High Customer Engagement with Online Communities

Welcome everybody, we have been building communities for a long time at Grazitti and trace agenda we thought we would share about why we think salesforce is a great platform to build communities and give some examples of what we have been able to achieve for one of our customers using Salesforce communities. So, just briefly about the structure of the presentation, a little bit about Grazitti, why online communities kind of communities you should care about, the success stories that Marketo had, the technology dices that you faced when you were building communities, factors you should consider and why salesforce? With that brief overview let me just jump right in. About Grazitti, we are web marketing technology company, we offer marketing technology services to both b2b and b2c customers like Adobe, Expedia, American Express among many others. We are also building a large number of online communities for our customers and we provide the entire gamut of services in building communities including strategy, development, management and support. We build communities on almost all the platforms including open service ones like WordPress and drupal. Enterprise platforms like salesforce, jive, lithium. For customers like Marketo, Alteryx, Lancope, jasper wireless for whom we build portal called m2m.com and most recently for Optimizely. According to Gartner as you might have read, 50% of all online customer self-service search activities will be via a virtual assistant what that means 50% of support activities will need to be automated either through virtual assistant or through virtual presence of folks and leveraging the large base of communities otherwise support cost will just become the killer cost in time to come. Which lands us to why online communities? Obviously, the biggest reason to consider online communities is to reduce support cost. Cisco, for e.g., got 32% reduction in time to resolve tickets in estimated 7m$ savings. Another great reason is to get new product ideas and feedback on your current products. Techsmith saved about half a million dollars from 1200 new product ideas on their community. To improve customer engagement, you can see what Autodesk did and to gain new customers. Reducing support costs is clearly one of the largest benefits of the community whereas all the other three are equally relevant reasons to build a community. In fact, most people, when you look at in a company, will have different reasons and different focuses for their community which involves different types of online communities. There are support communities, I mean customers like at&t, best buy, Comcast, Lenovo, PayPal, Symantec, Marketo. All have support communities are very successful. If you are a large consumer brand, you may auto create a customer network community to get the network compact. You may auto create internal communities for all your stakeholders especially if you are a large corporation. Even if you are a small corporation, you want to get all your employees and stakeholders out on the same social platform to enable sharing and faster turnarounds. If you are a technology company which has the API or allows third party development, clearly a developer community is of immense value and for everybody who has a channel or a sales partner approach to selling, building a partner community is of extreme relevance where partners will come log deals and track how deals are flowing and provides support. So depending on the kinds of need you have which are most important from Grazitti perspective. You should consider one or more of this kind of communities and as you will see later we find that salesforce is a fairly flexible platform which allows us to build any kind of community at a fairly reasonable cost. Let me jump quickly to one of our significant success stories built on the salesforce community platform which would probably give us insights into why salesforce is a great platform to build communities. Let me introduce my co-speaker Vishal Sharma. Vishal as Hari mentioned has significant expertise in building communities and has been the architect for Marketo’s customer community. Over to you Vishal. Hi guys, so, as you talked about the communities and why they are so useful. Let’s just jump into Marketo, so Marketo is one of the companies who has actually found the concept of communities useful pretty early. I have been handling their account for the last three years and they started with the very basic community on top of salesforce years back and soon, they realized the potential in the community and within 2 years we built the most successful community on the Salesforce platform. Let me just jump in for a bit, for people who are not aware Marketo is marketing automation software company which is one of the fastest growing companies in the recent past event public last year and they are projected grow almost 100% year on year so far. They have 3000+ customers in 36 countries and across diverse industries and we have been working with them for the last 3 years with considerable success in driving community matrix. Back to you Vishal. Yeah, so, if you look at the screen right now and the facts listed over here people are actually taking a lot of interest in the community. They are like 43k registered users, in 2013, we were like 16k+ new users into the community. We will talk of the support case deflection later also but the most interesting thing is discussions. People are having discussions in the community they are talking but all the issues they are facing with the product, enhancements they would like to have by logging into more than 280+ ideas which are already executed and they are already part of the product now. So, the community is pretty useful for Marketo at the moment. They are like 1000+ articles already in the community, the content is also growing up. Customers have found this community to be extremely successful. In fact, if you go to any Marketo conference or presentation or call, they will always have a slide on the awesome community up or the presentation. As you can see from the testimonials that they have gotten over the years from their customers and salesforce itself. Testimonial to the fact that community is very useful for their audits. So, let’s just go with the business objectives of the Marketo, why they build an online community and why they are using it. It’s really useful to investing to such a customer centric community so, they obviously wanted to grow their user base, they wanted to reduce their cost of support, they wanted to make their footprint globally, they wanted to make sure the marketers are using their product. So, if you look at the Marketo community, most of the requests, most of the kind of discussions that are happening are kind of how to request. Leave aside Marketo, if you are using any of the product, you will find out most of the support cases that you receive are kind of how to request and how do you solve that problem, how do you reduce the cost of support for handling this kind of communities and communities are the best example of doing that. So if you allow the discussions to happen within a community, the customers who have already faced this kind of situations, this kind of issues, they can always answer to all your how to point up requests they can make. So, obviously the new customers are not going to log cases and that’s going to save the cost a lot. Every day the content is doing for Marketo and they want just one single place and organized place where they can deliver all the content of the product to the customers. Communities that want one place. As I said they wanted to control the volume and cost of the support operations which they are doing pretty successfully by using the community. They want to redefine the user experience on the support portal also. So, there is an interesting thing which happens when you do the support by the email or on the phone. And you will be surprised to know that when you do a very small change of moving from email to a web form or a web portal for loggin
g your cases, you will see a huge mode of deflection and the reason is very simple because your customer is going to better categorize the problem that he is actually facing in your product and you get a lot of information on the problems your customers are facing. So, it is always good to have a customer portal where you can get the cases customer escalate instead of having them in the email which says that it is not working or that is not working. So, as I said the support portals are pretty, it’s pretty nice to get the support tickets and obviously, all the tickets into the system so that in future you can always look at those cases, categorize them and see the volume of the cases in a particular bucket. You want your support to be 24*7 uptime so this is the best way of doing it. You want to improve the content search, and regular maintenance, just to add point Vishal, your search is clearly one of the most important ways of navigating a content rich site and probably it is the most neglected and that is one of our learnings with the Marketo community. You know, when we improve search, case deflection went up and let just quickly walk through what Marketo did. As Vishal mentioned, the community has a very engaging design with a lot of intuitive navigation, they have features like gamification, and they have a full-text search that’s built entirely on the salesforce communities platform. The interface is extremely easy to use, you can see search prominently on top, and the top three tires gives you a very good idea of what is contained where. This is probably the most interesting stack from a support perspective when we implemented the salesforce service cloud and implemented some of our service cloud optimization techniques we found that case deflection which was as high as 3 cases per customer in a month has come down to 1.18 as of December last year. This is a pretty amazing number obviously the December number even if you discount for the holidays on an average we have seen the case reference number have come down to 1.5 for cases per user per month from a high of 2.58 The thing that has helped us get there has to be listed on this slide. First thing was to suggest the customer whenever he is logging a case, the moment somebody starts something typing in, we suggest instead of help topics that person should look at before logging the case. The second thing that has helped in increasing case deflection is auto routing the case to the right person for answering that query. So the basic query will go to level 1 support engineers, if it is something which is advanced then it will get routed to level 2 support engineers and stay cognizant of their entire daily cycle occupancy rates skill levels and a lot of effort has gone into optimizing the support dashboard which allows the agents to be much more efficient than they were before. The other thing that happens with support always is that customer satisfaction is typically driven by extreme reactions. It’s always people who are unhappy who never fill out customer satisfaction survey normally, so, what we did was a simple automation of the customer satisfaction survey would go automatically on the closure of a ticket. As a result, the normal responses also started flowing. This simple thing has helped their and apart from all the improvements has helped that customer satisfaction ratings will jump at least 10% from where it was earlier. In relation, there has been a lot of improvements in the back end including custom dynamic SLA. The third thing that Marketo did was to set up learning management system is again built up in native salesforce. It’s sort of university for Marketo users, especially even their customer acquisition volume adding a lot of customers every month, every day so it contains all the relevant stuff and packages that people can digest in a virtual classroom mode as well as in canned classroom mode or in a live classroom mode. Best of all, it enables self-service learning model with guided paths to acquire knowledge and leading up to a certification. I think they are close to out 800 certified Marketo engineers out there or certified Marketo consultants out there already in the last one year. All in all, the Marketo community as Vishal mentioned, has over 43 thousand users, 17 thousand of them came in 2013. They have great support deflection matrix, a very active community, a large number of ideas and a lot of content which is being updated and went multi-lingual all at the same time. Sort of an ideal of what you want your community to be, so how can you build a community which is as successful as Marketo. So, let’s start with where you should first look and that’s selecting a technology platform, that is usually is one that gets you to scratch your heads more often than not. If have been in so many conversations where customers are saying okay, we need to have a community and after the end of 1 or 2 months, you select a vendor, and discover all the limitations that the person has ever told you about. We will just focus on what we think are really 4to6 top platforms that you should consider. Jive and Lithium are right there, there is Drupal in the open source tag and Salesforce we contend is exactly one of the most serious contenders in the community platform. What should you consider in selecting a technology platform? The first one is that it needs to be scalable, so as you grow customers, you don’t need to invest in hardware or re-write your software. It needs to be flexible and customizable so that you can build with all the features you want and today with it, you know 30 to 40% customers are in mobile especially your support customers on the move. You have to make sure that your platform enables mobile customers to interact with your community as seamlessly as anybody on a desktop or laptop or tablet. Cost is obviously have been in consideration and especially with the enterprise ones running fairly high costs on an annual basis. The cost of developing your community is sometimes a key consideration unless you are working with a vendor like us, sorry for the plug, the time it will take to get your community up and running, what’s available out of the box vs what needs to be developed and what kind of support and maintenance can you account on once you have your community live. It’s on all of these parameters that Gartner rated community platforms and we sort of listed out of the sixth that you should have in your consideration set there is Jive and salesforce in the leaders quadrant within lithium and drupal also need to be worthy of consideration. WordPress is a good platform, with a challenge with a WordPress is with all the security holes especially with an enterprise situation. I don’t really want to play with WordPress, Microsoft share point used to be ahead of the curve but they haven’t innovated fast enough for what’s happening today in the social world. So, my set of 4 platforms you should consider is Jive, Salesforce, Drupal and Lithium and each of those has their own peculiarities. Lithium that salesforce represents the most optimal platform of choice. Because for in the first part, salesforce already has all your customers right, your salesforce is a CRM which means that you need to import customers instead of users. Whatever you do in your community would be simply visible to your sales reps. It comes with best in class security, you don’t need to worry about scaling of 10 users to a million users that salesforce takes care of. It’s extremely stable unlike lots of other platforms where you will get late night requests,– listing went off it comes with a lot of re-built functionality, it has industry standard SSO support which allows you to integrate it with your product if it is an online product or with any other online properties you might have. All in all the biggest advantage of salesforce is the ability to customize, configure programs salesforce and the fact where it removes the hassle of managing the infrastructure. It does have a few limitations that you should be aware of. The design is probably the biggest one, most salesforce communitie
s you see have a fairly limited out of the box design especially for public communities, it doesn’t come with the gamification plugin. There are third-party plugins available and search is not all that great because it’s not full-text search but it’s still database search. If you can get around these limitations, we think that salesforce gives you the best platform to build any kind of community that you may consider and we have considered experience and success with doing that over the last few years. So, what we have done to come around the limitation of salesforce – we cerated pre-packaged community that we can deploy with a short notice which offers responsive layout, inbuilt gamification, full-text search using open source full-text search engines and the host of capability and functionality using rich user profiles customer reporting that will make deploying a Salesforce solution pretty fast. The thing to remember is that salesforce is probably the lowest cost per seat of all the enterprise platforms. Obviously, not as an open source, but open source will also come with the overhead of a large development cost of the front. In our experience with multiple of these community platforms, we have found that the flexibility and the stability just to go back to the considerations of the platform stability, scalability, and flexibility that salesforce offers are unmatched at a lower development and overall licensing cost compared to any other enterprising platforms. And the fact that you know while a responsive comes free whereas with most of the enterprise platforms, you have to make do with mobile experiences which are not necessary up to It comes with a fairly reasonable development time as a bunch of stuff available out of the box and comes with a tiered support and maintenance program that you can meet and buy as per your budget and convenience. Means in our experience, salesforce is the platform of choice for you to consider any kind of community. Just a plug for our salesforce community development services, we offer 3 packages for people to get started with salesforce communities, all of them look very pretty and I would invite you to get in touch with Hari to learn more. These packages are deployed within 10 weeks depending upon which one you are interested in, the basic packages about getting up a customer engagement community. The standard package is where we will help you set up a support community using the salesforce service cloud and premium packages you will incorporate gamification and any other specific requirements that you might have including partner portal.Recap- Communities help you reduce cost, increase engagement, get product ideas in customers. You can build different kinds of communities, we think salesforce offers a very stable, secure and scalable community development platform and custom salesforce communities with Grazitti are easy and quick to set up and get to success. So, at this point, I would like to open up to questions. Please feel free to type the question on the chat window and we will be happy to answer them. Alright, thanks, Alok, thanks, Vishal, so if you have any questions, later on, you can always contact us on at [email protected] and our website is www.grazitti.com. Thank you, thanks for your attendance, thanks for your time, have a great day ahead!