Customer Showcase June 2024: Stephanie from Quantexa

stephanierichardson

Hi, I'm Stephanie Richardson, Senior Community Manager at Quantexa. The Quantexa Community launched in November 2022 and recently passed 2,500 members. We are a B2B Community and our members are primarily our customers, partners, and employees, as well as a small number of prospects. In November 2023, for the Community's one-year anniversary, we analysed our performance for each program and initiative we've worked on against the higher-level business objectives that they contribute to all across the business

Some of the programs we've been working on:

• Developer Support: All developer Support is provided through the Community, which means Data Engineers make up a large part of our membership.
• Voice of Customer (VoC): Including Ideation & User Research programs.
• Analytics: Mainly using Vanilla, Google Analytics, and Qualtrics.
• Gamification: Including Vanilla points & badges, as well as competitions we run with swag and other prizes.
• Community Library: Articles written by Quantexa SMEs utilizing Vanilla's KB functionality. We also have an employee-only category in the Community where drafts are posted as discussions which are then reviewed and published in the library once approved (shout out to discussion templates where we store our guidelines for articles and the convert-to-article feature!).
• Specialist User Groups: These are focussed more on industry & solution discussions (as opposed to technical support).
• Events: We host Community Connects and have had a few webinars on topics like Product Ideation and how to use the Community for support, as well as focus group sessions through our User Research Panel. We have lots more in the pipeline, including customer roundtables through our User Groups.
• Email Strategy: We're working on mapping this out to cover the entire customer journey on the Community and automating it as much as possible.
• Advocacy: We hope to kick this off properly this year to engage some more senior personas and allow us to receive their feedback programmatically.

The stats & successes I've been most pleased about this year are:

• Average visits per active user: This steadily went up to around 20 visits per month per active user, meaning that our members visited, on average, every business day 🎉
• Support deflection: Through our Community survey (which is delivered via a CTA, our nav bar, and Qualtrics pop-up and slider), we ask members & visitors what they were looking for, if they found what they were looking for, and what they would have done if they didn't find what they were looking for. This allows us to calculate a support deflection rate, which we continuously measure over time as we implement improvements. This improved from 58 to 73% over the year.
• Ideation & User Research Panel: We have received 145 ideas since launching our Ideas Portal. We've also received feedback that the product focus group sessions we've done through our User Research Panel were some of the best customer engagements run at the company.
• Vanilla analytics: We've received a huge amount of praise and appreciation from various teams we work with on the detailed analytics we can pull through Vanilla and how valuable they are to the business. They also allow us to consistently provide evidence for and push forward with the most important projects, which is crucial considering how many initiatives we work on simultaneously.

Things that went really well:

• Developer support: We have a large technical audience who have seamlessly adopted the Community and use it for all technical Q&A. We consistently receive feedback on how quickly questions are resolved and how user-friendly it is to create and browse Q&A. As with all Communities, we want to move towards more members answering questions for other members (rather than our own triage team).
• Community platform design: We get consistent feedback about our UI/platform design; people find it easy to post and like the tagging and search options & functionality. We've put a lot of effort into making our Community design eye-catching and tracking how effective our changes are, for example by using UTMs to track clicks from various CTAs.
• Gamification: Our members love a bit of gamification and consistently highly rate it. We released a newly designed 'Get Rewarded' page (designed by the wonderful @sophielyons). We're working on how to best get engagement for the competitions, including getting the right level of effort to attract participants.

• VoC - Qualtrics for surveying : We have a Qualtrics slider & pop-up which gathers responses to our Community survey and feeds into a dashboard that we use for our reporting. This includes an overall Net Promoter Score (NPS) (which we further break down by role & persona) and ratings for each area of the Community.
• VoC - Member interviews: We run interviews (via Teams call) with our members and find this helps in so many ways, such as feeding into Product and R&D teams on content gaps and potential areas for product simplification and improvement. We feed our interview results into Qualtrics to create a dashboard to help us collate responses and report results.
• Vanilla search analysis: We analyse search queries using Vanilla's built-in Search dashboard, as well as custom dashboards we've created in Vanilla to go a level deeper and see what each role (customers, partners, employees, prospects & guests) is searching for. This helps us identify content gaps, areas for product simplification, and themes for content.
• Vanilla analytics: We consistently hear excellent feedback from other areas of the business on the detailed analytics we can provide. We would love to be able to refine these into even more detailed personas and use them to help us map and improve customer/partner journeys in the Community and more broadly.
• Community Library: Our library is hugely popular, with articles getting 100s-1000s of views and being viewed consistently over time. We work with our Research & Development team to produce a steady stream of high-quality articles. While this has been really successful, we have a long wishlist of improvements for Knowledge Base functionality that will help us become more efficient in creating content, gathering feedback on it, and especially, surfacing articles to the target viewers.

What we want to focus on this year

• User Research Program: As a newly launched program, we want to see this develop and mature. Initial feedback has been extremely enthusiastic, and it's clear how beneficial this will be to the business.
• Events (especially for Groups): In January, we held a webinar on our roadmap & product vision which was very well received across all members, including more senior and non-technical personas. We want to host more events to help grow our user groups and engage with users who aren't as comfortable with online Q&A as our technical users are. In order to really succeed in these areas, we need an improved landing page for groups and better events management & analytics, and marketing automations.
• Email Strategy: This goes along with the member journey; we are currently setting this up now that we're using Zapier to help us engage members who have become inactive, engage specific roles with targeted content (which Vanilla's new automation rules will help with), and onboard members. We currently use HubSpot to send out a manually curated monthly digest for our members so we're pleased that Vanilla has introduced the built-in digest and is working on marketing automations.

I would love to hear your feedback or suggestions - and I am always up for a coffee chat 🍵 And please feel free to add me on LinkedIn!

BrendanP

This is amazing @stephanierichardson. It's so impressive to see what you @norahquan & @sophielyons have been able to accomplish in a relatively short amount of time by online community standards.

It also sounds like some of our key initiatives this year roadmap-wise are really going to support some of the new programs you're running - particularly around events, groups and eventually the email communications functionality we're going to bring in.

As it relates to your support deflection rate, are you saying that nearly 73% of your support is handled via the community?

stephanierichardson

Thank you! We're really excited about the initiatives coming up on your roadmap 🤩

Re. the support deflection rate, 100% of our developer support has now moved to the Community (we've completely closed our old support portal). However, clients still have contacts in Quantexa so the support deflection rate refers to those who would have otherwise reached out to a Quantexa contact had they not used the Community to solve their issue.

HollyR

@stephanierichardson Thanks for sharing! I really like the insights you've shared here and plan to dig deeper in the weeks ahead. I'd love to hear more about your VoC Member Interviews! Frequency? How many people attend at one time? Duration? Number of questions you ask? Who leads those discussions? Thanks in advance!

stephanierichardson

Hi @HollyR, thanks so much 😊

We try to send out invitations weekly to around 10-15 members so that we can keep a steady pipeline going. As you can imagine, a fairly small percentage of people reply to say yes - we usually end up with 1-2 per month. The interviews are done 1-1 so that the person gets lots of opportunity to speak and it feels conversational. They are 30-45 minutes in length, and led by one of our team. These are the main questions we ask:

• How did you first hear about the Community?
• What do you usually visit the Community for?
• When you need support, what's your preferred method?
• What do you like the most about the Community/ favorite feature?
• Is there anything you would like to see improved on the Community?
• What would you like to see more of on the Community?
• How would you rate the following features? (and then we ask them to rate different Community categories)
• How likely are you recommend to recommend the Community?

Hope that helps!