Bunnings
Author Details Name: Jason Hill Title: Online Community Manager Company: Bunnings Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Bunnings is Australia and New Zealand's leading retailer of home improvement and lifestyle products, and a major supplier to project builders, commercial tradespeople and the housing industry. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our Bunnings Workshop online community provides inspiration for new home improvement projects and help and support to finish them. Thousands of customers get ideas and advice from our friendly and encouraging community every day. The Bunnings Workshop team includes three resident D.I.Y. experts sharing advice, and a community manager. The community supports our goal to deliver the best customer experience whether in-store or online. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Home improvement projects are challenging for many of our customers. People need ideas and ongoing support. Our research found most households had many unfinished projects and there was a perception that D.I.Y. was difficult. However, it is always inspiring to see how others are transforming their homes, and it's often more powerful to see someone just like you finish a project compared to watching an expert. It's also valuable to get product recommendations and project advice from peers. On Workshop, many community members share their knowledge and experiences to assist others, while Bunnings team members also share advice to help ensure every question gets answered and thousands of customers get the ideas and advice they need every day. 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 challenge was how to build awareness of the community without spending money on advertising. Our team and our community were sharing helpful advice and inspiring projects on the site every day, but as activity on the site grew our annual member surveys suggested it was also becoming more challenging for the community to find what they needed. We decided to utilise blog and knowledge base functionality and take all the best advice, ideas and projects that community members were sharing and turn them into articles that were more easily findable, accessible, promotable and digestible compared to lengthy forum discussions. We also worked every day to ensure all forum discussions had SEO friendly titles. This work has led to an enormous jump in organic search traffic to the community and a massive increase in community pageviews. Visits from organic search in the past 12 months were 167% higher year-on-year. Pageviews were also 97% higher year-on-year. Our team does not publish a huge number of articles (441 in the past 12 months) yet these articles are providing wildly popular with the community, representing 25% of all community pageviews in the past 12 months. Our content strategy of taking the best content from discussions and featuring it in articles to hero our members and the best content they are sharing has been very successful. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Our content strategy, focus on improving SEO and our commitment to delivering outstanding customer service on the community has driven enormous community growth in the past 12 months. Over 80% of traffic to the community is now from organic search, and the value of organic traffic to the site in the past 12 months has increased 167% year-on-year. The sales impact of the community has also grown significantly in the past year. Online sales directly from visits from our community was 98% higher year-on-year. This huge growth is despite a reduction in the size of the community team 12 months ago. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Community customer satisfaction is very pleasing. In the past 12 months, our community recorded a higher NPS than all other Bunnings digital channels. 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 Care tool has been important in ensuring that 100% of all D.I.Y. questions asked on the Bunnings Workshop community in the past 12 months were answered and that our NPS continues to grow. Meanwhile, TKB and Blog functionality in the Khoros Communities offering has allowed the Workshop team to be able to quickly and easily take the best content from our discussion boards and turn it into valuable articles for our community members. It is also quick and easy for our team to edit discussion titles to ensure they have SEO-friendly keywords, helping to drive our massive increase in organic search traffic to the community. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Khoros has remained a supportive partner of our community program. Our Khoros customer success manager is particularly proactive and always keen to demonstrate how Khoros tools can be harnessed to help grow the community, improve customer service and deliver on business objectives.Instacart
Author Details: Name: Annabel Becerra-Chavez Title: Sr. Program Manager Company: Instacart Tell us about you, your company, and your team? We are Instacart, a leading online grocery platform in the U.S. committed to reshaping how people shop for groceries. Instacart's mission is to create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. At Instacart, our Community Team plays a crucial role in fostering a vibrant and supportive environment for our shoppers. We strive to build and maintain a cohesive community where our shoppers feel valued, informed, and engaged. This sense of belonging and recognition is integral to our company as we believe in the importance of our shoppers' voices being heard and their contributions celebrated. Together, we work towards a common goal of providing an exceptional service that makes grocery shopping effortless and enjoyable for everyone involved. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our Community Team at Instacart plays a pivotal role in supporting the company's goals of retaining and celebrating top shoppers. We achieve this by fostering an inclusive, informative ecosystem for our shoppers. By building and maintaining strong relationships within our community, we ensure that our shoppers feel supported, valued, and connected. This not only enhances their satisfaction and loyalty but also empowers them to provide exceptional service, directly aligning with our company's objective of making grocery shopping effortless and more enjoyable for our customers. Our team fosters a community of support and information sharing between–both between Instacart and shoppers as well as shopper-to-shopper. This connectedness enhances shopper engagement, reduces churn, and increases the overall effectiveness of our service by helping shoppers grow and learn. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Instacart’s “Shop Talk” community was established in 2018 with the goal of providing shoppers with a place to connect, and for teams at Instacart to interact with shoppers and gather their feedback. There was an opportunity at that time to better understand the needs of our shopper community. Rather than just engaging on social media or asking for shopper feedback via surveys, we wanted to develop a space where internal teams could truly connect with and learn from shoppers. We also wanted a space for shoppers to engage with one another to help build a sense of belonging and camaraderie amongst peers. Through the years, this platform has effectively bridged the communication gap between shoppers and internal teams, ensuring that their feedback directly influences our operational and product strategies. It has also enabled shoppers to learn from one another. Over time, our aim has been to transform this platform into a vibrant, informative hub where shoppers feel their voices are not only heard but are integral to shaping our community and business strategies. In 2023, we took a strategic step to be among the first to transition from Khoros Classic to Aurora, Khoros’ latest community platform. Aurora’s simple and user-friendly interface facilitated a seamless upgrade and enabled us to swiftly customize our site and continually update it—an essential feature for our mobile-centric shoppers. This upgrade marked a significant enhancement over Khoros Classic, which, while robust, lacked the agility and ease of quick updates that Aurora offers. Moreover, leveraging Aurora's innovative features like Ideation & Events, their plug-and-play UI, and the enhanced ability to make changes to community settings easily has been transformative. These advancements not only foster a stronger sense of belonging among our community members but also enhance our feedback mechanisms, allowing us to gather and implement shopper insights more efficiently and make tangible impacts on their experiences and contributions. These strategic enhancements facilitated by the Khoros Aurora platform have not only empowered our community but also bolstered our commitment to making Instacart a responsive and shopper-centric company. 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 the past year, our team faced significant challenges with our site, which was then powered by Khoros Classic. Shoppers often found the platform clunky and difficult to navigate, a problem that was becoming a critical barrier to improving both shopper engagement and interaction. This issue largely stemmed from inherent limitations within our team's ability to receive engineering and design support, which significantly delayed our ability to implement essential UI/UX enhancements. Recognizing the opportunity to enhance both the usability and aesthetics of our platform, we decided to migrate to Khoros' newer Aurora platform, celebrated for its simplified and intuitive user interface. This migration and subsequent overhaul were spearheaded by our internal Community team, which took full advantage of Aurora's advanced, user-friendly capabilities. With this strategic move, we launched a comprehensive redesign of our "Shop Talk" UI/UX, aiming to elevate the overall shopper experience dramatically. This initiative was incredibly transformative. Post-redesign, we observed a 33% increase in page views and a 5% uplift in page views per visitor. These significant improvements in metrics demonstrated enhanced user interaction and satisfaction, confirming the effectiveness of the new design. Furthermore, the simplification of the platform's navigation and usability did not just enhance the current user experience but was also strategically planned to support scalable enhancements in the future. As we look forward, we anticipate these changes will yield long-term benefits, such as sustained shopper growth, improved shopper retention, and enhanced integration of shopper feedback into our ongoing platform improvements. These advancements will ensure that the Shop Talk community remains a robust and dynamic platform. This project not only exemplified our commitment to responsive and shopper-centric design but also underscored our dedication to continuously evolving our community platform to meet and anticipate the needs of our shoppers. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Cost Efficiency: Aurora’s improved site usability has reduced the need for extensive engineering and design support, leading to cost savings in technical resources Improve Shopper Quality: Shoppers ability to find educational content easier can lead to reduce costs associated with operational inefficiencies and customer satisfaction measures What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased User Engagement: The transition to the Khoros Aurora platform led to a 33% increase in page views and a 5% uplift in page views per visitor, indicating higher engagement and interaction among the community of Instacart shoppers that use the platform. Enhanced User Experience: The simplified and intuitive interface of Aurora improved user navigation, resulting in an increase in click-through rates. This improvement likely contributed to better user 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 Khoros Communities solution offered advanced customization capabilities that aligned seamlessly with our brand identity, allowing us to maintain a consistent and recognizable platform experience. Its analytics and reporting features provided precise measurements of community engagement and impact, which were crucial for strategic decision-making. Additionally, the platform’s flexibility enabled quick adaptations to evolving needs, further supported by Khoros's strong customer service and ability to integrate new features at scale. These factors, combined with the innovative tools provided by the Aurora platform, set Khoros apart as an invaluable partner in achieving our community goals. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Working with Khoros has been greatly facilitated by their responsiveness and support. The team’s ability to swiftly escalate issues and present potential solutions has been critical in addressing challenges efficiently. Moreover, the easy-to-use interface and proactive onboarding guidance helped our team transition smoothly to the Aurora platform, empowering us to enhance our community’s functionality and engagement without lengthy delays or resource constraints.
