Customer Showcase September 2024: Liselotte from WithSecure

LiselotteP

In February 2023, I embarked on a new journey by adopting the WithSecure Community, despite having no prior experience in Community Management. My background includes 12 years in customer support, which provided a solid foundation for this new role. The community had recently demerged from F-Secure Community (hi @Firmy !) due to the company’s split into consumer and B2B businesses.

Onboarding and Initial Steps

I immersed myself in Vanilla’s onboarding articles and videos, and actively engaged with the Success Community. The support and brilliant ideas from this community were invaluable. My goal was to ensure our product users could easily find the information they needed and discover new insights.

Community Structure and Evolution

Our community is primarily support-oriented, featuring a product discussion forum, and a knowledge base with product troubleshooting articles. Over time, it has evolved into a comprehensive platform where developers publish changelogs, release notes, and product marketing will publish important company and product updates. This information is then linked to in social media posts, newsletters, and customer portals.

Multilingual Support

Our product troubleshooting articles are written by our technical support team and sit on our CRM system, which are then published via a magical script (with a little bit of fairy dust) onto our Community. Our product marketing team publishes company and product update related content directly on Community. We then use the machine translation feature from Vanilla to translate these articles into 6 languages. It includes an ‘ignore list’ of words, a feature that other vendors didn’t offer.

Style Guide Revamp

We recently revamped our entire style guide to align with our public web support page. This project was made possible by our brilliant intern developer @piotrgorski , who writes (cryptic) custom code.

Partner Forum Subcommunity

In February 2024, we launched our Partner Forum subcommunity, a dedicated space for partners to discuss best practices and share tips. Despite initial struggles with traction, we hope that a proper layout (implemented by our intern) will boost engagement.

Lessons Learned since launching Partner Forum

• Group Access: Groups are difficult to access for users due to multiple clicks. We now use domain name-based role assignments for easier access to special categories.
• Mobile Optimization: More and more users access the community via mobile devices, so optimizing the user experience for all devices is crucial

Achievements

In April 2024, I won Higher Logic’s Community Champion of the Year award, a highlight of my community management experience so far.

Engagement Strategies

To increase user engagement, I implemented several strategies:

• Weekly Digest: Every Monday, I post a weekly digest highlighting popular posts and tagging authors.
• Personal Messages: I used to PM users who hadn’t logged in for a month and new users with relevant resources. Due to time constraints and low return rates, I paused these messages but plan to resume them with Automation Rules (fingers crossed!) For now, I've activated Vanilla's digest feature, and currently have 14 subscribers since the end of July. Its not many, but its not nothing!
• Internal Communication: I regularly reach out to teams to address their pain points, and post bi-monthly roundups on our internal page to keep internals up to date on what’s happening on Community and Partner Forum.

Growth and Future Projects

Our community visits have increased from an average of 10.3K per month to 23.4K per month since I adopted it in February 2023.

Future projects include:

• Migrating Ideation: Moving our ideation to Vanilla, allowing the creation of Jira tickets and Salesforce leads from published ideas.
• Personalized Experience: Enhancing personalization with an AI-powered custom search bar and personalized page layouts based on roles.
• Survey Expansion: Expanding surveys to Accepted Answer posts and Knowledge Base articles to gather more deflection data.
• Competitions: Running competitions like Easter Eggs and swag giveaways to boost engagement - mostly on Partner Forum.
• Onboarding Experience: Creating a more comprehensive onboarding experience for community users.
• Community Events: WithSecure already organize numerous webinars, partner meet-ups, and co-creation sessions. However, we desperately need more direct engagement between users and product management. To address this, I plan to introduce community-only events such as AMA sessions with product managers and Technical Support Drop-ins.

Speaking of, I actually did my first AMA a few weeks ago and it was a big success! I posted about it here: Preparing for my first AMA

Acknowledgments

Our community’s success wouldn’t be possible without our two super moderators, who are technical support engineers. They keep the forum organized and up-to-date, and they are the ones replying to questions on the Community, as we very rarely have peer-to-peer support.

On the Partner Forum, product management have stepped up and are interacting with users, which has been great for engagement.

Analytics and Metrics

Tracking business results is challenging without Google Analytics. We rely on Vanilla’s analytics, which include bots and crawlers. To get a clearer picture of how many pageviews are caused by bots, we need to use Vanilla’s API to pull more detailed information on our analytics.

We track several key metrics:

• Deflection Indicators: Page views on posts, knowledge base articles, and Accepted Answers. I posted about this recently here: How to get more deflection data
• Member Activity: Accumulated reputation, points by username, posts by username, badges by username, page views by role, and points by points source, aiming to implement a super user program.
• Sentiment Analysis: Reactions by author role, reaction type, and discussion name.
• Device and Browser Usage: Page views by device type and user browser family to ensure compatibility.
• Locale Tracking: Page views by locale, with English, Japanese, and French being the most popular languages. We also track page views, registrations, and posts by country, though VPN usage can affect accuracy.

Strategy Insights

For our main community, I shifted focus from user engagement and registration to providing more essential self-help content. Reducing homepage widgets and non-support related call-to-actions improved user experience and increased page views. Surveys, though limited in responses, have recently been adjusted to pop up 10 seconds after session start, with a short format to encourage participation.

In the Partner Forum, networking activities like easter egg hunts and prize giveaways drive short-term engagement but not long-term retention. Simplifying the layout and focusing on relevant content has shown better results. Additionally, I tag recent users in discussions that may be of interest (depending on their area of expertise, region...) to encourage them to join in on a discussion.

This showcase highlights our journey with Vanilla by Higher Logic, the challenges we’ve faced, and the successes we’ve achieved. We look forward to continuing to grow and improve our community.

Kirstie Macfarlane

For our main community, I shifted focus from user engagement and registration to providing more essential self-help content. Reducing homepage widgets and non-support related call-to-actions improved user experience and increased page views. 

This is great @LiselotteP !

I'm especially interested in your comments about how shifting your efforts from building engagement to creating content has actually increased page views and improved the experience for your users.

I think this is a really valuable point for others to consider. We often get caught up flashy ways to engage our customers and forget that content goes much further.