Sisense
Author Details: Name: David Raynor Title: Senior Community Manager Company: Sisense Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I joined Sisense as a Technical Account Manager in November 2022, started with the Community team in December 2023 as a Developer Liaison, and took over as Community Manager in January 2024. Sisense is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform that helps businesses gather, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources. It's designed to help businesses make informed decisions by providing a user-friendly interface for data exploration and reporting. We are a two-person Community team. Jackie Cordell and I handle the day-to-day operations of the community, identify and execute community projects and events, and report on community metrics. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Sisense Community strives to empower members to find solutions through continued learning and collaboration. We showcase best practices, interesting use cases, and top users. The Sisense Community helps users to implement Sisense more effectively and efficiently. That supports Sisense's goals of customer retention and expansion. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Sisense Community was underperforming, with low participation and shrinking growth. Internal teams were not confident in the community experience and hesitated to recommend it to their customers. Customer retention and growth were suffering as customers were not able to quickly find answers for their questions and solve problems. Community is an integral part of improving those metrics. 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. When I started the community, we were focused on engaging directly with the community to rebuild trust with our users. Responding to posts in a timely and closing the loop were the first actions we took to prove that we are dedicated to creating an active and engaged forum. The result is that engagement is up across the board, growing by 100% - 300% YoY. Internal engagement has also increased, with technical resources participating in the community by answering forum posts, creating Knowledge Base articles, and promoting the community to their customers. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Customer retention and revenue growth are lagging indicators of Community engagement, so we have not been able to quantify the ROI yet. However, as Community engagement continues to grow we expect to see reduced churn and increased expansion. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We focus on user engagement. We want to see our current users engaging more, asking questions, providing solutions, viewing KB docs and Blogs, and generally being more active and engaged. As we create ways to tie community engagement with increased customer lifetime value, reduced support costs, and reduced churn, those will become important ROI markers for us. 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? Our Customer Success team has been very engaged and helpful in moving us toward our goals. Their support team has been quick to respond to tickets, and I appreciate the Khoros Forums also. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The ability to send an email escalation when a post has not been responded to has been very helpful, as has the assistance of the CS team to help us monitor our KPIs.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.Atlassian
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!GoTo
Author Details: Name: Glenn Dobson Title: Manager, Community and Social Media Support Company: GoTo Tell us about you, your company, and your team? GoTo believes that in a flexibility-first world, great work can happen anywhere. That mindset has helped us fulfill the promise of reliability, connection, and simplicity for tens of millions of people through our portfolio of products, including GoTo Connect, GoTo Webinar, and LogMeIn Rescue. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The GoTo Community team utilizes a two-pronged approach to support our Company goals. The first focuses on Customer Support and Success which we achieve through a tailored proactive approach based on our members' feedback. The second focuses on Customer Education and Product Innovation so that our members receive more than just a Solution and our Product teams not only see a feature request, but also a use case supporting it. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The GoTo Community is the combination of two existing communities, and as a result offers some unique challenges. Made up of thirteen different product communities across three lines of Business, a one size fits all approach has never been an option. While Customer Support and Success is a universal goal, what that means varies between each member group. We work cross functionally with multiple teams across GoTo, often providing a deeper level of understanding of our customers and their needs. Our thirteen communities range from mature (10+ years), to newly established and growing. With each we strive to understand their unique needs and preferences, and then provide support and engagement that is accurate, timely and delivered with empathy. 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 the biggest challenges we have faced recently is the introduction of a new generation of products. Change is always challenging, especially when your customer base is comfortable with your legacy solution. We utilized our community to capture detailed customer feedback critical to our Product teams. Our members aided in identifying areas that needed more attention as well as quality of life improvements earlier in the process. 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 decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. 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 GoTo Community allowed us to gather more detailed feedback from our customers and provide our Product teams with more context around their in product survey results. It empowered us to have real conversations with our customers and provide them with information and solutions in ways that answered their specific needs. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have always benefited from the fantastic support Khoros and our Account Manager provides, but the shared knowledge of the Atlas Community members cannot be understated.HubSpot
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.HubSpot
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.Instructure
Author Details: Name: K Lundstrum Title: Community Manager Company: Instructure Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Instructure is the innovative education technology company behind Canvas, the world’s most popular learning management system and developing Ed-cosystem. As a company, we seek to elevate student success, amplify the power of teaching, and inspire everyone to learn together. Our Community team is at the heart of it all, driving vision and strategy in content, engagement, and innovation within the Instructure Community, a Khoros community. We’re dedicated to ensuring our users and over 2.2 million Community members have access to a wealth of knowledge, self-support resources, and peer collaboration. Through the Community, we empower educators, administrators, and students to discover solutions, share best practices, and access valuable resources—all while fostering a vibrant environment for learning and growth. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our role is at the core of Instructure’s mission—empowering users to be more self-sufficient and providing scalable, effective customer support through our online community. By fostering peer-to-peer problem solving and collaborating with internal teams to share best practices, we’re committed to enhancing teaching and learning. Our efforts drive impact at scale, ensuring that millions of users can quickly find the solutions they need, reducing reliance on traditional support channels, and creating a more efficient, dynamic support experience across the entire Instructure Ed-cosystem! Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Instructure Community, one of the first of its kind and now nearing its 15th year, has grown and evolved across three platforms while staying true to its inception: to capture the energy, excitement, and learning of InstructureCon, our annual conference, and keep it alive year-round online—it's the ultimate perpetual unconference! Built for our diverse user base of educators, administrators, IT professionals, and students, the Community offers quick, easy access to a wealth of resources, tips, and troubleshooting. It's more than just support; it’s a vibrant, multi-faceted self-service hub where users can tap into content created by both Instructure employees and their peers. Today, powered by Khoros, the Community continues to thrive as a scalable solution, enabling our 2.2 million members and millions more visitors to find answers fast. The collaborative spirit of peer-to-peer support and self-service empowers users to solve problems on their own, while also reducing the demand on traditional support channels. In fact, we’ve seen a clear link between increased page views and a decreased need for direct Support assistance. The impact of this self-service success is huge! At scale, it means significant case avoidance for our first-line support agents, saving the company money every quarter while freeing up our teams to tackle more complex, time-consuming cases. It’s a win-win that fuels both efficiency and innovation for everyone involved! 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 year, the challenge we set out to solve was scaling the Instructure Community to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth through acquisitions and new product development. As Instructure’s Ed-cosystem continues to expand, so does the need for consistent, efficient, and scalable support across our entire product suite. With each new product added to the portfolio, the demand for quick access to resources, self-service tools, and peer collaboration grows—making the role of the Community more critical than ever. To meet this challenge, we focused on applying the proven strategies that have made the Instructure Community so successful to the broader Ed-cosystem. Our goal was simple: extend the Community's power and reach to support every corner of Instructure’s expanding portfolio. By integrating new products and user groups into the existing Community framework, we could provide a unified, scalable self-service platform that empowers users to find solutions across the entire product line, reducing strain on traditional support channels. While we’re beginning to expand the impact of the Community, the journey is just getting started. Customers are gradually discovering the wealth of resources available, and engagement is steadily building. As users explore and start tapping into the peer-to-peer support and self-service options, we expect the benefits to unfold over time. The true scale of savings through case avoidance will become more apparent as more members engage with the platform. By applying the same proven strategies that made Canvas LMS successful, we’re laying the foundation for a future where the Community plays a pivotal role in reducing support demands and creating a scalable experience across all of Instructure’s products. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Thanks to our commitment to fostering an environment of innovation, we’ve experienced an incredible 3% membership growth quarter over quarter! This growth isn’t just numbers on a page; it’s a testament to the needs this Community meets. New members are joining us, excited to be part of a vibrant ecosystem that prioritizes learning, advocacy, and thought leadership. We’re not just a community; we’re a movement! Our strategy to create “connection voracity” has truly paid off. We’re thrilled to report that 69% of our visitors found exactly what they were looking for! This means our resources are hitting the mark, empowering our users to engage deeply and meaningfully with our content. And it doesn’t stop there—an astounding 87% of our users rated our guides as helpful. This is more than just a number; it reflects our dedication to providing valuable insights that empower our users to thrive. When our members feel supported and informed, they become our greatest advocates, spreading the word about the invaluable solutions Instructure provides, and resources available within our community! We’ve become the ultimate source for self-enablement and self-support for every Instructure Ed-cosystem user. The results speak volumes: a staggering 95% accepted solution rate in our Q&A sessions, with a remarkable 72% solution view rate! Users are not just seeking help; they are finding it! This high level of engagement shows that our community is a reliable hub where answers are at their fingertips. Plus, with an impressive 26:1 unique visitors-to-support case ratio, we’re efficiently serving our users while deflecting an average of 1 million support tickets quarterly. This operational efficiency means we can focus even more on enhancing user experiences. When we look at these outcomes, it’s clear that addressing our strategic challenges has driven significant value. We’re not just keeping up; we’re leading the way! The synergy between our innovative offerings, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency creates a powerful narrative of success. We’re building a legacy that will resonate for years to come—a community that champions self-empowerment, fosters meaningful connections, and continually sets the standard for excellence. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Please see the previous question. By fostering self-service through our Khoros Community, we’ve consistently seen significant value in key metrics. Over the past year, our contact deflection rate held steady at26 visits to 1 support case, and we estimate that that deflects an average1 million quarterly support tickets. Additionally, the solution rate within the Community has averaged over 95%, as more users are solving problems through peer-to-peer discussions. These outcomes highlight the success of our strategy in leveraging self-service principles to improve overall customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and increase engagement—scalable community success. 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 is a powerhouse that supercharges our self-support initiatives! With its advanced features—like custom discussion filters, seamless knowledge base integration, and robust analytics tracking—we’re not just making strides; we’re leaping toward success! These incredible tools empower us to cultivate a vibrant community that thrives on member contributions while giving us the data-driven insights we need to continually refine and elevate our approach. But that’s not all! The ability to personalize user experiences, automate content moderation, and segment content for specific audiences has been an absolute game-changer, driving scalable solutions that make our community truly shine! And let’s talk about integration—thanks to Khoros seamlessly connecting with Instructure’s existing tools and resources, we’ve created an effortless user experience that encourages enthusiastic participation and engagement from our members like never before! Together, we’re not just building a community; we’re igniting a movement where every member feels empowered, valued, and excited to contribute. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Please see the previous question. The combination of an intuitive platform, robust analytics, and the ability to easily scale our initiatives has positioned us to continuously evolve the Instructure Community, delivering immediate and long-term value to our users and our business as we optimize content delivery, create more targeted resources, and improve the overall self-service experience.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.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.
