Company: Shopify Company background: Shopify is a leading provider of essential internet infrastructure for commerce, offering trusted tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size. Shopify makes commerce better for everyone with a platform and services that are engineered for reliability, while delivering a better shopping experience for consumers everywhere. Contact: Ty Williams Title: Community Program Manager Related URLs: https://community.shopify.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community? Do you use your community for support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.? Has the community charter evolved in any way since launch? Shopify Community is a part of an integrated front-facing knowledge base for Shopify. We build, optimize, and maintain an engaged digital space for our merchants, partners, and experts to learn, seek support, provide product feedback, and grow their businesses. Launched in 2006, the platform has evolved from an built in-house forum platform to the Khoros supported Community platform, evolving from the out-of-box Khoros community platform to our updated design in November 2021. We strive to expand our impact through developing cross-functional internal collaborations and implementing scalable Community management strategies. 2. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen. Did you get executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was your process to gain this buy-in? How have you achieved cross functional support, added stake-holders and increased organizational adoption? Shopify Community went through a series of phases. In the beginning, it lacked dedicated ownership which led to process and governance challenges. As the platform grew, we started to build a scalable Community management structure by hiring a dedicated Program Manager. During this time the Program Manager owned all aspects - from strategizing, creating, and maintaining the digital space, which ultimately led to the migration to Khoros. After the migration, we shifted our focus to improving the user experience of our global audience. In three years, we launched eight languages based on our internal analysis and cross-functional collaboration. When the pandemic hit, business shifted from physical to digital which allowed us to expand the team and have more bandwidth to optimize operations and increase organizational adoption. 3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible. Some of the results and impact we’ve been able to make while on the Khoros community platform include: Opened 20 Groups with the Guest Blogging workflow. Published 315 proactive localized Community Blog posts in nine languages. Reduced the Minutes to First Reply (AVG) from 794 minutes to 669 minutes in English. Launched Events and Groups with Splash API integration. Bulk archived 100,000 topics and piloted the multilingual Accepted Solutions audit program, which resulted in a steady improvement of 14% increase as year to date 2022. As of June 1, 2022, we surpassed 50,000 total solutions! Implemented automatic role assignment for Shopify Partners and Shopify Plus members. Deployed custom tooling to support internal stakeholder reporting purposes. Community Blog Community Events Community Forums Community Groups
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