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2020 Customer Awards: Splunk, Inc. - The Accelerator

2020 Customer Awards: Splunk, Inc. - The Accelerator

Splunk: Turn Data Into DoingSplunk: Turn Data Into Doing
Company: Splunk, Inc.

Company background: Splunk is the world’s first Data-to-Everything Platform, helping companies of all kinds, around the world, bring data to every question, decision and action. We offer a portfolio of products and solutions, on-premises and cloud, that help IT operations predict and prevent problems with one unified monitoring solution, help Security streamline their entire stack with Splunk as the nerve center, help DevOps practitioners detect, investigate and diagnose problems easily with end-to-end observability, and so much more.

Contact: Bryan Jennewein, PhD

Title: Director of Community Engagement

Related URLs: Visit Our Splunk Community!

Kudos Category: The Accelerator

1. Please describe your company and your initiative.

Splunk is the world’s first Data-to-Everything Platform, helping companies of all kinds, around the world, bring data to every question, decision and action. We offer a portfolio of products and solutions, on-premises and cloud, that help IT operations predict and prevent problems with one unified monitoring solution, help Security streamline their entire stack with Splunk as the nerve center, help DevOps practitioners detect, investigate and diagnose problems easily with end-to-end observability, and so much more. 

The Splunk Community is dedicated to providing a place for anyone who is involved with Splunk in their organization to ask questions, learn, give back and have fun. Our community is comprised of more than 200k+ total members and 12k+ monthly active members worldwide and includes programs designed that help members connect, online and in-person, in real-time and asynchronously, to ask questions, seek guidance, provide answers, share success, drive product innovation, learn something new, explore what they’re passionate about, and learn and grow along-the-way.

2. What was the “before” state? What challenges did you have to overcome?

The Splunk Community had been on the same disparate (and out-dated) technology stacks for several years, and one particular platform had not had a major upgrade in almost 3 years. It was nearly impossible to get meaningful data and insights about our community and to put that data to work fueling the strategy and growth of our community programs. We had three main programs, which included our online product Q&A forum called Splunk Answers, local/regional user groups, an MVP program called SplunkTrust, and new innovation and feedback program called Splunk Ideas. 

The challenges were that these programs all functioned as disparate programs, and the technology supporting them was too outdated to provide the capabilities and the data we need to drive these forward. We wanted to see both membership and engagement with our programs grow, but technology limitations were our biggest blocker.



3. What were the results? Please cite qualitative and quantitative results.

Launching Khoros was like injecting jet fuel into community programs, as every single one has seen an acceleration that exceeds our every expectation. 

Since launching Khoros, we've seen increased adoption and utilization in just the first month with a ~10% increase to 2M+ unique page views in a 30-day period and about 15% of registered users have already engaged by posting within the community. We’ve increased new member conversion by 200%+, converting about 1.4k+ new members in our first month or so. And our members are freaking out (in a good way!) about all of the new gamification elements we’ve been able to introduce. We’ve awarded 11k+ badges since launch, and we’ve delivered a new Ranking system with 15 ranks, and integrated our old “karma” system in place of the Khoros “kudos” system. 

And perhaps our biggest achievement and accelerant with launch was a successful migration of our old site into the new Khoros site. In less than four months, not only did we launch our brand new site in a beautifully branded experience, but we also migrated thousands of user accounts, 100k+ posts, 140k+ solutions, millions of comments and more. Our users went to sleep one night and woke up to a seamless migration and breath-taking new user experience and features. What’s more, with this migration, we could now ascertain metrics never before possible, including activity and engagement from our SplunkTrust (MVPs) in our other areas and programs. 

But wait! There’s more! Launching Khoros has also allowed the community to expand. That’s right… we launched a brand new site, migrated a monolithic site in the process, AND launched new community programs to include blogs, discussions outside of our Q&A section, and cross-promotion with our other programs and resources. 

If this was the result in just the first month or so, we cannot wait to see where our first year takes us!