Customer Showcase July 2024: Sam from Augury

Hi all! I'm Sam, the Community Team Lead from Augury. I currently lead the customer enablement program at Augury which includes documentation through our knowledge base on Vanilla, our online community (on Vanilla of course), and our online Academy. Those 3 components come together in a channel we call The Endpoint. I've got two great team members who work tirelessly to fill our knowledge base and Academy with great content and let me tell you - life is much easier with them in the picture!

We've got a small B2B community of about 2,000 customers, partners, and prospects but we just celebrated our 1st anniversary and are thrilled with the growth we've seen. Our customers are primarily manufacturers who are on the plant floor day in and day out. They don't have time to get on the community and check out what's new and it really impacts how we measure success, how we run our programs, and what we expect from our users. Keep reading to learn more!

What we pay attention to

We have a few key metrics that we bubble up to our business in a quarterly dashboard. They include:

• Total users
• % of Heavy Contributors (Users who contribute at least once a month)
• % of Intermittent Contributors (Users who contribute at least once every 6 months)
  
  We like the total of the above two metrics to come in around 10% or higher. Right now we're at 10.3%! Anyone who falls in either of those two classifications is considered active.
  
• % of our Active Product users Active in The Endpoint
• Views on Knowledge Base
• New Knowledge Base Articles Added
• Course Completion Rate
• Total Course Completions
• New Courses Added

We measure a whole lot more than that, but those are what we hold ourselves to in order to give us an idea of where we stand.

Things that work well for us

• Gamification: This year we revamped our gamification program by re-doing our ranks, prizes, adding new badges, automating badges between our Academy and Vanilla via Zapier, and launching monthly opportunities to earn points called our badge of the month program. After launching we saw a 25% increase in visits per active user, 140% increase in contributors, 23% increase in active users, and 40% increase in points distributed!
• Our Content Strategy: I mentioned earlier that I have two team content creators on my team who fill the Knowledge Base and Academy with great content. That works extremely well and I'm so grateful for their efforts because it's catapulted our velocity. One thing that also works well is our community posts. We outsource almost every post to internal team members. We don't get a lot of member posts because that's not the kind of user we're working with, but we get a lot of engagement on posts we share. So our community is like a smaller, more engaged knowledge base. We pay internal team members to create posts on best practices, feature updates, 'did you know' posts, event announcements, and more. We get better content and more content ever since we stopped trying to do it ourselves and turned it over to the experts.
• Automation: We use Zapier for so much to connect our various systems, track data, unify our gamification, notify users, send prizes for rank upgrades, and so much more. I can't wait to start implementing the automation rules on our production site to make this an even stronger muscle!
• Email Digests: We don't use the Vanilla digest feature because it's not customizable enough. We do build two manual digests in Marketo each month and send them to our entire customer base though, and not just our vanilla users. Because of this, we saw an immediate increase in new users that has a consistent spike with each digest. We also saw better engagement with our content and surpassed our goal by double with regards to guiding traffic to The Endpoint.

Things we're working on for the rest of the year

• Translations: Many of our users don't speak English so our knowledge base is essentially useless to them. We're working with Vanilla to get a Google translate button added to our site as well as a translation vendor who will actually automate the translation of our knowledge base content through the API. We're so excited for this project.
• Analytics: We have so much data from so many sources and no singular place to see it all which makes dashboard creations very manual and very involved with the API's of various systems. Including Vanilla's. We have a vendor who is going to (through the API) take all our disparate data from disjointed systems, bring it together in a data lake, and visualize it for us in our BI tool. I can't wait to have a wholistic view of everything happening with our customer enablement programs.
• SEO: Many of our users rely on Google for answers, but so much of our content is blocked by a login. We're working with a vendor that's going to help us take all our Vanilla content and expose portions of it to the Google search engine so it can show up when our users are looking for answers!

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!