Entry submitted by: Tatyana Gorbunova (Community Manager)
Community: SmartBear Community
Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction
As the leader in software quality tools for the connected world, SmartBear supports more than four million software professionals and over 25,000 organizations in 194 countries that use its products to build and deliver the world’s greatest applications. With today’s applications deploying on mobile, Web, desktop, Internet of Things (IoT) or even embedded computing platforms, the connected nature of these applications through public and private APIs presents a unique set of challenges for developers, testers and operations teams. SmartBear's software quality tools assist with code review, functional and load testing, API readiness as well as performance monitoring of these modern applications.
Our Story
We moved to the Lithium community at the beginning of 2015. One of the first tasks was to move all of our old product forums to one community engine - Lithium. We had products in different software areas with different customers. We had to take into account their specifics and habits.
What we did
We started working from two directions – from the community members’ side (externally) and from staff’s side (internally).
We had many community members by the time we moved to Lithium. In addition, each month, plenty of new members joined us. We decided to help all of them get used to our new community and help them get as many benefits from us as possible. For this, we launched two main community programs:
- The first one was meant to boost activity of current community members;
- The second one was supposed to help new community members get started in the Community easier.
Moreover, we had been working with our highly-skilled users and nurturing community experts. They were ready to share their knowledge and help other users resolve their issues. Sometimes, getting help from other customers is much more effective than getting help from, for example, the Support Team. Customers know all cons and pros of a product, and they are not shy to share them.
To increase the quality of our Community, we tried to involve our company teams in the Community. We have been working with R&D, QA, Support and Documentation to make them participate more actively in the Community.
What issue were we trying to solve?
One of the main issues we had was related to customer satisfaction. Our customers were completely unsatisfied by our Community, and they preferred submitting questions to our Support Team. That increased the load on the team, which was unacceptable.
Moving to Lithium helped us increase customer satisfaction. We saw that more and more people preferred asking the Community as they knew that they would get answers either from other customers or someone from the company.
Our results
We are seeing awesome growth in all community metrics:
|
Metrics |
YoY Growth,% |
|
CHI |
+18% |
|
New Topics |
+58% |
|
%Topics replied < 24hrs |
+12% |
|
#Solutions |
+240% |
Our CSAT in January 2016 was 60%. We help new community members get involved in the community life faster. Our current community members understand the value of the Community, and they are ready to share their knowledge with other community members.
