Zoom
Author Details: Name: Briuana Green Title: Senior Community Manager Name: Alexis Brown Title: Senior Manager, Global Community and Social Media Company: Zoom Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Zoom is an all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform, to make connecting easier, more immersive, and dynamic for both businesses and individuals. Zoom operates by putting customers first and enabling meaningful connections and facilitating modern collaboration. With solutions like Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Phone, Zoom Clips, Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Docs, and more all in one offering, we help drive human innovation and deliver exceptional results for our users. The Zoom Community team is part of the Digital Customer Support organization, dedicated to delivering customer satisfaction and resolution through various digital platforms, those including the Zoom community, knowledge base, chatbot, and support web experience. By offering 24/7 online support, we enable accessible resolutions for our customers. Since joining Zoom in 2021, the Community team is proud to continuously make a positive impact on both our customers and our internal teams. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Zoom Community team fosters a healthy, welcoming environment where users are encouraged to seek digital support first. It offers a space for end users to collaborate and find solutions alongside fellow Zoom users. As a company, we are committed to delivering innovative technology and exceptional user experiences. Providing the support customers need to succeed with our products is a top priority, and the Zoom Community is one of many avenues for users to seek help, share knowledge, and collaborate. This positive and supportive online community compliments Zoom's overarching mission of one platform delivering limitless human connection. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Zoom Community was created to meet the needs of Zoom users worldwide, offering a dynamic online forum where individuals can ask questions, find solutions, and collaborate with peers. In response to growing demand for 24/7 online support, the Zoom Community team was established in March 2021. By August of the same year, the community officially launched, and has since expanded to over 371,000 members, 173,000 posts, 39 million page views, and 24 million visits. As a key resource for Zoom users, the community works in tandem with Zoom's digital support tools, including the knowledge base and chatbot. This forum empowers users to self-serve by either searching for answers or asking new questions, receiving guidance from experts. It fosters connections among users, helping them expand their knowledge, exchange ideas, and discover innovative solutions. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Over the past year, the Zoom Community has evolved into a key destination for Zoom users, offering valuable updates on product launches, feature solutions, upcoming webinars, and service statuses. With a wide array of content shared within the community, we've seen significant improvements, innovations, and strengthened partnerships. Here are some of the key initiatives driving this growth. SEO Optimization: A major success for our community has been the effectiveness of our SEO optimization efforts, significantly boosting our visibility. Our threads now consistently rank higher in Google search results, making it easier for users to find Zoom-related solutions. This enhanced visibility allows for faster issue resolution, improving the overall user experience and attracting a broader audience, further establishing our community as a crucial support resource. Voice of the Customer (VoC): The community plays a vital role in collecting and conveying customer feedback to internal teams. By prioritizing the voice of the customer, we can address trending topics, resolve identified bugs, and fill content gaps, helping us maintain exceptional customer satisfaction. Knowledge Base (KB): The community helps us uncover knowledge gaps in our self-service resources. By monitoring frequently asked questions, we can identify areas for improvement in our knowledge base, ensuring users find the information they need more easily and escalating issues when necessary. Customer Success Forum and On-Demand Learning: This year, we expanded the community to include more collaborative spaces like the Customer Success Forum, Customer Success Events, and On-Demand Learning areas. These spaces provide opportunities for users to share success stories, unique use cases, customer spotlights, and access live and recorded webinars. Escalations and Service Impacting Events: We use the community to communicate updates on service-impacting events and system status. There have been multiple instances where issues or bugs were first identified through reports from community members. New Product Announcements: With the introduction of new products such as Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Docs, and Zoom Clips, we've added dedicated forums for each innovation. These spaces allow customers to ask questions, share use cases, and learn from previous discussions, fostering a deeper understanding of these products. Community Champion Spotlight Series: To celebrate the contributions of our experts, we launched a monthly Community Champion Spotlight Series, highlighting the outstanding work and expertise of our top champions. This year, we enhanced the Happy Rewards program to better recognize and reward community members. Leveraging Khoros' gamification features, we introduced: Leaderboards: New weekly leaderboards highlight top contributors based on accepted solutions. Reputation Levels and Rank Icons: Updated rank titles and icons showcase member expertise. Badges: Increased thresholds for badges awarded for accepted solutions, likes, and replies. Collectively, these driving projects that were prioritized over this past year helped us to truly strengthen the customer experience on the community, which in turn, enabled us to better support and connect with our users. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on providing solutions for our customers and overall customer satisfaction, we achieved significant business outcomes that reflect our commitment to delivering helpful support and valuable information to our users. SEO Impact and Business Outcomes: Our SEO optimization has markedly increased our visibility in search engine results, which directly impacts user engagement. Over the past year, our key metrics demonstrate the following results: Increased Organic Traffic: Our threads now rank higher on Google, leading to a noticeable increase in organic traffic to our community. In August, we saw a 54% year-over-year increase in total clicks from Google Search. This growth in traffic indicates that more users are finding and accessing our solutions through search engines. Enhanced User Engagement: The higher visibility has resulted in increased interaction with our content. During our third year, the community saw a 22.36% increase in page views, a 33.71% rise in visits, a 29.94% boost in unique visitors, and a 17.65% growth in total user time, reflecting improved engagement. Improved Problem Resolution: In August 2024, we achieved a remarkable 48.6% reduction in the average time to first reply, bringing it down to just 18.7 hours compared to 36 hours in August of the previous year. This improvement in problem resolution contributes to greater customer satisfaction and reduces the need for additional support. Customer Satisfaction and Business Value: Our focus on customer satisfaction is evident in the positive feedback and increased participation within our community. Specific results include: Higher Satisfaction Scores: Customer satisfaction for our community forum jumped significantly from 84.5% in August 2023 to an outstanding 93.6% in August 2024, indicating higher satisfaction with the support and resources available, as users can more easily find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Increased Community Growth: Year-over-year growth in community membership and activity levels shows that users find our community valuable for expanding their knowledge and resolving issues. Total registered members increased by 28.6% year-over-year, rising from 283,851 at the end of August 2023 to 365,057 at the end of August 2024. Cost Efficiency: By empowering users to resolve issues independently through improved SEO and accessible information, we’ve reduced the reliance on direct support channels, leading to cost savings in support operations. In summary, our efforts to optimize SEO, expand programs, and consistently provide users with timely solutions have led to significant growth in both user engagement and community traffic. These enhancements have not only improved the efficiency of our support but also generated measurable business value through cost savings and an enhanced user experience. Our goal is to empower users to resolve issues and broaden their knowledge of Zoom’s capabilities. The Zoom Community’s wealth of shared knowledge and information helps us achieve this mission. By analyzing year-over-year key metrics, we can clearly see how our continued growth reflects the community’s success in delivering solutions that meet user needs. 2023 Zoom Community by the Numbers – YoY growth (August 2023) compared to (August 2024): Solution views increased by 50% Community visits increased by 22% Unique visitors increased by 25% Page views increased by 11% Number of clicks from the Zoom support site to the community; from Google to the community (August 2023 Google clicks: 320K, August 2024: 494K) Membership growth increased by 29% What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Addressing the increased need for self-service within our community has yielded several key progress outcomes, enhancing both customer satisfaction and support efficiency. Here are the specific results and metrics that quantify these improvements: Increased Traffic to the Community: Traffic Growth: Our SEO enhancements have led to a 53.6% increase in organic traffic to the community. This surge in visits indicates that more users are discovering and accessing our community through search engine results. Increased Resolution Rate: Solution Visibility: The rise in community traffic has corresponded with a 50% increase in solution views. This boost in visibility has directly improved our resolution rate for user issues. Increased Self-help Success Rate: Effective Self-service: The improved SEO has facilitated greater access to self-help resources. This reflects the community’s enhanced role in enabling users to resolve their issues independently as opposed to creating support tickets and calls. Increased CSAT Scores: Customer Satisfaction: As users increasingly find solutions through the community, our customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) have risen by nearly 10%, increasing from 84.5% in August 2023 to 93.6% in August 2024. This improvement is a direct result of users’ ability to quickly and efficiently address their problems. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros Communities has been pivotal in the successful launch and development of the Zoom Community, offering extensive features, customization options, and integrated tools that supported our goals. Here’s how Khoros has distinguished itself and contributed to our success: Customization Design Flexibility: Khoros provided robust customization options that allowed us to align the community platform with our brand identity. We implemented custom top navigation and dropdown menus to seamlessly integrate Zoom resources, creating a cohesive look and feel across our marketing and support sites. Recent Activity Feed: A standout feature is the custom recent activity feed, which organizes posts into categories like "Latest Posts," "Trending Posts," "Solved," and "Unanswered." This structure helps users easily find relevant content, enhancing their overall experience. Gamification Rewards and Recognition: Khoros’s gamification features have been key in driving user engagement. By implementing leaderboards and custom badges, we effectively recognize and motivate community members for their contributions and solutions. Analytics In-Depth Insights: Khoros’s analytics tools provide valuable metrics on traffic, content, and user activity. These insights enable us to track trends, gather feedback, and make informed, data-driven decisions. Our monthly Listening Reports, generated from this data, offer a comprehensive overview of community growth, top discussions, and member contributions. These reports have directly influenced new knowledge base articles, product features, and content updates. Custom Components Cost-Effective Advertising: Khoros’s custom components allow us to promote events, product launches, and important announcements through ads and banners. This feature has been especially useful for communicating updates during service-impacting events in a cost-efficient manner. Integrations Khoros Care: A major benefit of Khoros is its Khoros Care feature, which helps us manage and prioritize the high volume of community posts, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly to boost user satisfaction. Qualtrics: By integrating Qualtrics for customer surveys directly within our community, we’ve streamlined the process of gathering valuable user feedback. Tableau: The availability of the Tableau API has been essential in analyzing user behavior and engagement, providing deeper insights into community interaction. Khoros Communities has given us the tools and flexibility to build a dynamic, engaging platform. From customization and gamification to powerful analytics and seamless integrations, these features have been instrumental in helping us meet our goals and deliver ongoing value to our users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Working with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing our needs and challenges, thanks to several key aspects of our experience: Relationship with the Professional Services Team: JWT Login Flow: By working with Khoros’s professional services team, we successfully implemented a JWT login flow, enabling better customer identification and more personalized services. This enhancement also supports the setup of special-access forums, providing a tailored experience based on account types. Ease of Integrations: Seamless Platform Integration: One of Khoros’s key strengths is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other platforms. This has allowed us to connect the community with various tools, improving how we manage user interactions and support. Integrations with platforms like Qualtrics for surveys and Tableau for data analysis have been especially valuable in optimizing operations and gathering actionable insights. These elements of our experience with Khoros have been instrumental in providing targeted support, enhancing user engagement, and streamlining our community management processes.PowerSchool
Author Details: Name: Jamie Harmon Title: Supervisory, Community Company: PowerSchool Tell us about you, your company, and your team? PowerSchool is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, connecting teachers, administrators, and families through unified technology to enhance the learning experience. Over the past few years, PowerSchool has expanded with the addition of several new products, and the PowerSchool Community Team has remained focused on providing a consistent and exemplary support experience to our growing customer base. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The PowerSchool Community Team plays a vital role in supporting PowerSchool's mission to enhance the educational experience for K-12 institutions. The team is dedicated to creating an integrated support experience that meets the diverse needs of all customers across PowerSchool’s expanding product portfolio. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We implemented the PowerSchool Community for all PowerSchool customers, including school administrators, office staff, educators, families, and school job applicants. Our primary goal was to provide a seamless, consistent community and support experience across all products in the PowerSchool portfolio. Over our history, PowerSchool has grown to provide additional products, each with their own support documentation and processes. The growth has made PowerSchool a leading provider of cloud-based K-12 education software allowing us to offer a customized, integrated experience to all customers. At the same time, this has posed a unique challenge when presenting a unified support experience. Customers with multiple PowerSchool products had to manage many logins across multiple support platforms. By consolidating SSO for some products and bringing more resources into the community, we’ve created a collaborative space where customers can easily find answers, engage with peers, access support, and provide feedback. We’ve also tailored the support experience for each product to address the unique needs of our customers. The PowerSchool Community has evolved into a comprehensive support experience that is deeply integrated into products across the PowerSchool portfolio. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Our biggest innovation this year was the integration of self-service AI Chat within the PowerSchool Community, offering immediate assistance to customers and significantly reducing support case volume. Simple how-to questions make up a large portion of PowerSchool support queries. While our support team can resolve these requests efficiently, it still takes time for clients to open cases, wait for a response, and confirm a resolution is functional. Now, with self-service AI Chat, clients are able to report an issue and receive actionable guidance right away, without opening a traditional support case. This has brought us even closer to the lightning-fast one-touch support experience we have been striving for. For more complex inquiries, the chat interface seamlessly escalates to a live agent with a full transcript of their previous conversation. This streamlined process has made for a more complete self-service experience, surprising and delighting customers with cutting-edge, highly efficient support. Meanwhile, the increased deflection rate has eased the workload of our superb support team, allowing them additional time to focus on the complex issues that need their direct attention. We rolled out our AI Chat experience with a soft launch in July, followed by a full launch across four products in August. Going forward, we are integrating AI Chat into high-priority products at a regular cadence. Our centralization of all PowerSchool support resources in the PowerSchool Community has ensured that all clients will have easy, consistent access to up-to-date resources and, eventually, AI Chat. Collaboration between our Product, Support, Marketing, and Customer Success teams was key to fine-tuning the AI tool and optimizing the escalation workflow. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By integrating self-service AI Chat directly into product pages and centralizing all PowerSchool support resources in the PowerSchool Community, we achieved several significant business outcomes that highlight the value of this solution: Increased Efficiency and Cost Savings: Since the full AI Chat launch on August 5th, 2024, 54% of 1,289 chats have been successfully resolved through the AI chat experience with only 46% needing transfer to a Support engineer. This reduction has reduced the need for support agent intervention, resulting in both decreased operational costs and increased bandwidth for support agents. Community Growth: We added over 200,000 new members to our community in the past year, reflecting our successful centralization efforts. In particular, single sign-on improvements have been effective, streamlining access for all customers. Higher Engagement: We experienced over 20% growth in member logins, an 80% increase in unique visitors, and more than a 60% rise in total visits compared to the previous year. Additionally, page views increased by 51%, indicating greater engagement with community content. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The integration of AI Chat and other improvements to our community have led to measurable progress outcomes: Added over 200,000 new members to the PowerSchool Community in the past year, driven by our focus on resource centralization and single sign-on from product to community. Achieved over 20% growth in member logins, 80% growth in unique visitors, and more than a 60% increase in visits compared to last year. We saw a 51% increase in page views this year. Achieved our CSAT goal of 95%. Since the AI chat launch on August 5, 2024, 54% of 1,289 chats have been successfully resolved through the AI chat experience. Community members have helped resolve nearly 50% of customer forum posts. PowerSchool Mentors, our community super users, have responded to over 1,200 forum posts this year and participated in 65 beta tests. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros Communities platform was essential in the launch of our new AI Chat tool, PowerSchool Assistant. We needed a platform that was not only powerful enough to host a high volume of support resources, but also flexible enough to integrate with additional services offered by other vendors. Khoros Communities has been extraordinarily successful on both accounts. At present, the PowerSchool Community contains over 20,000 knowledge base articles across nearly 50 products in the PowerSchool portfolio. We’ve embedded AI Chat directly into product category pages within the community, creating a seamless experience that integrates AI with our extensive knowledge bases, allowing customers to access support without leaving the current page. This experience consistently surpasses customers’ expectations by presenting relevant answers to pressing concerns, empowering all PowerSchool users whether they are seasoned technical contacts, total newcomers, or anywhere in between. Additionally, the analytics tools built into Khoros Communities have enabled us to track user engagement and make data-driven decisions while iterating and improving on our AI Chat experience. At this point, Khoros is deeply integrated into our customer experience framework, allowing us to meet aggressive goals by creating cohesive, efficient, and user-friendly solutions. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? While we didn't work directly with Khoros on the AI chat implementation, the platform's flexibility and robust feature set played a crucial role in addressing our needs. Khoros enabled us to seamlessly integrate the AI chat into our existing community, ensuring it fit within the user experience we had already established. This has allowed us to roll out a transformative new user experience for all members of the PowerSchool Community without disrupting any existing customer workflows. This consistent, continued functionality is essential given PowerSchool’s mission of supporting personalized education for students around the world. Khoros Communities’ powerful knowledge base functionality allowed the AI to pull accurate, up-to-date answers from community resources, improving case deflection and enhancing self-service success. Additionally, Khoros’ analytics tools provided valuable insights into customer interactions, helping us track engagement, identify trends, and refine the AI experience to better meet user needs. This adaptability and ease of use were essential in successfully addressing our challenges and delivering an improved, efficient customer support experience.Fortinet
Author Details: Name: Kate McMillan Title: Service Technology Manager Company: Fortinet Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I’m part of the Community team for Fortinet. Founded more than 20 years ago in Sunnyvale, California, Fortinet continues to be a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our portfolio of over 50 enterprise-grade products is the largest integrated offering available, delivering proven cybersecurity everywhere you need it. More than 755,000 customers trust Fortinet solutions, which are among the most deployed, most patented, and most validated in the industry. Our team works as part of the support side of the business, building the Fortinet Community which provides a single source of support knowledge and community for our customers and our worldwide partner network. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Fortinet’s mission is ‘Securing people, devices, and data everywhere’. Our aim is to provide customers with the information they need at the time they need it, facilitating quick solutions with minimal customer effort. We build community-based solutions which put the customer first, connecting our users with the most relevant content from our wide network of product experts, allowing them to keep their people, devices and data secure. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We created the Fortinet Community in 2021, bringing together multiple disparate systems to provide our customers with a single place to find answers, collaborate and share ideas. Since that time, we have grown to a community of 125,000 registered members globally with 41 million page views per year and 6.5 million unique visitors. We put the community in place for various groups across the Fortinet ecosystem: our customers, support teams, partners and distributors, sales and sales engineers make use of the Community on a daily basis. The Community was intended to solve the challenge of providing information and answers to Fortinet’s extensive customer base on the range of 50+ leading security products we provide. As the largest installed base of network firewalls in the industry, we are serving a vast audience. We also needed to scale this wealth of expert knowledge so that it could be made available to as many people as possible, 24/7. We wanted to enable our teams who interact with our customers in chat to have a seamless and consistent experience. We also wanted this experience to take advantage of our existing knowledge base to reduce time to resolution and set the stage for more advanced interactions with Generative AI capabilities. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Major Win: Community Powered Knowledge Since the launch of Community in 2021, we have seen three years of growth in terms of the content provided, membership numbers and engagement with the Community platform. One of our goals of the program is the promotion of centralized and reusable knowledge within our support ecosystem. With over 50 products in the security arena, Fortinet is constantly evolving, and we want to make sure the wealth of knowledge and technical expertise within our organization is available for customers to find when they need help. The Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program at Fortinet aims to do just that; we operate on the KCS principle that “all of us are smarter than one of us” and we work to capture that knowledge so that it can be reused to help our customers again and again. We work hand in hand with colleagues globally including TAC Support teams, Advanced Support, Sales Engineers and Specialists to capture knowledge and craft it into knowledge articles, which live on the Community. These are constantly evolving as our engineers update these articles to ensure they remain relevant and up to date. By leveraging a federated search engine (SearchUnify) alongside Khoros we can combine all our support data in Community – including additional content sources such as our documentation, websites, video content, and leading FortiGuard library so that customers find an answer from one unified UI. The KCS education program is strongly interlinked with the Community platform as well. With regular newsletters, training sessions and constant feedback loops we are working to build and extend this knowledge sharing culture. The win for Fortinet here is the ability to develop content at scale and Khoros helps us do this with a unified publishing engine. Our customers and partners have also been empowered with the ability to suggest article edits and submit new article ideas so we can work with our community to develop content based on their input. The change in perspective for our engineering teams has been massive as we shift the mindset towards capturing knowledge and creating articles. We work closely with this audience, running frequent communications, feedback sessions and providing incentives to show appreciation for strong contributions. Monthly newsletters call out our top contributors to both the Knowledge Baseand Forum, with rewards and recognition for those who are going above and beyond to help us grow Community. When we see team members embracing the KCS principles, their teammates can nominate them to receive a ‘KCS Champion’ award, to highlight their contributions and continue to build awareness of their achievements and the program. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We have been seeing a steady upward trend in the quantity of high-quality articles being produced to create knowledge on the community platform. We have seen a 179% YoY increase in the number of Knowledge Articles created by our internal experts. We are also seeing a huge increase in the number of Knowledge Articles being updated on the Community. This is valuable because it keeps our body of knowledge up to date, therefore both our engineer and customer audiences have a reliable, well-maintained library of information to access when they need to find an answer. Updates to Knowledge Base articles have increased 211% YoY. In addition, we have been able to scale support at operationally efficient levels while the business expands year over year. The number of members registering with the site is up 357% YoY, and member entrances have increased by 310% YoY. We also see increased participation across our global network in the support organization with teams from all regions contributing to our hub of Fortinet knowledge on the Khoros platform. Another positive outcome is the rate at which our Knowledge Articles are attached to support cases. Attaching an article to a support case – i.e., signaling that the article was used to help the case - helps us track how frequently articles are being used to solve our customer issues, and measure knowledge reuse across the support organization. Our attach rate has increased by 155% since we have started monitoring this KPI. We have built a network of KCS ‘coaches’ globally, who work within our support teams, promoting the benefits of creating reusable knowledge and guiding our teams as we continue to navigate the huge shift towards these principles. As with any successful KCS Program, strong buy in and support from senior leadership has also played a huge part in the success of the program: “A solid knowledge platform is a critical step to being able to satisfy customers' ever growing need to help themselves to solve problems quickly and efficiently; answering once and offsetting those same questions that come from all corners of our global customer base. Fortinet Community has absolutely excelled in standing up as a go-to resource in which we at Fortinet and customers alike can trust, knowing that if there are answers they can be found quickly. This is a key enabler to allowing us more time for thorough research and resolution of the tougher cases, so hats off and big thanks to the Community team in providing the launchpad for the next step in the journey - knowledge-centered customer support.” - Dave Monery, Global VP Support A further business outcome we have seen is improvement in the customer experience on Community. Through the Khoros Value Analytics survey, we can maintain a constant feedback loop with customers, providing an opportunity to hear about their experiences: “Awesome articles that help new community members. As a new member, it can be very confusing to navigate the world of Fortinet so these support articles can be helpful.” “The Forum has a certain quality of loyalty and 'family vibe' while being professional at the same time which I've never encountered elsewhere.” Catering to a huge range of customers with vastly varying backgrounds and technical expertise means we are constantly striving for a balance between supporting our customers who are getting started with Fortinet and those who have many years of experience with our product set. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased self-service success rate Our self-service success rate (i.e. the number of customers who can find what they are looking for when they come to the Community) has improved since the introduction of the KCS Program and our investment in the Community. The Self-Service Success reported by our customers has increased steadily from an average of 62% in H1 2023 to 71% in H1 2024. We are on track for 77% for Q3 2024. We continue to implement further measures to make content as easy to find as possible, including eliminating duplicate content and analyzing search data to improve findability. We also measure CSAT on Community, and we have seen a steady increase here as well. Hand in hand with seeing more self-service, we see fewer tickets per customer. Despite rapid growth in the business, our ticket volumes are stable, representing a reduced support cost and ability to deliver a support experience that consistently delivers high Customer Satisfaction scores. Khoros Chat implementation The success of Community has led us to implement Khoros Chat, to extend the reuse of knowledge and create a seamless experience for customers, where agent knowledge and community content can dovetail to build positive outcomes. This allows us to bring automation to our customers as they seek support; the interlinking of Chat with our Community is a perfect opportunity to suggest Community content, such as Knowledge articles and relevant forum threads. Increased collaboration across teams within Fortinet We work closely with colleagues in the Documentation department, and cross-promote content between the ‘Doc site’ (docs.fortinet.com) and Community. Although these are different categories of information, there are clear links between the two. We have identified useful articles relevant to documents and useful documents relevant to articles. Creating cross-links between these two information sources enables us to further improve the experience for our customers and get them the information they need as quickly as possible. The Marketing team also work closely with the Community team; from SEO and optimizing our content for findability, to ‘getting started’ initiatives aimed at creating a smooth journey for customers who are just beginning their Fortinet experience. We also collaborate with teams across the business to build dedicated ‘Group Pages’ on Community where there is a special interest or business need. These groups bring people together to solve problems and share knowledge in specific areas, such as Professional Services and Advanced Support. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The platform’s ability to create custom workflows We have been able to create workflows which fit our needs around submitting articles, review steps and publishing due to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. We can easily manage roles and permissions to allow processes to work efficiently for each user type. This has been important as our needs are constantly evolving through our adoption of KCS methods. Khoros APIs for custom reporting and analytics By integrating our Tableau reporting tools via Khoros APIs we have combined critical Community and Knowledge metrics with our people and case related data to create insightful and actionable views of our activities. This visibility allows us to track our performance across all teams and regions and helps us measure the impact of the Community and our Self-Service initiatives. Ability to scale and platform stability We have seen massive amounts of growth in the Fortinet community over the last three years. The Khoros Community platform has been able to handle more than 20M visits per year with minimal services interruptions. Since our knowledge base is housed on the Fortinet community, these attributes are critical to our success in delivering support every day to our customers. Seamless integration with Khoros Chat Rolling out Khoros Chat to work alongside Community enhances our ability to provide world class support at enterprise level. Our agents have a complete view of the wealth of information available to them in Community, combined with a feature rich chat platform, allowing us to best serve our customer base, solve issues and feed back into the knowledge loop we are forming. Ability to merge other Communities post-acquisition Khoros has enabled us to merge other communities with the Fortinet Community as Fortinet continues to grow as a business. As we acquire other organizations, we can integrate their content with our own, building customized Group pages and functionality where required, to extend their own customer experience and facilitate a smooth transition thanks to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have worked with Khoros to build a strong community, increase our membership numbers and create a single source of troubleshooting knowledge for our customers to learn, share and collaborate on. By expanding our Khoros product set to include live chat, we have brought further support options to our customer base, to get them the help they need as quickly as possible. The Khoros CSM team have helped us work towards our knowledge reuse goals, and the flexibility of Khoros credits has allowed us to complete additional projects including a Data Deep Dive to better understand our audience and how they are using community. The ability of the Khoros platform to scale with us as we grow to millions of page views and high volumes of content has been instrumental to our success with the KCS program so far. KCS and the reuse of knowledge from our collective experience will continue to be front and center of our community strategy moving forwards. This will feed into maintaining our KPIs, engaging with our users and promoting the value of Community. Most importantly, our knowledge base is serving as the foundation for multiple upcoming Generative AI offerings for our customers and our teams. We will continue to: Strive to provide the best possible experience for our customers on community and ensure they can find what they are looking for. Work with our support teams to provide high quality, relevant content to help them solve issues quickly. Collaborate with different areas of the Business internally to innovate and create new Community experiences. Recognize and reward our super user community who go above and beyond to support our peers. Ensure everyone can be a part of engaging with community and feel the benefits. In 2025 we will continue to develop our community offering with further custom group pages, expansion of our super user offering, and further promotion of the amazing things achieved by the Community team. Generative AI will play a major role for Fortinet and Khoros as we look to take advantage of some of the new capabilities of the platform including Agent Assist AI and our own Gen AI technologies working together to provide an even more seamless agent and customer experience.Qlik
Author Details: Name: Suzanne Macaluso Title: Senior Advisor, Digital Platforms Company: Qlik Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Qlik® helps you use your data to solve problems, meet new objectives, and address critical business needs. My team is responsible for our Community, both front and and back end. We oversee every aspect of the platform and the overall Community program. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our role is pivotal in supporting the overall Community program, strategy, and governance, aligning with the company's strategic objectives from the front end to the back end. This alignment is crucial as it ensures our Community is a healthy, positive environment where our members can feel comfortable collaborating and brainstorming. We work across the entire organization, ensuring we are helping the business meet its needs. We are the heartbeat of Qlik. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our Community platform was initially conceived with a clear goal in mind: create a space where our customers, partners, students, and prospects could come to ask questions, find answers, and share knowledge anytime, from anywhere. This inclusive platform, open to all, also aimed to ensure our employees were actively involved, demonstrating our commitment, transparency, and the value we place on our members. It's the only platform where our members can reach us 24x7x365. Our use case started with an initiative to support users in a one-to-many service model. The Community was instrumental in allowing our members to ask questions and facilitate answers through their peers. This enabled users to solve problems before opening a support ticket and served to educate and unite members using our solutions. We knew it could be so much more! The Community soon played a crucial role in promoting Qlik events, helping Marketing teams increase event attendance. Product managers came to us looking for a collaborative space to blog about upcoming software releases and technical information and to share information about new features and functionality. They soon realized they could help answer questions and learn from our customers and partners. Customer Success teams wanted to know if their customers were in the Community and were asking us to give demonstrations on all the aspects available in the Community to get their customers more engaged. Our Community soon became the heartbeat of Qlik, where anyone can come and collaborate on all things Qlik. They could even share the Apps they built. This year, we also learned that because of the platform's flexibility and our structure with stakeholders, it doesn’t matter where the team managing the Community lives within an organization. Our team recently moved from Marketing to IT, and the platform demonstrated how easily adaptable it was. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. One of our challenges was a significant increase in spam infiltrating our Community. Our goal was to prevent our members from encountering spam and having to report it. We worked closely with the Khoros team, who played a crucial role in enhancing the spam filter and educating us about the platform's capabilities, of which we were unaware. This collaboration with the Khoros moderation team and our TAM was instrumental in effectively mitigating the spam issue. Knowledge Sharing: Providing a platform for users to find answers and share experiences, which reduced the need for direct support. Engagement: Our Community encourages internal and external members to participate, fostering a strong sense of belonging and transparency. This inclusivity ensures everyone feels informed and part of the larger Qlik Solutions family. Event Participation: Increasing attendance at Qlik events through targeted promotion within the Community. Customer Feedback: Facilitating direct communication between Product Managers and users, allowing for real-time feedback and insights. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased Engagement: 26% year-over-year growth in community engagement. Cost Savings: 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection. Membership Growth: A 32% increase in new members, indicating successful outreach and onboarding strategies. Qlik Events: 4.5% increase in event registrations. Blog Views: 66K average monthly blog views. Spam mitigation: Significant improvement following adjustments made to the platform. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Addressing the challenges above led to several positive outcomes, reinforcing our confidence in the Khoros Communities solution and its ability to deliver on our goals. Increased Engagement 26% Year-over-Year Growth: This consistent growth in engagement indicates that users find value in the community, leading to more interactions and discussions. Membership Growth 32% Increase in New Members: The community's openness and active promotion attracted more users, expanding the base of participants who can contribute and benefit from shared knowledge. Reduced Support Tickets Proactive Problem Solving: The community reduced the volume of direct support inquiries by enabling users to find answers through peer support, freeing up resources for more complex issues. 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection. Enhanced Event Attendance 4.5% Increase in Registrations: Promoting Qlik events through the community significantly boosted participation, leading to more successful events and greater visibility for Qlik solutions. Improved Customer Insights Feedback Loop with Product Management: The collaborative space allowed product managers to receive real-time user feedback and insights, leading to better-informed product development and feature enhancements. Stronger Customer Relationships Increased Customer Engagement: Customer Success teams demonstrated Community benefits to clients, fostering stronger relationships and increasing customer satisfaction. Employee Involvement Engaged Workforce: Employee participation in the Community enhanced transparency and showed commitment to user success, building trust and a sense of community. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros platform played a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals through several differentiating features and capabilities: User-Friendly Interface The intuitive design made it easy for users to navigate and engage with content, encouraging participation and reducing barriers to entry. Robust Knowledge Management Khoros provided tools for organizing and categorizing content, making it easy for users to find relevant information and solutions quickly. Engagement Tools Features like gamification, badges, and leaderboards motivated users to participate actively and contribute to discussions, fostering a sense of community. Integration Capabilities Seamless integration of other platforms allowed for a unified experience, facilitating user engagement across different touchpoints. Analytics and Insights Built-in analytics provided valuable data on user engagement, content performance, and community health, enabling us to adapt strategies based on real-time feedback. Gamification By utilizing the “Top Kudoed Posts” component time range under “My Profile” -> “Preferences” -> “Kudos,” we created a dynamic user interface on the Community homepage. The dynamic leaderboard component lets users effortlessly view the top engaged users within their selected time frame, motivating them to strive for peak performance across various ranges. Enabling Factors Strong Community Management Dedicated community moderators ensured that discussions were moderated, questions were answered, and content was continually refreshed and promoted. Cross-Departmental Collaboration Involvement from Marketing, Product Management, R&D, Support, and Customer Success teams ensured that community initiatives aligned with broader company goals. Feedback Loops Regularly soliciting user feedback helped refine community strategies and features, ensuring the platform evolved to meet the needs of our members. Promotional Campaigns Targeted campaigns to promote Community participation and upcoming events helped drive traffic and engagement within the platform. The combination of Khoros platform-tailored features and our team's strategic efforts created an ecosystem that supported knowledge sharing and user engagement. By leveraging these strengths, we continue to improve our already thriving Community, which enhanced our members' overall experience and reinforced their loyalty to Qlik Solutions. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our experience with Khoros has given us a strong understanding of irrelevant content in our community. Collaborating with our Khoros moderation team and our TAM has been crucial in addressing our needs and challenges. They offered proactive guidance and advice, helping us navigate decisions and implement changes on the platform. Through discussions about their experiences with other communities, we gained valuable insights and best practices for managing spam and understanding its impact on moderation time. The reports provided by our Khoros team and TAM painted a clear picture that allowed us to refine our engagement model effectively. Our familiarity with Khoros’ tools for tracking engagement trends and customizing content has empowered us to tackle this challenge, keeping our users motivated and connected.Schneider Electric
Author Details: Name: Zineb EZ-ZERROUQI Title: Global Customer Engagement Leader, Online Communities Company: Schneider Electric Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Schneider’s purpose is to create Impact by empowering all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability. At Schneider, we call this Life Is On. Our mission is to be the trusted partner in Sustainability and Efficiency. We are a global industrial technology leader bringing world-leading expertise in electrification, automation and digitization to smart industries, resilient infrastructure, future-proof data centers, intelligent buildings, and intuitive homes. Anchored by our deep domain expertise, we provide integrated end-to-end lifecycle AI enabled Industrial IoT solutions with connected products, automation, software, and services, delivering digital twins to enable profitable growth for our customers. We are a people company with an ecosystem of 168,000 colleagues and more than a million partners operating in over 100 countries to ensure proximity to our customers and stakeholders. We embrace diversity and inclusion in everything we do, guided by our meaningful purpose of a sustainable future for all. Our community team is dedicated to enhancing and maintaining our community platform, ensuring it remains a vibrant and engaging space for all users. Comprising eight talented individuals, we focus on technical development, customer engagement, and performance monitoring. Our mission is to create a seamless and enriching experience for our community members. We strive to continuously improve the platform’s features, foster meaningful interactions, and ensure optimal performance. Our team consists of the following roles, with each leader supported by additional team members: Community Platform Owner is a key role responsible for the overall success and strategic direction of the community platform. This individual ensures that the platform meets the needs of its users and aligns with the organization’s goals. Technical/Product Leader who oversees the development and implementation of new features. Customer Engagement Leader who manages and organizes content for the platform and drives user engagement and community activities. Adoption Leader who ensures that new technologies and processes are effectively integrated and utilized within the community platform and is responsible for improving the visibility and ranking of the community platform in search engine results. Performance Analyst who monitors and analyzes platform performance to ensure a smooth user experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our Community team consists of 8 individuals with complementary skills and expertise, working collaboratively towards a common goal or objective. The team members have defined roles and responsibilities, meet regularly to discuss progress and challenges, and leverage each other's strengths to deliver high-quality work. The team environment fosters open communication, mutual support, and a shared sense of accountability for the team's outcomes to drive the success of our community. Great people make Schneider Electric a great company. Our ultimate ambition is to deliver higher performance and greater employee engagement, through world-class people practices that are supported by a multi-hub model. Schneider Electric is a people-centric company where employees come to work for a meaningful purpose and are empowered to deliver impact in an inclusive environment. The Schneider Electric Community offers several benefits that can significantly help our company Schneider Electric in various ways: Knowledge Sharing and Problem Solving: The community provides a platform for users to discuss and solve problems related to energy management and automation. This collaborative environment helps in quickly addressing technical issues and sharing best practices. User Engagement and Feedback: By engaging with users directly, Schneider Electric can gather valuable feedback on their products and services. This feedback can be used to improve existing offerings and develop new solutions that better meet customer needs. Training and Development: The community offers access to customized training. This helps users upgrade their skills and knowledge, ensuring they can effectively use Schneider Electric’s products and solutions. Innovation and Co-Creation: The community fosters innovation by allowing users to co-innovate and collaborate with a global network of peers. This can lead to the development of new ideas and solutions that benefit both Schneider Electric and its customers. Increased Visibility and Brand Loyalty: Active participation in the community can increase Schneider Electric’s visibility and strengthen brand loyalty. Engaging with users and providing valuable resources can build a strong, loyal customer base. By leveraging the Schneider Electric Community, our company can enhance customer satisfaction, drive innovation, and maintain a competitive edge in the market. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers who have EcoStruxure IT data center software: Schneider Electric internal users Users who need help installing, setting up, and configuring their software go to the EcoStruxure IT Help Center to search the documentation for guidance. Users who encounter issues that are not addressed in the documentation go to the community to search for posts about their situation or create a new post to ask the other users for assistance. EcoStruxure IT technical communicators Technical writers create online help articles for end users and gain insights on effectiveness from platform analytics to share with product owners. The help center gathers documentation for the entire data center infrastructure management (DCIM) software suite. Paired with the community forum, everything the customer or end user needs is in one place. The challenge: Software documentation is scattered across product pages and is created in different formats: online articles, PDF format, and in some cases is embedded in the product. The help center presents all the products in the DCIM offer in one place where users can search for content or links to resources. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Three new teams have asked to join and host their content on the help center. These teams use older and more traditional methods of creating content, creating books or manuals, and having technical support create FAQs published on a different site. They’ve seen the flexibility and the benefits of managing their documentation directly in the help center and reaching customers where they are – in the community. The platform integrates with mySchneider. Within our team, this has saved us 20 hours per week, which gives us additional time to author new content. We have one person dedicated to the Help Center, one writer focused on a specific product, and another team adopting it. The time savings are immediate in authoring, editing, and publishing, allowing us to provide new information to customers in real time. Increased usage has led to the need for more staff, which is a positive development! While it’s a bit of an exaggeration to say the staff has quadrupled, we have certainly grown. Additionally, there are significant time savings in the documentation delivery process. The authoring interface is user-friendly, with draft management capabilities well-integrated across the platform. Challenging the status quo, “the way we’ve always done it” and encouraging colleagues who have never explored a new way of working in documentation was difficult. It took the better part of a year to convince one team to try a proof of concept. SmartConnect content has moved from hosting CHM-like help pages on their product portal to the help center. The install base is large, and user engagement in that category immediately increased significantly. The PCNS team is in the process of migrating the FAQs created by support to the help center instead of using their CRM tool. They will now create and maintain content in the help center Software services team has asked to create and maintain user-facing content on the help center instead of local PDFs. A technical expert was assigned to regularly monitor the posts in the community. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Excellent customer engagements stats from the analytics: EcoStruxure IT Help Center home page Visits: 64,317 (2024) vs 15,722 (2023): +309% YoY Unique Visitors: 37,371(2024) vs 10,572 (2023): +253% YoY Page Views: 80,079 (2024) vs 20,920 (2023): +283% YoY EcoStruxure IT Help Center Categories Visits: 380 117 (2024) vs 1283 (2023): +29,527% YoY Unique Visitors: 295 006 (2024) vs 840 (2023): +35,000% YoY Page Views: 604 977 (2024) vs 2318 (2023): +26,000% YoY What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As highlighted in the analytics shared earlier, we’ve seen a significant increase in several key metrics: Page Views: There has been a substantial rise in the number of page views, indicating that more users are engaging with our content. Visitors and Unique Visitors: The number of visitors and unique visitors has also grown considerably, reflecting a broader reach and increased interest in our Help Center. Community Engagement: Achieving 0 unanswered questions is a fantastic milestone for our community. This accomplishment demonstrates our commitment to providing timely and effective support. Solution Views and Accepted Solutions: There has been a notable increase in both solution views and accepted solutions. This indicates that users are not only finding the answers they need but are also validating the quality and usefulness of the solutions provided. These metrics underscore the positive impact of our efforts to enhance the Help Center and foster a supportive community environment. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros AI solution distinguished itself in several keyways that significantly contributed to our ability to achieve our goals for the year: Automated Moderation: Khoros AI’s automated moderation tools helped maintain a positive community environment by efficiently filtering out inappropriate content and flagging potential issues, saving valuable time and resources. Personalized User Experience: By analyzing user behavior and preferences, Khoros AI enabled us to deliver personalized content and recommendations, which enhanced user satisfaction and engagement. Scalability: The solution’s scalability ensured that we could maintain high levels of service and engagement as our community grew, without compromising on quality. Integration Capabilities: Seamless integration with our existing tools and platforms allowed for a unified approach to community management and data analysis. Support and Training: Access to comprehensive support and training resources ensured that our team could fully leverage the AI capabilities, maximizing the solution’s impact. Other factors that contributed to our success included strong internal collaboration, clear goal-setting, and continuous feedback loops to refine our strategies based on real-time data and insights. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Working with Khoros provided several key advantages that enabled us to address the need/challenge effectively: Comprehensive Analytics: Khoros’ great analytics tools allowed us to gain deep insights into community engagement and user behavior, helping to identify areas needing improvement. Efficient Moderation: The platform’s advanced moderation features streamlined the process of managing community interactions, ensuring a positive and safe environment for all users. Customizable Solutions: Khoros offered some flexible and customizable solutions that could be tailored to meet specific community needs, making it easier to implement targeted strategies. Support and Training: Access to Khoros’ support and training resources ensured that our team was well-equipped to utilize the platform’s features to their fullest potential.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.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.USPS
Author Details: Name: Mary Beth Levin Title: Manager, Social Media Strategy and Analytics Company: USPS Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I have two teams under my tent: social intelligence and publishing. The publishing team manages content on our 18 accounts on six different platforms. It also manages the ZONE, the first (and so far only) social media ambassador program in the federal government. The social intelligence team takes a 360-degree look at what is being said about us on social and traditional media. Its purpose is brand protection, crisis mitigation, and a better customer experience. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our goal is to do good and do better. Unlike many other programs which are based in marketing, we are fortunate to be based in communications in a center of excellence model. This means we are a servant with many masters: HQ communications, field communications, operations, HR, government relations, licensing, marketing and even the Postal Inspection Service. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We wanted to map-out feedback coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We also needed to protect customer privacy. When looking at concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites, we noted specific “customer service hotspots”. We also noted that the types of concerns varied by location. At its very heart, USPS is about logistics. We swim in data. At times we drown in data. With social media, this is yet another set of information competing for people’s time and attention. We needed to provide information in a way that was accessible and compelling to people who are already super busy. Our objective was to make things better for everyone: customers and employees. And we needed to recognize that not everyone loves pie charts and bar graphs. Social listening software has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on). This is why social listening software will map-out to cities and states and can do so for a limited percentage of social media mentions (about one-third for those platforms which allow access). Listening software will pull in product reviews, but not location reviews. And there is the issue of integrating data from various sources. USPS uses POS surveys, but these have limitations: they only capture the retail experience, tend to focus on extreme experiences, can’t include photos/videos, and results are rarely shared outside of a select group. The teams we involved included communications, social intelligence, social customer response, marketing, operations and government relations. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We think of social media as the world’s largest focus group. In social listening the customer is driving the agenda of the conversation, telling us what is most important. We developed an interactive heatmap to illustrate concerns coming to us on social media to the 5-digit zip code level, map-out a variety of specific concerns, and provide real-time as well as longitudinal data. We integrated data from 34 online review sites and our social customer response software (customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media accounts on FB and X). We incorporated our internal tracking software to show not only the destination address, but where it was last scanned (because issues can occur further upstream). In doing so, we provided a one-stop shopping experience for those wanting to know what was going on nationally and in their neighborhood. Users can select one or more postal areas, districts, zip codes, or subjects (tags). The data goes back to January, 2016 and is updated daily. Because what we were doing was so new, we had to go through an 18-month clearance process to ensure data was secure and the information users were viewing had been scrubbed of personally identifying information. We knew we were competing for time and attention. And we are cognizant of the fact that our audience is not comprised of data scientists who love excel spreadsheets. We intentionally used a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. People can see a heatmap and recognize that they don’t want the area they work in to show as red! They relate to top ten lists and the personal element of customer quotes, images, and videos the dashboard can show. And seeing how they are doing relative to others and shake them out of complacency with a healthy sense of competition. Working with the unions, we selected local leaders who would give a short presentation featuring the data of that specific location. This was then tied-in to a larger conversation about social media and its role in greater accountability. The feedback received was “I’ve been working here 20 years and no one has ever explained it to me that way. This makes sense.” Employees recognized that unlike other forms of feedback, this information is publicly posted. We promised the unions that the information would never be used punitively. These first conversations discussed customer concerns coming to us on our corporate social media sites. In response to feedback, we included online review sites. This information was emailed on a weekly basis. Information about the heatmap was provided in numerous formal presentations to leadership. Anyone with a USPS email address can access the heatmap. For those using the heatmap, there are weekly office hours, an ops manual, and individual tutorials. Online reviews are shared weekly to those on the ground. Area newsletters share the info monthly. District newsletters highlight results in their localities. There have been close to 100 articles for internal audiences. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Results include the following: Sharing the info in short meetings lead to a 54% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And 18% decrease in ECC (calls to the 800-number) Specifically: 31% decrease in WIMP (Where Is My Package) 51% decrease in certified exception 85% decrease in WMM (Where Is My Mail) These changes were stat sig. Sharing the review info via weekly emails led to a 35% decrease in customer concerns coming to us on social media. And a 17% increase in online review scores. Since USPS spends $58 per ECC and $4 per SCR case, the savings can be significant. We have applied for a patent. Completed the one-year preliminary application and filed the final application. The heatmap received external validation: Featured case study by the Social Intelligence Lab Presented at the SocialMedia.Org Board Meeting Presented at the Ragan and PR Daily Social Media Conference 2024 PR News 2024 Digital Awards winner for two categories: Social Listening and Employee Engagement The Postal Regulatory Commission “applauded the Postal Service for using social listening to determine what people are saying about its brand and services on social media. The social media heat map is an effective tool for visualizing customer comments and categorizing them by concern and geographic area.” It is not often that we receive praise from this entity. Link to report by the Postal Regulatory Commission where USPS was recognized. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We found additional nontraditional use cases: The Office of the Inspector General asked: are there passport concerns worth investigating? (Spoiler: no.) Saved a lot of blood, sweat, and tears since such investigations usually take more than a year. Government Relations – are concerns coming to congressional offices anecdotal or indicative? The heatmap has been used to investigate the location and show that the customer’s concerns were not the norm. We have now divided the heatmap into congressional districts. Proof of concept that employee engagement scores (high and low) correlate with better customer service and savings. Test effectiveness of interventions such as a manga promoting customer service approaches. A/B testing for new tracking software. No increase in tracking complaints observed, leading to expanded rollout. During natural disasters, we use it to identify local concerns (change of address, closure, theft) to inform operations and social media posts. Anticipating PR concerns: e.g. the trend line was going up in Puerto Rico because limited storage led to packages being stored outside. And then it rained. We were able to find additional storage and have a ready answer for the press (who did reach out to us). Located customer service hotspots for Operation Santa for targeted training. This program provides presents to 25K children every year. We don’t want anything to go wrong here. Determined locations for rollout of products and services such as Informed Delivery (now at 64.9M participants). Gemba (site) visits: researching before arriving and giving credit when it’s due. “Hey Erica, I saw that you got a shout-out on social media. Keep up the great work!” Personally, it is extremely gratifying to get an email from someone on the other side of the country saying, “Thank you so much for this email! We only hear from leadership when things go wrong.” It is not exclusively about improving customer service. It is about creating an environment in which good work and good people are honored. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? There were two things: The flexibility and the sophistication of the tagging system which allows one to code using Boolean or Lucene rules. LLM are still in their infancy and many software lack transparency in their accuracy. I know what I want and the terms my customers are using. When I develop the code myself, I know I’m getting exactly what I am looking for; I don’t have to spend time on learning models. Khoros cut its teeth in customer response. They know how to pull data on the backend to integrate with the new interface we created. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The team understood and appreciated our business case and wholeheartedly supported us in developing something completely new.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.Palo Alto Networks
Author Details: Name: Jerilyn Forsythe Title: Sr. Program Manager Company: Palo Alto Networks Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Palo Alto Networks is the world’s cybersecurity leader. We innovate to outpace cyberthreats, so organizations can embrace technology with confidence. We provide next-generation cybersecurity to thousands of customers globally, across all sectors. Our best-in-class cybersecurity platforms and services are backed by industry-leading threat intelligence and strengthened by state-of-the-art AI and automation. LIVEcommunity is Palo Alto Networks official online community and a key pillar of the company’s online self-service and digital strategy. The LIVEcommunity team helps all its members improve their security posture by providing a vibrant and intuitive peer-to-peer support channel for customers, partners and employees. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? LIVEcommunity’s mission is to be the first line of digital support to all Palo Alto Networks customers and partners, delivering a world-class community experience where members proactively find and share solutions, increase their cybersecurity knowledge and easily discover critical resources. Industry experts from around the world rely on Palo Alto Networks to stay up-to-date on rapidly evolving best practices. Our community platform is a key delivery method of critical information and valuable resources to our global customer base. As Sr. Program Manager, I oversee the development and delivery of programs for LIVEcommunity, including coordinating cross-functional teams, defining program objectives, timelines, and success metrics, and ensuring alignment with business goals. With a focal point on quality, strategic internal and external communications, and stakeholder relationships, I am able to contribute to the overall growth and success of LIVEcommunity and the company at-large. Our 400,000 members—cybersecurity professionals from around the world—prove that thousands of minds working together is far more powerful than a lone engineer. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Bolstered by our remarkable growth in the past two years, and guided by meticulous metrics and feedback from stakeholders and customers, LIVEcommunity has driven significant innovation through the successful implementation of two key developments: a BrightCove video analytics solution to support our Customer Success teams; and the launch of a new Support FAQ area to enhance customer empowerment through self-service capabilities. These initiatives align with our ongoing mission to foster scalable self-service, providing value both internally and externally. In preparation for the launch of the Support FAQ, we collaborated closely with various teams to ensure that this solution addressed the most-pressing challenges faced by our customers. We engaged with our most actively involved community members, including LIVEcommunity Cyber Elite experts, and partnered with internal support teams to analyze case metrics and understand common pain points. This thorough collaboration allowed us to gain a deep understanding of customer challenges, particularly during product migration and their evolving digital support needs. By leveraging the wealth of knowledge across all Palo Alto Networks digital assets and the community’s repository of Accepted Solutions, we curated a comprehensive collection of resources to address customers' most common questions. Additionally, our Customer Success teams highlighted the need for more granular video data to better serve customers. To address this, we worked with Khoros Professional Services to implement a custom-built video analytics dashboard, consolidating all video data into a single, accessible interface. This solution allows for the extraction and downloading of detailed video performance metrics, empowering teams with valuable insights. Both the Support FAQ and Brightcove video analytics dashboard initiatives reflect our commitment to driving innovation and supporting stakeholders in maximizing the platform's potential. These solutions not only resolve specific customer challenges but enable internal teams to deliver high-quality, data-driven content that enhances the overall customer experience. 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. Palo Alto Networks LIVEcommunity has demonstrated its ability to transform customer support by providing users with invaluable answers, solutions, and knowledge. Since its establishment in 2015, LIVEcommunity has continuously evolved to serve as a centralized platform for peer-to-peer support, essential resources, customer journey guidance, and self-help materials. This transformation has enabled LIVEcommunity to effectively address challenges and deliver substantial value to both Palo Alto Networks and its customers. The past year has marked a period of exceptional growth and innovation for LIVEcommunity. Notably, our efforts to enhance customer offerings have resulted in significant improvements in key community performance indicators (KPIs). We saw remarkable growth in the last two years. The following metrics underscore the expanding impact of LIVEcommunity on both existing and potential customers (comparing the period from October 2023 through September 2024 with the previous 12 months): More than 26.6 million total page views (a 129% increase) 4.9 million Accepted Solutions views (a 103% increase) 15% rise in member registrations 41% growth in total visits One of the most notable achievements in 2024 has been the deployment of a cutting-edge BrightCove video analytics solution. A challenge emerged as we identified a gap in accessible video data, which was hampering the ability of our Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to make data-driven decisions. To address this, our community team collaborated closely with CSMs and engaged Khoros Professional Services (PS) to implement a custom video analytics dashboard on LIVEcommunity — marking a first-of-its-kind solution. This innovation brings a centralized analytics platform with a feather-light API consumption experience, reusable components, downloadable metrics, and asynchronous automation. The impact has been substantial, unlocking new levels of efficiency, insight, and scalability for our teams. Additionally, in June of 2024, the Support FAQ section was launched representing a critical milestone in Palo Alto Networks’ digital support strategy. This collaborative project involved our digital support teams and leveraged resources across the company's digital assets, reinforcing our commitment to scalable, self-service solutions. The Support FAQ section not only serves as a user-friendly tool for our customers but also empowers our Technical Assistance Center (TAC) engineers by providing them with an actionable resource to guide customers to quick, effective resolutions. Both developments underscore our commitment to fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation, with each solution driving forward growth, customer satisfaction, and streamlined knowledge management across the organization. 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 introduction of the Support FAQ area has greatly contributed to our mission of streamlining customer experiences. By providing additional problem-solving resources, we have been able to reduce support costs, increase customer satisfaction, and foster a positive perception of our brand. This is evident in the following metrics: Cost Savings: Trending at a 63.5% increase in support cost reduction YoY based on Forrester and TSIA industry standard community value calculations. This notable surge reflects the community's significant contribution as a cost-effective avenue for customer support. Customer Satisfaction: In 2024, our on-site survey revealed that 70% of LIVEcommunity visitors who sought support successfully found the assistance they needed. This data underscores the effectiveness of our self-help resources, including the Support FAQ, in meeting customer needs. User Engagement: Since its launch at the end of June, the Support FAQ has garnered an impressive 14,000 page views and more than 8,300 unique visitors. These compelling figures indicate a high level of customer engagement, illustrating their active interest in seeking and utilizing the information provided. Impact of Accepted Solutions: The inclusion of Accepted Solutions in Support FAQ articles has proven to be effective. On average, Accepted Solutions included in the Support FAQ have more than doubled their views rate since the launch of the Support FAQ. With the September 2024 release of the Brightcove video analytics solution, we have enabled our global Customer Success teams to gain in-depth insights into the performance of their produced videos. This initiative has not only solidified our relationships with key stakeholders but equipped them with valuable knowledge to enhance their customer content strategies. The adoption of the BrightCove dashboard has been widely embraced by product managers across our product portfolio, driving informed decision-making and further optimizing video content to serve our customers better. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The successful implementation of the BrightCove analytics dashboard exemplifies our commitment to delivering innovative solutions to internal stakeholders and building meaningful, collaborative relationships within the organization. Through diligent research, engagement with Khoros Professional Services, and a well-defined plan of action, we were able to create a pioneering dashboard that addresses the specific needs of our stakeholders. This achievement showcases our ability to drive progress and deliver on the expectations of our partners. Another key outcome of our efforts has been the development of a centralized FAQ resource, aimed at streamlining access to information and reducing the time spent searching for answers. With this initiative, we are well-positioned to drive a reduction in support case volume by offering easily accessible, relevant content. By aggregating related information and incorporating Accepted Solutions, we have significantly strengthened our self-help resources, setting the stage for improved customer satisfaction and greater support efficiency moving forward. Looking ahead, tracking essential metrics such as unique visitors, page views, and engagement data will provide us with deeper insights into customer behavior and overall content effectiveness. These insights will guide us in refining our content strategy, ensuring that future resources are even better aligned with customer needs. By incorporating the Support FAQ content and keywords into federated search across all digital resources adds immense value by providing customers with a unified, seamless experience when seeking answers to their technical questions. By centralizing access to critical Support FAQ content, we empower users to quickly find relevant information, minimizing frustration and time spent searching across disparate platforms. This not only enhances the efficiency of troubleshooting but also reduces the need for direct support, enabling customers to resolve issues on their own. Moreover, integrating Support FAQ content into AI copilots further amplifies this value, allowing TAC engineers to tap into a well-organized, comprehensive knowledge base for faster case resolution. Automated isolation and remediation driven by this content ensure that technical issues are addressed swiftly and accurately, enhancing the quality of service delivery. 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 community solutions have been a key differentiator in enabling us to meet and exceed our goals for the year. Khoros’ comprehensive built-in features and intuitive functionalities allowed us to rapidly design, develop, and deploy a new Support FAQ section in a remarkably short timeframe. This speed and agility were instrumental in addressing emerging internal and customer needs, ensuring we could respond promptly and efficiently without the need for time-consuming custom development. One of the most impactful aspects of the solution was its ability to streamline our workflow through ready-to-use tools, which allowed for seamless collaboration and quick iteration during the build process. Additionally, the platform's scalability played a crucial role in supporting our long-term objectives. As our community grows, the Support FAQ will continue to be a go-to resource for customers looking for answers. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? One of our key strategic objectives is to enable our stakeholders and internal teams to fully leverage the capabilities of the Khoros platform, and our longstanding partnership with Khoros has been key in achieving this. A highlight of our collaboration was the development of the groundbreaking BrightCove analytics dashboard, which exemplifies the value of our partnership with Khoros. Additionally, the expertise and unwavering support from both the Customer Success and Professional Services teams have been vital in facilitating this initiative. Their guidance, combined with the efforts of our internal teams, allowed us to seamlessly implement this powerful new tool for our Customer Success teams. This collaboration not only equipped our team with the necessary resources but also ensured we could effectively deliver on our goals and elevate our overall service offerings.
