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has its own limitations: the platform may limit access in its API, biographical information may be incomplete or outdated, customers may not be posting using their mobile phones (and if they are, geolocation may not be turned on).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.Medion AG
Author Details: Name: Arnd Rychel Title: Community Infrastructure Engineer Company: Medion AG Tell us about you, your company, and your team? About me: I have been working at MEDION since 2000. Since 2014, I've been in charge of the MEDION Community as Community Manager. Company: MEDION, as one of the very few companies that boasts a comprehensive portfolio of classic entertainment electronics as well as information technology products, remains in a position to respond to the demands of a digital and networked CE market with its user-friendly product range in the Project Business segment. In addition to its traditional business involving special sales promotions of consumer electronics products in Europe, MEDION also markets a complementary line of services, particularly in the areas of telecommunications, photo services, downloads and other online services. MEDION is also continuing to strengthen its brand as a symbol of products and services offering high quality and best value for money as well as excellent design. MEDION has a good presence in Germany and the entire eurozone, as well as in Scandinavia and the UK, and with the support of its retail and cooperation partners maintains very well organized and professional sales and service units in these countries. Our team: Our ‘International Knowledge Management’ team collects internal and external knowledge and makes it available both within the company and to end customers. In addition to operating instructions and downloads of drivers, our work also includes service processes and the maintenance of product databases and FAQs. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? We select and distribute knowledge in order to reduce support requests and improve self-service, among other things. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We have introduced the Community to generally relieve the entire After Sales process. The aim was to expand self-service. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Among other things, the community FAQs are integrated via API on our service homepage. We have optimised our FAQs in two main ways for this purpose. For product-specific FAQs, the name and material number are stored in the footer of the FAQ so that they can be displayed to the searching end customer in conjunction with our product database on our service homepage. On the other hand, IRIS codes are stored in the footer of general FAQs so that they can be used in conjunction with our online troubleshooter. Depending on the result, the customer can either help themselves and thus avoid sending in the device or start a repair service online, whereby all relevant data (including the IRIS codes) is transmitted to the repair service centre. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Self-service has enabled costs to be saved in the After Sales Support and repair departments. No specific key figures are available. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The (API) integration on our service homepage significantly reduces support enquiries (call, email) and repair submissions. The integration of public and internal FAQs on the intranet provides call centre agents with extensive knowledge in a structured manner. Concrete key figures are not available. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The combination of customised modules at code level (html, css, variables) is what makes the complex workflow with external systems possible in the first place. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We implement most of our customisation ourselves. However, if things get more complex or there is no OOTB solution, the teamwork with Khoros is very good and effective (example: customisation of SSO with the help of Nils Drews).Atlassian
Author Details: Name: Janice James Title: Community Manager Company: Atlassian Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Hi! I’m a community manager on the online (forum) team led by Monique van den Berg. We’re a mighty team of six tackling all the things online for Atlassian! How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The forum team is the beating heart of Atlassian community programs. We support the company goal of helping more people in our community self serve their own success journey. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Community is a native concept to Atlassian. Company founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes hosted the first local Atlassian user group meetup in 2006. Now, as a global company, Atlassian continues to unite users by centering the customer experience around its community and learning programs. Atlassian's community consists of robust learning, champion, events (ACE), and creator programs. The democratized nature of information in communities makes them a natural conduit for product-led businesses like Atlassian and a figurative safe harbor for users to freely exchange knowledge. The challenge we were looking to solve was how to successfully influence community-led growth across a global organization. To address this, Atlassian formed a team of community strategists to guide internal customers (platform and product teams) on how to effectively leverage community programs in their go-to-market strategies. Strategists work directly with product and platform teams to integrate community programs into their workflows, resulting in increased engagement (from Atlassian team members and users), an enhanced product feedback & ideation loop, and increased product/feature awareness. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Formed in early 2024, the community strategist team swiftly addressed the challenge of integrating community strategies across Atlassian's diverse portfolio of teams. The opportunity: Leverage the Khoros community platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement. The team innovated by conducting community-led growth planning workshops, bringing together teams from across the Atlassian solutions portfolio. These workshops resulted in tailored community strategies for each team, aligned with their specific KPIs. For example, the Atlassian Intelligence team focused on an end-to-end plan for the launch of Rovo and growing group membership by 125%, while the Confluence team aimed to boost Atlassian team member engagement in the forum and as speakers at their events. By facilitating collaboration, we overcame the challenge of creating cohesive community strategies that respected each product team's unique needs. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As a newly formed team driving internal enablement, we're in the early stages of our initiatives. However, in addition to the metrics already mentioned (product/feature awareness, engagement, and feedback) the team is influencing the following community and learning organization KPIs with our work in enabling community-led growth: Online community MAU Community and Proprietary events attendance Learning courses and certifications completed From our example above of Atlassian Intelligence, Rovo, and Confluence - The outcomes measured from their tailored strategies at the close of last quarter were successfully launching the Rovo product board and associated gamification challenges with strong Atlassian team member engagement, along with a 53% increase in group membership for Atlassian Intelligence KPI. With Confluence, we successfully influenced their KPIs with a 13% increase in accepted answers + a 62% increase in Atlassian Speakers at their events. An early win was the creation of a series of gamified learning initiatives within the community ecosystem for Atlassian Intelligence, Loom, and Confluence. This initiative leveraged the Khoros community to facilitate post-live event discussions within the forum. This led to increased engagement (posts, kudos) in those spaces of 6%, 12%, and 74%, respectively. Another example is we ran a month-long Jira July product love campaign, where users participated in forum activities that deepened their knowledge of Jira while showcaseing how it’s helped set their business teams up for success. This initiative contributed to a ~53% QoQ increase in posts to the Jira collection. These early wins have been crucial in demonstrating the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to wider adoption across the organization and positioning our community at the center of our product development and user engagement efforts. We expect to have more quantifiable data in the coming months as our initiatives mature. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We’re still in the early stages of gathering long-term data, however we've already observed promising progress outcomes that indicate positive trends in addressing our challenges: Diversified Community Engagement: By tactically engaging teams, we’re aiming to expand community event offerings, creating more touchpoints for user interaction and knowledge sharing. Increase in Atlassian-Hosted Events: We've seen a notable uptick in the number of Atlassian-hosted community events. This increase is expected to positively impact our CSAT and NPS scores as users benefit from more direct interactions with Atlassian experts and peers. Enhanced Internal Involvement: Atlassian team member involvement within our community ecosystem has markedly increased. This deeper engagement will empower users to resolve their questions and create on-demand knowledge as more Atlassian team members actively participate in community discussions. Structured Engagement Playbooks: We've developed comprehensive playbooks for different internal stakeholder groups on how to engage with the community. These resources are aimed at empowering more Atlassian team members to effectively reach and support community members. Broader Organizational Integration: We've observed a deeper permeation of community initiatives throughout the Atlassian organization. As more teams become equipped and utilize community channels in their workflows, we anticipate adoption of community-led growth will have significant mutually beneficial outcomes. Enhanced Internal Enablement: By tactically enabling internal teams, we're creating more 'stickiness' for community programs internally overall. Initial outcomes are laying the groundwork for the team influence on measurable improvements in key areas such as customer lifetime value, support deflection, and overall customer satisfaction. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? We can directly attribute success to the Khoros platform's ability to be enterprise-ready. While the Atlassian community does have a dedicated engineering team, many of the features and capabilities used in our work are 'out-of-the-box' functionality. Many of our tactical recommendations for community-led growth are achieved using the Khoros out-of-the-box functionality. The platform's enterprise-ready features have allowed us to easily and quickly scale community initiatives for teams across our product suite. For instance, the badge and group hub features enable community strategists to easily spin up experiments, resulting in increased traffic and engagement in those spaces. Overall, the platform enables us to provide a gamified centralized knowledge exchange, improve awareness of our portfolios capabilities, and provide a fun and rewarding user experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our partnership with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing the challenges of a community program with complex needs. Working with a platform partner capable of providing the right resources at the right time has ensured Atlassian can implement initiatives that utilize the platform effectively. We’d also like to note the training and resources made available to users. Khoros Academy and live sessions have empowered our team to maximize platform's potential. This was particularly helpful when we onboarded four community managers at once! Throughout our partnership, Khoros has consistently demonstrated its commitment to our success. The holistic support on offer from the team has been vital in addressing challenges unique to our program and helping drive our community initiatives forward. Cheers!HubSpot
Author Details: Name: Gabrielle Herrera Title: Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth Company: HubSpot Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Community is an amplifier. Layering human connection on top of any of our customer-facing efforts makes them better. Our mission is to educate, connect and inspire the HubSpot community. In 2023 we showed that through hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, spreading HubSpot advocacy across the web, and by driving access and engagement to some of the hardest audiences to reach. In 2024, we're turning this amplifier up to 11. Our focus is to provide a human touch at scale using Community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. Our teams include Success Community, Communities of Practice, Identity based Communities (The Spot) and ensuring we’re spreading our advocates (Champions community) love throughout the community. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Using experimentation and scalable approaches, the Community Strategy & Operations team helps HubSpot identify hot pockets of community interest and value, and then scale those opportunities into valuable and sustainable communities for our ecosystem members. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers want to be guided and get personalized examples & advice (often preferably from a human). We have no shortage of great resources for our customers, but they don’t always get utilized. We need to spend our highly-talented CSMs’ time on high-leverage moments and stakeholders, not gathering links for front-line reps - but as we continue to succeed, there are even more people vying for CSM time. Through Community, we can scale success so reps can focus on leverage points, without removing the human touch from the experience by transforming into a Community Success Center. Peer responses and public answers save us potentially multimillions per year in support costs (and lift Partners up). Community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation. The Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users and developers on the HubSpot Community to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent and invaluable expertise. The Community Success Center allows HubSpot to become more efficient while keeping a human touch. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Evolving from a support community aimed at answering a single, point-in-time question to a recurring, lively success destination has been our major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, Customer Success content lives in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customer apply our tools to their needs efficiently and effectively. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The HubSpot Community sees 4 million visits per year and 14k posts annually. 96% of solutions are provided by peers and 98% of posts are replied to within 24 hours. In collaboration with the Product Marketing team, we’ve facilitated 30 product Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions YTD, providing customers real life examples and access to the Product team in a cost-efficient manner. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In 2024 we launched a federated search including Knowledge Base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from our Developer Changelog. We also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a one-stop shop to the right solution. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for. We’ve been able to improve relevancy, and in turn adoption of the Community, by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers. Example of our Professional tier Community: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-HubSpot/ct-p/professional What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The HubSpot Community (community.hubspot.com) launched in 2016 on Khoros (formerly Lithium) as the solution for free user support. Since 2016 the Community has grown in visibility and use cases. We have over 400,000 members (all time), > 1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. We can also associate community usage with healthier customers. Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Since incorporating CARE into our team, we’ve been able to streamline processes and ensure we’re putting the right resources into the right initiatives and biggest value-adds for our customers. Before CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators spent a lot of time in moderation, completing duplicative tasks and trying to clear up confusion around the division of work. This inefficient process negatively impacted how many Accepted Solutions - those peer-to-peer responses that deflect support tickets - they were able to accept each month. With CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, which help the person who raised the question and help the person who responded excel in the gamification of the Community, encouraging them to continue to engage. This efficiency win also allows the Community Managers to spend time on strategic initiatives such as our Workflows Library and build high-impact cross functional relationships with internal stakeholders.Bell Canada
Author Details: Name: Darrell Harrison Title: Community Manager, Specialist Business Strategy - Digital Support Company: Bell Canada Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Bell is Canada’s largest communications provider, connecting millions of customers throughout the country on our powerful wireless and fibre networks, and delivering compelling content to national and local audiences on our leading TV, radio and digital platforms. Our team of more than 50,000 reflects the diversity of the Canadian population and includes employees living and working in communities of all sizes across every province and territory. Bell Let’s Talk began in 2010, together we’ve created the world’s largest conversation about mental health. As a result, Canadian organizations large and small in every region have received new funding from Bell Let’s Talk and from governments and corporations that have joined the cause. Bell Let’s Talk funds Canadian mental health initiatives and organizations all year long that are creating real change in their communities each and every day. Since 2010, Bell Let’s Talk has committed $139,588,747 to Canadian mental health initiatives. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Business Support team within Bell Canada focuses on driving the best digital (online/app) experience for our customers. Whether the customer has questions, curiosities or requires technical, account, product or sales/activation assistance; the Digital Support team creates and develops the digital pathways to connect the customer to self serve, peer to peer or service support through all available digital channels. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our Brand and Bell Let’s Talk teams charged the Digital Support/Bell Community Forum team with the monumental task of putting together an in-house solution for Bell Let’s Talk Day on January 24th, 2024 with 9 days notice. The teams were facing three specific challenges: Functionality – For 2024 our Brand and Bell Let’s Talk teams wanted to expand the conversation and capture active responses from Canadians and others around the world to the Bell Let’s Talk question “Tell us what you plan to do to create change in mental health for yourself, your community or your workplace, today and all year long.” Cost – The cost to find a platform capable of allowing user & anonymous user registration, posting abilities and metric/KPI data collection was growing, running in the tens of thousands of dollars. Time – Time was short and we, the Bell Community/Digital Support team had 9 days to deliver a viable and functional platform. Within the first 3 days the Digital Support/Bell Community team had built a mock-up, demonstrated and delivered on functionality and metric/KPI’s, all essentially at no cost to the teams as we leveraged our Khoros Community to build a custom Blog page, separate from the rest of the Community, but utilizing all the community functions and features has to offer. Specifically; allowing anonymous blog comments, building event specific keyword and smut filters, isolating Page View and Visit metrics, exporting comments and engagement data from Khoros Care. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. This was a huge win for Bell Let’s Talk 2024 and in the future as the Digital Support/Bell Community team was able to prove in a challengingly short time that we can innovate and change the way we use the Khoros Community platform. The versatility allows us to manipulate it’s functions and features to serve specific needs and adapt to challenges as they arise. Whether we are working with Branding, Marketing, Product or Sales teams, we have shown that no matter the challenge put forth, the Bell Community Forum can align to those opportunities, meet the challenge and alleviate time and cost constraints for all teams involved. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The number one outcome for the business was the efficient use of time. This time efficiency allowed the Bell Community team to extract further value and use from the Community. The financial value achieved was the decrease in spend by tens of thousands of dollars, all by using ‘an in-house’ solution. As before, the versatility of the Khoros Community platform allowed our team to flip standard use cases on their head and pivot on how we traditionally used Blogs. Between the two; English Bell Let’s Talk and French Cause pour la Cause we generated just over 480 comments in the 24 hour campaign. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Bell Let’s Talk day lasts an entire 24 hours and within that time period the 2024 Bell Let’s Talk blog totaled: 8% of all the day’s Page Views across the entire Bell Community 82% of all Blog Page Views in one day vs. an entire week’s average 6.7K total Page Views 2.7K Visits 2.1 Unique Visits 480+ individual posts in both English and French Through Khoros Care, our alternate social channels Bell Let’s Talk 2024 generated: 22.7K Mentions 209M Impressions 20.2M total Reach 18.8K Bell Let’s Talk Hashtags What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Not only was the immense cost savings such a large part of the Khoros Community being the main differentiator in pulling off a hugely successful Bell Let’s Talk 2024; but the ability of our developer and management teams to work and collaborate so effectively through the Community Stage environment. Having a backend like Stage allowed us to build the structure, design and layout the page, give and receive feedback, demonstrate the changes and functionality, etc. all quickly, easily and internally. Without Khoros Community’s Stage, we simply could not have delivered to the degree that we had and with such a short turnaround. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Community Manager has over a decade of experience with Khoros Communities and our Developer Natalie has been working with Khoros Studio and Stage since launch in 2021. They both know what the Community platform is capable of, what its limitations are and how both of those can be pushed, stretched or customized. Khoros has and continues to hold workshops, courses and webinars throughout the year(s) and we encourage your to register, participate and apply what you have learned in them. Khoros has built a platform for you to address the digital challenges your company faces.Visa
Author Details: Name: Anthony Pichardo Title: Product Manager Company: Visa Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Launched in 2016 the Visa Developer Platform continues to explode in growth, currently averaging 8 billion API calls each month. The portal is the face of Visa’s digital-first strategy and is compromised of a developer portal, community platform, API gateway, and service components used to enhance product and client experiences. Myself and Sophie are the product managers supporting the developer experience and community platform. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? My role is to lead the developer experience team which is inclusive of our developer center and community platform. As a team we strive to provide our developers with the tools and resources they need to discover and implement our suite of products. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our team uses Khoros Community to engage with our customers in a dedicated channel of choice with expert support and like minded peers available to connect in real time. We focus on improvement at the platform level, inclusive of the developer and partner portals. The community helps to enhance the Visa Developer Platform as the single, trusted, and open platform that easily serves all client developer solution needs. Our community solution was intended to solve the challenge of how to create a quality customer experience that leveraged self service to provide cost savings through contact deflection. We decided to use Community for this challenge as we see it as a way to have a better branded experience and we knew we would be able to scale the service at a lower cost due to the inherent self-service nature of communities. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. In addressing the challenge of driving Community self-service, we wanted to foster and encourage peer-to-peer engagement to improve quality of member interactions and to increase customer trust and advocacy. This has involved improving process efficiencies and streamlining the onboarding experience for clients, including leveraging the community and documentation to provide better support and responsiveness to customer feedback. The focus is on reducing time it takes for clients to start using their APIs, with the community able to deflect initial questions that are easily answerable by us fostering and encouraging peer-to-peer engagement. In addition to our Community team, this also involved the Customer Success team who provide a lot of the customer support and manage all the customer intake channels. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In the last 12 months, this has resulted in an estimated $3.5M of cost savings in support deflection. We have also seen a 16% improvement in Registrations this year compared with last year. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We have achieved a 59% resolution rate in our Community over the last 12 months, with customers not needing to go anywhere else to have their question answered. Also, our Accepted Solutions have increased 20% from the previous year, giving us an overall resolution rate of 22%. We want to make sure we have a healthy resolution balance i.e. not resolving everything and encouraging discussion and active involvement as customers leverage the community as part of their overall Visa Developer Platform experience. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The flexibility of the Khoros Solution has been very helpful in achieving positive results each year. Initially Khoros worked with our UX team to help design the Community with our users and brand in mind. This year we have seen a 16.1% increase in New Members compared with last year. The amount of data we are able to review also enables us to target focus areas and give meaningful feedback on success we are having with the larger business goals. It means we have a better understanding of how to engage with our Developers and what they want. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The capabilities of the platform, such as the admin console make it easy for myself and Sophie to manage. Our Khoros CSM, Ben, is also very helpful in collaborating with us on areas we are being successful in, areas we can grow and also new functionality / changes that can help in our goals. The extensive data and KPI reporting also make it easier to share data with the wider business. For example, we have multiple metrics to show how new developers are discovering the Community, such as Number of Visits, Registrations and New Visitors, which all increased over the last 12 months.Upwork
Author Details: Name: Stan Gromer Title: Director, CS Technology and Innovation Company: Upwork Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Over the past few years, the Upwork Community has evolved from a modest set of 4 forums into a dynamic ecosystem. In recent years, we've expanded to include over 100 groups, hosted hundreds of events, and built an entire Academy, along with a variety of support resources. As the organization’s needs have grown, so has the role of the Community. It now serves a wide array of use cases, enabling cross-functional collaboration and addressing the needs of Upwork’s freelancers, clients, and internal teams. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Upwork is the world’s largest online marketplace connecting freelancers with clients across a wide range of industries. The Upwork Community plays a vital role in supporting this ecosystem, offering freelancers and clients a space to learn, collaborate, and grow. Over the years, the Community has expanded from a few forums to an interactive hub featuring groups, events, an Academy, podcasts, and AMA sessions. With resources like learning paths, expert insights, and peer-to-peer support, the Upwork Community enhances user engagement, skill development, and success on the platform, fostering a global network of professionals thriving in the freelance economy. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Over the past few years, the Upwork Community has evolved from a modest set of 4 forums into a dynamic ecosystem. In recent years, we've expanded to include over 100 groups, hosted hundreds of events, and built an entire Academy, along with a variety of support resources. As the organization’s needs have grown, so has the role of the Community. It now serves a wide array of use cases, enabling cross-functional collaboration and addressing the needs of Upwork’s freelancers, clients, and internal teams. Our Community team consists of the Moderation, Community Programs (Groups, AMA, Podcasts, etc.), and Community Product team (focused on technology for Community, Academy, Events, Certifications, and Chatbots), while our Academy team is comprised of Coaching & Events, Academy Content, and Certification. This solution was created to address key challenges: Scaling: Accommodating a rapidly growing community. Versatility: Providing an array of support and learning resources across different functions within the organization. Engagement: Enhancing user engagement and retention by integrating education and support tools into the platform. Integration: Bridging our educational content, events, and support features into one cohesive 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. A major recent innovation was the development of UPCATS (Upwork Courses And Training System), a custom-built Learning Management System (LMS) on the Khoros platform, enhancing the Upwork Academy’s capabilities. What began as a basic knowledge base has evolved into a fully immersive learning experience, now offering advanced learning paths, quizzes, SCORM support, and robust analytics. This solution addressed our critical need for a scalable, flexible LMS while also pushing the technical boundaries of what Khoros could handle. In addition to the LMS, we focused on integrating our Academy with the Upwork Community to provide a seamless user journey. Members can now move between the Academy and the Community to ask questions, get feedback on their Upwork profiles, and discuss best practices with peers. This integration not only supports learning but fosters engagement, allowing members to build relationships, share insights, and grow their skills. Key innovations introduced with UPCATS and Community integration include: Learning Paths: Offering customizable courses that track user progress, with badges and certificates awarded upon completion. Quizzes and Interactive Modules: Enhancing learning through real-time quizzes and hands-on activities. SCORM Support: Integrating legacy SCORM content, allowing a versatile training system for multiple learning formats. Advanced Analytics: Utilizing Khoros APIs and Upwork’s Data Warehouse for in-depth tracking of user activity, enabling data-driven insights and personalization. Community Integration: Allowing members to create and share their own learning paths within the Community, promoting peer-to-peer learning. We didn’t stop with just the LMS—Community engagement was another major focus. In the past year, we launched an AMA Series and a Community Podcast, both hosted and published using Khoros. These initiatives were designed to address the growing need for expert insights and live, interactive discussions on topics critical to freelancers and agencies, such as AI integration, video editing, client management, and proposal creation. The Inspiration Podcast and AMA Series evolved from our blog, driven by community demand. Special location-based AMAs like "Croatia Vibes" and "India Vibes" brought in diverse perspectives from global freelancers, ensuring that we addressed a broad range of issues specific to different regions. Across 11 AMA events, we saw strong engagement with 1,856 total registrants and an average attendance rate of 40.67%. We’ve also built an Education Marketplace on Upwork Academy, offering curated content from leading providers like Coursera, Jasper, and Udemy. This marketplace gives our users access to world-class learning resources, further empowering them to grow their careers. Additionally, our enterprise team approached us to help set up resources for office hours and webinars for enterprise customers. Leveraging the events functionality on Khoros, we quickly stood up a comprehensive events platform that goes beyond a traditional Zoom page. The solution not only provided a space for live webinars but created a library for on-demand content that enterprise customers can continually reference. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Through the implementation of UPCATS and other key initiatives, we’ve seen significant business outcomes that demonstrate the value of our Community and Academy solutions, as well as their impact on both users and internal stakeholders. User Engagement & Completion Rates: Since the launch of our Academy’s learning paths, we’ve supported over 1 million users, with 250,000 completing their first learning path. Our focus on increasing completions has paid off, with 32% of users now completing their first learning path, a significant jump that demonstrates how effective our learning experience has become. The introduction of features like quizzes, interactive modules, and video libraries has enhanced the overall learning experience and driven this growth. Community Retention: A direct result of our emphasis on engagement, our Community retention rate has doubled from 8% in Q1 to 16% in Q3. This increase was driven by proactive outreach efforts, including a new monthly newsletter, which has attracted over 200,000 members. This initiative, powered by Khoros, has exceeded our expectations in terms of participation and engagement, creating an additional touchpoint that brings members back into the community for further interaction and learning. Content Expansion: In addition to learning paths, we’ve expanded our educational offerings with video libraries, third-party content from leading providers such as Coursera, Jasper, and Udemy, and coaching sessions. These offerings have increased the breadth of educational resources available to our community and have strengthened the connection between learning and career advancement. Scalable Growth: UPCATS not only solved the immediate need for a scalable LMS but also opened doors for future growth and innovations across Upwork Academy. Its success has laid the foundation for us to continue evolving our learning and development initiatives, providing a model that other parts of the organization can build upon. By integrating our Academy and Community platforms, we have created a cohesive experience that empowers users to not only learn but also engage with one another, driving higher levels of participation, skill development, and job success. The combination of these features has not only increased user satisfaction but also provided tangible business benefits, such as improved talent retention and enhanced value for both freelancers and clients on the Upwork platform. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Learning and development opportunities via a new AI Education Library are critical to ensuring talent on Upwork are operating to their greatest potential. We see a strong correlation between completing an Upwork Academy learning path and getting hired. In fact, independent professionals who complete a learning path are up to three times more likely to be hired within a month of submitting their first proposal or project, compared to those who do not complete a learning path. Through these initiatives, Upwork is continuing to connect clients with faster, better and more flexible talent, while attracting skilled professionals by giving them access to the tools they want and need to supercharge their work, including training on how to fully leverage the tools provided through our platform. By combining our AI/Chatbot and Community teams in early 2024, we’ve significantly improved our deflection and self-service rates. Over the past 18 months, we increased our deflection rate from the low 50% range to 80%. This was achieved by guiding users to Community for support, where many questions are resolved by existing resources or peer assistance. We also implemented a seamless integration allowing the Community team to escalate complex cases to Zendesk with a single click when needed. Additionally, personalized user journeys have led to faster resolutions and greater self-help success, as users are directed to the most relevant resources based on their needs. 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 stands out due to its flexibility and ability to be customized to our specific needs. Beyond the out-of-the-box forum features, we built an entire Academy/LMS on the Community platform—something we couldn’t achieve with any other platform. Khoros allowed us to innovate, from repurposing the Ideas board as a Known Issues section to launching coaching programs, blogs, and groups. Its versatility ensures we never have to say “we can’t do this,” enabling us to creatively solve problems and scale our offerings seamlessly. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Khoros’ flexibility and robust integration capabilities were key to addressing our challenges. The platform’s customization options allowed us to seamlessly build complex systems like UPCATS (Upwork Courses and Training System) directly on top of the Community, blending traditional community engagement with an advanced LMS. Another standout feature was the ability to integrate multiple functions—such as learning paths, events, and support—within a single platform. This helped us not only scale quickly but also maintain a unified user experience. The ease of API integrations and bulk data access enabled us to build advanced analytics dashboards and customize user journeys based on real-time data. Finally, the support from Khoros’ customer success team was invaluable. Their ongoing guidance allowed us to push the platform’s limits, creating solutions like interactive learning paths, AMA events, and podcast series, all while keeping everything under one roof.GoTo
Author Details: Name: Glenn Dobson Title: Manager, Community and Social Media Support Company: GoTo Tell us about you, your company, and your team? GoTo believes that in a flexibility-first world, great work can happen anywhere. That mindset has helped us fulfill the promise of reliability, connection, and simplicity for tens of millions of people through our portfolio of products, including GoTo Connect, GoTo Webinar, and LogMeIn Rescue. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The GoTo Community team utilizes a two-pronged approach to support our Company goals. The first focuses on Customer Support and Success which we achieve through a tailored proactive approach based on our members' feedback. The second focuses on Customer Education and Product Innovation so that our members receive more than just a Solution and our Product teams not only see a feature request, but also a use case supporting it. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The GoTo Community is the combination of two existing communities, and as a result offers some unique challenges. Made up of thirteen different product communities across three lines of Business, a one size fits all approach has never been an option. While Customer Support and Success is a universal goal, what that means varies between each member group. We work cross functionally with multiple teams across GoTo, often providing a deeper level of understanding of our customers and their needs. Our thirteen communities range from mature (10+ years), to newly established and growing. With each we strive to understand their unique needs and preferences, and then provide support and engagement that is accurate, timely and delivered with empathy. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. One of the biggest challenges we have faced recently is the introduction of a new generation of products. Change is always challenging, especially when your customer base is comfortable with your legacy solution. We utilized our community to capture detailed customer feedback critical to our Product teams. Our members aided in identifying areas that needed more attention as well as quality of life improvements earlier in the process. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The GoTo Community allowed us to gather more detailed feedback from our customers and provide our Product teams with more context around their in product survey results. It empowered us to have real conversations with our customers and provide them with information and solutions in ways that answered their specific needs. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have always benefited from the fantastic support Khoros and our Account Manager provides, but the shared knowledge of the Atlas Community members cannot be understated.Macmillan Learning
Author Details: Name: Symphonie Swift Title: Product Marketing Manager Company: Macmillan Learning Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Macmillan Learning is a privately-held, family-owned company that inspires what’s possible for every learner. We envision a world where all students succeed and work to make that vision a reality by creating meaningful content, innovative technologies, and engaging learning experiences for students of all abilities and backgrounds. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? We focus on connecting educators and institutions with the resources that can best support their teaching goals and enhance student learning. We listen to the needs of instructors, administrators, and students to ensure that our content, tools, and services align with the evolving educational landscape. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our team put this solution in place for higher educational professionals looking for upskilling opportunities to better address the challenges they are facing in their teaching today. After confirming interest for courses that Macmillan Learning could offer customers–due to our excellent subject matter experts (SMEs)–we needed to determine what might be missing as part of the professional development experience. We heard again and again the importance of networking and peer learning opportunities, and we knew that a community aspect to our offering could solve this problem. Unlike other professional development offerings out there, we developed not only a best-in-class course, but were able to complement it with a best-in-class community, giving our customers what they were looking for. 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 year ago, our marketing and communications teams came together with a proposal for an emerging business opportunity: a professional development that addressed an immediate challenge facing instructors today–AI in the classroom. We used this as an opportunity to develop a professional development experience unlike others that included synchronous, asynchronous and peer-to-peer learning. Our offering, the Institute at Macmillan Learning, created accountability community experiences alongside the course content, supporting participants as they upskill to meet key professional challenges in real time. Leveraging the use of the Khoros Community, our team created a closed Group Hub community to facilitate an integrated support ecosystem for participants’ professional practice. The community provides participants with accountability and networking opportunities, which enhance the overall professional development experience. After launching the first iteration of the Institute's first course offering, Teaching with Generative AI: A Course for Educators, in May of 2024, the community quickly became one of our company’s top five performing communities on the Khoros platform, accounting for more than 11% of page views across all of our company’s communities. Our community was also the first to successfully drive engagement outside of impressions, accounting for more than 89% of content interactions (Kudos given), contributing to an engagement rate of nearly 12% on the Institute’s community content. This success in engagement was largely driven by our marketing and communications teams’ commitment to community monitoring and moderation, which encouraged continued and sustained engagement from participants in the course. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As an emerging business opportunity to create solutions for new audiences outside of only current customers, the Institute ran as a pilot program earlier this year with two iterations of the Teaching with Generative AI course, starting in May and July. Previously, our company had not explored offering professional development as a service; through this process–and largely due to the success of the accountability community in Khoros–we were able to validate the idea and demonstrate its potential to generate revenue. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. For this pilot offering, our team sought to answer a couple of key questions: Can we provide professional development as a service? And Can we reach audiences in new markets? We learned that the answer to both of these questions is yes; customers are willing to pay for the service and we are working to scale it, and we reached new customers who were not previous adopters of our other products and services (94.6% of course participants were new customers). After the first two courses, we can report an NPS score of 58.8% for completers of the courses, and a retention rate of 99.1%. We also tracked traffic to our web pages and webinars during the promotion of the Institute and experienced a spike in both. 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? An area of focus for us was community engagement. We aimed to encourage participants not only to respond to the work in their professional development course, but also to engage with each other. The solution allowed us to have discussion threads that made engagement easy, as participants could either cut/paste their assignment or attach it, with their peers offering feedback to them. Since there were so many people, we also summarized the key learnings from the group in a weekly blog post, which was also hosted in the closed community. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our company has used Khoros to host many communities for years now, so we knew the platform would serve us well to address our needs of creating a community that could accompany our course offering. We specifically found the different nodes within a closed Group Hub helpful for organizing the community and ensuring that it was easy to navigate for participants. Thanks to the available nodes within Khoros, we were able to create a discussion forum, Q&A, resource library (tkb) and a designated space for course highlights (blog), all easily accessible for participants in the course.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.
