Customer Showcase: Building a Rewards Program, uncovering ROI stats, and hosting CSM Competitions

annayardley

Hi everyone!

My name is Anna Yardley and I am the Community manager at Domo. I spend my day-to-day in our online Community Forums, which are hosted on Vanilla.

The Domo Community Forums are the go-to space for connecting with and learning from the vibrant Domo community. You’ll get help solving challenges through collaborative support from thousands of other Domo enthusiasts while also growing your expertise of the Domo platform.​

I've been in my role for 2.5 years and have seen massive engagement transformations in our Community as we've implemented different programs. Below, I'll share some of the most impactful things we've done for the health of our community. I hope they can spark your curiosity and help you as well! Happy to answer any questions and continue conversation in the comments below.

Building an Advocate and Rewards Program

We started seeing significant results on our Forum once we implemented a rewards program. Our highest ranked members (we call them Coaches) are invited to participate in our advocate program that rewards them for answering questions on our Forum. Logistically, we did this by connecting Vanilla with an advocate-specific platform to aid in automatically rewarding members with gift cards as they answer questions.

Since implementing this, we have a 100% answer rate (our internal teams RARELY intervene to make sure a question gets answered) and our average time to answer consistently sits around 30 min! This has been a game-changer for our Community. Our customers know that if they come to the Community, they will get an answer (likely) faster than any other support resource. As we share this statistic with our new and current customers, it's an easy "sell" to get them to sign up to start getting value from our Community Forum.

Business Results – ROI uncovered

We bring all our Vanilla analytics into Domo, our data and analytics platform, to understand the bigger picture and impact our Community has on the company as a whole. It's no secret that proving the value and worth of Community can be SO hard because measuring the ROI seems near impossible. However, this last year, using the power of Domo, we uncovered the most important metric for our Community team. By joining our community data by account, we've learned that:

• Accounts that have at least one active community member are 30% more likely to renew their contract compared to accounts that have no members in the community

This statistic shows that the Community directly impacts ACV – which is one of our top company priorities and health metrics.

Account Team Community Sign-ups Competition

Because the metrics above illustrate how crucial it is that every customer uses the Community, our team's #1 objective is to make sure every account has at least one active member in the Community (but hopefully even more). One of the things we do to increase community membership is hosting an annual competition among our CSMs to encourage their customers to sign up or log back into the Community Forums. Throughout the 3-week timeline, the CSMs with the most points get a nice reward. Here are the logistics:

• When a new user signs up for the Community Forum = 2 points to their CSM
• If an existing user logs back into the Community Forum (active user) = 1 point to their CSM

Using the power of Domo, we've created a leaderboard that updates in real time as CSMs accumulate points. The points are allotted automatically because of the integration we have between Domo + Vanilla. As we send out communications throughout the competition, our CSMs are reminded of the importance of the Community and want to share it with their customers. This has increased internal and external Community visibility.

Conclusion

The last 1.5 years has been substantial for our Community as we've implemented new programs and uncovered key statistics to measure our impact. Our Community is extremely active and engaged, which becomes a great selling point for prospective customers. Our Community members are passionate about our product and want to help and learn from each other.

I'd love to connect with you and answer any questions you may have about our Community program.

BrendanP

This is an incredible story and implementation of community strategies @annayardley !

Getting other departments involved creatively, understanding the impact of your community on retention + using the community as a selling point because the p2p support is so effective are compelling things. Congrats to you and the rest of the Domo team!