Atlassian
Author Details: Name: Janice James Title: Community Manager Company: Atlassian Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Hi! I’m a community manager on the online (forum) team led by Monique van den Berg. We’re a mighty team of six tackling all the things online for Atlassian! How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The forum team is the beating heart of Atlassian community programs. We support the company goal of helping more people in our community self serve their own success journey. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Community is a native concept to Atlassian. Company founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes hosted the first local Atlassian user group meetup in 2006. Now, as a global company, Atlassian continues to unite users by centering the customer experience around its community and learning programs. Atlassian's community consists of robust learning, champion, events (ACE), and creator programs. The democratized nature of information in communities makes them a natural conduit for product-led businesses like Atlassian and a figurative safe harbor for users to freely exchange knowledge. The challenge we were looking to solve was how to successfully influence community-led growth across a global organization. To address this, Atlassian formed a team of community strategists to guide internal customers (platform and product teams) on how to effectively leverage community programs in their go-to-market strategies. Strategists work directly with product and platform teams to integrate community programs into their workflows, resulting in increased engagement (from Atlassian team members and users), an enhanced product feedback & ideation loop, and increased product/feature awareness. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Formed in early 2024, the community strategist team swiftly addressed the challenge of integrating community strategies across Atlassian's diverse portfolio of teams. The opportunity: Leverage the Khoros community platform as the centerpiece of a comprehensive plan to drive product adoption and user engagement. The team innovated by conducting community-led growth planning workshops, bringing together teams from across the Atlassian solutions portfolio. These workshops resulted in tailored community strategies for each team, aligned with their specific KPIs. For example, the Atlassian Intelligence team focused on an end-to-end plan for the launch of Rovo and growing group membership by 125%, while the Confluence team aimed to boost Atlassian team member engagement in the forum and as speakers at their events. By facilitating collaboration, we overcame the challenge of creating cohesive community strategies that respected each product team's unique needs. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. As a newly formed team driving internal enablement, we're in the early stages of our initiatives. However, in addition to the metrics already mentioned (product/feature awareness, engagement, and feedback) the team is influencing the following community and learning organization KPIs with our work in enabling community-led growth: Online community MAU Community and Proprietary events attendance Learning courses and certifications completed From our example above of Atlassian Intelligence, Rovo, and Confluence - The outcomes measured from their tailored strategies at the close of last quarter were successfully launching the Rovo product board and associated gamification challenges with strong Atlassian team member engagement, along with a 53% increase in group membership for Atlassian Intelligence KPI. With Confluence, we successfully influenced their KPIs with a 13% increase in accepted answers + a 62% increase in Atlassian Speakers at their events. An early win was the creation of a series of gamified learning initiatives within the community ecosystem for Atlassian Intelligence, Loom, and Confluence. This initiative leveraged the Khoros community to facilitate post-live event discussions within the forum. This led to increased engagement (posts, kudos) in those spaces of 6%, 12%, and 74%, respectively. Another example is we ran a month-long Jira July product love campaign, where users participated in forum activities that deepened their knowledge of Jira while showcaseing how it’s helped set their business teams up for success. This initiative contributed to a ~53% QoQ increase in posts to the Jira collection. These early wins have been crucial in demonstrating the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to wider adoption across the organization and positioning our community at the center of our product development and user engagement efforts. We expect to have more quantifiable data in the coming months as our initiatives mature. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. We’re still in the early stages of gathering long-term data, however we've already observed promising progress outcomes that indicate positive trends in addressing our challenges: Diversified Community Engagement: By tactically engaging teams, we’re aiming to expand community event offerings, creating more touchpoints for user interaction and knowledge sharing. Increase in Atlassian-Hosted Events: We've seen a notable uptick in the number of Atlassian-hosted community events. This increase is expected to positively impact our CSAT and NPS scores as users benefit from more direct interactions with Atlassian experts and peers. Enhanced Internal Involvement: Atlassian team member involvement within our community ecosystem has markedly increased. This deeper engagement will empower users to resolve their questions and create on-demand knowledge as more Atlassian team members actively participate in community discussions. Structured Engagement Playbooks: We've developed comprehensive playbooks for different internal stakeholder groups on how to engage with the community. These resources are aimed at empowering more Atlassian team members to effectively reach and support community members. Broader Organizational Integration: We've observed a deeper permeation of community initiatives throughout the Atlassian organization. As more teams become equipped and utilize community channels in their workflows, we anticipate adoption of community-led growth will have significant mutually beneficial outcomes. Enhanced Internal Enablement: By tactically enabling internal teams, we're creating more 'stickiness' for community programs internally overall. Initial outcomes are laying the groundwork for the team influence on measurable improvements in key areas such as customer lifetime value, support deflection, and overall customer satisfaction. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? We can directly attribute success to the Khoros platform's ability to be enterprise-ready. While the Atlassian community does have a dedicated engineering team, many of the features and capabilities used in our work are 'out-of-the-box' functionality. Many of our tactical recommendations for community-led growth are achieved using the Khoros out-of-the-box functionality. The platform's enterprise-ready features have allowed us to easily and quickly scale community initiatives for teams across our product suite. For instance, the badge and group hub features enable community strategists to easily spin up experiments, resulting in increased traffic and engagement in those spaces. Overall, the platform enables us to provide a gamified centralized knowledge exchange, improve awareness of our portfolios capabilities, and provide a fun and rewarding user experience. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Our partnership with Khoros has been instrumental in addressing the challenges of a community program with complex needs. Working with a platform partner capable of providing the right resources at the right time has ensured Atlassian can implement initiatives that utilize the platform effectively. We’d also like to note the training and resources made available to users. Khoros Academy and live sessions have empowered our team to maximize platform's potential. This was particularly helpful when we onboarded four community managers at once! Throughout our partnership, Khoros has consistently demonstrated its commitment to our success. The holistic support on offer from the team has been vital in addressing challenges unique to our program and helping drive our community initiatives forward. Cheers!HubSpot
Author Details: Name: Gabrielle Herrera Title: Senior Marketing Manager, Community Growth Company: HubSpot Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Community is an amplifier. Layering human connection on top of any of our customer-facing efforts makes them better. Our mission is to educate, connect and inspire the HubSpot community. In 2023 we showed that through hundreds of thousands of dollars saved, spreading HubSpot advocacy across the web, and by driving access and engagement to some of the hardest audiences to reach. In 2024, we're turning this amplifier up to 11. Our focus is to provide a human touch at scale using Community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. Our teams include Success Community, Communities of Practice, Identity based Communities (The Spot) and ensuring we’re spreading our advocates (Champions community) love throughout the community. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Using experimentation and scalable approaches, the Community Strategy & Operations team helps HubSpot identify hot pockets of community interest and value, and then scale those opportunities into valuable and sustainable communities for our ecosystem members. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Customers want to be guided and get personalized examples & advice (often preferably from a human). We have no shortage of great resources for our customers, but they don’t always get utilized. We need to spend our highly-talented CSMs’ time on high-leverage moments and stakeholders, not gathering links for front-line reps - but as we continue to succeed, there are even more people vying for CSM time. Through Community, we can scale success so reps can focus on leverage points, without removing the human touch from the experience by transforming into a Community Success Center. Peer responses and public answers save us potentially multimillions per year in support costs (and lift Partners up). Community is the go-to self-service platform for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, advocacy, and ideation. The Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users and developers on the HubSpot Community to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent and invaluable expertise. The Community Success Center allows HubSpot to become more efficient while keeping a human touch. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. Evolving from a support community aimed at answering a single, point-in-time question to a recurring, lively success destination has been our major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, Customer Success content lives in emails, ephemeral events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customer apply our tools to their needs efficiently and effectively. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. The HubSpot Community sees 4 million visits per year and 14k posts annually. 96% of solutions are provided by peers and 98% of posts are replied to within 24 hours. In collaboration with the Product Marketing team, we’ve facilitated 30 product Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions YTD, providing customers real life examples and access to the Product team in a cost-efficient manner. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. In 2024 we launched a federated search including Knowledge Base articles, HubSpot Academy (customer education) videos and certifications, and API documentation from our Developer Changelog. We also redesigned the navigation, ensuring customers have a one-stop shop to the right solution. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for. We’ve been able to improve relevancy, and in turn adoption of the Community, by developing personalized landing pages based on a customer’s product tiers. Example of our Professional tier Community: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Welcome-to-the-HubSpot/ct-p/professional What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The HubSpot Community (community.hubspot.com) launched in 2016 on Khoros (formerly Lithium) as the solution for free user support. Since 2016 the Community has grown in visibility and use cases. We have over 400,000 members (all time), > 1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. We can also associate community usage with healthier customers. Khoros provides us a platform for discussion forums, affinity groups, Q&A, blogs, events, email functionality, and custom signatures for users. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Since incorporating CARE into our team, we’ve been able to streamline processes and ensure we’re putting the right resources into the right initiatives and biggest value-adds for our customers. Before CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators spent a lot of time in moderation, completing duplicative tasks and trying to clear up confusion around the division of work. This inefficient process negatively impacted how many Accepted Solutions - those peer-to-peer responses that deflect support tickets - they were able to accept each month. With CARE, our Community Managers and Moderators are able to efficiently moderate the community forums and quickly accept replies on the forums, which help the person who raised the question and help the person who responded excel in the gamification of the Community, encouraging them to continue to engage. This efficiency win also allows the Community Managers to spend time on strategic initiatives such as our Workflows Library and build high-impact cross functional relationships with internal stakeholders.Upwork
Author Details: Name: Stan Gromer Title: Director, CS Technology and Innovation Company: Upwork Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Over the past few years, the Upwork Community has evolved from a modest set of 4 forums into a dynamic ecosystem. In recent years, we've expanded to include over 100 groups, hosted hundreds of events, and built an entire Academy, along with a variety of support resources. As the organization’s needs have grown, so has the role of the Community. It now serves a wide array of use cases, enabling cross-functional collaboration and addressing the needs of Upwork’s freelancers, clients, and internal teams. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Upwork is the world’s largest online marketplace connecting freelancers with clients across a wide range of industries. The Upwork Community plays a vital role in supporting this ecosystem, offering freelancers and clients a space to learn, collaborate, and grow. Over the years, the Community has expanded from a few forums to an interactive hub featuring groups, events, an Academy, podcasts, and AMA sessions. With resources like learning paths, expert insights, and peer-to-peer support, the Upwork Community enhances user engagement, skill development, and success on the platform, fostering a global network of professionals thriving in the freelance economy. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Over the past few years, the Upwork Community has evolved from a modest set of 4 forums into a dynamic ecosystem. In recent years, we've expanded to include over 100 groups, hosted hundreds of events, and built an entire Academy, along with a variety of support resources. As the organization’s needs have grown, so has the role of the Community. It now serves a wide array of use cases, enabling cross-functional collaboration and addressing the needs of Upwork’s freelancers, clients, and internal teams. Our Community team consists of the Moderation, Community Programs (Groups, AMA, Podcasts, etc.), and Community Product team (focused on technology for Community, Academy, Events, Certifications, and Chatbots), while our Academy team is comprised of Coaching & Events, Academy Content, and Certification. This solution was created to address key challenges: Scaling: Accommodating a rapidly growing community. Versatility: Providing an array of support and learning resources across different functions within the organization. Engagement: Enhancing user engagement and retention by integrating education and support tools into the platform. Integration: Bridging our educational content, events, and support features into one cohesive experience. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. A major recent innovation was the development of UPCATS (Upwork Courses And Training System), a custom-built Learning Management System (LMS) on the Khoros platform, enhancing the Upwork Academy’s capabilities. What began as a basic knowledge base has evolved into a fully immersive learning experience, now offering advanced learning paths, quizzes, SCORM support, and robust analytics. This solution addressed our critical need for a scalable, flexible LMS while also pushing the technical boundaries of what Khoros could handle. In addition to the LMS, we focused on integrating our Academy with the Upwork Community to provide a seamless user journey. Members can now move between the Academy and the Community to ask questions, get feedback on their Upwork profiles, and discuss best practices with peers. This integration not only supports learning but fosters engagement, allowing members to build relationships, share insights, and grow their skills. Key innovations introduced with UPCATS and Community integration include: Learning Paths: Offering customizable courses that track user progress, with badges and certificates awarded upon completion. Quizzes and Interactive Modules: Enhancing learning through real-time quizzes and hands-on activities. SCORM Support: Integrating legacy SCORM content, allowing a versatile training system for multiple learning formats. Advanced Analytics: Utilizing Khoros APIs and Upwork’s Data Warehouse for in-depth tracking of user activity, enabling data-driven insights and personalization. Community Integration: Allowing members to create and share their own learning paths within the Community, promoting peer-to-peer learning. We didn’t stop with just the LMS—Community engagement was another major focus. In the past year, we launched an AMA Series and a Community Podcast, both hosted and published using Khoros. These initiatives were designed to address the growing need for expert insights and live, interactive discussions on topics critical to freelancers and agencies, such as AI integration, video editing, client management, and proposal creation. The Inspiration Podcast and AMA Series evolved from our blog, driven by community demand. Special location-based AMAs like "Croatia Vibes" and "India Vibes" brought in diverse perspectives from global freelancers, ensuring that we addressed a broad range of issues specific to different regions. Across 11 AMA events, we saw strong engagement with 1,856 total registrants and an average attendance rate of 40.67%. We’ve also built an Education Marketplace on Upwork Academy, offering curated content from leading providers like Coursera, Jasper, and Udemy. This marketplace gives our users access to world-class learning resources, further empowering them to grow their careers. Additionally, our enterprise team approached us to help set up resources for office hours and webinars for enterprise customers. Leveraging the events functionality on Khoros, we quickly stood up a comprehensive events platform that goes beyond a traditional Zoom page. The solution not only provided a space for live webinars but created a library for on-demand content that enterprise customers can continually reference. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Through the implementation of UPCATS and other key initiatives, we’ve seen significant business outcomes that demonstrate the value of our Community and Academy solutions, as well as their impact on both users and internal stakeholders. User Engagement & Completion Rates: Since the launch of our Academy’s learning paths, we’ve supported over 1 million users, with 250,000 completing their first learning path. Our focus on increasing completions has paid off, with 32% of users now completing their first learning path, a significant jump that demonstrates how effective our learning experience has become. The introduction of features like quizzes, interactive modules, and video libraries has enhanced the overall learning experience and driven this growth. Community Retention: A direct result of our emphasis on engagement, our Community retention rate has doubled from 8% in Q1 to 16% in Q3. This increase was driven by proactive outreach efforts, including a new monthly newsletter, which has attracted over 200,000 members. This initiative, powered by Khoros, has exceeded our expectations in terms of participation and engagement, creating an additional touchpoint that brings members back into the community for further interaction and learning. Content Expansion: In addition to learning paths, we’ve expanded our educational offerings with video libraries, third-party content from leading providers such as Coursera, Jasper, and Udemy, and coaching sessions. These offerings have increased the breadth of educational resources available to our community and have strengthened the connection between learning and career advancement. Scalable Growth: UPCATS not only solved the immediate need for a scalable LMS but also opened doors for future growth and innovations across Upwork Academy. Its success has laid the foundation for us to continue evolving our learning and development initiatives, providing a model that other parts of the organization can build upon. By integrating our Academy and Community platforms, we have created a cohesive experience that empowers users to not only learn but also engage with one another, driving higher levels of participation, skill development, and job success. The combination of these features has not only increased user satisfaction but also provided tangible business benefits, such as improved talent retention and enhanced value for both freelancers and clients on the Upwork platform. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Learning and development opportunities via a new AI Education Library are critical to ensuring talent on Upwork are operating to their greatest potential. We see a strong correlation between completing an Upwork Academy learning path and getting hired. In fact, independent professionals who complete a learning path are up to three times more likely to be hired within a month of submitting their first proposal or project, compared to those who do not complete a learning path. Through these initiatives, Upwork is continuing to connect clients with faster, better and more flexible talent, while attracting skilled professionals by giving them access to the tools they want and need to supercharge their work, including training on how to fully leverage the tools provided through our platform. By combining our AI/Chatbot and Community teams in early 2024, we’ve significantly improved our deflection and self-service rates. Over the past 18 months, we increased our deflection rate from the low 50% range to 80%. This was achieved by guiding users to Community for support, where many questions are resolved by existing resources or peer assistance. We also implemented a seamless integration allowing the Community team to escalate complex cases to Zendesk with a single click when needed. Additionally, personalized user journeys have led to faster resolutions and greater self-help success, as users are directed to the most relevant resources based on their needs. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? Khoros stands out due to its flexibility and ability to be customized to our specific needs. Beyond the out-of-the-box forum features, we built an entire Academy/LMS on the Community platform—something we couldn’t achieve with any other platform. Khoros allowed us to innovate, from repurposing the Ideas board as a Known Issues section to launching coaching programs, blogs, and groups. Its versatility ensures we never have to say “we can’t do this,” enabling us to creatively solve problems and scale our offerings seamlessly. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Khoros’ flexibility and robust integration capabilities were key to addressing our challenges. The platform’s customization options allowed us to seamlessly build complex systems like UPCATS (Upwork Courses and Training System) directly on top of the Community, blending traditional community engagement with an advanced LMS. Another standout feature was the ability to integrate multiple functions—such as learning paths, events, and support—within a single platform. This helped us not only scale quickly but also maintain a unified user experience. The ease of API integrations and bulk data access enabled us to build advanced analytics dashboards and customize user journeys based on real-time data. Finally, the support from Khoros’ customer success team was invaluable. Their ongoing guidance allowed us to push the platform’s limits, creating solutions like interactive learning paths, AMA events, and podcast series, all while keeping everything under one roof.GoTo
Author Details: Name: Glenn Dobson Title: Manager, Community and Social Media Support Company: GoTo Tell us about you, your company, and your team? GoTo believes that in a flexibility-first world, great work can happen anywhere. That mindset has helped us fulfill the promise of reliability, connection, and simplicity for tens of millions of people through our portfolio of products, including GoTo Connect, GoTo Webinar, and LogMeIn Rescue. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The GoTo Community team utilizes a two-pronged approach to support our Company goals. The first focuses on Customer Support and Success which we achieve through a tailored proactive approach based on our members' feedback. The second focuses on Customer Education and Product Innovation so that our members receive more than just a Solution and our Product teams not only see a feature request, but also a use case supporting it. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The GoTo Community is the combination of two existing communities, and as a result offers some unique challenges. Made up of thirteen different product communities across three lines of Business, a one size fits all approach has never been an option. While Customer Support and Success is a universal goal, what that means varies between each member group. We work cross functionally with multiple teams across GoTo, often providing a deeper level of understanding of our customers and their needs. Our thirteen communities range from mature (10+ years), to newly established and growing. With each we strive to understand their unique needs and preferences, and then provide support and engagement that is accurate, timely and delivered with empathy. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. One of the biggest challenges we have faced recently is the introduction of a new generation of products. Change is always challenging, especially when your customer base is comfortable with your legacy solution. We utilized our community to capture detailed customer feedback critical to our Product teams. Our members aided in identifying areas that needed more attention as well as quality of life improvements earlier in the process. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. By focusing on decreasing the time to first reply and proactively sharing product development we were able to improve our Community Experience Survey results by 10% (YTD avg), resulting in increased contact deflection and customer retention. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The GoTo Community allowed us to gather more detailed feedback from our customers and provide our Product teams with more context around their in product survey results. It empowered us to have real conversations with our customers and provide them with information and solutions in ways that answered their specific needs. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? We have always benefited from the fantastic support Khoros and our Account Manager provides, but the shared knowledge of the Atlas Community members cannot be understated.Instructure
Author Details: Name: K Lundstrum Title: Community Manager Company: Instructure Tell us about you, your company, and your team? Instructure is the innovative education technology company behind Canvas, the world’s most popular learning management system and developing Ed-cosystem. As a company, we seek to elevate student success, amplify the power of teaching, and inspire everyone to learn together. Our Community team is at the heart of it all, driving vision and strategy in content, engagement, and innovation within the Instructure Community, a Khoros community. We’re dedicated to ensuring our users and over 2.2 million Community members have access to a wealth of knowledge, self-support resources, and peer collaboration. Through the Community, we empower educators, administrators, and students to discover solutions, share best practices, and access valuable resources—all while fostering a vibrant environment for learning and growth. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? Our role is at the core of Instructure’s mission—empowering users to be more self-sufficient and providing scalable, effective customer support through our online community. By fostering peer-to-peer problem solving and collaborating with internal teams to share best practices, we’re committed to enhancing teaching and learning. Our efforts drive impact at scale, ensuring that millions of users can quickly find the solutions they need, reducing reliance on traditional support channels, and creating a more efficient, dynamic support experience across the entire Instructure Ed-cosystem! Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? The Instructure Community, one of the first of its kind and now nearing its 15th year, has grown and evolved across three platforms while staying true to its inception: to capture the energy, excitement, and learning of InstructureCon, our annual conference, and keep it alive year-round online—it's the ultimate perpetual unconference! Built for our diverse user base of educators, administrators, IT professionals, and students, the Community offers quick, easy access to a wealth of resources, tips, and troubleshooting. It's more than just support; it’s a vibrant, multi-faceted self-service hub where users can tap into content created by both Instructure employees and their peers. Today, powered by Khoros, the Community continues to thrive as a scalable solution, enabling our 2.2 million members and millions more visitors to find answers fast. The collaborative spirit of peer-to-peer support and self-service empowers users to solve problems on their own, while also reducing the demand on traditional support channels. In fact, we’ve seen a clear link between increased page views and a decreased need for direct Support assistance. The impact of this self-service success is huge! At scale, it means significant case avoidance for our first-line support agents, saving the company money every quarter while freeing up our teams to tackle more complex, time-consuming cases. It’s a win-win that fuels both efficiency and innovation for everyone involved! What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. This year, the challenge we set out to solve was scaling the Instructure Community to keep pace with the company’s rapid growth through acquisitions and new product development. As Instructure’s Ed-cosystem continues to expand, so does the need for consistent, efficient, and scalable support across our entire product suite. With each new product added to the portfolio, the demand for quick access to resources, self-service tools, and peer collaboration grows—making the role of the Community more critical than ever. To meet this challenge, we focused on applying the proven strategies that have made the Instructure Community so successful to the broader Ed-cosystem. Our goal was simple: extend the Community's power and reach to support every corner of Instructure’s expanding portfolio. By integrating new products and user groups into the existing Community framework, we could provide a unified, scalable self-service platform that empowers users to find solutions across the entire product line, reducing strain on traditional support channels. While we’re beginning to expand the impact of the Community, the journey is just getting started. Customers are gradually discovering the wealth of resources available, and engagement is steadily building. As users explore and start tapping into the peer-to-peer support and self-service options, we expect the benefits to unfold over time. The true scale of savings through case avoidance will become more apparent as more members engage with the platform. By applying the same proven strategies that made Canvas LMS successful, we’re laying the foundation for a future where the Community plays a pivotal role in reducing support demands and creating a scalable experience across all of Instructure’s products. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Thanks to our commitment to fostering an environment of innovation, we’ve experienced an incredible 3% membership growth quarter over quarter! This growth isn’t just numbers on a page; it’s a testament to the needs this Community meets. New members are joining us, excited to be part of a vibrant ecosystem that prioritizes learning, advocacy, and thought leadership. We’re not just a community; we’re a movement! Our strategy to create “connection voracity” has truly paid off. We’re thrilled to report that 69% of our visitors found exactly what they were looking for! This means our resources are hitting the mark, empowering our users to engage deeply and meaningfully with our content. And it doesn’t stop there—an astounding 87% of our users rated our guides as helpful. This is more than just a number; it reflects our dedication to providing valuable insights that empower our users to thrive. When our members feel supported and informed, they become our greatest advocates, spreading the word about the invaluable solutions Instructure provides, and resources available within our community! We’ve become the ultimate source for self-enablement and self-support for every Instructure Ed-cosystem user. The results speak volumes: a staggering 95% accepted solution rate in our Q&A sessions, with a remarkable 72% solution view rate! Users are not just seeking help; they are finding it! This high level of engagement shows that our community is a reliable hub where answers are at their fingertips. Plus, with an impressive 26:1 unique visitors-to-support case ratio, we’re efficiently serving our users while deflecting an average of 1 million support tickets quarterly. This operational efficiency means we can focus even more on enhancing user experiences. When we look at these outcomes, it’s clear that addressing our strategic challenges has driven significant value. We’re not just keeping up; we’re leading the way! The synergy between our innovative offerings, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency creates a powerful narrative of success. We’re building a legacy that will resonate for years to come—a community that champions self-empowerment, fosters meaningful connections, and continually sets the standard for excellence. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Please see the previous question. By fostering self-service through our Khoros Community, we’ve consistently seen significant value in key metrics. Over the past year, our contact deflection rate held steady at 26 visits to 1 support case, and we estimate that that deflects an average 1 million quarterly support tickets. Additionally, the solution rate within the Community has averaged over 95%, as more users are solving problems through peer-to-peer discussions. These outcomes highlight the success of our strategy in leveraging self-service principles to improve overall customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs, and increase engagement—scalable community success. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros platform is a powerhouse that supercharges our self-support initiatives! With its advanced features—like custom discussion filters, seamless knowledge base integration, and robust analytics tracking—we’re not just making strides; we’re leaping toward success! These incredible tools empower us to cultivate a vibrant community that thrives on member contributions while giving us the data-driven insights we need to continually refine and elevate our approach. But that’s not all! The ability to personalize user experiences, automate content moderation, and segment content for specific audiences has been an absolute game-changer, driving scalable solutions that make our community truly shine! And let’s talk about integration—thanks to Khoros seamlessly connecting with Instructure’s existing tools and resources, we’ve created an effortless user experience that encourages enthusiastic participation and engagement from our members like never before! Together, we’re not just building a community; we’re igniting a movement where every member feels empowered, valued, and excited to contribute. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? Please see the previous question. The combination of an intuitive platform, robust analytics, and the ability to easily scale our initiatives has positioned us to continuously evolve the Instructure Community, delivering immediate and long-term value to our users and our business as we optimize content delivery, create more targeted resources, and improve the overall self-service experience.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.Dynatrace
Author Details: Name: Malgorzata Murawska Title: Community Manager Company: Dynatrace Tell us about you, your company, and your team? In the Community team, we often compare ourselves to the Power Rangers. Besides supervising the forum, each team member has tasks tailored to their experience and unique superpowers that enrich our work. We're proud to have such a unique team, thanks to the diverse perspectives, talents, and incredible people behind them. Maciej is an experienced and passionate product owner who makes sure the Community runs smoothly. Ana is a natural leader, excelling in team management. Agata is an expert in marketing, networking, and cross-team cooperation. Iza can translate any data and numbers into insightful conclusions. Michał is a talented UI designer and a meticulous Product Ideas manager. And there’s me – I joined three months ago and I love it already. As for my role, I find great joy in content creation and project management. Despite our differences, we share a common passion: helping people. We’re the right people in the right place, as the work culture at Dynatrace supports openness, curiosity, authenticity, and providing meaningful answers. All Dynatracers share and are driven by these values, so it’s no wonder our product—Dynatrace—is an excellent tool that makes customers' lives easier. With deep observability, intelligence, and automation, Dynatrace modernizes and optimizes cloud operations and simply ensures the software works perfectly. The Dynatrace platform leverages AI to anticipate future behaviors, deliver precise answers and intelligent automation, automatically provide recommendations, create suggested workflows or dashboards, and let people use natural language to explore, solve, and complete tasks. How does your role and your team support your company and its goals? The Community Team is vital when it comes to bridging the gap between our company and customers. Our Community isn’t just a platform for knowledge sharing; it’s a vivid space where individuals come together to solve problems, share insights, and build lasting relationships, often meeting in person. We prioritize making self-service easy for our visitors, ensuring they can quickly find resources to address their needs. By creating an environment where our guests feel heard, we facilitate valuable connections between them and product development teams. This allows us to gather insights into their needs, ideas, and real-life use cases, which in return improves Dynatrace offerings. Our efforts directly align with Dynatrace's core values: Innovate with Passion, Engage with Purpose, and Win with Integrity. By creating diverse content that appeals to a broad audience, we support critical company goals, such as enhancing our Go-To-Market strategy. Collaborating closely with marketing, sales, customer success managers, and developers, we increase visibility and access to expert support, ultimately enriching the customer experience. This approach not only reinforces the Community’s value but also advances Dynatrace’s mission to provide exceptional solutions to clients. Who were the teams and use cases you put this solution in place for? What challenges was this solution intended to solve? Community is a platform that brings experts, clients, and partners together around our product. One of its incredible advantages is that it collaborates with many departments across the organization, including product managers, engineers, developers, technical experts, sales, documentation, marketing, etc. The Community is designed to enable Dynatrace users to share knowledge, tips, and tricks while also allowing them to solve their problems in real time. A vital aspect of the Community is the feedback channel and a space where clients can propose product improvements and new solutions. This allows the product to better meet users' expectations by fostering dialogue. The Community also addresses challenges such as empowering users to troubleshoot independently, facilitating cross-department collaboration, improving post-purchase customer experience, and driving continuous product enhancement based on user input. What is a recent win, major innovation, or challenge your team has tackled in the past year that this solution helped you address? Describe the challenge, opportunity, and teams involved. The Dynatrace Community is a highly dynamic organization, constantly generating new ideas and implementing those that improve our work. Recently, we collaborated with several product managers and key decision-makers within a range of departments - R&D, Documentation, Developers, Product, Support - to enhance the overall customer experience and satisfaction. Our main objective was to simplify one of the core reasons the Community is so valuable—self-service and problem-solving, increase CSAT, and to deflect chat conversations and number of raised tickets. The reason behind it was the challenge of scattered problem solutions located in different, non-related resources. That's why we created a Troubleshooting Forum where users can share use cases, detailing their problems and providing solutions. These posts are usually well-received, generating a lot of views, engagement, and gratitude from the Community members. What were the business outcomes and value driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Community's success is mostly measured in bounced support tickets, increased page views (the most popular posts have around 300,000 views!), likes and comments given. What were the progress outcomes driven by addressing these challenges? Please share specific results, metrics, and/or KPIs that quantify the change. Besides increased values mentioned above, our actions result in Increased customer adoption, Shorter onboarding time for new features, Increased Customer advocacy. What differentiated the Khoros Communities solution in your ability to achieve/deliver on your goals for the year? What in the solution helped enable it? Were other factors involved? The Khoros Communities solution played a crucial role in helping us achieve our goals for the year. Our objectives included increasing the number of active users, posts, and page views, enhancing customer experience and support through effective product idea management, and creating engaging content. Additionally, we wanted to establish groups where users with shared interests could connect and ensure that self-service and problem-solving were quick and easy. Khoros, a standout multi-faceted platform, enabled all of these by providing a robust and flexible platform that allowed us to manage and grow our Community efficiently. The ability to create specialized groups, facilitate content sharing, and offer seamless self-service solutions helped us meet these goals. However, we couldn’t have achieved this without the promotion of the Community and strong collaboration with other teams, who played a key role in increasing visibility and engagement within the Community. What parts of your experience working with Khoros enabled you to address the need or challenge? The Khoros Communities solution provided a powerful and flexible platform for effectively managing and growing our Community. A key feature is the Product Idea Forum, vital for maintaining client communication, gathering feedback, and continuously improving our product. Additionally, we really appreciate the ability to create specialized groups, enabling users with shared interests to connect and boosting participation. The platform also simplified content sharing, allowing us to create engaging materials that resonated with our audience. Its self-service capabilities made issue resolution quick and easy.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.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.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.
