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has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on).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.474Views0CommentsUSPS
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.ViewsCommentsMedion AG
Author Details: Name: Arnd Rychel Title: Community Infrastructure Engineer Company: Medion AG Tell us about you, your company, and your team? About me: I have been working at MEDION since 2000. Since 2014, I've been in charge of the MEDION Community as Community Manager. Company: MEDION, as one of the very few companies that boasts a comprehensive portfolio of classic entertainment electronics as well as information technology products, remains in a position to respond to the demands of a digital and networked CE market with its user-friendly product range in the Project Business segment. In addition to its traditional business involving special sales promotions of consumer electronics products in Europe, MEDION also markets a complementary line of services, particularly in the areas of telecommunications, photo services, downloads and other online services. MEDION is also continuing to strengthen its brand as a symbol of products and services offering high quality and best value for money as well as excellent design. MEDION has a good presence in Germany and the entire eurozone, as well as in Scandinavia and the UK, and with the support of its retail and cooperation partners maintains very well organized and professional sales and service units in these countries. Our team: Our ‘International Knowledge Management’ team collects internal and external knowledge and makes it available both within the company and to end customers. In addition to operating instructions and downloads of drivers, our work also includes service processes and the maintenance of product databases and FAQs. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? We select and distribute knowledge in order to reduce support requests and improve self-service, among other things. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We have introduced the Community to generally relieve the entire After Sales process. The aim was to expand self-service. 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. Among other things, the community FAQs are integrated via API on our service homepage. We have optimised our FAQs in two main ways for this purpose. For product-specific FAQs, the name and material number are stored in the footer of the FAQ so that they can be displayed to the searching end customer in conjunction with our product database on our service homepage. On the other hand, IRIS codes are stored in the footer of general FAQs so that they can be used in conjunction with our online troubleshooter. Depending on the result, the customer can either help themselves and thus avoid sending in the device or start a repair service online, whereby all relevant data (including the IRIS codes) is transmitted to the repair service centre. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Self-service has enabled costs to be saved in the After Sales Support and repair departments. No specific key figures are available. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The (API) integration on our service homepage significantly reduces support enquiries (call, email) and repair submissions. The integration of public and internal FAQs on the intranet provides call centre agents with extensive knowledge in a structured manner. Concrete key figures are not available. 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 combination of customised modules at code level (html, css, variables) is what makes the complex workflow with external systems possible in the first place. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We implement most of our customisation ourselves. However, if things get more complex or there is no OOTB solution, the teamwork with Khoros is very good and effective (example: customisation of SSO with the help of Nils Drews).ViewsCommentsAtlassian
Author Details: Name: Janice James Title: Community Manager Company: Atlassian Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Hi! I’m a community manager on the online (forum) team led by Monique van den Berg. We’re a mighty team of six tackling all the things online for Atlassian! How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The forum team is the beating heart of Atlassian community programs. We support the company goal of helping more people in our community self serve their own success journey. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Community is a native concept to Atlassian. Company founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes hosted the first local Atlassian user group meetup in 2006. Now, as a global company, Atlassian continues to unite users by centering the customer experience around its community and learning programs. Atlassian's community consists of robust learning, champion, events (ACE), and creator programs. The democratized nature of information in communities makes them a natural conduit for product-led businesses like Atlassian and a figurative safe harbor for users to freely exchange knowledge. The challenge we were looking to solve was how to successfully influence community-led growth across a global organization. To address this, Atlassian formed a team of community strategists to guide internal customers (platform and product teams) on how to effectively leverage community programs in their go-to-market strategies. Strategists work directly with product and platform teams to integrate community programs into their workflows, resulting in increased engagement (from Atlassian team members and users), an enhanced product feedback & ideation loop, and increased product/feature awareness. 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. Formed in early 2024, the community strategist team swiftly addressed the challenge of integrating community strategies across Atlassian's diverse portfolio of teams. The opportunity: Leverage the Khoros community platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement. The team innovated by conducting community-led growth planning workshops, bringing together teams from across the Atlassian solutions portfolio. These workshops resulted in tailored community strategies for each team, aligned with their specific KPIs. For example, the Atlassian Intelligence team focused on an end-to-end plan for the launch of Rovo and growing group membership by 125%, while the Confluence team aimed to boost Atlassian team member engagement in the forum and as speakers at their events. By facilitating collaboration, we overcame the challenge of creating cohesive community strategies that respected each product team's unique needs. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As a newly formed team driving internal enablement, we're in the early stages of our initiatives. However, in addition to the metrics already mentioned (product/feature awareness, engagement, and feedback) the team is influencing the following community and learning organization KPIs with our work in enabling community-led growth: Online community MAU Community and Proprietary events attendance Learning courses and certifications completed From our example above of Atlassian Intelligence, Rovo, and Confluence - The outcomes measured from their tailored strategies at the close of last quarter were successfully launching the Rovo product board and associated gamification challenges with strong Atlassian team member engagement, along with a 53% increase in group membership for Atlassian Intelligence KPI. With Confluence, we successfully influenced their KPIs with a 13% increase in accepted answers + a 62% increase in Atlassian Speakers at their events. An early win was the creation of a series of gamified learning initiatives within the community ecosystem for Atlassian Intelligence, Loom, and Confluence. This initiative leveraged the Khoros community to facilitate post-live event discussions within the forum. This led to increased engagement (posts, kudos) in those spaces of 6%, 12%, and 74%, respectively. Another example is we ran a month-long Jira July product love campaign, where users participated in forum activities that deepened their knowledge of Jira while showcaseing how it’s helped set their business teams up for success. This initiative contributed to a ~53% QoQ increase in posts to the Jira collection. These early wins have been crucial in demonstrating the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to wider adoption across the organization and positioning our community at the center of our product development and user engagement efforts. We expect to have more quantifiable data in the coming months as our initiatives mature. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We’re still in the early stages of gathering long-term data, however we've already observed promising progress outcomes that indicate positive trends in addressing our challenges: Diversified Community Engagement: By tactically engaging teams, we’re aiming to expand community event offerings, creating more touchpoints for user interaction and knowledge sharing. Increase in Atlassian-Hosted Events: We've seen a notable uptick in the number of Atlassian-hosted community events. This increase is expected to positively impact our CSAT and NPS scores as users benefit from more direct interactions with Atlassian experts and peers. Enhanced Internal Involvement: Atlassian team member involvement within our community ecosystem has markedly increased. This deeper engagement will empower users to resolve their questions and create on-demand knowledge as more Atlassian team members actively participate in community discussions. Structured Engagement Playbooks: We've developed comprehensive playbooks for different internal stakeholder groups on how to engage with the community. These resources are aimed at empowering more Atlassian team members to effectively reach and support community members. Broader Organizational Integration: We've observed a deeper permeation of community initiatives throughout the Atlassian organization. As more teams become equipped and utilize community channels in their workflows, we anticipate adoption of community-led growth will have significant mutually beneficial outcomes. Enhanced Internal Enablement: By tactically enabling internal teams, we're creating more 'stickiness' for community programs internally overall. Initial outcomes are laying the groundwork for the team influence on measurable improvements in key areas such as customer lifetime value, support deflection, and overall customer satisfaction. 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? We can directly attribute success to the Khoros platform's ability to be enterprise-ready. While the Atlassian community does have a dedicated engineering team, many of the features and capabilities used in our work are 'out-of-the-box' functionality. Many of our tactical recommendations for community-led growth are achieved using the Khoros out-of-the-box functionality. The platform's enterprise-ready features have allowed us to easily and quickly scale community initiatives for teams across our product suite. For instance, the badge and group hub features enable community strategists to easily spin up experiments, resulting in increased traffic and engagement in those spaces. Overall, the platform enables us to provide a gamified centralized knowledge exchange, improve awareness of our portfolios capabilities, and provide a fun and rewarding user experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our partnership with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing the challenges of a community program with complex needs. Working with a platform partner capable of providing the right resources at the right time has ensured Atlassian can implement initiatives that utilize the platform effectively. We’d also like to note the training and resources made available to users. Khoros Academy and live sessions have empowered our team to maximize platform's potential. This was particularly helpful when we onboarded four community managers at once! Throughout our partnership, Khoros has consistently demonstrated its commitment to our success. The holistic support on offer from the team has been vital in addressing challenges unique to our program and helping drive our community initiatives forward. Cheers!ViewsCommentsHubSpot
Author Details: Name: Gabrielle Herrera Title: Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth Company: HubSpot Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Community is an amplifier. Layering human connection on top of any of our customer-facing efforts makes them better. Our mission is to educate, connect and inspire the HubSpot community. In 2023 we showed that through hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, spreading HubSpot advocacy across the web, and by driving access and engagement to some of the hardest audiences to reach. In 2024, we're turning this amplifier up to 11. Our focus is to provide a human touch at scale using Community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. Our teams include Success Community, Communities of Practice, Identity based Communities (The Spot) and ensuring we’re spreading our advocates (Champions community) love throughout the community. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Using experimentation and scalable approaches, the Community Strategy & Operations team helps HubSpot identify hot pockets of community interest and value, and then scale those opportunities into valuable and sustainable communities for our ecosystem members. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers want to be guided and get personalized examples & advice (often preferably from a human). We have no shortage of great resources for our customers, but they don’t always get utilized. We need to spend our highly-talented CSMs’ time on high-leverage moments and stakeholders, not gathering links for front-line reps - but as we continue to succeed, there are even more people vying for CSM time. Through Community, we can scale success so reps can focus on leverage points, without removing the human touch from the experience by transforming into a Community Success Center. Peer responses and public answers save us potentially multimillions per year in support costs (and lift Partners up). Community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation. The Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users and developers on the HubSpot Community to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent and invaluable expertise. The Community Success Center allows HubSpot to become more efficient while keeping a human touch. 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. Evolving from a support community aimed at answering a single, point-in-time question to a recurring, lively success destination has been our major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, Customer Success content lives in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customer apply our tools to their needs efficiently and effectively. 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 HubSpot Community sees 4 million visits per year and 14k posts annually. 96% of solutions are provided by peers and 98% of posts are replied to within 24 hours. In collaboration with the Product Marketing team, we’ve facilitated 30 product Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions YTD, providing customers real life examples and access to the Product team in a cost-efficient manner. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In 2024 we launched a federated search including Knowledge Base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from our Developer Changelog. We also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a one-stop shop to the right solution. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for. We’ve been able to improve relevancy, and in turn adoption of the Community, by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers. Example of our Professional tier Community: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-HubSpot/ct-p/professional 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 HubSpot Community (community.hubspot.com) launched in 2016 on Khoros (formerly Lithium) as the solution for free user support. Since 2016 the Community has grown in visibility and use cases. We have over 400,000 members (all time), > 1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. We can also associate community usage with healthier customers. Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Since incorporating CARE into our team, we’ve been able to streamline processes and ensure we’re putting the right resources into the right initiatives and biggest value-adds for our customers. Before CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators spent a lot of time in moderation, completing duplicative tasks and trying to clear up confusion around the division of work. This inefficient process negatively impacted how many Accepted Solutions - those peer-to-peer responses that deflect support tickets - they were able to accept each month. With CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, which help the person who raised the question and help the person who responded excel in the gamification of the Community, encouraging them to continue to engage. This efficiency win also allows the Community Managers to spend time on strategic initiatives such as our Workflows Library and build high-impact cross functional relationships with internal stakeholders.ViewsCommentsVideotron
Author Details: Name: Julian Durand Burgoyne Title: Sr. Manager, Digital Engagement and Social Media Company: Videotron Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Videotron is a Canadian telecommunications leader. A wholly owned subsidiary of Quebecor Media Inc., Videotron is an integrated communications company engaged in cable television, interactive multimedia development, Internet access, cable telephone and wireless telephone services. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? My team handles digital engagement and social media both for customer service and technical support. We handle all things digital in the customer service space for Videotron. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Over the years we deployed a strategy of serving the customer on the channel of their choosing. We deployed capabilities with Khoros to enable us to do just that. Secure forms helped us authenticate customers and allowed us to serve them on a broader range of channels previously inaccessible. We previously had no contact entry point on our support website. The initial reason behind this being we wanted to promote self-service to avoid costs. However, after deploying support on so many channels it didn’t make sense to keep our support site without a way to contact us. We expected that adding messaging capabilities on that section of our website would drive significant volumes that we were maybe not ready to handle. We decided it was time for us to try automation, which we always were skeptical of. This skepticism stemmed from expecting our customer base to hate having to speak to a bot. We were skeptical of traditional bots, since customer service is our DNA and we found bots to be a bit too cold and non-personal. Additionally, accuracy of the GenAI was also a concern, though all of this was dispelled with the POC. Videotron being a leader in customer service satisfaction when we launched automation we wanted to do it right. So, we partnered with Khoros to test in one fell swoop, brand messenger, Flow and the new Helix AI capabilities. In a few months we built and trained a virtual assistant with knowledge of our entire support website that leverages Helix Generative AI capabilities to answer customers in a fluid, in depth and personalized way. 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. It allowed us to launch a new major contact point, driving new volumes in Khoros Care, while also deflecting contacts that could be answered without a current support site for the type of customer that didn’t want to search the site and would’ve contacted us. We have doubled our incoming volume within Khoros Care. We achieved for the first time parity with our live chat and conversations incoming within Care. Around a third of the volume coming into our bot doesn’t end up to an agent. 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 new entry point brought 50% new conversations from what we had before launching it, which is roughly 12,000 new conversations per month. However, thanks to the automation in that channel, 56% of those conversations never make it to an agent. Some of it we think goes to another channel, based on issue type that cannot be resolved by bot, but still didn't go through to a handover. Real estimated deflection is around 80% of that 56%, so roughly a third of all incoming volume in the bot. 36% of all incoming volume from our support site is deflected. 36% of incoming volume on the entry point in our support site is the bot. The 20% difference is from the customers choosing to not stay for the asynchronous messaging in Brand Messenger and choosing to call us or use our live chat. Conversations that make it to an agent are on average 22% faster than similar private conversations on our other Khoros Care channels. So even when a handoff is necessary the information gathered with the virtual assistant helps the agent handle the situation faster. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We were expecting agents to be apprehensive of AI, but it wasn't the case. They welcomed the help provided by the bot. It helped us find gaps or issues that flew under the radar, having lots of volume being tagged by AI Insights. It also helped us establish a better process where the web teams broadcast changes done to the website since it now can conflict with the bot knowledge. What differentiated the Khoros AI solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Flow was easy to learn and allowed us our very small project team of 2, to deploy, modify, and iterate on our AI project. It’s a great too allowing us to quickly find bugs and issues and fix them without needing code knowledge or any internal IT resources that can have an impact somewhere else. Generative AI can be a complex matter, but Khoros’ team was instrumental in allowing us to deliver a working prototype that passed all of our test in order to be client facing. Once the GenAI part was working, building the actual bot in Flow around it was easy to do. Flow is very user friendly the no code – low code approach works wonders in enabling users to build what they envision without the need to involved a big team of developers. We love the fact that the GenAI works as a part of flow and that we can build around it. That allows to be more focused and handhold the end user when needed and leverage the GenAI when it is the time to do so. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Not only is the technology great and easy to use, but Khoros’ accessibility as a partner, ease of communication and collaboration stands out as a defining facilitating factor what we managed to deliver. We always greatly appreciated Khoros for their quick and accessible support and in project like these it makes a world of difference having access to the right people at the right moment. Khoros’ team took the time to guide us and train us at our own pace enabling us to be able to quickly get a grip on Flow thus allowing us to work even better with the team assisting us in building the solution.ViewsCommentsLucky Mobile
Author Details: Name: Darrell Harrison Title: Community Manager, Specialist Business Strategy - Digital Support Company: Lucky Mobile Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Lucky Mobile is a Canadian prepaid mobile virtual network operator. Lucky Mobile is Canada’s super cheap mobile provider. There’s no credit check, no long-term commitment and no data overage charges. Truth is, you don’t have to be lucky to get great mobile savings – you just have to be with Lucky Mobile. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? When launching the Lucky Mobile Community in Q4 2021 our goal was to alleviate call centre and live chat volume by providing an additional platform of support available 24/7. The Lucky Mobile Community team focuses on driving the best digital peer to peer, self-serve experience for our customers. Whether the customer has questions, curiosities or requires technical, account, product or sales/activation assistance; the Lucky Mobile Community team develops the digital pathways to connect the customer to their desired self serve, peer to peer or customer support channel. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Focusing on contact centre volume reduction, the implementation of a Khoros Community would provide a 24/7 source of both searchable and peer to peer knowledge and support; adding to the social contact channel already available and operating within Khoros Care. Generally speaking, the Lucky Mobile customer base has the same handful of questions or issues; with nearly all being solvable via self-serve. Therefore, the main challenges the Lucky Mobile Community was intended to solve was to encourage, educate and commit the customer to use self-serve moving forward to address their questions or concerns as the first line of contact, before reaching out to an agent. This way we can answer their question or deliver the solution to their problem far quicker. 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. In order to deliver on the main goal of the Lucky Mobile Community; self-serve and peer to peer support, the Lucky Mobile Community had to build its reputation as a knowledgeable and helpful place. We worked hard to grow community content, increase solutions, resolution rate and lower peer to peer response times. We built out TKB content, maintained a respectable SLA to allow Community users’ posts to breathe and develop thoughts, responses and the solutions needed. 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’ll go into additional detail below as progress outcomes directly relate to business and value outcomes, but the main value outcome is always to reduce the cost to serve the customer while increasing the customer’s use of self-serve. Through increased Community content, Blogs, TKBs, Accepted Solutions, Solution Views, Resolution Rate and Contact Rate we’re driving a $327K 2024 YTD contact savings from the Lucky Mobile Community alone. By building the connecting bridges between Khoros Care’s social media, leveraging the After Hours automated response and soon Agent Assist, we are able to provide faster resolution, through less contacts, while educating the customer on where to find the answer themselves in the future. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The Lucky Mobile Community finished 2022 with a Community Resolution Rate of 26%, Avg. Min. to First Response of 2.6K minutes and 133.5K Solution Views. In 2023 we had maintained the Community Resolution Rate of 26% but delivered an exemplary 39% decrease in Min. to First Response at 1.6K minutes (1K minutes faster) and a 65% increase in Solution Views to a total of 220K YoY. On the social media side we targeted an 80% SLA in 20 min. or less and achieved 72% across 4.3K Conversations, 15.6K Posts and a 95% CSAT. 2024 YTD, the Lucky Mobile Community currently holds a 22% Resolution Rate, has further reduced Min. to First Response by another 18.75% down to 1.3K minutes (300 min. faster) and are already 25% above 2023’s Solution Views; currently 275K. We are equating an approximate contact deflection savings of $327K 2024 YTD from the Community alone as only 11% of customers who visited the Lucky Mobile Community first, then called in or reached out to Live Chat. On the social media side, 2024 YTD we have achieved an 85% SLA in 20 min. or less across 1.4K Conversations and 7.5K Posts with an 88% CSAT. 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 number one differentiator the Khoros Community solution has in relation to our business goals, is the connection between Khoros Care and the Khoros Community. Utilizing Khoros Care for our social engagement side allows the Lucky Mobile Community to increase traffic with the use of social-to-community pathing via agents and community moderators. We utilize Community redirection via agents and Khoros Care’s after hours/out of office auto-response. Additionally, other factors adding to our success through 2024 and into 2025 will be the increased use of Khoros Agent Assist. Agent Assist helps social agents connect relevant community topics and solutions to their social media customers. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Community Manager and Social Media Specialist have over a decade of experience with Khoros Communities and Khoros Care each. Our long term partnership and experience has afforded us the time to learn and absorb all of what Khoros platforms have to offer. As we grow, meet new challenges and opportunities, we can match those challenges with the appropriate Khoros solution.ViewsCommentsBell Canada
Author Details: Name: Darrell Harrison Title: Community Manager, Specialist Business Strategy - Digital Support Company: Bell Canada Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Bell is Canada’s largest communications provider, connecting millions of customers throughout the country on our powerful wireless and fibre networks, and delivering compelling content to national and local audiences on our leading TV, radio and digital platforms. Our team of more than 50,000 reflects the diversity of the Canadian population and includes employees living and working in communities of all sizes across every province and territory. Bell Let’s Talk began in 2010, together we’ve created the world’s largest conversation about mental health. As a result, Canadian organizations large and small in every region have received new funding from Bell Let’s Talk and from governments and corporations that have joined the cause. Bell Let’s Talk funds Canadian mental health initiatives and organizations all year long that are creating real change in their communities each and every day. Since 2010, Bell Let’s Talk has committed $139,588,747 to Canadian mental health initiatives. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Business Support team within Bell Canada focuses on driving the best digital (online/app) experience for our customers. Whether the customer has questions, curiosities or requires technical, account, product or sales/activation assistance; the Digital Support team creates and develops the digital pathways to connect the customer to self serve, peer to peer or service support through all available digital channels. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our Brand and Bell Let’s Talk teams charged the Digital Support/Bell Community Forum team with the monumental task of putting together an in-house solution for Bell Let’s Talk Day on January 24th, 2024 with 9 days notice. The teams were facing three specific challenges: Functionality – For 2024 our Brand and Bell Let’s Talk teams wanted to expand the conversation and capture active responses from Canadians and others around the world to the Bell Let’s Talk question “Tell us what you plan to do to create change in mental health for yourself, your community or your workplace, today and all year long.” Cost – The cost to find a platform capable of allowing user & anonymous user registration, posting abilities and metric/KPI data collection was growing, running in the tens of thousands of dollars. Time – Time was short and we, the Bell Community/Digital Support team had 9 days to deliver a viable and functional platform. Within the first 3 days the Digital Support/Bell Community team had built a mock-up, demonstrated and delivered on functionality and metric/KPI’s, all essentially at no cost to the teams as we leveraged our Khoros Community to build a custom Blog page, separate from the rest of the Community, but utilizing all the community functions and features has to offer. Specifically; allowing anonymous blog comments, building event specific keyword and smut filters, isolating Page View and Visit metrics, exporting comments and engagement data from Khoros Care. 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. This was a huge win for Bell Let’s Talk 2024 and in the future as the Digital Support/Bell Community team was able to prove in a challengingly short time that we can innovate and change the way we use the Khoros Community platform. The versatility allows us to manipulate it’s functions and features to serve specific needs and adapt to challenges as they arise. Whether we are working with Branding, Marketing, Product or Sales teams, we have shown that no matter the challenge put forth, the Bell Community Forum can align to those opportunities, meet the challenge and alleviate time and cost constraints for all teams involved. 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 number one outcome for the business was the efficient use of time. This time efficiency allowed the Bell Community team to extract further value and use from the Community. The financial value achieved was the decrease in spend by tens of thousands of dollars, all by using ‘an in-house’ solution. As before, the versatility of the Khoros Community platform allowed our team to flip standard use cases on their head and pivot on how we traditionally used Blogs. Between the two; English Bell Let’s Talk and French Cause pour la Cause we generated just over 480 comments in the 24 hour campaign. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Bell Let’s Talk day lasts an entire 24 hours and within that time period the 2024 Bell Let’s Talk blog totaled: 8% of all the day’s Page Views across the entire Bell Community 82% of all Blog Page Views in one day vs. an entire week’s average 6.7K total Page Views 2.7K Visits 2.1 Unique Visits 480+ individual posts in both English and French Through Khoros Care, our alternate social channels Bell Let’s Talk 2024 generated: 22.7K Mentions 209M Impressions 20.2M total Reach 18.8K Bell Let’s Talk Hashtags 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? Not only was the immense cost savings such a large part of the Khoros Community being the main differentiator in pulling off a hugely successful Bell Let’s Talk 2024; but the ability of our developer and management teams to work and collaborate so effectively through the Community Stage environment. Having a backend like Stage allowed us to build the structure, design and layout the page, give and receive feedback, demonstrate the changes and functionality, etc. all quickly, easily and internally. Without Khoros Community’s Stage, we simply could not have delivered to the degree that we had and with such a short turnaround. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Community Manager has over a decade of experience with Khoros Communities and our Developer Natalie has been working with Khoros Studio and Stage since launch in 2021. They both know what the Community platform is capable of, what its limitations are and how both of those can be pushed, stretched or customized. Khoros has and continues to hold workshops, courses and webinars throughout the year(s) and we encourage your to register, participate and apply what you have learned in them. Khoros has built a platform for you to address the digital challenges your company faces.ViewsCommentsDominion Energy
Author Details: Name: Courtney Koogler Ercolano Title: Communications Consultant Company: Dominion Energy Tell us about you, your company, and your team? My name is Courtney Koogler Ercolano and I’m a Communications Consultant for Dominion Energy. I’ve worked in digital communications for 8+ years. I worked on the previous platform and helped onboard Khoros in 2021. Since then, I’ve become a system administrator to ensure the platform works as the team needs it to. This includes training customer care agents and other admins on how to use the platform as well as strategizing on how to use Care to best serve Dominion Energy’s needs. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? I sit under Customer Communications on the Corporate Communications team. I work alongside Customer Experience and Care teams in our local regions to meet our company goals (with a focus on the customer). The corporate team also sets governance for brand responses and creates processes for how to handle specific situations and escalations. We’ve built out a specific process for our customer care agents so that they can focus on serving our customers. Our goals include reducing call volume as it’s expensive and not ideal for all of our customers. Additionally, we use Khoros to expand our digital care offerings so we can continue to meet our customers where they are (or expect us to be). It’s important for us to be on the channels our customers prefer and to be able to serve our customers on the channel they come to us on. Our goal is to serve them on that channel and hopefully resolve their issue in that channel. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our challenge was to Reduce costs as it’s expensive to have people on the phones, Increase resources - digital positions are much more attractive, and Provide the digital options customers want. Our goal is never to get rid of the phone as there are cases that must be handled over the phone and customers who desire that option. One size does not fit all. Our challenge is finding a way to meet customers where they expect us to be and meet their expectations as a brand in general, not only as a utilities provider. The team uses Khoros Care to handle conversations across traditional social channels like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, Review channels, and digital channels including Apple Business Chat. 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 launched Apple Chat about a year and a half ago, and have continued to expand the offering in South Carolina because it has been so successful. Virginia is our next focus for this channel to help call diversion. Normally, it would be difficult to say whether this channel reduces calls, but because of message suggest, we can see that people chose this channel instead. Message Suggest is a prompt that appears to iPhone users when they go to make a phone call encouraging them to message the business instead. We use a tag in Khoros to track message suggest. During a storm, customers need to be able to report their outages to us. During one (very recent!) particular storm in South Carolina, our app was not working, our website outage reporting was down, and our IVR was down. Apple Chat was bombarded - but luckily, we had that option. Customers could report their outage using Apple Chat until our other options were back up. 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 primary business outcomes are that we’re able to directly divert calls through Message Suggest, offer chat options directly on our page using entry points, and test how customers would utilize this digital channel to move them away from phone calls in different regions. It’s important that we have data on how customers choose to use our resources so that we show leadership the need to grow channels, or offer new channels. More customers may choose to use digital after using Apple Chat. For example, we noticed a spike in Facebook use in South Carolina following the storm that pushed that customer base to Apple Chat. In addition, Dominion Energy has a goal of improving customer experience and increasing customer loyalty by delivering timely responses and faster resolution over traditional support channels. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In the first half of 2024, the team delivered on this goal and saw an increase in agent efficiency by decreasing Median Time to Agent response by 70% when compared to the same time period in 2023. This means our agents were able to respond faster to incoming posts from our customers. In addition, the team noticed a decrease in average handle time by 52%. Lastly, our team uses a message suggest tag to see how many conversations came through Apple Chat that were prompted to send a message rather than make a phone call. We saw a 30% increase in these Apple Chat conversations that would have gone to voice. 70% decrease in median TAR YoY (Jan-June 2024) 52% decrease in average handle time YoY (Jan-June 2024) 30% increase YoY in Apple Chat conversations that would have gone to voice (July-September 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? Khoros has helped us move beyond just looking at social media. Having a holistic view of the digital customer experience in one spot has shown us how this can be a more efficient process, divert calls, and improve the customer experience. Khoros has also expanded offerings to create a seamless customer and agent experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Khoros has been a great partner in suggesting ways to utilize the software package we already have and ways to optimize our instance. Often times, I don’t have to go sell anyone on a big investment, because we can test things out in Khoros that are in our current contract, show the value and grow from there. In addition, the ease of using the platform and having the option to work with an optimization specialist and tweak things on our own has been helpful. With our past provider it was hard to feel like an expert.ViewsCommentsVisa
Author Details: Name: Anthony Pichardo Title: Product Manager Company: Visa Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Launched in 2016 the Visa Developer Platform continues to explode in growth, currently averaging 8 billion API calls each month. The portal is the face of Visa’s digital-first strategy and is compromised of a developer portal, community platform, API gateway, and service components used to enhance product and client experiences. Myself and Sophie are the product managers supporting the developer experience and community platform. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? My role is to lead the developer experience team which is inclusive of our developer center and community platform. As a team we strive to provide our developers with the tools and resources they need to discover and implement our suite of products. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our team uses Khoros Community to engage with our customers in a dedicated channel of choice with expert support and like minded peers available to connect in real time. We focus on improvement at the platform level, inclusive of the developer and partner portals. The community helps to enhance the Visa Developer Platform as the single, trusted, and open platform that easily serves all client developer solution needs. Our community solution was intended to solve the challenge of how to create a quality customer experience that leveraged self service to provide cost savings through contact deflection. We decided to use Community for this challenge as we see it as a way to have a better branded experience and we knew we would be able to scale the service at a lower cost due to the inherent self-service nature of communities. 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. In addressing the challenge of driving Community self-service, we wanted to foster and encourage peer-to-peer engagement to improve quality of member interactions and to increase customer trust and advocacy. This has involved improving process efficiencies and streamlining the onboarding experience for clients, including leveraging the community and documentation to provide better support and responsiveness to customer feedback. The focus is on reducing time it takes for clients to start using their APIs, with the community able to deflect initial questions that are easily answerable by us fostering and encouraging peer-to-peer engagement. In addition to our Community team, this also involved the Customer Success team who provide a lot of the customer support and manage all the customer intake channels. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In the last 12 months, this has resulted in an estimated $3.5M of cost savings in support deflection. We have also seen a 16% improvement in Registrations this year compared with last year. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We have achieved a 59% resolution rate in our Community over the last 12 months, with customers not needing to go anywhere else to have their question answered. Also, our Accepted Solutions have increased 20% from the previous year, giving us an overall resolution rate of 22%. We want to make sure we have a healthy resolution balance i.e. not resolving everything and encouraging discussion and active involvement as customers leverage the community as part of their overall Visa Developer Platform experience. 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 flexibility of the Khoros Solution has been very helpful in achieving positive results each year. Initially Khoros worked with our UX team to help design the Community with our users and brand in mind. This year we have seen a 16.1% increase in New Members compared with last year. The amount of data we are able to review also enables us to target focus areas and give meaningful feedback on success we are having with the larger business goals. It means we have a better understanding of how to engage with our Developers and what they want. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The capabilities of the platform, such as the admin console make it easy for myself and Sophie to manage. Our Khoros CSM, Ben, is also very helpful in collaborating with us on areas we are being successful in, areas we can grow and also new functionality / changes that can help in our goals. The extensive data and KPI reporting also make it easier to share data with the wider business. For example, we have multiple metrics to show how new developers are discovering the Community, such as Number of Visits, Registrations and New Visitors, which all increased over the last 12 months.ViewsComments
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