning areas. These spaces provide opportunities for users to share success stories, unique use cases, customer spotlights, and access live and recorded webinars. Escalations and Service Impacting Events: We use the community to communicate updates on service-impacting events and system status. There have been multiple instances where issues or bugs were first identified through reports from community members. New Product Announcements: With the introduction of new products such as Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Docs, and Zoom Clips, we've added dedicated forums for each innovation. These spaces allow customers to ask questions, share use cases, and learn from previous discussions, fostering a deeper understanding of these products. Community Champion Spotlight Series: To celebrate the contributions of our experts, we launched a monthly Community Champion Spotlight Series, highlighting the outstanding work and expertise of our top champions. This year, we enhanced the Happy Rewards program to better recognize and reward community members. Leveraging Khoros' gamification features, we introduced: Leaderboards: New weekly leaderboards highlight top contributors based on accepted solutions. Reputation Levels and Rank Icons: Updated rank titles and icons showcase member expertise. Badges: Increased thresholds for badges awarded for accepted solutions, likes, and replies. Collectively, these driving projects that were prioritized over this past year helped us to truly strengthen the customer experience on the community, which in turn, enabled us to better support and connect with our users. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on providing solutions for our customers and overall customer satisfaction, we achieved significant business outcomes that reflect our commitment to delivering helpful support and valuable information to our users. SEO Impact and Business Outcomes: Our SEO optimization has markedly increased our visibility in search engine results, which directly impacts user engagement. Over the past year, our key metrics demonstrate the following results: Increased Organic Traffic: Our threads now rank higher on Google, leading to a noticeable increase in organic traffic to our community. In August, we saw a 54% year-over-year increase in total clicks from Google Search. This growth in traffic indicates that more users are finding and accessing our solutions through search engines. Enhanced User Engagement: The higher visibility has resulted in increased interaction with our content. During our third year, the community saw a 22.36% increase in page views, a 33.71% rise in visits, a 29.94% boost in unique visitors, and a 17.65% growth in total user time, reflecting improved engagement. Improved Problem Resolution: In August 2024, we achieved a remarkable 48.6% reduction in the average time to first reply, bringing it down to just 18.7 hours compared to 36 hours in August of the previous year. This improvement in problem resolution contributes to greater customer satisfaction and reduces the need for additional support. Customer Satisfaction and Business Value: Our focus on customer satisfaction is evident in the positive feedback and increased participation within our community. Specific results include: Higher Satisfaction Scores: Customer satisfaction for our community forum jumped significantly from 84.5% in August 2023 to an outstanding 93.6% in August 2024, indicating higher satisfaction with the support and resources available, as users can more easily find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Increased Community Growth: Year-over-year growth in community membership and activity levels shows that users find our community valuable for expanding their knowledge and resolving issues. Total registered members increased by 28.6% year-over-year, rising from 283,851 at the end of August 2023 to 365,057 at the end of August 2024. Cost Efficiency: By empowering users to resolve issues independently through improved SEO and accessible information, we’ve reduced the reliance on direct support channels, leading to cost savings in support operations. In summary, our efforts to optimize SEO, expand programs, and consistently provide users with timely solutions have led to significant growth in both user engagement and community traffic. These enhancements have not only improved the efficiency of our support but also generated measurable business value through cost savings and an enhanced user experience. Our goal is to empower users to resolve issues and broaden their knowledge of Zoom’s capabilities. The Zoom Community’s wealth of shared knowledge and information helps us achieve this mission. By analyzing year-over-year key metrics, we can clearly see how our continued growth reflects the community’s success in delivering solutions that meet user needs. 2023 Zoom Community by the Numbers – YoY growth (August 2023) compared to (August 2024): Solution views increased by 50% Community visits increased by 22% Unique visitors increased by 25% Page views increased by 11% Number of clicks from the Zoom support site to the community; from Google to the community (August 2023 Google clicks: 320K, August 2024: 494K) Membership growth increased by 29% What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Addressing the increased need for self-service within our community has yielded several key progress outcomes, enhancing both customer satisfaction and support efficiency. Here are the specific results and metrics that quantify these improvements: Increased Traffic to the Community: Traffic Growth: Our SEO enhancements have led to a 53.6% increase in organic traffic to the community. This surge in visits indicates that more users are discovering and accessing our community through search engine results. Increased Resolution Rate: Solution Visibility: The rise in community traffic has corresponded with a 50% increase in solution views. This boost in visibility has directly improved our resolution rate for user issues. Increased Self-help Success Rate: Effective Self-service: The improved SEO has facilitated greater access to self-help resources. This reflects the community’s enhanced role in enabling users to resolve their issues independently as opposed to creating support tickets and calls. Increased CSAT Scores: Customer Satisfaction: As users increasingly find solutions through the community, our customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) have risen by nearly 10%, increasing from 84.5% in August 2023 to 93.6% in August 2024. This improvement is a direct result of users’ ability to quickly and efficiently address their problems. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros Communities has been pivotal in the successful launch and development of the Zoom Community, offering extensive features, customization options, and integrated tools that supported our goals. Here’s how Khoros has distinguished itself and contributed to our success: Customization Design Flexibility: Khoros provided robust customization options that allowed us to align the community platform with our brand identity. We implemented custom top navigation and dropdown menus to seamlessly integrate Zoom resources, creating a cohesive look and feel across our marketing and support sites. Recent Activity Feed: A standout feature is the custom recent activity feed, which organizes posts into categories like "Latest Posts," "Trending Posts," "Solved," and "Unanswered." This structure helps users easily find relevant content, enhancing their overall experience. Gamification Rewards and Recognition: Khoros’s gamification features have been key in driving user engagement. By implementing leaderboards and custom badges, we effectively recognize and motivate community members for their contributions and solutions. Analytics In-Depth Insights: Khoros’s analytics tools provide valuable metrics on traffic, content, and user activity. These insights enable us to track trends, gather feedback, and make informed, data-driven decisions. Our monthly Listening Reports, generated from this data, offer a comprehensive overview of community growth, top discussions, and member contributions. These reports have directly influenced new knowledge base articles, product features, and content updates. Custom Components Cost-Effective Advertising: Khoros’s custom components allow us to promote events, product launches, and important announcements through ads and banners. This feature has been especially useful for communicating updates during service-impacting events in a cost-efficient manner. Integrations Khoros Care: A major benefit of Khoros is its Khoros Care feature, which helps us manage and prioritize the high volume of community posts, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly to boost user satisfaction. Qualtrics: By integrating Qualtrics for customer surveys directly within our community, we’ve streamlined the process of gathering valuable user feedback. Tableau: The availability of the Tableau API has been essential in analyzing user behavior and engagement, providing deeper insights into community interaction. Khoros Communities has given us the tools and flexibility to build a dynamic, engaging platform. From customization and gamification to powerful analytics and seamless integrations, these features have been instrumental in helping us meet our goals and deliver ongoing value to our users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Working with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing our needs and challenges, thanks to several key aspects of our experience: Relationship with the Professional Services Team: JWT Login Flow: By working with Khoros’s professional services team, we successfully implemented a JWT login flow, enabling better customer identification and more personalized services. This enhancement also supports the setup of special-access forums, providing a tailored experience based on account types. Ease of Integrations: Seamless Platform Integration: One of Khoros’s key strengths is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other platforms. This has allowed us to connect the community with various tools, improving how we manage user interactions and support. Integrations with platforms like Qualtrics for surveys and Tableau for data analysis have been especially valuable in optimizing operations and gathering actionable insights. These elements of our experience with Khoros have been instrumental in providing targeted support, enhancing user engagement, and streamlining our community management processes.PowerSchool
Author Details: Name: Jamie Harmon Title: Supervisory, Community Company: PowerSchool Tell us about you, your company, and your team? PowerSchool is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, connecting teachers, administrators, and families through unified technology to enhance the learning experience. Over the past few years, PowerSchool has expanded with the addition of several new products, and the PowerSchool Community Team has remained focused on providing a consistent and exemplary support experience to our growing customer base. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The PowerSchool Community Team plays a vital role in supporting PowerSchool's mission to enhance the educational experience for K-12 institutions. The team is dedicated to creating an integrated support experience that meets the diverse needs of all customers across PowerSchool’s expanding product portfolio. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We implemented the PowerSchool Community for all PowerSchool customers, including school administrators, office staff, educators, families, and school job applicants. Our primary goal was to provide a seamless, consistent community and support experience across all products in the PowerSchool portfolio. Over our history, PowerSchool has grown to provide additional products, each with their own support documentation and processes. The growth has made PowerSchool a leading provider of cloud-based K-12 education software allowing us to offer a customized, integrated experience to all customers. At the same time, this has posed a unique challenge when presenting a unified support experience. Customers with multiple PowerSchool products had to manage many logins across multiple support platforms. By consolidating SSO for some products and bringing more resources into the community, we’ve created a collaborative space where customers can easily find answers, engage with peers, access support, and provide feedback. We’ve also tailored the support experience for each product to address the unique needs of our customers. The PowerSchool Community has evolved into a comprehensive support experience that is deeply integrated into products across the PowerSchool portfolio. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Our biggest innovation this year was the integration of self-service AI Chat within the PowerSchool Community, offering immediate assistance to customers and significantly reducing support case volume. Simple how-to questions make up a large portion of PowerSchool support queries. While our support team can resolve these requests efficiently, it still takes time for clients to open cases, wait for a response, and confirm a resolution is functional. Now, with self-service AI Chat, clients are able to report an issue and receive actionable guidance right away, without opening a traditional support case. This has brought us even closer to the lightning-fast one-touch support experience we have been striving for. For more complex inquiries, the chat interface seamlessly escalates to a live agent with a full transcript of their previous conversation. This streamlined process has made for a more complete self-service experience, surprising and delighting customers with cutting-edge, highly efficient support. Meanwhile, the increased deflection rate has eased the workload of our superb support team, allowing them additional time to focus on the complex issues that need their direct attention. We rolled out our AI Chat experience with a soft launch in July, followed by a full launch across four products in August. Going forward, we are integrating AI Chat into high-priority products at a regular cadence. Our centralization of all PowerSchool support resources in the PowerSchool Community has ensured that all clients will have easy, consistent access to up-to-date resources and, eventually, AI Chat. Collaboration between our Product, Support, Marketing, and Customer Success teams was key to fine-tuning the AI tool and optimizing the escalation workflow. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By integrating self-service AI Chat directly into product pages and centralizing all PowerSchool support resources in the PowerSchool Community, we achieved several significant business outcomes that highlight the value of this solution: Increased Efficiency and Cost Savings: Since the full AI Chat launch on August 5th, 2024, 54% of 1,289 chats have been successfully resolved through the AI chat experience with only 46% needing transfer to a Support engineer. This reduction has reduced the need for support agent intervention, resulting in both decreased operational costs and increased bandwidth for support agents. Community Growth: We added over 200,000 new members to our community in the past year, reflecting our successful centralization efforts. In particular, single sign-on improvements have been effective, streamlining access for all customers. Higher Engagement: We experienced over 20% growth in member logins, an 80% increase in unique visitors, and more than a 60% rise in total visits compared to the previous year. Additionally, page views increased by 51%, indicating greater engagement with community content. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The integration of AI Chat and other improvements to our community have led to measurable progress outcomes: Added over 200,000 new members to the PowerSchool Community in the past year, driven by our focus on resource centralization and single sign-on from product to community. Achieved over 20% growth in member logins, 80% growth in unique visitors, and more than a 60% increase in visits compared to last year. We saw a 51% increase in page views this year. Achieved our CSAT goal of 95%. Since the AI chat launch on August 5, 2024, 54% of 1,289 chats have been successfully resolved through the AI chat experience. Community members have helped resolve nearly 50% of customer forum posts. PowerSchool Mentors, our community super users, have responded to over 1,200 forum posts this year and participated in 65 beta tests. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros Communities platform was essential in the launch of our new AI Chat tool, PowerSchool Assistant. We needed a platform that was not only powerful enough to host a high volume of support resources, but also flexible enough to integrate with additional services offered by other vendors. Khoros Communities has been extraordinarily successful on both accounts. At present, the PowerSchool Community contains over 20,000 knowledge base articles across nearly 50 products in the PowerSchool portfolio. We’ve embedded AI Chat directly into product category pages within the community, creating a seamless experience that integrates AI with our extensive knowledge bases, allowing customers to access support without leaving the current page. This experience consistently surpasses customers’ expectations by presenting relevant answers to pressing concerns, empowering all PowerSchool users whether they are seasoned technical contacts, total newcomers, or anywhere in between. Additionally, the analytics tools built into Khoros Communities have enabled us to track user engagement and make data-driven decisions while iterating and improving on our AI Chat experience. At this point, Khoros is deeply integrated into our customer experience framework, allowing us to meet aggressive goals by creating cohesive, efficient, and user-friendly solutions. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? While we didn't work directly with Khoros on the AI chat implementation, the platform's flexibility and robust feature set played a crucial role in addressing our needs. Khoros enabled us to seamlessly integrate the AI chat into our existing community, ensuring it fit within the user experience we had already established. This has allowed us to roll out a transformative new user experience for all members of the PowerSchool Community without disrupting any existing customer workflows. This consistent, continued functionality is essential given PowerSchool’s mission of supporting personalized education for students around the world. Khoros Communities’ powerful knowledge base functionality allowed the AI to pull accurate, up-to-date answers from community resources, improving case deflection and enhancing self-service success. Additionally, Khoros’ analytics tools provided valuable insights into customer interactions, helping us track engagement, identify trends, and refine the AI experience to better meet user needs. This adaptability and ease of use were essential in successfully addressing our challenges and delivering an improved, efficient customer support experience.Fortinet
Author Details: Name: Kate McMillan Title: Service Technology Manager Company: Fortinet Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I’m part of the Community team for Fortinet. Founded more than 20 years ago in Sunnyvale, California, Fortinet continues to be a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our portfolio of over 50 enterprise-grade products is the largest integrated offering available, delivering proven cybersecurity everywhere you need it. More than 755,000 customers trust Fortinet solutions, which are among the most deployed, most patented, and most validated in the industry. Our team works as part of the support side of the business, building the Fortinet Community which provides a single source of support knowledge and community for our customers and our worldwide partner network. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Fortinet’s mission is ‘Securing people, devices, and data everywhere’. Our aim is to provide customers with the information they need at the time they need it, facilitating quick solutions with minimal customer effort. We build community-based solutions which put the customer first, connecting our users with the most relevant content from our wide network of product experts, allowing them to keep their people, devices and data secure. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We created the Fortinet Community in 2021, bringing together multiple disparate systems to provide our customers with a single place to find answers, collaborate and share ideas. Since that time, we have grown to a community of 125,000 registered members globally with 41 million page views per year and 6.5 million unique visitors. We put the community in place for various groups across the Fortinet ecosystem: our customers, support teams, partners and distributors, sales and sales engineers make use of the Community on a daily basis. The Community was intended to solve the challenge of providing information and answers to Fortinet’s extensive customer base on the range of 50+ leading security products we provide. As the largest installed base of network firewalls in the industry, we are serving a vast audience. We also needed to scale this wealth of expert knowledge so that it could be made available to as many people as possible, 24/7. We wanted to enable our teams who interact with our customers in chat to have a seamless and consistent experience. We also wanted this experience to take advantage of our existing knowledge base to reduce time to resolution and set the stage for more advanced interactions with Generative AI capabilities. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Major Win: Community Powered Knowledge Since the launch of Community in 2021, we have seen three years of growth in terms of the content provided, membership numbers and engagement with the Community platform. One of our goals of the program is the promotion of centralized and reusable knowledge within our support ecosystem. With over 50 products in the security arena, Fortinet is constantly evolving, and we want to make sure the wealth of knowledge and technical expertise within our organization is available for customers to find when they need help. The Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program at Fortinet aims to do just that; we operate on the KCS principle that “all of us are smarter than one of us” and we work to capture that knowledge so that it can be reused to help our customers again and again. We work hand in hand with colleagues globally including TAC Support teams, Advanced Support, Sales Engineers and Specialists to capture knowledge and craft it into knowledge articles, which live on the Community. These are constantly evolving as our engineers update these articles to ensure they remain relevant and up to date. By leveraging a federated search engine (SearchUnify) alongside Khoros we can combine all our support data in Community – including additional content sources such as our documentation, websites, video content, and leading FortiGuard library so that customers find an answer from one unified UI. The KCS education program is strongly interlinked with the Community platform as well. With regular newsletters, training sessions and constant feedback loops we are working to build and extend this knowledge sharing culture. The win for Fortinet here is the ability to develop content at scale and Khoros helps us do this with a unified publishing engine. Our customers and partners have also been empowered with the ability to suggest article edits and submit new article ideas so we can work with our community to develop content based on their input. The change in perspective for our engineering teams has been massive as we shift the mindset towards capturing knowledge and creating articles. We work closely with this audience, running frequent communications, feedback sessions and providing incentives to show appreciation for strong contributions. Monthly newsletters call out our top contributors to both the Knowledge Baseand Forum, with rewards and recognition for those who are going above and beyond to help us grow Community. When we see team members embracing the KCS principles, their teammates can nominate them to receive a ‘KCS Champion’ award, to highlight their contributions and continue to build awareness of their achievements and the program. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We have been seeing a steady upward trend in the quantity of high-quality articles being produced to create knowledge on the community platform. We have seen a 179% YoY increase in the number of Knowledge Articles created by our internal experts. We are also seeing a huge increase in the number of Knowledge Articles being updated on the Community. This is valuable because it keeps our body of knowledge up to date, therefore both our engineer and customer audiences have a reliable, well-maintained library of information to access when they need to find an answer. Updates to Knowledge Base articles have increased 211% YoY. In addition, we have been able to scale support at operationally efficient levels while the business expands year over year. The number of members registering with the site is up 357% YoY, and member entrances have increased by 310% YoY. We also see increased participation across our global network in the support organization with teams from all regions contributing to our hub of Fortinet knowledge on the Khoros platform. Another positive outcome is the rate at which our Knowledge Articles are attached to support cases. Attaching an article to a support case – i.e., signaling that the article was used to help the case - helps us track how frequently articles are being used to solve our customer issues, and measure knowledge reuse across the support organization. Our attach rate has increased by 155% since we have started monitoring this KPI. We have built a network of KCS ‘coaches’ globally, who work within our support teams, promoting the benefits of creating reusable knowledge and guiding our teams as we continue to navigate the huge shift towards these principles. As with any successful KCS Program, strong buy in and support from senior leadership has also played a huge part in the success of the program: “A solid knowledge platform is a critical step to being able to satisfy customers' ever growing need to help themselves to solve problems quickly and efficiently; answering once and offsetting those same questions that come from all corners of our global customer base. Fortinet Community has absolutely excelled in standing up as a go-to resource in which we at Fortinet and customers alike can trust, knowing that if there are answers they can be found quickly. This is a key enabler to allowing us more time for thorough research and resolution of the tougher cases, so hats off and big thanks to the Community team in providing the launchpad for the next step in the journey - knowledge-centered customer support.” - Dave Monery, Global VP Support A further business outcome we have seen is improvement in the customer experience on Community. Through the Khoros Value Analytics survey, we can maintain a constant feedback loop with customers, providing an opportunity to hear about their experiences: “Awesome articles that help new community members. As a new member, it can be very confusing to navigate the world of Fortinet so these support articles can be helpful.” “The Forum has a certain quality of loyalty and 'family vibe' while being professional at the same time which I've never encountered elsewhere.” Catering to a huge range of customers with vastly varying backgrounds and technical expertise means we are constantly striving for a balance between supporting our customers who are getting started with Fortinet and those who have many years of experience with our product set. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased self-service success rate Our self-service success rate (i.e. the number of customers who can find what they are looking for when they come to the Community) has improved since the introduction of the KCS Program and our investment in the Community. The Self-Service Success reported by our customers has increased steadily from an average of 62% in H1 2023 to 71% in H1 2024. We are on track for 77% for Q3 2024. We continue to implement further measures to make content as easy to find as possible, including eliminating duplicate content and analyzing search data to improve findability. We also measure CSAT on Community, and we have seen a steady increase here as well. Hand in hand with seeing more self-service, we see fewer tickets per customer. Despite rapid growth in the business, our ticket volumes are stable, representing a reduced support cost and ability to deliver a support experience that consistently delivers high Customer Satisfaction scores. Khoros Chat implementation The success of Community has led us to implement Khoros Chat, to extend the reuse of knowledge and create a seamless experience for customers, where agent knowledge and community content can dovetail to build positive outcomes. This allows us to bring automation to our customers as they seek support; the interlinking of Chat with our Community is a perfect opportunity to suggest Community content, such as Knowledge articles and relevant forum threads. Increased collaboration across teams within Fortinet We work closely with colleagues in the Documentation department, and cross-promote content between the ‘Doc site’ (docs.fortinet.com) and Community. Although these are different categories of information, there are clear links between the two. We have identified useful articles relevant to documents and useful documents relevant to articles. Creating cross-links between these two information sources enables us to further improve the experience for our customers and get them the information they need as quickly as possible. The Marketing team also work closely with the Community team; from SEO and optimizing our content for findability, to ‘getting started’ initiatives aimed at creating a smooth journey for customers who are just beginning their Fortinet experience. We also collaborate with teams across the business to build dedicated ‘Group Pages’ on Community where there is a special interest or business need. These groups bring people together to solve problems and share knowledge in specific areas, such as Professional Services and Advanced Support. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The platform’s ability to create custom workflows We have been able to create workflows which fit our needs around submitting articles, review steps and publishing due to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. We can easily manage roles and permissions to allow processes to work efficiently for each user type. This has been important as our needs are constantly evolving through our adoption of KCS methods. Khoros APIs for custom reporting and analytics By integrating our Tableau reporting tools via Khoros APIs we have combined critical Community and Knowledge metrics with our people and case related data to create insightful and actionable views of our activities. This visibility allows us to track our performance across all teams and regions and helps us measure the impact of the Community and our Self-Service initiatives. Ability to scale and platform stability We have seen massive amounts of growth in the Fortinet community over the last three years. The Khoros Community platform has been able to handle more than 20M visits per year with minimal services interruptions. Since our knowledge base is housed on the Fortinet community, these attributes are critical to our success in delivering support every day to our customers. Seamless integration with Khoros Chat Rolling out Khoros Chat to work alongside Community enhances our ability to provide world class support at enterprise level. Our agents have a complete view of the wealth of information available to them in Community, combined with a feature rich chat platform, allowing us to best serve our customer base, solve issues and feed back into the knowledge loop we are forming. Ability to merge other Communities post-acquisition Khoros has enabled us to merge other communities with the Fortinet Community as Fortinet continues to grow as a business. As we acquire other organizations, we can integrate their content with our own, building customized Group pages and functionality where required, to extend their own customer experience and facilitate a smooth transition thanks to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have worked with Khoros to build a strong community, increase our membership numbers and create a single source of troubleshooting knowledge for our customers to learn, share and collaborate on. By expanding our Khoros product set to include live chat, we have brought further support options to our customer base, to get them the help they need as quickly as possible. The Khoros CSM team have helped us work towards our knowledge reuse goals, and the flexibility of Khoros credits has allowed us to complete additional projects including a Data Deep Dive to better understand our audience and how they are using community. The ability of the Khoros platform to scale with us as we grow to millions of page views and high volumes of content has been instrumental to our success with the KCS program so far. KCS and the reuse of knowledge from our collective experience will continue to be front and center of our community strategy moving forwards. This will feed into maintaining our KPIs, engaging with our users and promoting the value of Community. Most importantly, our knowledge base is serving as the foundation for multiple upcoming Generative AI offerings for our customers and our teams. We will continue to: Strive to provide the best possible experience for our customers on community and ensure they can find what they are looking for. Work with our support teams to provide high quality, relevant content to help them solve issues quickly. Collaborate with different areas of the Business internally to innovate and create new Community experiences. Recognize and reward our super user community who go above and beyond to support our peers. Ensure everyone can be a part of engaging with community and feel the benefits. In 2025 we will continue to develop our community offering with further custom group pages, expansion of our super user offering, and further promotion of the amazing things achieved by the Community team. Generative AI will play a major role for Fortinet and Khoros as we look to take advantage of some of the new capabilities of the platform including Agent Assist AI and our own Gen AI technologies working together to provide an even more seamless agent and customer experience.Qlik
Author Details: Name: Suzanne Macaluso Title: Senior Advisor, Digital Platforms Company: Qlik Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Qlik® helps you use your data to solve problems, meet new objectives, and address critical business needs. My team is responsible for our Community, both front and and back end. We oversee every aspect of the platform and the overall Community program. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our role is pivotal in supporting the overall Community program, strategy, and governance, aligning with the company's strategic objectives from the front end to the back end. This alignment is crucial as it ensures our Community is a healthy, positive environment where our members can feel comfortable collaborating and brainstorming. We work across the entire organization, ensuring we are helping the business meet its needs. We are the heartbeat of Qlik. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our Community platform was initially conceived with a clear goal in mind: create a space where our customers, partners, students, and prospects could come to ask questions, find answers, and share knowledge anytime, from anywhere. This inclusive platform, open to all, also aimed to ensure our employees were actively involved, demonstrating our commitment, transparency, and the value we place on our members. It's the only platform where our members can reach us 24x7x365. Our use case started with an initiative to support users in a one-to-many service model. The Community was instrumental in allowing our members to ask questions and facilitate answers through their peers. This enabled users to solve problems before opening a support ticket and served to educate and unite members using our solutions. We knew it could be so much more! The Community soon played a crucial role in promoting Qlik events, helping Marketing teams increase event attendance. Product managers came to us looking for a collaborative space to blog about upcoming software releases and technical information and to share information about new features and functionality. They soon realized they could help answer questions and learn from our customers and partners. Customer Success teams wanted to know if their customers were in the Community and were asking us to give demonstrations on all the aspects available in the Community to get their customers more engaged. Our Community soon became the heartbeat of Qlik, where anyone can come and collaborate on all things Qlik. They could even share the Apps they built. This year, we also learned that because of the platform's flexibility and our structure with stakeholders, it doesn’t matter where the team managing the Community lives within an organization. Our team recently moved from Marketing to IT, and the platform demonstrated how easily adaptable it was. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. One of our challenges was a significant increase in spam infiltrating our Community. Our goal was to prevent our members from encountering spam and having to report it. We worked closely with the Khoros team, who played a crucial role in enhancing the spam filter and educating us about the platform's capabilities, of which we were unaware. This collaboration with the Khoros moderation team and our TAM was instrumental in effectively mitigating the spam issue. Knowledge Sharing: Providing a platform for users to find answers and share experiences, which reduced the need for direct support. Engagement: Our Community encourages internal and external members to participate, fostering a strong sense of belonging and transparency. This inclusivity ensures everyone feels informed and part of the larger Qlik Solutions family. Event Participation: Increasing attendance at Qlik events through targeted promotion within the Community. Customer Feedback: Facilitating direct communication between Product Managers and users, allowing for real-time feedback and insights. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased Engagement: 26% year-over-year growth in community engagement. Cost Savings: 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection. Membership Growth: A 32% increase in new members, indicating successful outreach and onboarding strategies. Qlik Events: 4.5% increase in event registrations. Blog Views: 66K average monthly blog views. Spam mitigation: Significant improvement following adjustments made to the platform. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Addressing the challenges above led to several positive outcomes, reinforcing our confidence in the Khoros Communities solution and its ability to deliver on our goals. Increased Engagement 26% Year-over-Year Growth: This consistent growth in engagement indicates that users find value in the community, leading to more interactions and discussions. Membership Growth 32% Increase in New Members: The community's openness and active promotion attracted more users, expanding the base of participants who can contribute and benefit from shared knowledge. Reduced Support Tickets Proactive Problem Solving: The community reduced the volume of direct support inquiries by enabling users to find answers through peer support, freeing up resources for more complex issues. 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection. Enhanced Event Attendance 4.5% Increase in Registrations: Promoting Qlik events through the community significantly boosted participation, leading to more successful events and greater visibility for Qlik solutions. Improved Customer Insights Feedback Loop with Product Management: The collaborative space allowed product managers to receive real-time user feedback and insights, leading to better-informed product development and feature enhancements. Stronger Customer Relationships Increased Customer Engagement: Customer Success teams demonstrated Community benefits to clients, fostering stronger relationships and increasing customer satisfaction. Employee Involvement Engaged Workforce: Employee participation in the Community enhanced transparency and showed commitment to user success, building trust and a sense of community. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros platform played a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals through several differentiating features and capabilities: User-Friendly Interface The intuitive design made it easy for users to navigate and engage with content, encouraging participation and reducing barriers to entry. Robust Knowledge Management Khoros provided tools for organizing and categorizing content, making it easy for users to find relevant information and solutions quickly. Engagement Tools Features like gamification, badges, and leaderboards motivated users to participate actively and contribute to discussions, fostering a sense of community. Integration Capabilities Seamless integration of other platforms allowed for a unified experience, facilitating user engagement across different touchpoints. Analytics and Insights Built-in analytics provided valuable data on user engagement, content performance, and community health, enabling us to adapt strategies based on real-time feedback. Gamification By utilizing the “Top Kudoed Posts” component time range under “My Profile” -> “Preferences” -> “Kudos,” we created a dynamic user interface on the Community homepage. The dynamic leaderboard component lets users effortlessly view the top engaged users within their selected time frame, motivating them to strive for peak performance across various ranges. Enabling Factors Strong Community Management Dedicated community moderators ensured that discussions were moderated, questions were answered, and content was continually refreshed and promoted. Cross-Departmental Collaboration Involvement from Marketing, Product Management, R&D, Support, and Customer Success teams ensured that community initiatives aligned with broader company goals. Feedback Loops Regularly soliciting user feedback helped refine community strategies and features, ensuring the platform evolved to meet the needs of our members. Promotional Campaigns Targeted campaigns to promote Community participation and upcoming events helped drive traffic and engagement within the platform. The combination of Khoros platform-tailored features and our team's strategic efforts created an ecosystem that supported knowledge sharing and user engagement. By leveraging these strengths, we continue to improve our already thriving Community, which enhanced our members' overall experience and reinforced their loyalty to Qlik Solutions. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our experience with Khoros has given us a strong understanding of irrelevant content in our community. Collaborating with our Khoros moderation team and our TAM has been crucial in addressing our needs and challenges. They offered proactive guidance and advice, helping us navigate decisions and implement changes on the platform. Through discussions about their experiences with other communities, we gained valuable insights and best practices for managing spam and understanding its impact on moderation time. The reports provided by our Khoros team and TAM painted a clear picture that allowed us to refine our engagement model effectively. Our familiarity with Khoros’ tools for tracking engagement trends and customizing content has empowered us to tackle this challenge, keeping our users motivated and connected.SAS Institute
Author Details: Name: Chris Hemedinger Title: Director of SAS User Engagement Company: SAS Institute Tell us about you, your company, and your team? About me: I'm a technology enthusiast who believes in the power of community to drive technology success, learning, and connections. As Director of SAS User Engagement, I lead a talented 12-member team that looks after the SAS Support Community and many other programs that benefit users of SAS® software and SAS. About SAS: SAS, based in Cary, N.C., is a software company with roots in academia. Founded at N.C. State University in 1976, SAS has grown to become the leader in business analytics software and services and the world’s largest privately held software company. Co-founder Jim Goodnight remains at the helm as CEO and more than 80,000 business, government, and university sites in more than 140 countries rely on SAS® software. We make it easier for more people to use powerful analytics every day, to shorten the path from data to insight – and to inspire bold new discoveries that drive progress. The result: analytics that breaks down barriers, fuels ambition, and gets results. We give our customers THE POWER TO KNOW®. About my team: The SAS User Engagement team manages key programs of outreach to SAS users, including our online support communities, expert webinars, user group events, blogs, a technical newsletter, a developer engagement program and more. All of these programs have a home in our hosted Khoros community platform. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? By providing a forum for discussion and support, we increase our customers’ ability to self-serve in finding answers to their technical questions and challenges. This improves customer satisfaction and saves on support costs, two metrics that are supported by data we collect. We also use the community platform to support other strategic programs at SAS, such as our annual SAS Hackathon, our SAS Customer Recognition Awards, our Ask the Expert webinar series and more. The community also provides operational support for support initiatives such as hotfix notices and syndicated content directly into the user experience for our product offerings. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our best-in-class community plays a vital role in expressing SAS’ customer-centric ethos built over five decades. Key turning points in our story: Long before SAS spun out of NCSU in 1976, as our three co-founders wrote the first lines of SAS code, they welcomed input from an enthusiastic nascent community of SAS users. Our first users conference, which drew 300+ attendees, further baked customer-centricity into our culture and products. Online user collaboration sprouted in 1986 when SAS users connected via the SAS-L email listserve. In the late 2000s, we launched a SAS community on Jive, followed in 2015 with the migration to Khoros. The latter move was in line with our customer-centric ethos and users' growing preference for peer-to-peer and self-service support. It marked a significant uptick in investment. We tripled community-management staff to grow engagement, curate content and enlist employee and customer experts to improve the quality and number of solved topics. The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted business as usual. In-person events, the prevalent way of connecting with our customers for many years, were off the table. This presented an opportunity to reimagine how to serve and engage our customers online at higher levels. Collaborating with our counterparts in global marketing, research and development, sales, and technical support, we leveled up our digital capabilities to that end. Our Khoros-hosted SAS Support Community became – and remains – an indispensable hub for many programs that engage, equip, and encourage SAS software users. Social-distancing protocols receded, and in-person events resumed, but the digital pivot equipped us with a strong, agile platform that continues to grow and evolve. Today, communities.sas.com is the largest digital gathering of SAS users with more than 330,000 members. In the past year, nearly 10,000 topics were published (nearly 2,800 questions solved) and there were 8.4 million visits, with 15 million page views. 80+ special-interest groups give members additional ways to connect. SAS employees share their expertise through more than 7,000 knowledge base articles. User-engagement programs, such as SAS Analytics Explorers, SAS Inner Circle and the SAS Developer portal serve and delight our most ardent SAS fans. Recently we began syndicating community content within popular new products, SAS® Intelligent Decisioning and SAS® Model Manager. Varied programs, two goals: 1) Shrink the distance between customers and the answers they need to win with SAS (community health); 2) Increase customer satisfaction and lower support costs (community success). What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Our Khoros community platform is at the heart of the overall success of our user-engagement program. It’s more than just a website, having grown far beyond its beginnings as a home for technical discussions. This makes it difficult to pinpoint just one win. In the past year, innovative use of Khoros’ bulk data APIs has enabled us to gain insights to shape strategic decisions for how we engage with community members—particularly new community members and new SAS users. The challenge: faster, deeper engagement with SAS users, especially new community members. The opportunity: greater customer loyalty evidenced by higher net promoter scores among community members and more engagement by new members. This includes a space for new users to receive enhanced moderation. Overall, our community boasts an average “first reply” time of just about 400 minutes. In our special “New Users” board, a designated “safe space” for new-user questions, 72% of first replies come within 2 hours, and over 92% come within 12 hours. Teams involved: our counterparts in marketing, product management, R&D, and technical support. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The SAS Support Community delivers significant value throughout the customer experience. Having grown beyond is customer-support roots, today it also drives customer satisfaction (according to net-promoter scores), brand awareness (for example, as the digital home of the popular SAS Hackathon), and increasingly is a leading source of information on new solutions and innovation (exemplified by community content syndicated in SAS solutions.) It has become the hub of SAS expertise online and complements other channels such as GitHub and YouTube. Overall community health and success metrics: 1,000% SAS Community ROI based on deflected technical support tracks (calculated with Value Analytics data and standard ROI formula.) New members: 14K+ YTD Page views: 12 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 15+ million) Visits: 7 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 8 million) New topics: 5K+ YTD Solved topics often garner more than half of total topic views. 84% of topics receive a reply within 24 hours 74% rate of successful searches, proof that SAS users are finding the help they need What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Efforts to engage new members in particular have paid off. We started with a stretch goal of 20% engagement (defined by “liking” posts, publishing topics and replies, etc., within 90 days of registering.) Our email onboarding campaign sends a “welcome” email to new members soon after they register. The email acquaints them with best practices and invites them to connect with fellow members, share their expertise and level up by earning ranks and badges. Two weeks later, emails are sent to those who have asked a question encouraging them to mark a reply as a solution and to those who have yet to post a topic. Additional campaigns invite members to attend webinars, play SAS Bowl Trivia, participate in the SAS Hackathon, and engage with SAS in myriad other ways. In the past year, our Khoros platform has delivered more than 1.5 million emails, garnering a 17.5% open rate and a 14% click-to-open rate. This consistent, proactive outreach, enabled by our Khoros platform, has driven these and other key metrics: SAS User Community Net Promoter Score rose 11% in 2024 over 2023 30% of new members engaged within three months of joining What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? As a global leader in data and AI, SAS is all about transforming a world of data into trusted decisions. That’s reflected in the way we run our community program. The abundance of data, analyzed with SAS® software, enables us to send targeted emails to boost engagement, gain invaluable insight into prevalent topics, content worthy of promoting in other channels, opportunities to delight customers, and much more. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Khoros platform enables us to make high-impact data-driven campaigns and decisions. The admin console makes it easy for community managers to manage content, the site’s structure and look and feel, and set permissions for members. There are easy-to-use mechanisms to include code in posts and upload animations, images, and video. There are APIs for everything and abundant data to analyze with SAS software. We make full use of our platform’s discussion styles—blogs, events, forums, contests, events, group hubs, ideas, and TKBs. Looking ahead, by being able to syndicate community content directly into our own software solutions, we anticipate further expanding use of communities.sas.com as an operational hub and a way to showcase GenAI capabilities.Schneider Electric
Author Details: Name: Zineb EZ-ZERROUQI Title: Global Customer Engagement Leader, Online Communities Company: Schneider Electric Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Schneider’s purpose is to create Impact by empowering all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability. At Schneider, we call this Life Is On. Our mission is to be the trusted partner in Sustainability and Efficiency. We are a global industrial technology leader bringing world-leading expertise in electrification, automation and digitization to smart industries, resilient infrastructure, future-proof data centers, intelligent buildings, and intuitive homes. Anchored by our deep domain expertise, we provide integrated end-to-end lifecycle AI enabled Industrial IoT solutions with connected products, automation, software, and services, delivering digital twins to enable profitable growth for our customers. We are a people company with an ecosystem of 168,000 colleagues and more than a million partners operating in over 100 countries to ensure proximity to our customers and stakeholders. We embrace diversity and inclusion in everything we do, guided by our meaningful purpose of a sustainable future for all. Our community team is dedicated to enhancing and maintaining our community platform, ensuring it remains a vibrant and engaging space for all users. Comprising eight talented individuals, we focus on technical development, customer engagement, and performance monitoring. Our mission is to create a seamless and enriching experience for our community members. We strive to continuously improve the platform’s features, foster meaningful interactions, and ensure optimal performance. Our team consists of the following roles, with each leader supported by additional team members: Community Platform Owner is a key role responsible for the overall success and strategic direction of the community platform. This individual ensures that the platform meets the needs of its users and aligns with the organization’s goals. Technical/Product Leader who oversees the development and implementation of new features. Customer Engagement Leader who manages and organizes content for the platform and drives user engagement and community activities. Adoption Leader who ensures that new technologies and processes are effectively integrated and utilized within the community platform and is responsible for improving the visibility and ranking of the community platform in search engine results. Performance Analyst who monitors and analyzes platform performance to ensure a smooth user experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our Community team consists of 8 individuals with complementary skills and expertise, working collaboratively towards a common goal or objective. The team members have defined roles and responsibilities, meet regularly to discuss progress and challenges, and leverage each other's strengths to deliver high-quality work. The team environment fosters open communication, mutual support, and a shared sense of accountability for the team's outcomes to drive the success of our community. Great people make Schneider Electric a great company. Our ultimate ambition is to deliver higher performance and greater employee engagement, through world-class people practices that are supported by a multi-hub model. Schneider Electric is a people-centric company where employees come to work for a meaningful purpose and are empowered to deliver impact in an inclusive environment. The Schneider Electric Community offers several benefits that can significantly help our company Schneider Electric in various ways: Knowledge Sharing and Problem Solving: The community provides a platform for users to discuss and solve problems related to energy management and automation. This collaborative environment helps in quickly addressing technical issues and sharing best practices. User Engagement and Feedback: By engaging with users directly, Schneider Electric can gather valuable feedback on their products and services. This feedback can be used to improve existing offerings and develop new solutions that better meet customer needs. Training and Development: The community offers access to customized training. This helps users upgrade their skills and knowledge, ensuring they can effectively use Schneider Electric’s products and solutions. Innovation and Co-Creation: The community fosters innovation by allowing users to co-innovate and collaborate with a global network of peers. This can lead to the development of new ideas and solutions that benefit both Schneider Electric and its customers. Increased Visibility and Brand Loyalty: Active participation in the community can increase Schneider Electric’s visibility and strengthen brand loyalty. Engaging with users and providing valuable resources can build a strong, loyal customer base. By leveraging the Schneider Electric Community, our company can enhance customer satisfaction, drive innovation, and maintain a competitive edge in the market. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers who have EcoStruxure IT data center software: Schneider Electric internal users Users who need help installing, setting up, and configuring their software go to the EcoStruxure IT Help Center to search the documentation for guidance. Users who encounter issues that are not addressed in the documentation go to the community to search for posts about their situation or create a new post to ask the other users for assistance. EcoStruxure IT technical communicators Technical writers create online help articles for end users and gain insights on effectiveness from platform analytics to share with product owners. The help center gathers documentation for the entire data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software suite. Paired with the community forum, everything the customer or end user needs is in one place. The challenge: Software documentation is scattered across product pages and is created in different formats: online articles, PDF format, and in some cases is embedded in the product. The help center presents all the products in the DCIM offer in one place where users can search for content or links to resources. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Three new teams have asked to join and host their content on the help center. These teams use older and more traditional methods of creating content, creating books or manuals, and having technical support create FAQs published on a different site. They’ve seen the flexibility and the benefits of managing their documentation directly in the help center and reaching customers where they are – in the community. The platform integrates with mySchneider. Within our team, this has saved us 20 hours per week, which gives us additional time to author new content. We have one person dedicated to the Help Center, one writer focused on a specific product, and another team adopting it. The time savings are immediate in authoring, editing, and publishing, allowing us to provide new information to customers in real time. Increased usage has led to the need for more staff, which is a positive development! While it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the staff has quadrupled, we have certainly grown. Additionally, there are significant time savings in the documentation delivery process. The authoring interface is user-friendly, with draft management capabilities well-integrated across the platform. Challenging the status quo, “the way we’ve always done it” and encouraging colleagues who have never explored a new way of working in documentation was difficult. It took the better part of a year to convince one team to try a proof of concept. SmartConnect content has moved from hosting CHM-like help pages on their product portal to the help center. The install base is large, and user engagement in that category immediately increased significantly. The PCNS team is in the process of migrating the FAQs created by support to the help center instead of using their CRM tool. They will now create and maintain content in the help center Software services team has asked to create and maintain user-facing content on the help center instead of local PDFs. A technical expert was assigned to regularly monitor the posts in the community. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Excellent customer engagements stats from the analytics: EcoStruxure IT Help Center home page Visits: 64,317 (2024) vs 15,722 (2023): +309% YoY Unique Visitors: 37,371(2024) vs 10,572 (2023): +253% YoY Page Views: 80,079 (2024) vs 20,920 (2023): +283% YoY EcoStruxure IT Help Center Categories Visits: 380 117 (2024) vs 1283 (2023): +29,527% YoY Unique Visitors: 295 006 (2024) vs 840 (2023): +35,000% YoY Page Views: 604 977 (2024) vs 2318 (2023): +26,000% YoY What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As highlighted in the analytics shared earlier, we’ve seen a significant increase in several key metrics: Page Views: There has been a substantial rise in the number of page views, indicating that more users are engaging with our content. Visitors and Unique Visitors: The number of visitors and unique visitors has also grown considerably, reflecting a broader reach and increased interest in our Help Center. Community Engagement: Achieving 0 unanswered questions is a fantastic milestone for our community. This accomplishment demonstrates our commitment to providing timely and effective support. Solution Views and Accepted Solutions: There has been a notable increase in both solution views and accepted solutions. This indicates that users are not only finding the answers they need but are also validating the quality and usefulness of the solutions provided. These metrics underscore the positive impact of our efforts to enhance the Help Center and foster a supportive community environment. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros AI solution distinguished itself in several keyways that significantly contributed to our ability to achieve our goals for the year: Automated Moderation: Khoros AI’s automated moderation tools helped maintain a positive community environment by efficiently filtering out inappropriate content and flagging potential issues, saving valuable time and resources. Personalized User Experience: By analyzing user behavior and preferences, Khoros AI enabled us to deliver personalized content and recommendations, which enhanced user satisfaction and engagement. Scalability: The solution’s scalability ensured that we could maintain high levels of service and engagement as our community grew, without compromising on quality. Integration Capabilities: Seamless integration with our existing tools and platforms allowed for a unified approach to community management and data analysis. Support and Training: Access to comprehensive support and training resources ensured that our team could fully leverage the AI capabilities, maximizing the solution’s impact. Other factors that contributed to our success included strong internal collaboration, clear goal-setting, and continuous feedback loops to refine our strategies based on real-time data and insights. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Working with Khoros provided several key advantages that enabled us to address the need/challenge effectively: Comprehensive Analytics: Khoros’ great analytics tools allowed us to gain deep insights into community engagement and user behavior, helping to identify areas needing improvement. Efficient Moderation: The platform’s advanced moderation features streamlined the process of managing community interactions, ensuring a positive and safe environment for all users. Customizable Solutions: Khoros offered some flexible and customizable solutions that could be tailored to meet specific community needs, making it easier to implement targeted strategies. Support and Training: Access to Khoros’ support and training resources ensured that our team was well-equipped to utilize the platform’s features to their fullest potential.USPS
Author Details: Name: Mary Beth Levin Title: Manager, Social Media Strategy and Analytics Company: USPS Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I have two teams under my tent: social intelligence and publishing. The publishing team manages content on our 18 accounts on six different platforms. It also manages the ZONE, the first (and so far only) social media ambassador program in the federal government. The social intelligence team takes a 360-degree look at what is being said about us on social and traditional media. Its purpose is brand protection, crisis mitigation, and a better customer experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our goal is to do good and do better. Unlike many other programs which are based in marketing, we are fortunate to be based in communications in a center of excellence model. This means we are a servant with many masters: HQ communications, field communications, operations, HR, government relations, licensing, marketing and even the Postal Inspection Service. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We wanted to map-out feedback coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We also needed to protect customer privacy. When looking at concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites, we noted specific “customer service hotspots”. We also noted that the types of concerns varied by location. At its very heart, USPS is about logistics. We swim in data. At times we drown in data. With social media, this is yet another set of information competing for people’s time and attention. We needed to provide information in a way that was accessible and compelling to people who are already super busy. Our objective was to make things better for everyone: customers and employees. And we needed to recognize that not everyone loves pie charts and bar graphs. Social listening software has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on). This is why social listening software will map-out to cities and states and can do so for a limited percentage of social media mentions (about one-third for those platforms which allow access). Listening software will pull in product reviews, but not location reviews. And there is the issue of integrating data from various sources. USPS uses POS surveys, but these have limitations: they only capture the retail experience, tend to focus on extreme experiences, can’t include photos/videos, and results are rarely shared= outside of a select group. The teams we involved included communications, social intelligence, social customer response, marketing, operations and government relations. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We think of social media as the world’s largest focus group. In social listening the customer is driving the agenda of the conversation, telling us what is most important. We developed an interactive heatmap to illustrate concerns coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We integrated data from 34 online review sites and our social customer response software (customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media accounts on FB and X). We incorporated our internal tracking software to show not only the destination address, but where it was last scanned (because issues can occur further upstream). In doing so, we provided a one-stop shopping experience for those wanting to know what was going on nationally and in their neighborhood. Users can select one or more postal areas, districts, zip codes, or subjects (tags). The data goes back to January, 2016 and is updated daily. Because what we were doing was so new, we had to go through an 18-month clearance process to ensure data was secure and the information users were viewing had been scrubbed of personally identifying information. We knew we were competing for time and attention. And we are cognizant of the fact that our audience is not comprised of data scientists who love excel spreadsheets. We intentionally used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. People can see a heatmap and recognize that they don’t want the area they work in to show as red! They relate to top ten lists and the personal element of customer quotes, images, and videos the dashboard can show. And seeing how they are doing relative to others and shake them out of complacency with a healthy sense of competition. Working with the unions, we selected local leaders who would give a short presentation featuring the data of that specific location. This was then tied-in to a larger conversation about social media and its role in greater accountability. The feedback received was “I’ve been working here 20 years and no one has ever explained it to me that way. This makes sense.” Employees recognized that unlike other forms of feedback, this information is publicly posted. We promised the unions that the information would never be used punitively. These first conversations discussed customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites. In response to feedback, we included online review sites. This information was emailed on a weekly basis. Information about the heatmap was provided in numerous formal presentations to leadership. Anyone with a USPS email address can access the heatmap. For those using the heatmap, there are weekly office hours, an ops manual, and individual tutorials. Online reviews are shared weekly to those on the ground. Area newsletters share the info monthly. District newsletters highlight results in their localities. There have been close to 100 articles for internal audiences. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Results include the following: Sharing the info in short meetings lead to a 54% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And 18% decrease in ECC (calls to the 800-number) Specifically: 31% decrease in WIMP (Where Is My Package) 51% decrease in certified exception 85% decrease in WMM (Where Is My Mail) These changes were stat sig. Sharing the review info via weekly emails led to a 35% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And a 17% increase in online review scores. Since USPS spends $58 per ECC and $4 per SCR case, the savings can be significant. We have applied for a patent. Completed the one-year preliminary application and filed the final application. The heatmap received external validation: Featured case study by the Social Intelligence Lab Presented at the SocialMedia.Org Board Meeting Presented at the Ragan and PR Daily Social Media Conference 2024 PR News 2024 Digital Awards winner for two categories: Social Listening and Employee Engagement The Postal Regulatory Commission “applauded the Postal Service for using social listening to determine what people are saying about its brand and services on social media. The social media heat map is an effective tool for visualizing customer comments and categorizing them by concern and geographic area.” It is not often that we receive praise from this entity. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We found additional nontraditional use cases: The Office of the Inspector General asked: are there passport concerns worth investigating? (Spoiler: no.) Saved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears since such investigations usually take more than a year. Government Relations – are concerns coming to congressional offices anecdotal or indicative? The heatmap has been used to investigate the location and show that the customer’s concerns were not the norm. We have now divided the heatmap into congressional districts. Proof of concept that employee engagement scores (high and low) correlate with better customer service and savings. Test effectiveness of interventions such as a manga promoting customer service approaches. A/B testing for new tracking software. No increase in tracking complaints observed, leading to expanded rollout. During natural disasters, we use it to identify local concerns (change of address, closure, theft) to inform operations and social media posts. Anticipating PR concerns: e.g. the trend line was going up in Puerto Rico because limited storage led to packages being stored outside. And then it rained. We were able to find additional storage and have a ready answer for the press (who did reach out to us). Located customer service hotspots for Operation Santa for targeted training. This program provides presents to 25K children every year. We don’t want anything to go wrong here. Determined locations for rollout of products and services such as Informed Delivery (now at 64.9M participants). Gemba (site) visits: researching before arriving and giving credit when it’s due. “Hey Erica, I saw that you got a shout-out on social media. Keep up the great work!” Personally, it is extremely gratifying to get an email from someone on the other side of the country saying, “Thank you so much for this email! We only hear from leadership when things go wrong.” It is not exclusively about improving customer service. It is about creating an environment in which good work and good people are honored. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? There were two things: The flexibility and the sophistication of the tagging system which allows one to code using Boolean or Lucene rules. LLM are still in their infancy and many software lack transparency in their accuracy. I know what I want and the terms my customers are using. When I develop the code myself, I know I’m getting exactly what I am looking for; I don’t have to spend time on learning models. Khoros cut its teeth in customer response. They know how to pull data on the backend to integrate with the new interface we created. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The team understood and appreciated our business case and wholeheartedly supported us in developing something completely new.USPS
Author Details: Name: Mary Beth Levin Title: Manager, Social Media Strategy and Analytics Company: USPS Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I have two teams under my tent: social intelligence and publishing. The publishing team manages content on our 18 accounts on six different platforms. It also manages the ZONE, the first (and so far only) social media ambassador program in the federal government. The social intelligence team takes a 360-degree look at what is being said about us on social and traditional media. Its purpose is brand protection, crisis mitigation, and a better customer experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our goal is to do good and do better. Unlike many other programs which are based in marketing, we are fortunate to be based in communications in a center of excellence model. This means we are a servant with many masters: HQ communications, field communications, operations, HR, government relations, licensing, marketing and even the Postal Inspection Service. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We wanted to map-out feedback coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We also needed to protect customer privacy. When looking at concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites, we noted specific “customer service hotspots”. We also noted that the types of concerns varied by location. At its very heart, USPS is about logistics. We swim in data. At times we drown in data. With social media, this is yet another set of information competing for people’s time and attention. We needed to provide information in a way that was accessible and compelling to people who are already super busy. Our objective was to make things better for everyone: customers and employees. And we needed to recognize that not everyone loves pie charts and bar graphs. Social listening software has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on). This is why social listening software will map-out to cities and states and can do so for a limited percentage of social media mentions (about one-third for those platforms which allow access). Listening software will pull in product reviews, but not location reviews. And there is the issue of integrating data from various sources. USPS uses POS surveys, but these have limitations: they only capture the retail experience, tend to focus on extreme experiences, can’t include photos/videos, and results are rarely shared outside of a select group. The teams we involved included communications, social intelligence, social customer response, marketing, operations and government relations. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We think of social media as the world’s largest focus group. In social listening the customer is driving the agenda of the conversation, telling us what is most important. We developed an interactive heatmap to illustrate concerns coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We integrated data from 34 online review sites and our social customer response software (customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media accounts on FB and X). We incorporated our internal tracking software to show not only the destination address, but where it was last scanned (because issues can occur further upstream). In doing so, we provided a one-stop shopping experience for those wanting to know what was going on nationally and in their neighborhood. Users can select one or more postal areas, districts, zip codes, or subjects (tags). The data goes back to January, 2016 and is updated daily. Because what we were doing was so new, we had to go through an 18-month clearance process to ensure data was secure and the information users were viewing had been scrubbed of personally identifying information. We knew we were competing for time and attention. And we are cognizant of the fact that our audience is not comprised of data scientists who love excel spreadsheets. We intentionally used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. People can see a heatmap and recognize that they don’t want the area they work in to show as red! They relate to top ten lists and the personal element of customer quotes, images, and videos the dashboard can show. And seeing how they are doing relative to others and shake them out of complacency with a healthy sense of competition. Working with the unions, we selected local leaders who would give a short presentation featuring the data of that specific location. This was then tied-in to a larger conversation about social media and its role in greater accountability. The feedback received was “I’ve been working here 20 years and no one has ever explained it to me that way. This makes sense.” Employees recognized that unlike other forms of feedback, this information is publicly posted. We promised the unions that the information would never be used punitively. These first conversations discussed customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites. In response to feedback, we included online review sites. This information was emailed on a weekly basis. Information about the heatmap was provided in numerous formal presentations to leadership. Anyone with a USPS email address can access the heatmap. For those using the heatmap, there are weekly office hours, an ops manual, and individual tutorials. Online reviews are shared weekly to those on the ground. Area newsletters share the info monthly. District newsletters highlight results in their localities. There have been close to 100 articles for internal audiences. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Results include the following: Sharing the info in short meetings lead to a 54% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And 18% decrease in ECC (calls to the 800-number) Specifically: 31% decrease in WIMP (Where Is My Package) 51% decrease in certified exception 85% decrease in WMM (Where Is My Mail) These changes were stat sig. Sharing the review info via weekly emails led to a 35% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And a 17% increase in online review scores. Since USPS spends $58 per ECC and $4 per SCR case, the savings can be significant. We have applied for a patent. Completed the one-year preliminary application and filed the final application. The heatmap received external validation: Featured case study by the Social Intelligence Lab Presented at the SocialMedia.Org Board Meeting Presented at the Ragan and PR Daily Social Media Conference 2024 PR News 2024 Digital Awards winner for two categories: Social Listening and Employee Engagement The Postal Regulatory Commission “applauded the Postal Service for using social listening to determine what people are saying about its brand and services on social media. The social media heat map is an effective tool for visualizing customer comments and categorizing them by concern and geographic area.” It is not often that we receive praise from this entity. Link to report by the Postal Regulatory Commission where USPS was recognized. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We found additional nontraditional use cases: The Office of the Inspector General asked: are there passport concerns worth investigating? (Spoiler: no.) Saved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears since such investigations usually take more than a year. Government Relations – are concerns coming to congressional offices anecdotal or indicative? The heatmap has been used to investigate the location and show that the customer’s concerns were not the norm. We have now divided the heatmap into congressional districts. Proof of concept that employee engagement scores (high and low) correlate with better customer service and savings. Test effectiveness of interventions such as a manga promoting customer service approaches. A/B testing for new tracking software. No increase in tracking complaints observed, leading to expanded rollout. During natural disasters, we use it to identify local concerns (change of address, closure, theft) to inform operations and social media posts. Anticipating PR concerns: e.g. the trend line was going up in Puerto Rico because limited storage led to packages being stored outside. And then it rained. We were able to find additional storage and have a ready answer for the press (who did reach out to us). Located customer service hotspots for Operation Santa for targeted training. This program provides presents to 25K children every year. We don’t want anything to go wrong here. Determined locations for rollout of products and services such as Informed Delivery (now at 64.9M participants). Gemba (site) visits: researching before arriving and giving credit when it’s due. “Hey Erica, I saw that you got a shout-out on social media. Keep up the great work!” Personally, it is extremely gratifying to get an email from someone on the other side of the country saying, “Thank you so much for this email! We only hear from leadership when things go wrong.” It is not exclusively about improving customer service. It is about creating an environment in which good work and good people are honored. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? There were two things: The flexibility and the sophistication of the tagging system which allows one to code using Boolean or Lucene rules. LLM are still in their infancy and many software lack transparency in their accuracy. I know what I want and the terms my customers are using. When I develop the code myself, I know I’m getting exactly what I am looking for; I don’t have to spend time on learning models. Khoros cut its teeth in customer response. They know how to pull data on the backend to integrate with the new interface we created. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The team understood and appreciated our business case and wholeheartedly supported us in developing something completely new.USAA
Author Details: Name: Lars Plougmann Title: Product Manager Name: Lori Castillo Title: Product Manager Company: USAA Tell us about you, your company, and your team? We are the product management team for USAA’s Social Chat. We sit within a larger team responsible for USAA’s chat capabilities, which is part of the organization developing all our digital channels. USAA is a 100-year-old member association offering financial services, such as insurance and banking. We don’t have branches, so our app and website are the main channels for self-service. Members can have direct conversations with our member service representatives on the phone or chat. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Social Chat fits with USAA’s philosophy to be available where our members are, and being asynchronous in nature, it offers our members a convenient way to engage with. Social Chat is available 24/7, crewed by a team of 100% human USAA member service representatives. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Social Chat is conducted by teams of member service representatives and specialists in Insurance, Bank, Life Insurance and other USAA companies. USAA maintains Social Chat policies that include standard responses for specific situations. This solves the challenge of having an official response available, but it is not necessarily convenient. The policy resides in a different system, and the integration mechanism falls back to copy/paste. Individual member service reps often compile a handy local list of official responses for quick access, and they include some of their own frequent responses. This can mean, if standard responses in a policy are updated, the change may not make it to those individual lists from where responses are copy/pasted. Response templates seem like such a simple feature in Khoros Care that it is barely worth mentioning. Yet, there is power in simplicity. Some of the situations where response templates really shine: When the appropriate response is long or complex. When using URLs in the response: A template helps our agents point to the relevant URL and avoid issues when copy/pasting URLs. When the response must be vetted by Corp Comms or Legal. The Bank team was the first to make use of response templates. The front-line team had a solid sense of which questions are asked most frequently, so those made up the first set of ten templates to be rolled out. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Once enabled, use of response templates for the Bank team quickly took off. Using response templates not only had the immediate benefits of quality and consistency, it also gave rise to new ideas for templates. The “Protect yourself and your accounts” template was developed by one of our member service reps. She got permission to experiment with scammers’ posts and honed our message by iterating and testing. It aligns with USAA’s mission to protect our members from scams, and that extends to social media. "Be cautious! Protect yourself & your accounts. Visit our Security Center (Security tab located at the bottom of USAA.com) for articles & recommendations. Also, visit the Advice & Guidance tab on the Federal Trade Commission website ftc.gov." By making the warning a response template, it is quick and easy for any of our member service reps to call out scams. We’ll hide the scammer’s post if that option is available. Our member service reps also take the extra step of reporting scammers’ accounts to social platforms. The earlier we address fraud, the more valuable the intervention is. While we don’t have specific estimates for the fraud prevented by using this template, there is an indication that it is effective: Some scammers delete their post once we apply the warning template - sometimes within a few minutes. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. (Examples: Decreased spend, Increased revenue, etc.) The benefit of templates is not just reduced time for the member service rep to compose a response. They reach further: Quality: The response templates are the result of teamwork, iteration and multiple perspectives - and vetted by lawyers if required. Consistency: By using approved templates for responses, available directly in the platform, members will receive consistent responses, regardless of which rep is handling the conversation. Through automated tagging, we can track that our team uses response templates close to 5,000 times a year. And we are just getting started. For our anti-scam response template, our analysis shows that 8% of the time that the template is applied, the scammer deletes their post. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Reduced error rate: Response templates are placed fully in the response field, reducing the probability of errors (eg typos, copy/paste irregularities, obsolete responses). Improved governance: When a response template is updated, it takes immediate effect in the system. It may take longer to update SOPs or individually maintained crib sheets of responses. We made sure to include automatic tagging: Each response template invokes a generic tag that the response used a response template and one or more topic-related tags. To be sure, we previously used templates sometimes: copy/pasted directly from policies with standard responses or from our member service reps’ individual lists. With response templates, this formerly invisible process has become visible and trackable. Cost of implementation was negligible. In most cases, we already had standard responses, they just weren’t conveniently stored within Care or shared with the full team. For a subsequent batch of response templates, the Social Chat product manager worked with a stakeholder team to address a set of scenarios that required longer than normal responses. The templates were crafted and went through Legal review and approval before making them available through Khoros Care. The project to implement response templates in Social Chat received our Chief Strategy and Brand Officer’s Excellence Award in Q2 of 2024. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Won’t the use of response templates make our team of 100% human member service reps sound like bots? Not necessarily. The beauty of the feature is that the response template populates the response field, allowing the rep to finesse and personalize the response before posting it. This focuses human effort where it matters and allows the rep to post an appropriate and empathetic response. Our member service reps use their best judgment when responding to social conversations. The templates are offered as an aid to swift and consistent responses, always with the encouragement that the individual response is tailored to the specific context. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Khoros Care solution consultant had expressed surprise that USAA was not using response templates. When we decided to go ahead, the reference guide in Atlas had all the information we needed to get going. Implementation was simple. As our library of response templates grows, we are looking at enabling response templates through the Agent Assist feature.Alteryx
Author Details: Name: Daniel Menke Title: Senior Community and Customer Success Operation Manager Company: Alteryx Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Alteryx is the leader in analytics automation. We strive to put analytics at everyones fingertips with a no code platform. I have been a part of the world class Alteryx Community for 7 years. Starting out as a moderator I now lead a robust team of developers, engagements specialists, and program managers who make the Alteryx Community a major asset of our offerings to our customers. Our team provides learning, engagement, and connection with our customers and prospects by keeping to our mission to build a place where people come to connect, engage, and learn from one another to drive meaningful outcomes for individuals, organizations, and society at large. Our values separate us from other Community's as we are not bound by convention and understand our members needs and proactively deliver value- added experiences. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? We support our company goals by creating a world class customer experience that allows our customers to move forward in their life cycle journey with support from peers and the great Alteryx Community. Community is one of the first benefits mentioned when buying our products and has allowed 100s of thousands of users become success with our products and their careers. The Alteryx Community is a key value add and has shown to have great impact on renewals and expansions. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our Community team implemented two solutions this year to assist our product organization: a Community-hosted Start Here page and an integration with Aha to simplify product feedback implementation. Our flagship product developers faced a challenge with the existing splash screen in our product—it was an important place for customers to find relevant resources, but their team did not have the development time or visibility into new resources to update the page with fresh content continually. Our solution was to design a custom community “Start Here” page featuring resources from all areas of our Community, with a featured video, a new content section, and tabbed pages with evergreen resources. Our second solution of note was our integration with the Aha platform. The product management team uses Aha to manage customer ideas for Alteryx’s products. The challenge was that we were already collecting ideas in our boards on the Community, but the feedback loop between systems was not seamless. Now, upon reaching a pre-determined “like” threshold, an idea is sent to Aha, enabling the product team to reply to comments and update statuses from within the Aha platform. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We've recently seen the value of the Start Here page for Community content promotion. Our Alteryx Community podcast, Alter Everything, has seen a stagnation in the listenership, and we’ve been looking for ways to grow the audience. Episode topics vary but often target company awareness, product adoption, and value realization. We began featuring podcast episodes at the top of the Start Here page, and so far, we’ve seen an almost 200% increase in podcast listens for featured episodes compared to non-featured episodes. Our Aha integration has been a major win behind the scenes for our product team and our customers—here is the list of Community ideas that were integrated into our flagship product’s latest release (Alteryx Designer 24.1): Custom Workflow Templates Marketplace Add-Ons Workflow XML parsing Formula functions (3-4 ideas represented) Product option in Summarize Border resizing Disable individual formulas PowerPoint Widescreen IRG Filter Enhancements (2-3 ideas represented) Engine Compatibility Mode option in user settings Windows 11 support Officially supported tools - Make Columns, Expect Equals DCM Migration Missing Macros The product team plans to incorporate at least nine more Community ideas into the next release later this month. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By leveraging the Khoros framework for the Start Here page, we optimized our business resources, leveraging the Community team’s capacity and filling a gap for the product team. The Start Here page also benefits our customers: it gives our team the ability to feature user-generated content in a new way, delighting our customers and increasing loyalty to our brand. Page views have continued to climb as more users migrate to the newest version of Designer. Since the go-live of the page in-product, the English version has received over 700K views. This effort has advanced our Alteryx Community vision: to create a leading digital experience to connect and empower analytical-minded people. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Both customer experience improvements discussed contribute to the success of the Alteryx Community. Making users feel seen (via in-product content features) and heard (via ideas implemented) increases their enthusiasm for the platform, which shines through in their willingness to share knowledge and solve problems together. Our universal in-product search (hosted by SearchUnify) also furthers the close relationship between our product and our Community, as Community results and the option to start a discussion show in the search bar in Alteryx Designer. Our impressive 82% CSAT score highlights our Community as a leading source of customer satisfaction. The quick 35-minute response time in our Designer discussion board is a 3% decrease in time to first response YOY. Our members consistently demonstrate their commitment to helping each other succeed and view the Community as the best place to get help from their peers. Here are a few recent unsolicited comments from our users: “The Community is the best part of Alteryx.” “Alteryx community is the best place to learn cool stuff about Alteryx and to share your learnings as well.” “The community has been an essential resource to solve problems we encounter when using Alteryx.” “Love it, this is the best software product community I have ever used over more years than I care to disclose 😊" What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros’ customizability allowed for the development of the Start Here page. Quick updates to the featured content section were made possible utilizing custom content. The ease of use of the admin allows our team to be more agile in responding to requests for content features and ensures our customers see fresh and engaging content each month. The support of international language Communities also contributed to the success of the Start Here page. Our product team set up the multiple Community page embeds so that when a user toggles their preferred language in the product, the Start Here page will pull from the corresponding in-language page. Working with our in-house developer and leaning on the collective expertise of our Khoros’ Atlas Community enabled us to provide seamless integration and support of Product team feedback initiatives. Through a direct integration with the feedback and ticket management platform, Aha, we can directly supply our product team with ideas born on the Community and ensure instantaneous feedback to the Alteryx Community on idea status and next steps. Additionally, we’ve enabled the ability to control the influx of feedback through a like threshold to ensure the most impactful and important ideas are brought directly to the forefront of our Product team’s intake. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? There were three key areas working with Khoros that enabled us to address our challenges: Customizability and agility: Khoros' platform allowed for the creation of the custom Start Here page, designed to bring Community resources and content directly to users in-product. The platform enables quick updates and allows us to meet the evolving needs of our product team and customers at scale. Seamless integration capabilities: Utilizing the robust integration capabilities enabled us to simplify the process of managing product feedback by automating the transfer of ideas and status updates to the product team. Leaning on the collective expertise of the Khoros team and Atlas Community: Along with our internal team’s know-how, we rely on the expert guidance of our Khoros CSM, the robust knowledge libraries in Atlas, and getting peer-to-peer feedback in Atlas discussion forms.
