Fortinet
Author Details: Name: Kate McMillan Title: Service Technology Manager Company: Fortinet Tell us about you, your company, and your team? I’m part of the Community team for Fortinet. Founded more than 20 years ago in Sunnyvale, California, Fortinet continues to be a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Our portfolio of over 50 enterprise-grade products is the largest integrated offering available, delivering proven cybersecurity everywhere you need it. More than 755,000 customers trust Fortinet solutions, which are among the most deployed, most patented, and most validated in the industry. Our team works as part of the support side of the business, building the Fortinet Community which provides a single source of support knowledge and community for our customers and our worldwide partner network. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Fortinet’s mission is ‘Securing people, devices, and data everywhere’. Our aim is to provide customers with the information they need at the time they need it, facilitating quick solutions with minimal customer effort. We build community-based solutions which put the customer first, connecting our users with the most relevant content from our wide network of product experts, allowing them to keep their people, devices and data secure. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We created the Fortinet Community in 2021, bringing together multiple disparate systems to provide our customers with a single place to find answers, collaborate and share ideas. Since that time, we have grown to a community of 125,000 registered members globally with 41 million page views per year and 6.5 million unique visitors. We put the community in place for various groups across the Fortinet ecosystem: our customers, support teams, partners and distributors, sales and sales engineers make use of the Community on a daily basis. The Community was intended to solve the challenge of providing information and answers to Fortinet’s extensive customer base on the range of 50+ leading security products we provide. As the largest installed base of network firewalls in the industry, we are serving a vast audience. We also needed to scale this wealth of expert knowledge so that it could be made available to as many people as possible, 24/7. We wanted to enable our teams who interact with our customers in chat to have a seamless and consistent experience. We also wanted this experience to take advantage of our existing knowledge base to reduce time to resolution and set the stage for more advanced interactions with Generative AI capabilities. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Major Win: Community Powered Knowledge Since the launch of Community in 2021, we have seen three years of growth in terms of the content provided, membership numbers and engagement with the Community platform. One of our goals of the program is the promotion of centralized and reusable knowledge within our support ecosystem. With over 50 products in the security arena, Fortinet is constantly evolving, and we want to make sure the wealth of knowledge and technical expertise within our organization is available for customers to find when they need help. The Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program at Fortinet aims to do just that; we operate on the KCS principle that “all of us are smarter than one of us” and we work to capture that knowledge so that it can be reused to help our customers again and again. We work hand in hand with colleagues globally including TAC Support teams, Advanced Support, Sales Engineers and Specialists to capture knowledge and craft it into knowledge articles, which live on the Community. These are constantly evolving as our engineers update these articles to ensure they remain relevant and up to date. By leveraging a federated search engine (SearchUnify) alongside Khoros we can combine all our support data in Community – including additional content sources such as our documentation, websites, video content, and leading FortiGuard library so that customers find an answer from one unified UI. The KCS education program is strongly interlinked with the Community platform as well. With regular newsletters, training sessions and constant feedback loops we are working to build and extend this knowledge sharing culture. The win for Fortinet here is the ability to develop content at scale and Khoros helps us do this with a unified publishing engine. Our customers and partners have also been empowered with the ability to suggest article edits and submit new article ideas so we can work with our community to develop content based on their input. The change in perspective for our engineering teams has been massive as we shift the mindset towards capturing knowledge and creating articles. We work closely with this audience, running frequent communications, feedback sessions and providing incentives to show appreciation for strong contributions. Monthly newsletters call out our top contributors to both the Knowledge Baseand Forum, with rewards and recognition for those who are going above and beyond to help us grow Community. When we see team members embracing the KCS principles, their teammates can nominate them to receive a ‘KCS Champion’ award, to highlight their contributions and continue to build awareness of their achievements and the program. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We have been seeing a steady upward trend in the quantity of high-quality articles being produced to create knowledge on the community platform. We have seen a 179% YoY increase in the number of Knowledge Articles created by our internal experts. We are also seeing a huge increase in the number of Knowledge Articles being updated on the Community. This is valuable because it keeps our body of knowledge up to date, therefore both our engineer and customer audiences have a reliable, well-maintained library of information to access when they need to find an answer. Updates to Knowledge Base articles have increased 211% YoY. In addition, we have been able to scale support at operationally efficient levels while the business expands year over year. The number of members registering with the site is up 357% YoY, and member entrances have increased by 310% YoY. We also see increased participation across our global network in the support organization with teams from all regions contributing to our hub of Fortinet knowledge on the Khoros platform. Another positive outcome is the rate at which our Knowledge Articles are attached to support cases. Attaching an article to a support case – i.e., signaling that the article was used to help the case - helps us track how frequently articles are being used to solve our customer issues, and measure knowledge reuse across the support organization. Our attach rate has increased by 155% since we have started monitoring this KPI. We have built a network of KCS ‘coaches’ globally, who work within our support teams, promoting the benefits of creating reusable knowledge and guiding our teams as we continue to navigate the huge shift towards these principles. As with any successful KCS Program, strong buy in and support from senior leadership has also played a huge part in the success of the program: “A solid knowledge platform is a critical step to being able to satisfy customers' ever growing need to help themselves to solve problems quickly and efficiently; answering once and offsetting those same questions that come from all corners of our global customer base. Fortinet Community has absolutely excelled in standing up as a go-to resource in which we at Fortinet and customers alike can trust, knowing that if there are answers they can be found quickly. This is a key enabler to allowing us more time for thorough research and resolution of the tougher cases, so hats off and big thanks to the Community team in providing the launchpad for the next step in the journey - knowledge-centered customer support.” - Dave Monery, Global VP Support A further business outcome we have seen is improvement in the customer experience on Community. Through the Khoros Value Analytics survey, we can maintain a constant feedback loop with customers, providing an opportunity to hear about their experiences: “Awesome articles that help new community members. As a new member, it can be very confusing to navigate the world of Fortinet so these support articles can be helpful.” “The Forum has a certain quality of loyalty and 'family vibe' while being professional at the same time which I've never encountered elsewhere.” Catering to a huge range of customers with vastly varying backgrounds and technical expertise means we are constantly striving for a balance between supporting our customers who are getting started with Fortinet and those who have many years of experience with our product set. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased self-service success rate Our self-service success rate (i.e. the number of customers who can find what they are looking for when they come to the Community) has improved since the introduction of the KCS Program and our investment in the Community. The Self-Service Success reported by our customers has increased steadily from an average of 62% in H1 2023 to 71% in H1 2024. We are on track for 77% for Q3 2024. We continue to implement further measures to make content as easy to find as possible, including eliminating duplicate content and analyzing search data to improve findability. We also measure CSAT on Community, and we have seen a steady increase here as well. Hand in hand with seeing more self-service, we see fewer tickets per customer. Despite rapid growth in the business, our ticket volumes are stable, representing a reduced support cost and ability to deliver a support experience that consistently delivers high Customer Satisfaction scores. Khoros Chat implementation The success of Community has led us to implement Khoros Chat, to extend the reuse of knowledge and create a seamless experience for customers, where agent knowledge and community content can dovetail to build positive outcomes. This allows us to bring automation to our customers as they seek support; the interlinking of Chat with our Community is a perfect opportunity to suggest Community content, such as Knowledge articles and relevant forum threads. Increased collaboration across teams within Fortinet We work closely with colleagues in the Documentation department, and cross-promote content between the ‘Doc site’ (docs.fortinet.com) and Community. Although these are different categories of information, there are clear links between the two. We have identified useful articles relevant to documents and useful documents relevant to articles. Creating cross-links between these two information sources enables us to further improve the experience for our customers and get them the information they need as quickly as possible. The Marketing team also work closely with the Community team; from SEO and optimizing our content for findability, to ‘getting started’ initiatives aimed at creating a smooth journey for customers who are just beginning their Fortinet experience. We also collaborate with teams across the business to build dedicated ‘Group Pages’ on Community where there is a special interest or business need. These groups bring people together to solve problems and share knowledge in specific areas, such as Professional Services and Advanced Support. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The platform’s ability to create custom workflows We have been able to create workflows which fit our needs around submitting articles, review steps and publishing due to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. We can easily manage roles and permissions to allow processes to work efficiently for each user type. This has been important as our needs are constantly evolving through our adoption of KCS methods. Khoros APIs for custom reporting and analytics By integrating our Tableau reporting tools via Khoros APIs we have combined critical Community and Knowledge metrics with our people and case related data to create insightful and actionable views of our activities. This visibility allows us to track our performance across all teams and regions and helps us measure the impact of the Community and our Self-Service initiatives. Ability to scale and platform stability We have seen massive amounts of growth in the Fortinet community over the last three years. The Khoros Community platform has been able to handle more than 20M visits per year with minimal services interruptions. Since our knowledge base is housed on the Fortinet community, these attributes are critical to our success in delivering support every day to our customers. Seamless integration with Khoros Chat Rolling out Khoros Chat to work alongside Community enhances our ability to provide world class support at enterprise level. Our agents have a complete view of the wealth of information available to them in Community, combined with a feature rich chat platform, allowing us to best serve our customer base, solve issues and feed back into the knowledge loop we are forming. Ability to merge other Communities post-acquisition Khoros has enabled us to merge other communities with the Fortinet Community as Fortinet continues to grow as a business. As we acquire other organizations, we can integrate their content with our own, building customized Group pages and functionality where required, to extend their own customer experience and facilitate a smooth transition thanks to the flexibility of the Khoros platform. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have worked with Khoros to build a strong community, increase our membership numbers and create a single source of troubleshooting knowledge for our customers to learn, share and collaborate on. By expanding our Khoros product set to include live chat, we have brought further support options to our customer base, to get them the help they need as quickly as possible. The Khoros CSM team have helped us work towards our knowledge reuse goals, and the flexibility of Khoros credits has allowed us to complete additional projects including a Data Deep Dive to better understand our audience and how they are using community. The ability of the Khoros platform to scale with us as we grow to millions of page views and high volumes of content has been instrumental to our success with the KCS program so far. KCS and the reuse of knowledge from our collective experience will continue to be front and center of our community strategy moving forwards. This will feed into maintaining our KPIs, engaging with our users and promoting the value of Community. Most importantly, our knowledge base is serving as the foundation for multiple upcoming Generative AI offerings for our customers and our teams. We will continue to: Strive to provide the best possible experience for our customers on community and ensure they can find what they are looking for. Work with our support teams to provide high quality, relevant content to help them solve issues quickly. Collaborate with different areas of the Business internally to innovate and create new Community experiences. Recognize and reward our super user community who go above and beyond to support our peers. Ensure everyone can be a part of engaging with community and feel the benefits. In 2025 we will continue to develop our community offering with further custom group pages, expansion of our super user offering, and further promotion of the amazing things achieved by the Community team. Generative AI will play a major role for Fortinet and Khoros as we look to take advantage of some of the new capabilities of the platform including Agent Assist AI and our own Gen AI technologies working together to provide an even more seamless agent and customer experience.Qlik
Author Details: Name: Suzanne Macaluso Title: Senior Advisor, Digital Platforms Company: Qlik Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Qlik® helps you use your data to solve problems, meet new objectives, and address critical business needs. My team is responsible for our Community, both front and and back end. We oversee every aspect of the platform and the overall Community program. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our role is pivotal in supporting the overall Community program, strategy, and governance, aligning with the company's strategic objectives from the front end to the back end. This alignment is crucial as it ensures our Community is a healthy, positive environment where our members can feel comfortable collaborating and brainstorming. We work across the entire organization, ensuring we are helping the business meet its needs. We are the heartbeat of Qlik. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Our Community platform was initially conceived with a clear goal in mind: create a space where our customers, partners, students, and prospects could come to ask questions, find answers, and share knowledge anytime, from anywhere. This inclusive platform, open to all, also aimed to ensure our employees were actively involved, demonstrating our commitment, transparency, and the value we place on our members. It's the only platform where our members can reach us 24x7x365. Our use case started with an initiative to support users in a one-to-many service model. The Community was instrumental in allowing our members to ask questions and facilitate answers through their peers. This enabled users to solve problems before opening a support ticket and served to educate and unite members using our solutions. We knew it could be so much more! The Community soon played a crucial role in promoting Qlik events, helping Marketing teams increase event attendance. Product managers came to us looking for a collaborative space to blog about upcoming software releases and technical information and to share information about new features and functionality. They soon realized they could help answer questions and learn from our customers and partners. Customer Success teams wanted to know if their customers were in the Community and were asking us to give demonstrations on all the aspects available in the Community to get their customers more engaged. Our Community soon became the heartbeat of Qlik, where anyone can come and collaborate on all things Qlik. They could even share the Apps they built. This year, we also learned that because of the platform's flexibility and our structure with stakeholders, it doesn’t matter where the team managing the Community lives within an organization. Our team recently moved from Marketing to IT, and the platform demonstrated how easily adaptable it was. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. One of our challenges was a significant increase in spam infiltrating our Community. Our goal was to prevent our members from encountering spam and having to report it. We worked closely with the Khoros team, who played a crucial role in enhancing the spam filter and educating us about the platform's capabilities, of which we were unaware. This collaboration with the Khoros moderation team and our TAM was instrumental in effectively mitigating the spam issue. Knowledge Sharing: Providing a platform for users to find answers and share experiences, which reduced the need for direct support. Engagement: Our Community encourages internal and external members to participate, fostering a strong sense of belonging and transparency. This inclusivity ensures everyone feels informed and part of the larger Qlik Solutions family. Event Participation: Increasing attendance at Qlik events through targeted promotion within the Community. Customer Feedback: Facilitating direct communication between Product Managers and users, allowing for real-time feedback and insights. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Increased Engagement: 26% year-over-year growth in community engagement. Cost Savings: 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection. Membership Growth: A 32% increase in new members, indicating successful outreach and onboarding strategies. Qlik Events: 4.5% increase in event registrations. Blog Views: 66K average monthly blog views. Spam mitigation: Significant improvement following adjustments made to the platform. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Addressing the challenges above led to several positive outcomes, reinforcing our confidence in the Khoros Communities solution and its ability to deliver on our goals. Increased Engagement 26% Year-over-Year Growth: This consistent growth in engagement indicates that users find value in the community, leading to more interactions and discussions. Membership Growth 32% Increase in New Members: The community's openness and active promotion attracted more users, expanding the base of participants who can contribute and benefit from shared knowledge. Reduced Support Tickets Proactive Problem Solving: The community reduced the volume of direct support inquiries by enabling users to find answers through peer support, freeing up resources for more complex issues. 1.4 M ROI saving from Community Support Deflection. Enhanced Event Attendance 4.5% Increase in Registrations: Promoting Qlik events through the community significantly boosted participation, leading to more successful events and greater visibility for Qlik solutions. Improved Customer Insights Feedback Loop with Product Management: The collaborative space allowed product managers to receive real-time user feedback and insights, leading to better-informed product development and feature enhancements. Stronger Customer Relationships Increased Customer Engagement: Customer Success teams demonstrated Community benefits to clients, fostering stronger relationships and increasing customer satisfaction. Employee Involvement Engaged Workforce: Employee participation in the Community enhanced transparency and showed commitment to user success, building trust and a sense of community. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros platform played a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals through several differentiating features and capabilities: User-Friendly Interface The intuitive design made it easy for users to navigate and engage with content, encouraging participation and reducing barriers to entry. Robust Knowledge Management Khoros provided tools for organizing and categorizing content, making it easy for users to find relevant information and solutions quickly. Engagement Tools Features like gamification, badges, and leaderboards motivated users to participate actively and contribute to discussions, fostering a sense of community. Integration Capabilities Seamless integration of other platforms allowed for a unified experience, facilitating user engagement across different touchpoints. Analytics and Insights Built-in analytics provided valuable data on user engagement, content performance, and community health, enabling us to adapt strategies based on real-time feedback. Gamification By utilizing the “Top Kudoed Posts” component time range under “My Profile” -> “Preferences” -> “Kudos,” we created a dynamic user interface on the Community homepage. The dynamic leaderboard component lets users effortlessly view the top engaged users within their selected time frame, motivating them to strive for peak performance across various ranges. Enabling Factors Strong Community Management Dedicated community moderators ensured that discussions were moderated, questions were answered, and content was continually refreshed and promoted. Cross-Departmental Collaboration Involvement from Marketing, Product Management, R&D, Support, and Customer Success teams ensured that community initiatives aligned with broader company goals. Feedback Loops Regularly soliciting user feedback helped refine community strategies and features, ensuring the platform evolved to meet the needs of our members. Promotional Campaigns Targeted campaigns to promote Community participation and upcoming events helped drive traffic and engagement within the platform. The combination of Khoros platform-tailored features and our team's strategic efforts created an ecosystem that supported knowledge sharing and user engagement. By leveraging these strengths, we continue to improve our already thriving Community, which enhanced our members' overall experience and reinforced their loyalty to Qlik Solutions. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our experience with Khoros has given us a strong understanding of irrelevant content in our community. Collaborating with our Khoros moderation team and our TAM has been crucial in addressing our needs and challenges. They offered proactive guidance and advice, helping us navigate decisions and implement changes on the platform. Through discussions about their experiences with other communities, we gained valuable insights and best practices for managing spam and understanding its impact on moderation time. The reports provided by our Khoros team and TAM painted a clear picture that allowed us to refine our engagement model effectively. Our familiarity with Khoros’ tools for tracking engagement trends and customizing content has empowered us to tackle this challenge, keeping our users motivated and connected.Zoom
Author Details: Name: Briuana Green Title: Senior Community Manager Name: Alexis Brown Title: Senior Manager, Global Community and Social Media Company: Zoom Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Zoom is an all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform, to make connecting easier, more immersive, and dynamic for both businesses and individuals. Zoom operates by putting customers first and enabling meaningful connections and facilitating modern collaboration. With solutions like Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Meetings, Zoom Team Chat, Zoom Phone, Zoom Clips, Zoom Contact Center, Zoom Docs, and more all in one offering, we help drive human innovation and deliver exceptional results for our users. The Zoom Community team is part of the Digital Customer Support organization, dedicated to delivering customer satisfaction and resolution through various digital platforms, those including the Zoom community, knowledge base, chatbot, and support web experience. By offering 24/7 online support, we enable accessible resolutions for our customers. Since joining Zoom in 2021, the Community team is proud to continuously make a positive impact on both our customers and our internal teams. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Zoom Community team fosters a healthy, welcoming environment where users are encouraged to seek digital support first. It offers a space for end users to collaborate and find solutions alongside fellow Zoom users. As a company, we are committed to delivering innovative technology and exceptional user experiences. Providing the support customers need to succeed with our products is a top priority, and the Zoom Community is one of many avenues for users to seek help, share knowledge, and collaborate. This positive and supportive online community compliments Zoom's overarching mission of one platform delivering limitless human connection. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Zoom Community was created to meet the needs of Zoom users worldwide, offering a dynamic online forum where individuals can ask questions, find solutions, and collaborate with peers. In response to growing demand for 24/7 online support, the Zoom Community team was established in March 2021. By August of the same year, the community officially launched, and has since expanded to over 371,000 members, 173,000 posts, 39 million page views, and 24 million visits. As a key resource for Zoom users, the community works in tandem with Zoom's digital support tools, including the knowledge base and chatbot. This forum empowers users to self-serve by either searching for answers or asking new questions, receiving guidance from experts. It fosters connections among users, helping them expand their knowledge, exchange ideas, and discover innovative solutions. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Over the past year, the Zoom Community has evolved into a key destination for Zoom users, offering valuable updates on product launches, feature solutions, upcoming webinars, and service statuses. With a wide array of content shared within the community, we've seen significant improvements, innovations, and strengthened partnerships. Here are some of the key initiatives driving this growth. SEO Optimization: A major success for our community has been the effectiveness of our SEO optimization efforts, significantly boosting our visibility. Our threads now consistently rank higher in Google search results, making it easier for users to find Zoom-related solutions. This enhanced visibility allows for faster issue resolution, improving the overall user experience and attracting a broader audience, further establishing our community as a crucial support resource. Voice of the Customer (VoC): The community plays a vital role in collecting and conveying customer feedback to internal teams. By prioritizing the voice of the customer, we can address trending topics, resolve identified bugs, and fill content gaps, helping us maintain exceptional customer satisfaction. Knowledge Base (KB): The community helps us uncover knowledge gaps in our self-service resources. By monitoring frequently asked questions, we can identify areas for improvement in our knowledge base, ensuring users find the information they need more easily and escalating issues when necessary. Customer Success Forum and On-Demand Learning: This year, we expanded the community to include more collaborative spaces like the Customer Success Forum, Customer Success Events, and On-Demand Learning areas. These spaces provide opportunities for users to share success stories, unique use cases, customer spotlights, and access live and recorded webinars. Escalations and Service Impacting Events: We use the community to communicate updates on service-impacting events and system status. There have been multiple instances where issues or bugs were first identified through reports from community members. New Product Announcements: With the introduction of new products such as Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Docs, and Zoom Clips, we've added dedicated forums for each innovation. These spaces allow customers to ask questions, share use cases, and learn from previous discussions, fostering a deeper understanding of these products. Community Champion Spotlight Series: To celebrate the contributions of our experts, we launched a monthly Community Champion Spotlight Series, highlighting the outstanding work and expertise of our top champions. This year, we enhanced the Happy Rewards program to better recognize and reward community members. Leveraging Khoros' gamification features, we introduced: Leaderboards: New weekly leaderboards highlight top contributors based on accepted solutions. Reputation Levels and Rank Icons: Updated rank titles and icons showcase member expertise. Badges: Increased thresholds for badges awarded for accepted solutions, likes, and replies. Collectively, these driving projects that were prioritized over this past year helped us to truly strengthen the customer experience on the community, which in turn, enabled us to better support and connect with our users. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on providing solutions for our customers and overall customer satisfaction, we achieved significant business outcomes that reflect our commitment to delivering helpful support and valuable information to our users. SEO Impact and Business Outcomes: Our SEO optimization has markedly increased our visibility in search engine results, which directly impacts user engagement. Over the past year, our key metrics demonstrate the following results: Increased Organic Traffic: Our threads now rank higher on Google, leading to a noticeable increase in organic traffic to our community. In August, we saw a 54% year-over-year increase in total clicks from Google Search. This growth in traffic indicates that more users are finding and accessing our solutions through search engines. Enhanced User Engagement: The higher visibility has resulted in increased interaction with our content. During our third year, the community saw a 22.36% increase in page views, a 33.71% rise in visits, a 29.94% boost in unique visitors, and a 17.65% growth in total user time, reflecting improved engagement. Improved Problem Resolution: In August 2024, we achieved a remarkable 48.6% reduction in the average time to first reply, bringing it down to just 18.7 hours compared to 36 hours in August of the previous year. This improvement in problem resolution contributes to greater customer satisfaction and reduces the need for additional support. Customer Satisfaction and Business Value: Our focus on customer satisfaction is evident in the positive feedback and increased participation within our community. Specific results include: Higher Satisfaction Scores: Customer satisfaction for our community forum jumped significantly from 84.5% in August 2023 to an outstanding 93.6% in August 2024, indicating higher satisfaction with the support and resources available, as users can more easily find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems. Increased Community Growth: Year-over-year growth in community membership and activity levels shows that users find our community valuable for expanding their knowledge and resolving issues. Total registered members increased by 28.6% year-over-year, rising from 283,851 at the end of August 2023 to 365,057 at the end of August 2024. Cost Efficiency: By empowering users to resolve issues independently through improved SEO and accessible information, we’ve reduced the reliance on direct support channels, leading to cost savings in support operations. In summary, our efforts to optimize SEO, expand programs, and consistently provide users with timely solutions have led to significant growth in both user engagement and community traffic. These enhancements have not only improved the efficiency of our support but also generated measurable business value through cost savings and an enhanced user experience. Our goal is to empower users to resolve issues and broaden their knowledge of Zoom’s capabilities. The Zoom Community’s wealth of shared knowledge and information helps us achieve this mission. By analyzing year-over-year key metrics, we can clearly see how our continued growth reflects the community’s success in delivering solutions that meet user needs. 2023 Zoom Community by the Numbers – YoY growth (August 2023) compared to (August 2024): Solution views increased by 50% Community visits increased by 22% Unique visitors increased by 25% Page views increased by 11% Number of clicks from the Zoom support site to the community; from Google to the community (August 2023 Google clicks: 320K, August 2024: 494K) Membership growth increased by 29% What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Addressing the increased need for self-service within our community has yielded several key progress outcomes, enhancing both customer satisfaction and support efficiency. Here are the specific results and metrics that quantify these improvements: Increased Traffic to the Community: Traffic Growth: Our SEO enhancements have led to a 53.6% increase in organic traffic to the community. This surge in visits indicates that more users are discovering and accessing our community through search engine results. Increased Resolution Rate: Solution Visibility: The rise in community traffic has corresponded with a 50% increase in solution views. This boost in visibility has directly improved our resolution rate for user issues. Increased Self-help Success Rate: Effective Self-service: The improved SEO has facilitated greater access to self-help resources. This reflects the community’s enhanced role in enabling users to resolve their issues independently as opposed to creating support tickets and calls. Increased CSAT Scores: Customer Satisfaction: As users increasingly find solutions through the community, our customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) have risen by nearly 10%, increasing from 84.5% in August 2023 to 93.6% in August 2024. This improvement is a direct result of users’ ability to quickly and efficiently address their problems. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros Communities has been pivotal in the successful launch and development of the Zoom Community, offering extensive features, customization options, and integrated tools that supported our goals. Here’s how Khoros has distinguished itself and contributed to our success: Customization Design Flexibility: Khoros provided robust customization options that allowed us to align the community platform with our brand identity. We implemented custom top navigation and dropdown menus to seamlessly integrate Zoom resources, creating a cohesive look and feel across our marketing and support sites. Recent Activity Feed: A standout feature is the custom recent activity feed, which organizes posts into categories like "Latest Posts," "Trending Posts," "Solved," and "Unanswered." This structure helps users easily find relevant content, enhancing their overall experience. Gamification Rewards and Recognition: Khoros’s gamification features have been key in driving user engagement. By implementing leaderboards and custom badges, we effectively recognize and motivate community members for their contributions and solutions. Analytics In-Depth Insights: Khoros’s analytics tools provide valuable metrics on traffic, content, and user activity. These insights enable us to track trends, gather feedback, and make informed, data-driven decisions. Our monthly Listening Reports, generated from this data, offer a comprehensive overview of community growth, top discussions, and member contributions. These reports have directly influenced new knowledge base articles, product features, and content updates. Custom Components Cost-Effective Advertising: Khoros’s custom components allow us to promote events, product launches, and important announcements through ads and banners. This feature has been especially useful for communicating updates during service-impacting events in a cost-efficient manner. Integrations Khoros Care: A major benefit of Khoros is its Khoros Care feature, which helps us manage and prioritize the high volume of community posts, ensuring that critical issues are addressed promptly to boost user satisfaction. Qualtrics: By integrating Qualtrics for customer surveys directly within our community, we’ve streamlined the process of gathering valuable user feedback. Tableau: The availability of the Tableau API has been essential in analyzing user behavior and engagement, providing deeper insights into community interaction. Khoros Communities has given us the tools and flexibility to build a dynamic, engaging platform. From customization and gamification to powerful analytics and seamless integrations, these features have been instrumental in helping us meet our goals and deliver ongoing value to our users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Working with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing our needs and challenges, thanks to several key aspects of our experience: Relationship with the Professional Services Team: JWT Login Flow: By working with Khoros’s professional services team, we successfully implemented a JWT login flow, enabling better customer identification and more personalized services. This enhancement also supports the setup of special-access forums, providing a tailored experience based on account types. Ease of Integrations: Seamless Platform Integration: One of Khoros’s key strengths is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other platforms. This has allowed us to connect the community with various tools, improving how we manage user interactions and support. Integrations with platforms like Qualtrics for surveys and Tableau for data analysis have been especially valuable in optimizing operations and gathering actionable insights. These elements of our experience with Khoros have been instrumental in providing targeted support, enhancing user engagement, and streamlining our community management processes.PowerSchool
Author Details: Name: Jamie Harmon Title: Supervisory, Community Company: PowerSchool Tell us about you, your company, and your team? PowerSchool is the leading provider of cloud-based software for K-12 education in North America, connecting teachers, administrators, and families through unified technology to enhance the learning experience. Over the past few years, PowerSchool has expanded with the addition of several new products, and the PowerSchool Community Team has remained focused on providing a consistent and exemplary support experience to our growing customer base. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The PowerSchool Community Team plays a vital role in supporting PowerSchool's mission to enhance the educational experience for K-12 institutions. The team is dedicated to creating an integrated support experience that meets the diverse needs of all customers across PowerSchool’s expanding product portfolio. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? We implemented the PowerSchool Community for all PowerSchool customers, including school administrators, office staff, educators, families, and school job applicants. Our primary goal was to provide a seamless, consistent community and support experience across all products in the PowerSchool portfolio. Over our history, PowerSchool has grown to provide additional products, each with their own support documentation and processes. The growth has made PowerSchool a leading provider of cloud-based K-12 education software allowing us to offer a customized, integrated experience to all customers. At the same time, this has posed a unique challenge when presenting a unified support experience. Customers with multiple PowerSchool products had to manage many logins across multiple support platforms. By consolidating SSO for some products and bringing more resources into the community, we’ve created a collaborative space where customers can easily find answers, engage with peers, access support, and provide feedback. We’ve also tailored the support experience for each product to address the unique needs of our customers. The PowerSchool Community has evolved into a comprehensive support experience that is deeply integrated into products across the PowerSchool portfolio. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Our biggest innovation this year was the integration of self-service AI Chat within the PowerSchool Community, offering immediate assistance to customers and significantly reducing support case volume. Simple how-to questions make up a large portion of PowerSchool support queries. While our support team can resolve these requests efficiently, it still takes time for clients to open cases, wait for a response, and confirm a resolution is functional. Now, with self-service AI Chat, clients are able to report an issue and receive actionable guidance right away, without opening a traditional support case. This has brought us even closer to the lightning-fast one-touch support experience we have been striving for. For more complex inquiries, the chat interface seamlessly escalates to a live agent with a full transcript of their previous conversation. This streamlined process has made for a more complete self-service experience, surprising and delighting customers with cutting-edge, highly efficient support. Meanwhile, the increased deflection rate has eased the workload of our superb support team, allowing them additional time to focus on the complex issues that need their direct attention. We rolled out our AI Chat experience with a soft launch in July, followed by a full launch across four products in August. Going forward, we are integrating AI Chat into high-priority products at a regular cadence. Our centralization of all PowerSchool support resources in the PowerSchool Community has ensured that all clients will have easy, consistent access to up-to-date resources and, eventually, AI Chat. Collaboration between our Product, Support, Marketing, and Customer Success teams was key to fine-tuning the AI tool and optimizing the escalation workflow. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By integrating self-service AI Chat directly into product pages and centralizing all PowerSchool support resources in the PowerSchool Community, we achieved several significant business outcomes that highlight the value of this solution: Increased Efficiency and Cost Savings: Since the full AI Chat launch on August 5th, 2024, 54% of 1,289 chats have been successfully resolved through the AI chat experience with only 46% needing transfer to a Support engineer. This reduction has reduced the need for support agent intervention, resulting in both decreased operational costs and increased bandwidth for support agents. Community Growth: We added over 200,000 new members to our community in the past year, reflecting our successful centralization efforts. In particular, single sign-on improvements have been effective, streamlining access for all customers. Higher Engagement: We experienced over 20% growth in member logins, an 80% increase in unique visitors, and more than a 60% rise in total visits compared to the previous year. Additionally, page views increased by 51%, indicating greater engagement with community content. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The integration of AI Chat and other improvements to our community have led to measurable progress outcomes: Added over 200,000 new members to the PowerSchool Community in the past year, driven by our focus on resource centralization and single sign-on from product to community. Achieved over 20% growth in member logins, 80% growth in unique visitors, and more than a 60% increase in visits compared to last year. We saw a 51% increase in page views this year. Achieved our CSAT goal of 95%. Since the AI chat launch on August 5, 2024, 54% of 1,289 chats have been successfully resolved through the AI chat experience. Community members have helped resolve nearly 50% of customer forum posts. PowerSchool Mentors, our community super users, have responded to over 1,200 forum posts this year and participated in 65 beta tests. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros Communities platform was essential in the launch of our new AI Chat tool, PowerSchool Assistant. We needed a platform that was not only powerful enough to host a high volume of support resources, but also flexible enough to integrate with additional services offered by other vendors. Khoros Communities has been extraordinarily successful on both accounts. At present, the PowerSchool Community contains over 20,000 knowledge base articles across nearly 50 products in the PowerSchool portfolio. We’ve embedded AI Chat directly into product category pages within the community, creating a seamless experience that integrates AI with our extensive knowledge bases, allowing customers to access support without leaving the current page. This experience consistently surpasses customers’ expectations by presenting relevant answers to pressing concerns, empowering all PowerSchool users whether they are seasoned technical contacts, total newcomers, or anywhere in between. Additionally, the analytics tools built into Khoros Communities have enabled us to track user engagement and make data-driven decisions while iterating and improving on our AI Chat experience. At this point, Khoros is deeply integrated into our customer experience framework, allowing us to meet aggressive goals by creating cohesive, efficient, and user-friendly solutions. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? While we didn't work directly with Khoros on the AI chat implementation, the platform's flexibility and robust feature set played a crucial role in addressing our needs. Khoros enabled us to seamlessly integrate the AI chat into our existing community, ensuring it fit within the user experience we had already established. This has allowed us to roll out a transformative new user experience for all members of the PowerSchool Community without disrupting any existing customer workflows. This consistent, continued functionality is essential given PowerSchool’s mission of supporting personalized education for students around the world. Khoros Communities’ powerful knowledge base functionality allowed the AI to pull accurate, up-to-date answers from community resources, improving case deflection and enhancing self-service success. Additionally, Khoros’ analytics tools provided valuable insights into customer interactions, helping us track engagement, identify trends, and refine the AI experience to better meet user needs. This adaptability and ease of use were essential in successfully addressing our challenges and delivering an improved, efficient customer support experience.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.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.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.SAS Institute
Author Details: Name: Chris Hemdinger 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.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.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.
