SAS Institute
Author Details: Name: Chris Hemedinger Title: Director of SAS User Engagement Company: SAS Institute Tell us about you, your company, and your team? About me: I'm a technology enthusiast who believes in the power of community to drive technology success, learning, and connections. As Director of SAS User Engagement, I lead a talented 12-member team that looks after the SAS Support Community and many other programs that benefit users of SAS® software and SAS. About SAS: SAS, based in Cary, N.C., is a software company with roots in academia. Founded at N.C. State University in 1976, SAS has grown to become the leader in business analytics software and services and the world’s largest privately held software company. Co-founder Jim Goodnight remains at the helm as CEO and more than 80,000 business, government, and university sites in more than 140 countries rely on SAS® software. We make it easier for more people to use powerful analytics every day, to shorten the path from data to insight – and to inspire bold new discoveries that drive progress. The result: analytics that breaks down barriers, fuels ambition, and gets results. We give our customers THE POWER TO KNOW®. About my team: The SAS User Engagement team manages key programs of outreach to SAS users, including our online support communities, expert webinars, user group events, blogs, a technical newsletter, a developer engagement program and more. All of these programs have a home in our hosted Khoros community platform. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? By providing a forum for discussion and support, we increase our customers’ ability to self-serve in finding answers to their technical questions and challenges. This improves customer satisfaction and saves on support costs, two metrics that are supported by data we collect. We also use the community platform to support other strategic programs at SAS, such as our annual SAS Hackathon, our SAS Customer Recognition Awards, our Ask the Expert webinar series and more. The community also provides operational support for support initiatives such as hotfix notices and syndicated content directly into the user experience for our product offerings. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our best-in-class community plays a vital role in expressing SAS’ customer-centric ethos built over five decades. Key turning points in our story: Long before SAS spun out of NCSU in 1976, as our three co-founders wrote the first lines of SAS code, they welcomed input from an enthusiastic nascent community of SAS users. Our first users conference, which drew 300+ attendees, further baked customer-centricity into our culture and products. Online user collaboration sprouted in 1986 when SAS users connected via the SAS-L email listserve. In the late 2000s, we launched a SAS community on Jive, followed in 2015 with the migration to Khoros. The latter move was in line with our customer-centric ethos and users' growing preference for peer-to-peer and self-service support. It marked a significant uptick in investment. We tripled community-management staff to grow engagement, curate content and enlist employee and customer experts to improve the quality and number of solved topics. The Covid-19 pandemic interrupted business as usual. In-person events, the prevalent way of connecting with our customers for many years, were off the table. This presented an opportunity to reimagine how to serve and engage our customers online at higher levels. Collaborating with our counterparts in global marketing, research and development, sales, and technical support, we leveled up our digital capabilities to that end. Our Khoros-hosted SAS Support Community became – and remains – an indispensable hub for many programs that engage, equip, and encourage SAS software users. Social-distancing protocols receded, and in-person events resumed, but the digital pivot equipped us with a strong, agile platform that continues to grow and evolve. Today, communities.sas.com is the largest digital gathering of SAS users with more than 330,000 members. In the past year, nearly 10,000 topics were published (nearly 2,800 questions solved) and there were 8.4 million visits, with 15 million page views. 80+ special-interest groups give members additional ways to connect. SAS employees share their expertise through more than 7,000 knowledge base articles. User-engagement programs, such as SAS Analytics Explorers, SAS Inner Circle and the SAS Developer portal serve and delight our most ardent SAS fans. Recently we began syndicating community content within popular new products, SAS® Intelligent Decisioning and SAS® Model Manager. Varied programs, two goals: 1) Shrink the distance between customers and the answers they need to win with SAS (community health); 2) Increase customer satisfaction and lower support costs (community success). 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 Khoros community platform is at the heart of the overall success of our user-engagement program. It’s more than just a website, having grown far beyond its beginnings as a home for technical discussions. This makes it difficult to pinpoint just one win. In the past year, innovative use of Khoros’ bulk data APIs has enabled us to gain insights to shape strategic decisions for how we engage with community members—particularly new community members and new SAS users. The challenge: faster, deeper engagement with SAS users, especially new community members. The opportunity: greater customer loyalty evidenced by higher net promoter scores among community members and more engagement by new members. This includes a space for new users to receive enhanced moderation. Overall, our community boasts an average “first reply” time of just about 400 minutes. In our special “New Users” board, a designated “safe space” for new-user questions, 72% of first replies come within 2 hours, and over 92% come within 12 hours. Teams involved: our counterparts in marketing, product management, R&D, and technical support. 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 SAS Support Community delivers significant value throughout the customer experience. Having grown beyond is customer-support roots, today it also drives customer satisfaction (according to net-promoter scores), brand awareness (for example, as the digital home of the popular SAS Hackathon), and increasingly is a leading source of information on new solutions and innovation (exemplified by community content syndicated in SAS solutions.) It has become the hub of SAS expertise online and complements other channels such as GitHub and YouTube. Overall community health and success metrics: 1,000% SAS Community ROI based on deflected technical support tracks (calculated with Value Analytics data and standard ROI formula.) New members: 14K+ YTD Page views: 12 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 15+ million) Visits: 7 million YTD (on pace to surpass last year's 8 million) New topics: 5K+ YTD Solved topics often garner more than half of total topic views. 84% of topics receive a reply within 24 hours 74% rate of successful searches, proof that SAS users are finding the help they need What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Efforts to engage new members in particular have paid off. We started with a stretch goal of 20% engagement (defined by “liking” posts, publishing topics and replies, etc., within 90 days of registering.) Our email onboarding campaign sends a “welcome” email to new members soon after they register. The email acquaints them with best practices and invites them to connect with fellow members, share their expertise and level up by earning ranks and badges. Two weeks later, emails are sent to those who have asked a question encouraging them to mark a reply as a solution and to those who have yet to post a topic. Additional campaigns invite members to attend webinars, play SAS Bowl Trivia, participate in the SAS Hackathon, and engage with SAS in myriad other ways. In the past year, our Khoros platform has delivered more than 1.5 million emails, garnering a 17.5% open rate and a 14% click-to-open rate. This consistent, proactive outreach, enabled by our Khoros platform, has driven these and other key metrics: SAS User Community Net Promoter Score rose 11% in 2024 over 2023 30% of new members engaged within three months of joining 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? As a global leader in data and AI, SAS is all about transforming a world of data into trusted decisions. That’s reflected in the way we run our community program. The abundance of data, analyzed with SAS® software, enables us to send targeted emails to boost engagement, gain invaluable insight into prevalent topics, content worthy of promoting in other channels, opportunities to delight customers, and much more. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our Khoros platform enables us to make high-impact data-driven campaigns and decisions. The admin console makes it easy for community managers to manage content, the site’s structure and look and feel, and set permissions for members. There are easy-to-use mechanisms to include code in posts and upload animations, images, and video. There are APIs for everything and abundant data to analyze with SAS software. We make full use of our platform’s discussion styles—blogs, events, forums, contests, events, group hubs, ideas, and TKBs. Looking ahead, by being able to syndicate community content directly into our own software solutions, we anticipate further expanding use of communities.sas.com as an operational hub and a way to showcase GenAI capabilities.Dynatrace
Author Details: Name: Malgorzata Murawska Title: Community Manager Company: Dynatrace Tell us about you, your company, and your team? In the Community team, we often compare ourselves to the Power Rangers. Besides supervising the forum, each team member has tasks tailored to their experience and unique superpowers that enrich our work. We're proud to have such a unique team, thanks to the diverse perspectives, talents, and incredible people behind them. Maciej is an experienced and passionate product owner who makes sure the Community runs smoothly. Ana is a natural leader, excelling in team management. Agata is an expert in marketing, networking, and cross-team cooperation. Iza can translate any data and numbers into insightful conclusions. Michał is a talented UI designer and a meticulous Product Ideas manager. And there’s me – I joined three months ago and I love it already. As for my role, I find great joy in content creation and project management. Despite our differences, we share a common passion: helping people. We’re the right people in the right place, as the work culture at Dynatrace supports openness, curiosity, authenticity, and providing meaningful answers. All Dynatracers share and are driven by these values, so it’s no wonder our product—Dynatrace—is an excellent tool that makes customers' lives easier. With deep observability, intelligence, and automation, Dynatrace modernizes and optimizes cloud operations and simply ensures the software works perfectly. The Dynatrace platform leverages AI to anticipate future behaviors, deliver precise answers and intelligent automation, automatically provide recommendations, create suggested workflows or dashboards, and let people use natural language to explore, solve, and complete tasks. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Community Team is vital when it comes to bridging the gap between our company and customers. Our Community isn’t just a platform for knowledge sharing; it’s a vivid space where individuals come together to solve problems, share insights, and build lasting relationships, often meeting in person. We prioritize making self-service easy for our visitors, ensuring they can quickly find resources to address their needs. By creating an environment where our guests feel heard, we facilitate valuable connections between them and product development teams. This allows us to gather insights into their needs, ideas, and real-life use cases, which in return improves Dynatrace offerings. Our efforts directly align with Dynatrace's core values: Innovate with Passion, Engage with Purpose, and Win with Integrity. By creating diverse content that appeals to a broad audience, we support critical company goals, such as enhancing our Go-To-Market strategy. Collaborating closely with marketing, sales, customer success managers, and developers, we increase visibility and access to expert support, ultimately enriching the customer experience. This approach not only reinforces the Community’s value but also advances Dynatrace’s mission to provide exceptional solutions to clients. 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 platform that brings experts, clients, and partners together around our product. One of its incredible advantages is that it collaborates with many departments across the organization, including product managers, engineers, developers, technical experts, sales, documentation, marketing, etc. The Community is designed to enable Dynatrace users to share knowledge, tips, and tricks while also allowing them to solve their problems in real time. A vital aspect of the Community is the feedback channel and a space where clients can propose product improvements and new solutions. This allows the product to better meet users' expectations by fostering dialogue. The Community also addresses challenges such as empowering users to troubleshoot independently, facilitating cross-department collaboration, improving post-purchase customer experience, and driving continuous product enhancement based on user input. 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. The Dynatrace Community is a highly dynamic organization, constantly generating new ideas and implementing those that improve our work. Recently, we collaborated with several product managers and key decision-makers within a range of departments - R&D, Documentation, Developers, Product, Support - to enhance the overall customer experience and satisfaction. Our main objective was to simplify one of the core reasons the Community is so valuable—self-service and problem-solving, increase CSAT, and to deflect chat conversations and number of raised tickets. The reason behind it was the challenge of scattered problem solutions located in different, non-related resources. That's why we created a Troubleshooting Forum where users can share use cases, detailing their problems and providing solutions. These posts are usually well-received, generating a lot of views, engagement, and gratitude from the Community members. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Community's success is mostly measured in bounced support tickets, increased page views (the most popular posts have around 300,000 views!), likes and comments given. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Besides increased values mentioned above, our actions result in Increased customer adoption, Shorter onboarding time for new features, Increased Customer advocacy. 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 played a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals for the year. Our objectives included increasing the number of active users, posts, and page views, enhancing customer experience and support through effective product idea management, and creating engaging content. Additionally, we wanted to establish groups where users with shared interests could connect and ensure that self-service and problem-solving were quick and easy. Khoros, a standout multi-faceted platform, enabled all of these by providing a robust and flexible platform that allowed us to manage and grow our Community efficiently. The ability to create specialized groups, facilitate content sharing, and offer seamless self-service solutions helped us meet these goals. However, we couldn’t have achieved this without the promotion of the Community and strong collaboration with other teams, who played a key role in increasing visibility and engagement within the Community. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The Khoros Communities solution provided a powerful and flexible platform for effectively managing and growing our Community. A key feature is the Product Idea Forum, vital for maintaining client communication, gathering feedback, and continuously improving our product. Additionally, we really appreciate the ability to create specialized groups, enabling users with shared interests to connect and boosting participation. The platform also simplified content sharing, allowing us to create engaging materials that resonated with our audience. Its self-service capabilities made issue resolution quick and easy.Sisense
Author Details: Name: David Raynor Title: Senior Community Manager Company: Sisense Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I joined Sisense as a Technical Account Manager in November 2022, started with the Community team in December 2023 as a Developer Liaison, and took over as Community Manager in January 2024. Sisense is a cloud-based business intelligence (BI) and analytics platform that helps businesses gather, analyze, and visualize data from multiple sources. It's designed to help businesses make informed decisions by providing a user-friendly interface for data exploration and reporting. We are a two-person Community team. Jackie Cordell and I handle the day-to-day operations of the community, identify and execute community projects and events, and report on community metrics. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Sisense Community strives to empower members to find solutions through continued learning and collaboration. We showcase best practices, interesting use cases, and top users. The Sisense Community helps users to implement Sisense more effectively and efficiently. That supports Sisense's goals of customer retention and expansion. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Sisense Community was underperforming, with low participation and shrinking growth. Internal teams were not confident in the community experience and hesitated to recommend it to their customers. Customer retention and growth were suffering as customers were not able to quickly find answers for their questions and solve problems. Community is an integral part of improving those metrics. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. When I started the community, we were focused on engaging directly with the community to rebuild trust with our users. Responding to posts in a timely and closing the loop were the first actions we took to prove that we are dedicated to creating an active and engaged forum. The result is that engagement is up across the board, growing by 100% - 300% YoY. Internal engagement has also increased, with technical resources participating in the community by answering forum posts, creating Knowledge Base articles, and promoting the community to their customers. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Customer retention and revenue growth are lagging indicators of Community engagement, so we have not been able to quantify the ROI yet. However, as Community engagement continues to grow we expect to see reduced churn and increased expansion. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We focus on user engagement. We want to see our current users engaging more, asking questions, providing solutions, viewing KB docs and Blogs, and generally being more active and engaged. As we create ways to tie community engagement with increased customer lifetime value, reduced support costs, and reduced churn, those will become important ROI markers for us. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Our Customer Success team has been very engaged and helpful in moving us toward our goals. Their support team has been quick to respond to tickets, and I appreciate the Khoros Forums also. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The ability to send an email escalation when a post has not been responded to has been very helpful, as has the assistance of the CS team to help us monitor our KPIs.Fortinet
Author Details: Name: Kate McMillan Title: Service Technology Manager Company: Fortinet Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I’m part of the Community team for Fortinet. Founded more than 20 years ago in Sunnyvale, California, Fortinet continues to be a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our portfolio of over 50 enterprise-grade products is the largest integrated offering available, delivering proven cybersecurity everywhere you need it. More than 755,000 customers trust Fortinet solutions, which are among the most deployed, most patented, and most validated in the industry. Our team works as part of the support side of the business, building the Fortinet Community which provides a single source of support knowledge and community for our customers and our worldwide partner network. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Fortinet’s mission is ‘Securing people, devices, and data everywhere’. Our aim is to provide customers with the information they need at the time they need it, facilitating quick solutions with minimal customer effort. We build community-based solutions which put the customer first, connecting our users with the most relevant content from our wide network of product experts, allowing them to keep their people, devices and data secure. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We created the Fortinet Community in 2021, bringing together multiple disparate systems to provide our customers with a single place to find answers, collaborate and share ideas. Since that time, we have grown to a community of 125,000 registered members globally with 41 million page views per year and 6.5 million unique visitors. We put the community in place for various groups across the Fortinet ecosystem: our customers, support teams, partners and distributors, sales and sales engineers make use of the Community on a daily basis. The Community was intended to solve the challenge of providing information and answers to Fortinet’s extensive customer base on the range of 50+ leading security products we provide. As the largest installed base of network firewalls in the industry, we are serving a vast audience. We also needed to scale this wealth of expert knowledge so that it could be made available to as many people as possible, 24/7. We wanted to enable our teams who interact with our customers in chat to have a seamless and consistent experience. We also wanted this experience to take advantage of our existing knowledge base to reduce time to resolution and set the stage for more advanced interactions with Generative AI capabilities. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Major Win: Community Powered Knowledge Since the launch of Community in 2021, we have seen three years of growth in terms of the content provided, membership numbers and engagement with the Community platform. One of our goals of the program is the promotion of centralized and reusable knowledge within our support ecosystem. With over 50 products in the security arena, Fortinet is constantly evolving, and we want to make sure the wealth of knowledge and technical expertise within our organization is available for customers to find when they need help. The Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program at Fortinet aims to do just that; we operate on the KCS principle that “all of us are smarter than one of us” and we work to capture that knowledge so that it can be reused to help our customers again and again. We work hand in hand with colleagues globally including TAC Support teams, Advanced Support, Sales Engineers and Specialists to capture knowledge and craft it into knowledge articles, which live on the Community. These are constantly evolving as our engineers update these articles to ensure they remain relevant and up to date. By leveraging a federated search engine (SearchUnify) alongside Khoros we can combine all our support data in Community – including additional content sources such as our documentation, websites, video content, and leading FortiGuard library so that customers find an answer from one unified UI. The KCS education program is strongly interlinked with the Community platform as well. With regular newsletters, training sessions and constant feedback loops we are working to build and extend this knowledge sharing culture. The win for Fortinet here is the ability to develop content at scale and Khoros helps us do this with a unified publishing engine. Our customers and partners have also been empowered with the ability to suggest article edits and submit new article ideas so we can work with our community to develop content based on their input. The change in perspective for our engineering teams has been massive as we shift the mindset towards capturing knowledge and creating articles. We work closely with this audience, running frequent communications, feedback sessions and providing incentives to show appreciation for strong contributions. Monthly newsletters call out our top contributors to both the Knowledge Baseand Forum, with rewards and recognition for those who are going above and beyond to help us grow Community. When we see team members embracing the KCS principles, their teammates can nominate them to receive a ‘KCS Champion’ award, to highlight their contributions and continue to build awareness of their achievements and the program. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We have been seeing a steady upward trend in the quantity of high-quality articles being produced to create knowledge on the community platform. We have seen a 179% YoY increase in the number of Knowledge Articles created by our internal experts. We are also seeing a huge increase in the number of Knowledge Articles being updated on the Community. This is valuable because it keeps our body of knowledge up to date, therefore both our engineer and customer audiences have a reliable, well-maintained library of information to access when they need to find an answer. Updates to Knowledge Base articles have increased 211% YoY. In addition, we have been able to scale support at operationally efficient levels while the business expands year over year. The number of members registering with the site is up 357% YoY, and member entrances have increased by 310% YoY. We also see increased participation across our global network in the support organization with teams from all regions contributing to our hub of Fortinet knowledge on the Khoros platform. Another positive outcome is the rate at which our Knowledge Articles are attached to support cases. Attaching an article to a support case – i.e., signaling that the article was used to help the case - helps us track how frequently articles are being used to solve our customer issues, and measure knowledge reuse across the support organization. Our attach rate has increased by 155% since we have started monitoring this KPI. We have built a network of KCS ‘coaches’ globally, who work within our support teams, promoting the benefits of creating reusable knowledge and guiding our teams as we continue to navigate the huge shift towards these principles. As with any successful KCS Program, strong buy in and support from senior leadership has also played a huge part in the success of the program: “A solid knowledge platform is a critical step to being able to satisfy customers' ever growing need to help themselves to solve problems quickly and efficiently; answering once and offsetting those same questions that come from all corners of our global customer base. Fortinet Community has absolutely excelled in standing up as a go-to resource in which we at Fortinet and customers alike can trust, knowing that if there are answers they can be found quickly. This is a key enabler to allowing us more time for thorough research and resolution of the tougher cases, so hats off and big thanks to the Community team in providing the launchpad for the next step in the journey - knowledge-centered customer support.” - Dave Monery, Global VP Support A further business outcome we have seen is improvement in the customer experience on Community. Through the Khoros Value Analytics survey, we can maintain a constant feedback loop with customers, providing an opportunity to hear about their experiences: “Awesome articles that help new community members. As a new member, it can be very confusing to navigate the world of Fortinet so these support articles can be helpful.” “The Forum has a certain quality of loyalty and 'family vibe' while being professional at the same time which I've never encountered elsewhere.” Catering to a huge range of customers with vastly varying backgrounds and technical expertise means we are constantly striving for a balance between supporting our customers who are getting started with Fortinet and those who have many years of experience with our product set. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased self-service success rate Our self-service success rate (i.e. the number of customers who can find what they are looking for when they come to the Community) has improved since the introduction of the KCS Program and our investment in the Community. The Self-Service Success reported by our customers has increased steadily from an average of 62% in H1 2023 to 71% in H1 2024. We are on track for 77% for Q3 2024. We continue to implement further measures to make content as easy to find as possible, including eliminating duplicate content and analyzing search data to improve findability. We also measure CSAT on Community, and we have seen a steady increase here as well. Hand in hand with seeing more self-service, we see fewer tickets per customer. Despite rapid growth in the business, our ticket volumes are stable, representing a reduced support cost and ability to deliver a support experience that consistently delivers high Customer Satisfaction scores. Khoros Chat implementation The success of Community has led us to implement Khoros Chat, to extend the reuse of knowledge and create a seamless experience for customers, where agent knowledge and community content can dovetail to build positive outcomes. This allows us to bring automation to our customers as they seek support; the interlinking of Chat with our Community is a perfect opportunity to suggest Community content, such as Knowledge articles and relevant forum threads. Increased collaboration across teams within Fortinet We work closely with colleagues in the Documentation department, and cross-promote content between the ‘Doc site’ (docs.fortinet.com) and Community. Although these are different categories of information, there are clear links between the two. We have identified useful articles relevant to documents and useful documents relevant to articles. Creating cross-links between these two information sources enables us to further improve the experience for our customers and get them the information they need as quickly as possible. The Marketing team also work closely with the Community team; from SEO and optimizing our content for findability, to ‘getting started’ initiatives aimed at creating a smooth journey for customers who are just beginning their Fortinet experience. We also collaborate with teams across the business to build dedicated ‘Group Pages’ on Community where there is a special interest or business need. These groups bring people together to solve problems and share knowledge in specific areas, such as Professional Services and Advanced Support. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The platform’s ability to create custom workflows We have been able to create workflows which fit our needs around submitting articles, review steps and publishing due to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. We can easily manage roles and permissions to allow processes to work efficiently for each user type. This has been important as our needs are constantly evolving through our adoption of KCS methods. Khoros APIs for custom reporting and analytics By integrating our Tableau reporting tools via Khoros APIs we have combined critical Community and Knowledge metrics with our people and case related data to create insightful and actionable views of our activities. This visibility allows us to track our performance across all teams and regions and helps us measure the impact of the Community and our Self-Service initiatives. Ability to scale and platform stability We have seen massive amounts of growth in the Fortinet community over the last three years. The Khoros Community platform has been able to handle more than 20M visits per year with minimal services interruptions. Since our knowledge base is housed on the Fortinet community, these attributes are critical to our success in delivering support every day to our customers. Seamless integration with Khoros Chat Rolling out Khoros Chat to work alongside Community enhances our ability to provide world class support at enterprise level. Our agents have a complete view of the wealth of information available to them in Community, combined with a feature rich chat platform, allowing us to best serve our customer base, solve issues and feed back into the knowledge loop we are forming. Ability to merge other Communities post-acquisition Khoros has enabled us to merge other communities with the Fortinet Community as Fortinet continues to grow as a business. As we acquire other organizations, we can integrate their content with our own, building customized Group pages and functionality where required, to extend their own customer experience and facilitate a smooth transition thanks to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have worked with Khoros to build a strong community, increase our membership numbers and create a single source of troubleshooting knowledge for our customers to learn, share and collaborate on. By expanding our Khoros product set to include live chat, we have brought further support options to our customer base, to get them the help they need as quickly as possible. The Khoros CSM team have helped us work towards our knowledge reuse goals, and the flexibility of Khoros credits has allowed us to complete additional projects including a Data Deep Dive to better understand our audience and how they are using community. The ability of the Khoros platform to scale with us as we grow to millions of page views and high volumes of content has been instrumental to our success with the KCS program so far. KCS and the reuse of knowledge from our collective experience will continue to be front and center of our community strategy moving forwards. This will feed into maintaining our KPIs, engaging with our users and promoting the value of Community. Most importantly, our knowledge base is serving as the foundation for multiple upcoming Generative AI offerings for our customers and our teams. We will continue to: Strive to provide the best possible experience for our customers on community and ensure they can find what they are looking for. Work with our support teams to provide high quality, relevant content to help them solve issues quickly. Collaborate with different areas of the Business internally to innovate and create new Community experiences. Recognize and reward our super user community who go above and beyond to support our peers. Ensure everyone can be a part of engaging with community and feel the benefits. In 2025 we will continue to develop our community offering with further custom group pages, expansion of our super user offering, and further promotion of the amazing things achieved by the Community team. Generative AI will play a major role for Fortinet and Khoros as we look to take advantage of some of the new capabilities of the platform including Agent Assist AI and our own Gen AI technologies working together to provide an even more seamless agent and customer experience.Atlassian
Author Details: Name: Janice James Title: Community Manager Company: Atlassian Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Hi! I’m a community manager on the online (forum) team led by Monique van den Berg. We’re a mighty team of six tackling all the things online for Atlassian! How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The forum team is the beating heart of Atlassian community programs. We support the company goal of helping more people in our community self serve their own success journey. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Community is a native concept to Atlassian. Company founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes hosted the first local Atlassian user group meetup in 2006. Now, as a global company, Atlassian continues to unite users by centering the customer experience around its community and learning programs. Atlassian's community consists of robust learning, champion, events (ACE), and creator programs. The democratized nature of information in communities makes them a natural conduit for product-led businesses like Atlassian and a figurative safe harbor for users to freely exchange knowledge. The challenge we were looking to solve was how to successfully influence community-led growth across a global organization. To address this, Atlassian formed a team of community strategists to guide internal customers (platform and product teams) on how to effectively leverage community programs in their go-to-market strategies. Strategists work directly with product and platform teams to integrate community programs into their workflows, resulting in increased engagement (from Atlassian team members and users), an enhanced product feedback & ideation loop, and increased product/feature awareness. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Formed in early 2024, the community strategist team swiftly addressed the challenge of integrating community strategies across Atlassian's diverse portfolio of teams. The opportunity: Leverage the Khoros community platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement. The team innovated by conducting community-led growth planning workshops, bringing together teams from across the Atlassian solutions portfolio. These workshops resulted in tailored community strategies for each team, aligned with their specific KPIs. For example, the Atlassian Intelligence team focused on an end-to-end plan for the launch of Rovo and growing group membership by 125%, while the Confluence team aimed to boost Atlassian team member engagement in the forum and as speakers at their events. By facilitating collaboration, we overcame the challenge of creating cohesive community strategies that respected each product team's unique needs. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As a newly formed team driving internal enablement, we're in the early stages of our initiatives. However, in addition to the metrics already mentioned (product/feature awareness, engagement, and feedback) the team is influencing the following community and learning organization KPIs with our work in enabling community-led growth: Online community MAU Community and Proprietary events attendance Learning courses and certifications completed From our example above of Atlassian Intelligence, Rovo, and Confluence - The outcomes measured from their tailored strategies at the close of last quarter were successfully launching the Rovo product board and associated gamification challenges with strong Atlassian team member engagement, along with a 53% increase in group membership for Atlassian Intelligence KPI. With Confluence, we successfully influenced their KPIs with a 13% increase in accepted answers + a 62% increase in Atlassian Speakers at their events. An early win was the creation of a series of gamified learning initiatives within the community ecosystem for Atlassian Intelligence, Loom, and Confluence. This initiative leveraged the Khoros community to facilitate post-live event discussions within the forum. This led to increased engagement (posts, kudos) in those spaces of 6%, 12%, and 74%, respectively. Another example is we ran a month-long Jira July product love campaign, where users participated in forum activities that deepened their knowledge of Jira while showcaseing how it’s helped set their business teams up for success. This initiative contributed to a ~53% QoQ increase in posts to the Jira collection. These early wins have been crucial in demonstrating the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to wider adoption across the organization and positioning our community at the center of our product development and user engagement efforts. We expect to have more quantifiable data in the coming months as our initiatives mature. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We’re still in the early stages of gathering long-term data, however we've already observed promising progress outcomes that indicate positive trends in addressing our challenges: Diversified Community Engagement: By tactically engaging teams, we’re aiming to expand community event offerings, creating more touchpoints for user interaction and knowledge sharing. Increase in Atlassian-Hosted Events: We've seen a notable uptick in the number of Atlassian-hosted community events. This increase is expected to positively impact our CSAT and NPS scores as users benefit from more direct interactions with Atlassian experts and peers. Enhanced Internal Involvement: Atlassian team member involvement within our community ecosystem has markedly increased. This deeper engagement will empower users to resolve their questions and create on-demand knowledge as more Atlassian team members actively participate in community discussions. Structured Engagement Playbooks: We've developed comprehensive playbooks for different internal stakeholder groups on how to engage with the community. These resources are aimed at empowering more Atlassian team members to effectively reach and support community members. Broader Organizational Integration: We've observed a deeper permeation of community initiatives throughout the Atlassian organization. As more teams become equipped and utilize community channels in their workflows, we anticipate adoption of community-led growth will have significant mutually beneficial outcomes. Enhanced Internal Enablement: By tactically enabling internal teams, we're creating more 'stickiness' for community programs internally overall. Initial outcomes are laying the groundwork for the team influence on measurable improvements in key areas such as customer lifetime value, support deflection, and overall customer satisfaction. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? We can directly attribute success to the Khoros platform's ability to be enterprise-ready. While the Atlassian community does have a dedicated engineering team, many of the features and capabilities used in our work are 'out-of-the-box' functionality. Many of our tactical recommendations for community-led growth are achieved using the Khoros out-of-the-box functionality. The platform's enterprise-ready features have allowed us to easily and quickly scale community initiatives for teams across our product suite. For instance, the badge and group hub features enable community strategists to easily spin up experiments, resulting in increased traffic and engagement in those spaces. Overall, the platform enables us to provide a gamified centralized knowledge exchange, improve awareness of our portfolios capabilities, and provide a fun and rewarding user experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our partnership with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing the challenges of a community program with complex needs. Working with a platform partner capable of providing the right resources at the right time has ensured Atlassian can implement initiatives that utilize the platform effectively. We’d also like to note the training and resources made available to users. Khoros Academy and live sessions have empowered our team to maximize platform's potential. This was particularly helpful when we onboarded four community managers at once! Throughout our partnership, Khoros has consistently demonstrated its commitment to our success. The holistic support on offer from the team has been vital in addressing challenges unique to our program and helping drive our community initiatives forward. Cheers!GoTo
Author Details: Name: Glenn Dobson Title: Manager, Community and Social Media Support Company: GoTo Tell us about you, your company, and your team? GoTo believes that in a flexibility-first world, great work can happen anywhere. That mindset has helped us fulfill the promise of reliability, connection, and simplicity for tens of millions of people through our portfolio of products, including GoTo Connect, GoTo Webinar, and LogMeIn Rescue. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The GoTo Community team utilizes a two-pronged approach to support our Company goals. The first focuses on Customer Support and Success which we achieve through a tailored proactive approach based on our members' feedback. The second focuses on Customer Education and Product Innovation so that our members receive more than just a Solution and our Product teams not only see a feature request, but also a use case supporting it. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The GoTo Community is the combination of two existing communities, and as a result offers some unique challenges. Made up of thirteen different product communities across three lines of Business, a one size fits all approach has never been an option. While Customer Support and Success is a universal goal, what that means varies between each member group. We work cross functionally with multiple teams across GoTo, often providing a deeper level of understanding of our customers and their needs. Our thirteen communities range from mature (10+ years), to newly established and growing. With each we strive to understand their unique needs and preferences, and then provide support and engagement that is accurate, timely and delivered with empathy. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. One of the biggest challenges we have faced recently is the introduction of a new generation of products. Change is always challenging, especially when your customer base is comfortable with your legacy solution. We utilized our community to capture detailed customer feedback critical to our Product teams. Our members aided in identifying areas that needed more attention as well as quality of life improvements earlier in the process. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The GoTo Community allowed us to gather more detailed feedback from our customers and provide our Product teams with more context around their in product survey results. It empowered us to have real conversations with our customers and provide them with information and solutions in ways that answered their specific needs. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have always benefited from the fantastic support Khoros and our Account Manager provides, but the shared knowledge of the Atlas Community members cannot be understated.HubSpot
Author Details: Name: Gabrielle Herrera Title: Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth Company: HubSpot Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Community is an amplifier. Layering human connection on top of any of our customer-facing efforts makes them better. Our mission is to educate, connect and inspire the HubSpot community. In 2023 we showed that through hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, spreading HubSpot advocacy across the web, and by driving access and engagement to some of the hardest audiences to reach. In 2024, we're turning this amplifier up to 11. Our focus is to provide a human touch at scale using Community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. Our teams include Success Community, Communities of Practice, Identity based Communities (The Spot) and ensuring we’re spreading our advocates (Champions community) love throughout the community. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Using experimentation and scalable approaches, the Community Strategy & Operations team helps HubSpot identify hot pockets of community interest and value, and then scale those opportunities into valuable and sustainable communities for our ecosystem members. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers want to be guided and get personalized examples & advice (often preferably from a human). We have no shortage of great resources for our customers, but they don’t always get utilized. We need to spend our highly-talented CSMs’ time on high-leverage moments and stakeholders, not gathering links for front-line reps - but as we continue to succeed, there are even more people vying for CSM time. Through Community, we can scale success so reps can focus on leverage points, without removing the human touch from the experience by transforming into a Community Success Center. Peer responses and public answers save us potentially multimillions per year in support costs (and lift Partners up). Community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation. The Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users and developers on the HubSpot Community to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent and invaluable expertise. The Community Success Center allows HubSpot to become more efficient while keeping a human touch. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Evolving from a support community aimed at answering a single, point-in-time question to a recurring, lively success destination has been our major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, Customer Success content lives in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customer apply our tools to their needs efficiently and effectively. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The HubSpot Community sees 4 million visits per year and 14k posts annually. 96% of solutions are provided by peers and 98% of posts are replied to within 24 hours. In collaboration with the Product Marketing team, we’ve facilitated 30 product Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions YTD, providing customers real life examples and access to the Product team in a cost-efficient manner. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In 2024 we launched a federated search including Knowledge Base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from our Developer Changelog. We also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a one-stop shop to the right solution. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for. We’ve been able to improve relevancy, and in turn adoption of the Community, by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers. Example of our Professional tier Community:https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-HubSpot/ct-p/professional What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The HubSpot Community (community.hubspot.com) launched in 2016 on Khoros (formerly Lithium) as the solution for free user support. Since 2016 the Community has grown in visibility and use cases. We have over 400,000 members (all time), > 1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. We can also associate community usage with healthier customers. Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Since incorporating CARE into our team, we’ve been able to streamline processes and ensure we’re putting the right resources into the right initiatives and biggest value-adds for our customers. Before CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators spent a lot of time in moderation, completing duplicative tasks and trying to clear up confusion around the division of work. This inefficient process negatively impacted how many Accepted Solutions - those peer-to-peer responses that deflect support tickets - they were able to accept each month. With CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, which help the person who raised the question and help the person who responded excel in the gamification of the Community, encouraging them to continue to engage. This efficiency win also allows the Community Managers to spend time on strategic initiatives such as our Workflows Library and build high-impact cross functional relationships with internal stakeholders.HubSpot
Author Details: Name: Gabrielle Herrera Title: Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth Company: HubSpot Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Community is an amplifier. Layering human connection on top of any of our customer-facing efforts makes them better. Our mission is to educate, connect and inspire the HubSpot community. In 2023 we showed that through hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, spreading HubSpot advocacy across the web, and by driving access and engagement to some of the hardest audiences to reach. In 2024, we're turning this amplifier up to 11. Our focus is to provide a human touch at scale using Community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. Our teams include Success Community, Communities of Practice, Identity based Communities (The Spot) and ensuring we’re spreading our advocates (Champions community) love throughout the community. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Using experimentation and scalable approaches, the Community Strategy & Operations team helps HubSpot identify hot pockets of community interest and value, and then scale those opportunities into valuable and sustainable communities for our ecosystem members. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers want to be guided and get personalized examples & advice (often preferably from a human). We have no shortage of great resources for our customers, but they don’t always get utilized. We need to spend our highly-talented CSMs’ time on high-leverage moments and stakeholders, not gathering links for front-line reps - but as we continue to succeed, there are even more people vying for CSM time. Through Community, we can scale success so reps can focus on leverage points, without removing the human touch from the experience by transforming into a Community Success Center. Peer responses and public answers save us potentially multimillions per year in support costs (and lift Partners up). Community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation. The Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users and developers on the HubSpot Community to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent and invaluable expertise. The Community Success Center allows HubSpot to become more efficient while keeping a human touch. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Evolving from a support community aimed at answering a single, point-in-time question to a recurring, lively success destination has been our major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, Customer Success content lives in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customer apply our tools to their needs efficiently and effectively. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The HubSpot Community sees 4 million visits per year and 14k posts annually. 96% of solutions are provided by peers and 98% of posts are replied to within 24 hours. In collaboration with the Product Marketing team, we’ve facilitated 30 product Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions YTD, providing customers real life examples and access to the Product team in a cost-efficient manner. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In 2024 we launched a federated search including Knowledge Base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from our Developer Changelog. We also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a one-stop shop to the right solution. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for. We’ve been able to improve relevancy, and in turn adoption of the Community, by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers. Example of our Professional tier Community:https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-HubSpot/ct-p/professional What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The HubSpot Community (community.hubspot.com) launched in 2016 on Khoros (formerly Lithium) as the solution for free user support. Since 2016 the Community has grown in visibility and use cases. We have over 400,000 members (all time), > 1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. We can also associate community usage with healthier customers. Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Since incorporating CARE into our team, we’ve been able to streamline processes and ensure we’re putting the right resources into the right initiatives and biggest value-adds for our customers. Before CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators spent a lot of time in moderation, completing duplicative tasks and trying to clear up confusion around the division of work. This inefficient process negatively impacted how many Accepted Solutions - those peer-to-peer responses that deflect support tickets - they were able to accept each month. With CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, which help the person who raised the question and help the person who responded excel in the gamification of the Community, encouraging them to continue to engage. This efficiency win also allows the Community Managers to spend time on strategic initiatives such as our Workflows Library and build high-impact cross functional relationships with internal stakeholders.Instructure
Author Details: Name: K Lundstrum Title: Community Manager Company: Instructure Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Instructure is the innovative education technology company behind Canvas, the world’s most popular learning management system and developing Ed-cosystem. As a company, we seek to elevate student success, amplify the power of teaching, and inspire everyone to learn together. Our Community team is at the heart of it all, driving vision and strategy in content, engagement, and innovation within the Instructure Community, a Khoros community. We’re dedicated to ensuring our users and over 2.2 million Community members have access to a wealth of knowledge, self-support resources, and peer collaboration. Through the Community, we empower educators, administrators, and students to discover solutions, share best practices, and access valuable resources—all while fostering a vibrant environment for learning and growth. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our role is at the core of Instructure’s mission—empowering users to be more self-sufficient and providing scalable, effective customer support through our online community. By fostering peer-to-peer problem solving and collaborating with internal teams to share best practices, we’re committed to enhancing teaching and learning. Our efforts drive impact at scale, ensuring that millions of users can quickly find the solutions they need, reducing reliance on traditional support channels, and creating a more efficient, dynamic support experience across the entire Instructure Ed-cosystem! Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Instructure Community, one of the first of its kind and now nearing its 15th year, has grown and evolved across three platforms while staying true to its inception: to capture the energy, excitement, and learning of InstructureCon, our annual conference, and keep it alive year-round online—it's the ultimate perpetual unconference! Built for our diverse user base of educators, administrators, IT professionals, and students, the Community offers quick, easy access to a wealth of resources, tips, and troubleshooting. It's more than just support; it’s a vibrant, multi-faceted self-service hub where users can tap into content created by both Instructure employees and their peers. Today, powered by Khoros, the Community continues to thrive as a scalable solution, enabling our 2.2 million members and millions more visitors to find answers fast. The collaborative spirit of peer-to-peer support and self-service empowers users to solve problems on their own, while also reducing the demand on traditional support channels. In fact, we’ve seen a clear link between increased page views and a decreased need for direct Support assistance. The impact of this self-service success is huge! At scale, it means significant case avoidance for our first-line support agents, saving the company money every quarter while freeing up our teams to tackle more complex, time-consuming cases. It’s a win-win that fuels both efficiency and innovation for everyone involved! What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. This year, the challenge we set out to solve was scaling the Instructure Community to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth through acquisitions and new product development. As Instructure’s Ed-cosystem continues to expand, so does the need for consistent, efficient, and scalable support across our entire product suite. With each new product added to the portfolio, the demand for quick access to resources, self-service tools, and peer collaboration grows—making the role of the Community more critical than ever. To meet this challenge, we focused on applying the proven strategies that have made the Instructure Community so successful to the broader Ed-cosystem. Our goal was simple: extend the Community's power and reach to support every corner of Instructure’s expanding portfolio. By integrating new products and user groups into the existing Community framework, we could provide a unified, scalable self-service platform that empowers users to find solutions across the entire product line, reducing strain on traditional support channels. While we’re beginning to expand the impact of the Community, the journey is just getting started. Customers are gradually discovering the wealth of resources available, and engagement is steadily building. As users explore and start tapping into the peer-to-peer support and self-service options, we expect the benefits to unfold over time. The true scale of savings through case avoidance will become more apparent as more members engage with the platform. By applying the same proven strategies that made Canvas LMS successful, we’re laying the foundation for a future where the Community plays a pivotal role in reducing support demands and creating a scalable experience across all of Instructure’s products. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Thanks to our commitment to fostering an environment of innovation, we’ve experienced an incredible 3% membership growth quarter over quarter! This growth isn’t just numbers on a page; it’s a testament to the needs this Community meets. New members are joining us, excited to be part of a vibrant ecosystem that prioritizes learning, advocacy, and thought leadership. We’re not just a community; we’re a movement! Our strategy to create “connection voracity” has truly paid off. We’re thrilled to report that 69% of our visitors found exactly what they were looking for! This means our resources are hitting the mark, empowering our users to engage deeply and meaningfully with our content. And it doesn’t stop there—an astounding 87% of our users rated our guides as helpful. This is more than just a number; it reflects our dedication to providing valuable insights that empower our users to thrive. When our members feel supported and informed, they become our greatest advocates, spreading the word about the invaluable solutions Instructure provides, and resources available within our community! We’ve become the ultimate source for self-enablement and self-support for every Instructure Ed-cosystem user. The results speak volumes: a staggering 95% accepted solution rate in our Q&A sessions, with a remarkable 72% solution view rate! Users are not just seeking help; they are finding it! This high level of engagement shows that our community is a reliable hub where answers are at their fingertips. Plus, with an impressive 26:1 unique visitors-to-support case ratio, we’re efficiently serving our users while deflecting an average of 1 million support tickets quarterly. This operational efficiency means we can focus even more on enhancing user experiences. When we look at these outcomes, it’s clear that addressing our strategic challenges has driven significant value. We’re not just keeping up; we’re leading the way! The synergy between our innovative offerings, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency creates a powerful narrative of success. We’re building a legacy that will resonate for years to come—a community that champions self-empowerment, fosters meaningful connections, and continually sets the standard for excellence. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Please see the previous question. By fostering self-service through our Khoros Community, we’ve consistently seen significant value in key metrics. Over the past year, our contact deflection rate held steady at26 visits to 1 support case, and we estimate that that deflects an average1 million quarterly support tickets. Additionally, the solution rate within the Community has averaged over 95%, as more users are solving problems through peer-to-peer discussions. These outcomes highlight the success of our strategy in leveraging self-service principles to improve overall customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and increase engagement—scalable community success. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros platform is a powerhouse that supercharges our self-support initiatives! With its advanced features—like custom discussion filters, seamless knowledge base integration, and robust analytics tracking—we’re not just making strides; we’re leaping toward success! These incredible tools empower us to cultivate a vibrant community that thrives on member contributions while giving us the data-driven insights we need to continually refine and elevate our approach. But that’s not all! The ability to personalize user experiences, automate content moderation, and segment content for specific audiences has been an absolute game-changer, driving scalable solutions that make our community truly shine! And let’s talk about integration—thanks to Khoros seamlessly connecting with Instructure’s existing tools and resources, we’ve created an effortless user experience that encourages enthusiastic participation and engagement from our members like never before! Together, we’re not just building a community; we’re igniting a movement where every member feels empowered, valued, and excited to contribute. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Please see the previous question. The combination of an intuitive platform, robust analytics, and the ability to easily scale our initiatives has positioned us to continuously evolve the Instructure Community, delivering immediate and long-term value to our users and our business as we optimize content delivery, create more targeted resources, and improve the overall self-service experience.Alteryx
Author Details: Name: Daniel Menke Title: Senior Community and Customer Success Operation Manager Company: Alteryx Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Alteryx is the leader in analytics automation. We strive to put analytics at everyones fingertips with a no code platform. I have been a part of the world class Alteryx Community for 7 years. Starting out as a moderator I now lead a robust team of developers, engagements specialists, and program managers who make the Alteryx Community a major asset of our offerings to our customers. Our team provides learning, engagement, and connection with our customers and prospects by keeping to our mission to build a place where people come to connect, engage, and learn from one another to drive meaningful outcomes for individuals, organizations, and society at large. Our values separate us from other Community's as we are not bound by convention and understand our members needs and proactively deliver value- added experiences. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? We support our company goals by creating a world class customer experience that allows our customers to move forward in their life cycle journey with support from peers and the great Alteryx Community. Community is one of the first benefits mentioned when buying our products and has allowed 100s of thousands of users become success with our products and their careers. The Alteryx Community is a key value add and has shown to have great impact on renewals and expansions. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our Community team implemented two solutions this year to assist our product organization: a Community-hosted Start Here page and an integration with Aha to simplify product feedback implementation. Our flagship product developers faced a challenge with the existing splash screen in our product—it was an important place for customers to find relevant resources, but their team did not have the development time or visibility into new resources to update the page with fresh content continually. Our solution was to design a custom community “Start Here” page featuring resources from all areas of our Community, with a featured video, a new content section, and tabbed pages with evergreen resources. Our second solution of note was our integration with the Aha platform. The product management team uses Aha to manage customer ideas for Alteryx’s products. The challenge was that we were already collecting ideas in our boards on the Community, but the feedback loop between systems was not seamless. Now, upon reaching a pre-determined “like” threshold, an idea is sent to Aha, enabling the product team to reply to comments and update statuses from within the Aha platform. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. We've recently seen the value of the Start Here page for Community content promotion. Our Alteryx Community podcast, Alter Everything, has seen a stagnation in the listenership, and we’ve been looking for ways to grow the audience. Episode topics vary but often target company awareness, product adoption, and value realization. We began featuring podcast episodes at the top of the Start Here page, and so far, we’ve seen an almost 200% increase in podcast listens for featured episodes compared to non-featured episodes. Our Aha integration has been a major win behind the scenes for our product team and our customers—here is the list of Community ideas that were integrated into our flagship product’s latest release (Alteryx Designer 24.1): Custom Workflow Templates Marketplace Add-Ons Workflow XML parsing Formula functions (3-4 ideas represented) Product option in Summarize Border resizing Disable individual formulas PowerPoint Widescreen IRG Filter Enhancements (2-3 ideas represented) Engine Compatibility Mode option in user settings Windows 11 support Officially supported tools - Make Columns, Expect Equals DCM Migration Missing Macros The product team plans to incorporate at least nine more Community ideas into the next release later this month. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By leveraging the Khoros framework for the Start Here page, we optimized our business resources, leveraging the Community team’s capacity and filling a gap for the product team. The Start Here page also benefits our customers: it gives our team the ability to feature user-generated content in a new way, delighting our customers and increasing loyalty to our brand. Page views have continued to climb as more users migrate to the newest version of Designer. Since the go-live of the page in-product, the English version has received over 700K views. This effort has advanced our Alteryx Community vision: to create a leading digital experience to connect and empower analytical-minded people. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Both customer experience improvements discussed contribute to the success of the Alteryx Community. Making users feel seen (via in-product content features) and heard (via ideas implemented) increases their enthusiasm for the platform, which shines through in their willingness to share knowledge and solve problems together. Our universal in-product search (hosted by SearchUnify) also furthers the close relationship between our product and our Community, as Community results and the option to start a discussion show in the search bar in Alteryx Designer. Our impressive 82% CSAT score highlights our Community as a leading source of customer satisfaction. The quick 35-minute response time in our Designer discussion board is a 3% decrease in time to first response YOY. Our members consistently demonstrate their commitment to helping each other succeed and view the Community as the best place to get help from their peers. Here are a few recent unsolicited comments from our users: “The Community is the best part of Alteryx.” “Alteryx community is the best place to learn cool stuff about Alteryx and to share your learnings as well.” “The community has been an essential resource to solve problems we encounter when using Alteryx.” “Love it, this is the best software product community I have ever used over more years than I care to disclose 😊" What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros’ customizability allowed for the development of the Start Here page. Quick updates to the featured content section were made possible utilizing custom content. The ease of use of the admin allows our team to be more agile in responding to requests for content features and ensures our customers see fresh and engaging content each month. The support of international language Communities also contributed to the success of the Start Here page. Our product team set up the multiple Community page embeds so that when a user toggles their preferred language in the product, the Start Here page will pull from the corresponding in-language page. Working with our in-house developer and leaning on the collective expertise of our Khoros’ Atlas Community enabled us to provide seamless integration and support of Product team feedback initiatives. Through a direct integration with the feedback and ticket management platform, Aha, we can directly supply our product team with ideas born on the Community and ensure instantaneous feedback to the Alteryx Community on idea status and next steps. Additionally, we’ve enabled the ability to control the influx of feedback through a like threshold to ensure the most impactful and important ideas are brought directly to the forefront of our Product team’s intake. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? There were three key areas working with Khoros that enabled us to address our challenges: Customizability and agility: Khoros' platform allowed for the creation of the custom Start Here page, designed to bring Community resources and content directly to users in-product. The platform enables quick updates and allows us to meet the evolving needs of our product team and customers at scale. Seamless integration capabilities: Utilizing the robust integration capabilities enabled us to simplify the process of managing product feedback by automating the transfer of ideas and status updates to the product team. Leaning on the collective expertise of the Khoros team and Atlas Community: Along with our internal team’s know-how, we rely on the expert guidance of our Khoros CSM, the robust knowledge libraries in Atlas, and getting peer-to-peer feedback in Atlas discussion forms.
