The Community also helps us create a space for our customers interact with one another. For small businesses, the ability to get insight from other small business owners is critical to their success.
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Company: Constant Contact
Entry submitted by: Samantha O’Connor (Community Manager)
Community/social channels:
https://community.constantcontact.com/
https://twitter.com/ctcthelp
https://twitter.com/constantcontact
https://www.facebook.com/constantcontact/
http://www.pinterest.com/constantcontact/
http://www.linkedin.com/company/constant-contact
http://instagram.com/constantcontact
Lithy category: Digital Design Excellence
Goals
Our social channels and the Community help to ensure that we are meeting our promise to our customers – Customers first, always. Having award-winning support for our customers has always been a top goal for Constant Contact. By adding in other channels to our support team, we are able to help our customers through the channel on which they wish to interact. The Community also helps us create a space for our customers interact with one another. For small businesses, the ability to get insight from other small business owners is critical to their success.
We also pride ourselves on being transparent and listening to our customer feedback. Throughout the organization we have many listening posts, and the Community is an integral part of this. With our in-product widget, we can get feedback from customers during the moments that matter. We can use the Community to crowdsource use-cases, find trending topics, and report back to customers on progress with different ideas.
Our homepage features our customers. We want their success to be our primary focus. We also feature our guest blog writers on the homepage, to show the depth of knowledge that you can find within the Community.
We also showcase various products and programs on the homepage through a carousel of banners. This allows us to let our customers know about various offers that we are promoting, different features in their account, partnerships, etc.
Design Execution
First, we started with structure, looking at the customer experience on the existing Community and determining where we could improve. We then took a look at how the rest of the support organization and the overall company was approaching CX. Armed with all of this information, we reduced the number of boards from about 60, to 22 (with three boards added since to cater to specific groups). We also divided the Community into four distinct sections (Knowledge & Support, Join the Discussion, Your Feedback & Ideas and Developer). We also re-designed our pages to match our in-product experience by switching the side rail, changing colors, etc.
BEFORE
AFTER
Second, we focused on creating boards that matched the Community audience. We analyzed the Community and found that compared to the Constant Contact base, we have a larger number of high value customer, who are generally more tech savvy. We also have many prospects on Community. In this phase, we focused on setting up boards to cater to the needs of these audiences.
Third, we launched a responsive site with the assistance of the Lithium Professional Services team. We wanted to ensure that the experience across all device types was consistent, seamless, and easy to use. In this phase, we focused more on the overall look of the pages instead of the structure.
Latest look:
Finally, we took a unified approach to online help by working to integrate our help channels to create a cohesive experience and design. This helped us present a branded experience across all online touch points, a unified approach to support, and an ease of use and familiarity to our customers.
The results
If we compare 6 months prior to our re-design to a 6 month period after the redesign we are seeing some promising numbers! Note: we took out data from the month we made the changes so as not to skew any numbers due to any testing or moderator activity – moving and archiving threads.
- Page views increased 20%
- Visits increased 23%
- Unique visitors increased 22%
- Kudos increased by 25%
- Accepted solutions increased by 17%
- Solution views increased by 27%
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