Community as a Retention Engine: How Kyriba Connected Engagement and AI to Drive Adoption and Advocacy

[Speaker 1]
Thank you. Hi, everyone. So, thank you so much for joining this session.

I'm Denise. I'm the CS Operations Director at Koriba. For those of you who don't know what Koriba is, we're a treasury and finance platform, and we cater to finance and treasury teams.

We're a management platform, and we had this dream of building a community, and this session today aims to share with you what our journey was into building community, from having a vision, having an idea, and all of the process that took us there. So, I'm going to click here. So, this was our starting point.

So, we had a vision. We did not yet know what good looked like. We didn't know exactly what we wanted to execute, but I was actually in the session yesterday, and contrary to the community session yesterday, we had a lot of people advocating for community.

So, we had product on board. We had marketing. We had all internal teams begging for community.

This was something that everybody wanted. So, for me in this journey, it was more about managing the stakeholders and how to manage everyone's different vision of how that would come together. And from an operational point of view, our journey was to kind of bring those ideas together and make it a cohesive community and really kind of aim to deliver what all of these teams wanted out of a community.

So, we had everyone on board. We didn't have to advocate internally to get community up and running. So, I do believe after going to the session yesterday, that's actually a pro in our sense because we didn't have to drive that enthusiasm internally.

So, what did we have at the time? At the time, we knew our engagement was fragmented. Customers didn't know where to go to kind of share ideas, product ideation.

So, that ended up being a support ticket that landed nowhere. So, that was one of the problems. We didn't have peer-to-peer engagement, which was also a challenge for our customers and we wanted them to have a place where they could do that.

Marketing wanted a place to share events, to advocate, and we wanted to also understand who our customers were that advocated for us, you know, and we didn't have a clear place to identify that. So, in January, we decided we only knew one thing. We knew we wanted to gain site platform, and that was it.

We didn't know much more. We didn't know what it looked like or how it was going to turn out. So, at the end of this, we had the ambition and this was to build a thriving customer community that drives product value and reduces time to resolution.

We didn't think of community so much as a support deflection, as I see a lot of teams do. That was more we wanted to share knowledge and that would be a consequence of potentially having the community, but support and support teams weren't our main community driver. We were looking more for peer-to-peer engagement, product ideation, and everything else that comes with community.

Right, so, as this is about building, I'd love to know where all of you are in your community journey. So, I'm going to set out a poll, a side of poll, to kind of understand the people who did join the session. Where are you on your journey?

Are you currently, do you have a mature, or have you not begun one? Where are you on that journey? So, that's interesting.

80% of you have already got a mature community, so I'm not teaching you much. But anyway, well, we share. We learn with each other.

So, that's very interesting that most of you already have a community. All right, so, I'm going to go, I think that's okay. I mean, the majority has spoken.

Oh, did I go back? Next. Okay, here we are.

Okay. So, what for us was really a determining factor in how we were going to build the community and I advocate for everyone to do that. We ask Insight for reference customers.

That was really important to us because we didn't know what good looked like. We didn't know what we were trying to, we knew what we wanted to achieve in the end, but we didn't know how we'd get there. So, for us, meeting with the reference customer really gave us clarity and we asked these key questions to this reference customer.

The key takeaway was we asked for references, for reference customer, and we asked them four things. How they structured the categories, we weren't sure how we were going to structure our categories. Who owns what after it's built?

Who's owning what part of the community? How they moderated and what they automated and what they didn't automate. And obviously, we always ask that key question.

What have you learned that you could tell us? What were your mistakes along the journey that we could learn from you? What would you have done differently?

What would you have done the same? So, that was really what we kind of asked that reference customer and it was pivotal to us. It was pivotal to us because decisions that were taking weeks to decide because no one in the room within our company really knew what that good looked like.

Suddenly, we kind of had a reference. We said, okay, well, we've seen it done this way. We know, like we got a lot of insight on engagement feedback loops that we'd never considered and a bunch of other just notes that people told us with experience that we just didn't know enough about, right?

So, that gave us a concrete definition of what good decisions were made in days instead of in weeks and it was a full circle. We are now reference customers to customers who are at the beginning of their community journey and that's very fulfilling for us because we saw ourselves a very short time ago in that same space, right? So, which brings me to how we organize ourselves.

So, for us, from an operational point of view, this was super important and this was very different, as I said, from the session that I was in yesterday. We had a lot of stakeholders. We had product.

We had marketing. We had 16 people in our OpCo meetings, all having their own opinions and ideas and visions and desires of what community was going to be like. So, we had to manage that.

So, we had to organize this in a structured way to ensure we would deliver. We did have a goal date to launch and I'll share that with you in the upcoming slides. So, it was critical that we organized ourselves to actually pull through and to actually deliver what we aimed to deliver.

So, this was not a platform project and I want you to think about it that way. For us, it was an operating model and it was an operating model internally that we were going to define how we were going to use community to achieve what we seeked out to achieve. All of the nice things, the product ideation, the peer-to-peer connection, improved content and all of that.

So, we had 16 people with nine functions all working on one stack channel. The 16 people in different functions were product management, marketing, our academy that's called Elevate. We did have some degree of support but that wasn't the main driver.

We had product strategy and delivery. We had corporate IT which was important to define how we logged in, how we implemented or connected community to Salesforce. That was important.

We had legal and I'll come to that why we needed legal and these were things we didn't really consider when we set out to do the project. And we had obviously our CSM team and Gainsight implementation team that guided us on the steps. Now, if all of you, 80% of you, have built community, you know there's not a lot of implementation from the Gainsight team.

It's really all on us. So, that's coming back to why references are so important. We have to kind of learn our way.

I mean, there are guidelines but you build it on your own. So, that was important to us. So, how we organized it and structured is we had weekly opcodes during the build.

That was important to have everyone in the room and decide what the milestones were, what we were delivering, what the decisions were. Then, we had a biweekly steer code with the executive sponsor to keep them up to date. And after we launched, and every phase had discipline, so we made sure we had a sign-off.

That became very critical for us because when you have a lot of stakeholders, different people say different things. And for me, it was very important to have those sign-offs, to document those sign-offs, to have follow-ups, to ensure everyone is on the right page. Otherwise, it just becomes very complex because we're all genuinely invested and we want the best, but it gets quite confusing.

So, it was very important to have that discipline with the sign-off and change requests assessed for impact because along the journey, you start off with 40 requirements and when you're mid-project, you now have 60 requirements because now everyone's remembered and gone online and remembered that something else is great and we'd love this and that, and you have to manage that. Some things we could accommodate and that was fine, but others we didn't, so we just had to kind of manage the stakeholders. That's the key takeaway here.

So, where we started. So, we started in January and we launched in April, so I'm going to take you through that journey. So, the kick-off and defining the governance happened in January.

In February, we gathered the requirements from all of these stakeholders to make sure we got sign-off on what each stakeholder aimed to achieve. In March was the build, and that's when we got into the crust of how do we actually execute this and what good looks like. And in April, we launched, and that came with some sacrifices that I'll talk through in the next slides.

And once we launched, it was out there. It wasn't everything everybody wanted, but it was enough to launch, and that's something that we did have to compromise if you want to do it in such a short amount of time. At Kariba, we're undergoing a lot of transformation, and time and discipline is really key, so I couldn't afford myself 8 months or 10 months to kind of figure it out.

Like, we had tight timelines we had to deliver, so that came with planning as well. We had to decide what we were going to deliver, what we could deliver, what was achievable, and just what wasn't, and that was okay. So, we broke it down into this is what will be present at launch, and this is what we'll take on after launch, and that's perfectly fine.

And I think a lot of times people get stuck on getting everything done, and then you kind of get lost and you're like, oh, but I didn't do this, but that's okay. At the end of the day, community is about having that place, having the basic requirements that you set out to achieve, and all the bells and whistles followed in the next upcoming months. So, May to June was all about marketing, doing what they do best, and telling everyone at every event, this is community, you now have a place for product aviation, and people were loving it, because our customers really felt unheard.

They felt like they didn't have, aside from support, a dedicated space to communicate, to share knowledge, and to share their enhancement request. That was a big, big one. We didn't realize how big it was.

In fact, when we launched, that was the busiest engagement. Everybody wanted to go on that enhancement. We actually even had internal people going on the enhancement request, and we're like, you're not supposed to be adding enhancement requests.

That's reserved for our customers. But that was interesting. So, it was something that we just hadn't explored enough, and it became very evident when we launched a community.

In July, that was the time, okay, we've settled. We've now launched. Customers know where to go.

It's running. Some glitches we fixed along the way. Now we can talk about the bells and whistles.

Now's the time to talk about the fun stuff, the AI, all the automations that we can do, translations, and that was something we had to give up on. We're a global company. We have customers all over the world, Japanese, French, and they don't really take to talking to English, but that was a compromise.

We had to launch in April, and we launched in English only, and that was okay. That was perfectly okay. When V2 came around, version 2, as we defined it, we called it the engagement project, we then decided, okay, this is now the time to look at how we can best serve our customers, and I'll take you through that as well.

So, we agreed on the requirements and the scope of what V2 would be, if there would be necessarily a V3 or V4 afterwards that didn't matter. We always looked at the milestones that we could achieve and that catered to the needs that the stakeholders were asking for until we moved on to the next cycle. So, we signed off on V2, and here's what each function actually owned.

So, as I said, we had a lot of buy-in internally, so each function owned different things, and this was important for us as well, and I think a key thing to share with you is we didn't have a community manager as of yet, so Ops Team was managing this. We were in the process of hiring someone, but this was all run by us, so we were making sure that each section that each team or stakeholder owned, they would own for themselves and drive, and we were driving the community as a whole. So, in saying that, we had marketing, they were passionate and they were involved in the UI, the UX experience, how it looked, the feel, the badges, all of what marketing does best, and that was their key stake, and they also had something really interesting that I've not seen on a lot of communities, but was very important to us.

They wanted the gamification on community, so they wanted to make sure that people or customers were getting points and merchandise for being in events like Pulse and other things that Koriba does, and so that was particularly important to them, so we had to have that in our community, so they have a gamification platform where customers can go in there, they do challenges, and based on those challenges, they earn points, and then they earn merchandising, which was hilarious to me, because I thought, who on earth wants to gain points to get a Koriba hat and, I don't know, other Koriba swag?

It turns out it was very popular. Everyone will do anything for swag, so that was also one. It was product ideation and swag, so everyone wanted to get some points to get anything they could get with Koriba, so that was very interesting to me from an operational point of view, so that was successful, so they were big parts and their requirements were all around that, and we had to make sure they took ownership of that and that they would comply with what we needed within the times we needed, so we would launch, so that was their ownership.

Then we had product, and product had a lot of big ideas with ideation. They wanted geoconnectivity, so that they would accept the ticket or not accept the ticket, and we're like, no, we're just going to start with a place where customers can do that. You guys need to look at that, and then maybe in V2 we attacked Jira.

We can't do everything all at once, and that was okay as well, but we also got them to own that section because that is essentially their section. They are the ones driving it. It's their ideation.

They are the ones saying to customers, yes, we can. No, we can't. Thank you for the vote, whatever, so we gave each stakeholder admin rights to manage their section of the community, and it's still run successfully today that way, and it's also a nice way to advocate internally because they all own a piece of the pie.

Community is not ours. It's the company's, and everyone has a share in it. Everyone is involved in advocating for it, and that's worked beautifully, even in our events because you find product people really passionate about it, marketing people really passionate about it because they all feel they own it.

It's not just one segmented CS or operational thing. It's all about the journey, right? Then we had our Elevate team, which is our academy, and they were instrumental.

They were very instrumental in the sense, firstly, they provided content to our customers. Now, our academy is not free, so we sell our courses, but they did find a place to share what the content of those courses were, what the main things or the main drivers they believe people should be doing, and that was good, too. They were instrumental in answering.

When you do launch a community, initially, people are not really engaging aside from the hello, and you say, introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about you, what you're doing, and so forth, but then when they actually start to ask questions, the academy team really stepped up, and they were the ones providing answers when customers weren't answering each other. You have to think of that when you're building a community because customers go, they're great, they see it, but if there's not engagement happening and nothing is pushing them to engage, then they're not going to engage, and someone needs to be answering their questions. If you start with 10, 15, 50 users, and none of them are answering each other, then it's just going to die, so that was something we had to think about initially.

There had to be input from us, and we had to engage with customers in order for customers to then continue those conversations so that our academy team was instrumental to make sure we got that engagement. Then we had support in CS Ops, and that was me and my team, and we were making sure that we were sharing content in the community, that customers could go there, read up on things that potentially could help them solve issues before they required to open a support ticket, although that wasn't at all our main driver. Then we had IT and corporate systems, and they were the ones helping us in terms of the connectivity, in terms of all of the architecture that was set behind building the community.

Then we had a phase strategy, which I discussed with you. We couldn't do all at once, and that was okay. We made the executive decision to say this is what we're going to deliver at launch, and this is what we're going to defer, and this is what we're going to do after launch.

V1, version 1, was deliberately launched without AI. We couldn't get to everything, so it was core first, exciting things later. Ultimately, that decision was our success.

If we hadn't made that decision early on, we probably wouldn't have been able to launch in April, so that was critical for us. Don't be afraid, is what I'm saying to say. You're not going to give everyone everything.

That's okay. You'll give it to them later. We deferred on purpose to protect the go-live dates, AI, mobile app, more languages, advanced dashboards, and make the point every deferred item was somebody's favorite feature.

That's sometimes hard when you have these people who are so excited and they're like, but you're not going to give me this, and that's okay. You just have to really manage your stakeholders and keep them motivated and on board and show them that you're going to do that. Finally, when version 2 was signed off in July, we gave them those bells and whistles.

We picked up. We got the AI moderation, the live translation, the native language experience, which was crucial for us, meaning that customers can actually go into the community and be confronted in the language that they speak, as opposed to just being English or defined by one language, whatever language that is. That was groundbreaking for us, being that we're a global company.

That only came in version 2. The hardest word in launch is later. Anyone who's actually implemented something knows it's the hardest thing to say, we'll do that later, right?

But it's okay to say it. That is what went right. Here is what went wrong.

I wanted to share with you what didn't go so well. These were the things. We knew what to build.

We learned what it takes to agree. That was maybe our hardest process in all of this, is to have everyone so committed and to have everyone agree on the vision, because someone was thinking that the ideation should be here. Someone was thinking that the gamification should be there.

Marketing thought that we should open the page with the gamification, and product thought otherwise. We underestimated how hard it can be to agree. That was certainly, for us, one of the lessons.

You have to build in a cushion for yourself if you have a short timeline as we did, because you know some things may go wrong, and you have to manage that. As good practice, I would always say, build yourselves a comfortable two-week, three-week cushion for anything that you're just not going to control. Agreeing is one of those.

Sometimes things take longer to agree. The delays you cannot control, the builds slipped from us for two weeks. We could not control the date, but we controlled the buffer.

The lesson, too, was registration and security. We didn't even factor that in when we got on this journey. We thought it was going to be easy-peasy.

We can just do SSO, or they'll register, and then it was like, oh, no, it's so much more complex than that. How do we validate them? Cariba is a closed community.

Our leadership was not keen to open it up to everyone, so that suddenly became a much bigger effort than we had initially thought it would be. That took a lot of effort that we didn't think of at the beginning, so that was the lesson for us. Lesson three, stack sign-off.

There were many dependencies to move forward, and that was also a challenge, because you had to wait for marketing to develop what they needed to develop in order to create the ideation section for product, and then they had to define the icons and so forth, so that was also something that took longer, and there were stacked sign-offs between all of the phases, and you have to account for that, so that was a lesson for us as well to make sure we managed everyone, that everyone knew what they had to sign off on in order not to delay the go-live. Lesson four was the unvalidated requirements. When we started the journey, as I shared, we didn't know what good looked like.

We were learning and going into the experience ourselves, so we validated the requirements, but there were requirements there that just didn't make any sense, and we didn't know any better when we validated them, right? We're in mid-project, and we start looking at the requirements again that we ourselves had accepted, and we're like, what does this even mean? What are you asking?

Is this even community? They themselves are like, I'm not sure. I think I chatted with you six months ago.

We're like, oh, okay, so this doesn't really make sense, so it's part of the journey, and it's okay. Again, I'm quite relaxed in that. I think I love building.

I love operations, and I think that's part of the journey, and you just have to take it with some sense of humor because everyone I don't think that there's any company today that doesn't get crazy requirements from people who are Googling. Well, back in the day it was Googling. Now it's Claude and ChachiBT and everything else, and you're going to get some really crazy random asks that don't even sometimes have anything to do with what you're building, and sometimes you know what it is.

Sometimes you don't, and that's okay. We made that mistake saying, oh, yeah. I mean, one that comes to mind that I think of, we were building Gainsight for CSM, and we were building community as well, and we knew for CSM we wanted to integrate Gong because that was part of the signals, and we had that requirement in community as well, and we thought, fine, Gong.

Sure, Gong. We know about Gong, and then we got halfway and like, what's Gong doing in community? How's Gong feeding community?

We don't get it, and then we went back to the people who asked it, and they said, well, isn't Gong integrated into Gainsight? And we're like, yeah, I think so, but that's not the community. That's the CSM Gainsight.

They're like, oh, you're probably right. We don't know what we wanted to do with Gong, and that's okay. We took it with good spirits, and it was fine.

So after all that, here is what we actually launched. So I'm going to show you our community which, as I said, is closed off to customers, to non-customers. Apologies.

And this is what it looks like today. It has four main parts to it, and that was intentional. These were the things we were trying to achieve.

So the community is closed, and this is your only look. So one front door, four things a customer can do. Learn, ask, discover, and contribute.

Those were our key outcomes. So the learning center is where training articles and product updates are owned by our education team, our Elevate team. Ask the community questions and answers with a live leaderboard.

And that was also a challenge, by the way, because marketing wanted that gamification I shared with you, and they called it points. So people earned points. So then when we said, but community has a leaderboard, they said, yeah, but you make a plan, because you can't call it points, because customers are going to get confused.

And we're like, oh, fantastic. And then we had to advocate. We were like, no, I'm telling you, the good practice says there has to be a leaderboard, and people take this really seriously.

They want to be leaders on the leaderboard. We cannot have a community without a leaderboard. So then my two wonderful team members were sitting in a room and were thinking, how are we going to work this around?

Points are points. How are we going to call points by any other name? So then we came up with the idea that our platforms are named by certain gems, like diamond, quartz, and so forth.

And so we said, oh, we know. We're going to call them gems, and our customers will get it, because the platforms are valuable gems. So we called them gems, and customers earn gems.

And the more gems they get, the higher up on the leaderboard they are, because they cannot have points. Points are restricted to the marketing gamification. So that was part of the journey as well.

You elaborate, you pivot, and you do what you can. And it actually turned out to be quite sweet, and people appreciated it. Then we have product ideas, where customers can submit, vote, and follow an idea all the way to the roadmap, and product is owning that, providing that feedback to customers.

And rewards and events, and that was the marketing section where they do different challenges, and they get their rewards, and that was also very popular. Now let me show you the value that we never put in the business case. And here's the value we never put into the business case.

So what we didn't consider, we knew what we aimed to achieve, but after developing, we really saw the value. This became apparent when we started to think of our day-to-day processes, how we communicated with customers, and I think most people and most companies do communicate a lot via email, and it just gets really tiring, and people just don't read the emails, because you've got maintenance emails, and email reminders. You've got surveys and peers.

You have release notes, and eventually mail is just another thing that customers look at and kind of say, oh, it's another email. So what's really going to drive them? So in our industry, particularly very recently, we had an ISO change, and this was critical for banks and our customers to be aware of, and community was the right place to announce that.

So we used community, and this is an example of it, where you're not sending emails, you're producing it, and you're providing the article in the community. It's searchable. Customers can go in there and say, I want to know about these ISO changes, and they can promote.

We have Q&As there already set for them, and they can ask questions, and we have teams who can answer them on it. So that was really crucial for us, and now we're doing it at every new thing that we have to communicate with them. We advocate for them to go to the community.

So it's searchable. Customers can find it when they need it, not when it happened or through the email. It's shareable.

You can share a link as opposed to an email. You can share a link and say, here's the information you need for whatever you need, and that's helpful to all of the teams that are engaging with customers. They can just share a link.

It's discussable. You have Q&A there, and people can answer, so it's live. It's not just a communication and off you go.

It's like, you can come back to us and ask us questions, and it doesn't have to be a support ticket again. So this is the example, and for a treasury audience, this alone justified the community internally, because we always have to communicate updates to customers. And that is V1.

And that's what we delivered in V1. So now I'm going to take you to V2. So this is where the fun happens.

So this is where we kind of let a lot of people down initially, and they said, oh, but customers are not going to be able to engage in their own language, and where's all the bells and whistles? And that's what we then agreed to do in V2. So this was in July.

We defined the requirements. We haven't completed V2. We're still in the process of it.

It's a very early community. We launched in April. So this is where we leveraged AI, and AI has been important to us.

Like I said, we don't have a dedicated community team. So AI has been fundamental for us for moderation. So we launched AI moderation.

It is overseen by a human if it flags anything, but it allows us to control if people are saying things that are not in agreeance with our code of ethics, and AI can just kind of run that and validate if something that should not have been said in the community. Otherwise, you have to have someone dedicated looking at the comments, looking at what people are posting, because you can't control that. So that was a game-changer for us.

We've implemented AI moderation, and that allows us to not have to have someone permanently controlling the community. So AI does the first pass, and then people make the call if AI flags something. If AI flags something, it goes to someone, and then that person says, yes, it's perfectly fine, or no, it's not.

The platform flags spam, abuse, and sensitive content, and moderators keep policy, context, and customer relationship. The native language interface, that was really important to us, so people now, when they sign in, if they're French, if they're Italian, they will see the community in the language that the user has defined, and that's also really good to make sure our customers feel that they can engage in their languages. They can also post in whatever language they want, and they will see people, and that was something that we had a lot of discussion about, because marketing was keen to do groups for regions, and leadership was like, well, that defies the purpose of community, because if it's not got a lot of posts yet, and we're segregating people by regions, then you're not really getting all of that insight from all the different regions. So AI translation, live translation was very important to us, because it means customers can see the posts in their language, and you're not segregating customers by region, and they can engage with each other, regardless of speaking the same language or not, so that was important to us, although I do say, have a test as well, because some of the languages are not 100%, and some customers can be sensitive, so make sure your customer base is okay with not 100% translation, or if you feel that one language is just not as well translated, maybe hold back for a while, and provide gainsight with that feedback, and say, listen, for this language, I'm a bit concerned, maybe you need to look at how you're translating it, and improve that. So we also did some automation with allow listing, Salesforce adds new customer domains automatically, so because our community is closed, we're only allowing customers, we're validating them by domain, and this was a manual effort on launch, we said, here's a list of customers, these are the people that can automatically sign up for community, now we've automated that process, so every time we sign a new logo, no one has to manually go in there, it automatically validates and updates that list, right? Self-service reporting, as I've shared with you, our internal teams are very active, and they own their own parts, and initially, they were all coming to us, asking us for reports, asking us to give them statistics of engagement and so forth, and we ended up teaching them how to produce their own reports so that they can pull that information for themselves, and that was also part of V2, we didn't have that capacity during V1, we were just focused on the launch, and at this moment, people are independently pulling the reports they need to work out what's working for them in that or other area of the community. So that was self-service reporting, and six months after launch, what did the numbers say? So before I show you what they say, we're going to go to a new poll, and I'd like to ask, and most of you, 80%, already have your community, so you know the answer to this, but I'm curious to say, what percentage of community members ever post?

Okay, everyone knows that. So, that's it. Fundamentally, guys, it is the first one, yeah, very few people post, and that's something we also have to learn to manage, because, and that's what I'm going to take you through the next slides, is how do you measure successful communities?

So now you've launched, everyone's excited, and new users are coming in, but do you have a successful community or don't you, and how do you measure that? So we started with looking at how many people were signing up. That was really exciting for us.

The more people signed up, the more we felt we were doing a good job. But once they've signed up, it's so much more than that. So by 30th of September, six months after launch, we had 1,135 total users, which was a good milestone for us, and we had 480 posts, 210 topics, 270 replies, so we were measuring the activity.

What was happening? What were customers doing? Quality signals, 68% of the topics were product ideas.

We knew there was a need for that, and 91% of ideas came from registered customers who, and not just the internal customers, who really wanted to share with us what they felt we needed to improve in our solutions. So the community is becoming a product feedback engine, and the top content today were product ideas and the ISO communication. However, there was a time where the gamification and the rewards were actually the biggest driver.

So it shifts, and you have to be looking into that because it's always shifting. What these numbers do not show is what the silent majority is doing, and that was something that we very recently have said to the teams. Okay, now we've achieved the signups, we want more signups, and we drive signups, but what about the silent majority?

So if less than 5% are posting, does that mean we don't have a successful community? What does that actually mean? And so we've had to look deeper and see the signals that community is sharing that you can't measure on posts and on activity because there is more happening.

So straight into the next slide, we're going into, this is the heart of the talk, where we say 96% of members never post. So how do we manage that? And they're still getting value, right?

And how do we show that to everyone who's invested so much? So we first treated that as a participation problem, and how did we make people post? So we thought we weren't engaging enough, and what was the right process?

But if posts are the only metric and 96% of the community looks like failure, it's not failure, it's a reach. And we had to pivot that thought process, which with every post we've learned, I mean, all of the sessions I've gone to, I've taken so much, which I'm taking back, including in community, especially now we're also on the road to implement SkillJar, and we hadn't thought of how the synergies were there, and we're obviously coming out of this definitely going to connect SkillJar to community. So every post we learn new things, and this was the thing, we had to stop thinking about how many people were posting, and what was the reach?

So what the silent majority actually does, they search before opening a ticket, the answer arrives before case does, they learn about changes like ISO without an email, they vote on ideas, product signal without waiting, they forward learning center content to train their own teams, and all of that needs to be looked at, and we weren't measuring that at all. So that was definitely a lesson for us. So remember the reference customers telling us to set realistic expectations, and that's important, because I think sometimes people set out to do community as we did, and we thought it was just going to be everyone signing up, it was going to be crazy, and at some point you need to learn from everyone here, 80% who know that it's less than 5% actually, so that you set up your own expectations and you don't feel like you failed, because you haven't failed, there's a lot of value in community, it's just how you look at it and how you measure where the value is.

So we're changing how we measure ultimately, this is what we're looking at today. So today we're looking at what, you know, we're changing how we measure the community and what people are doing. So what's the reach, the shift, the activity metrics told us the community exists, which is fine, the outcome metrics tell us whether it changes what customers do, and absolutely it's changed what our customers do.

So the four lessons that we've taken away from how we measure today and how we're looking to look at community, which we weren't looking at before, is the reach, how many customers read, search and use it without posting, so we're starting to look at the views, the searches, the visitors per account, right, that's more meaningful than the posts. The adoption, do they find the answers and join the product experiences, and that ties back to all of the lessons we've learned with SkillJar and the engagement between each other. Retain, the title callback of the session, I see community today as a retention engine, and most people who set out to do community don't think about it as a retention engine, and we've come to learn that it's so much more than what we initially, I mean, it served our purpose, but there's still so much more that it provides that we didn't really think of.

Certainly when we went out to build it, we weren't thinking of community as a retention engine, but at the end of the day, the engagement signals we get from community tied to NPS service and so forth feed our customer scorecard, our health scorecard, and that tells us a lot, and we've come to realize that customers that are engaged, that are in community, that are doing learnings, are customers that tend to renew, and those that aren't, we wouldn't even see slipping, so these are the opportunities to tell them to engage, teach them, drive them to engage, because we know the customers that are more engaged are customers that are less likely to churn and to leave us, and that's something we honestly didn't factor that much in, and we've come to learn. And advocate. We didn't really know who was advocating for us.

We didn't have a platform where people could advocate for us that we had visibility of, and now we do, so we now know who the contributors are and the references are, so we've just changed how we look at the community. It was so much more than what we actually bought into, and we're still learning, so we're very much still on the journey and the path. We're still learning our way through it.

Alright, so five things we would tell you if you haven't built a community and you're going to start a community today. So, one, ask for reference customers. I cannot overstate that enough.

That was crucial in our journey. I'm sad we didn't ask for it sooner. It took us a moment, and that was really important to us.

Two, treat it as an operating model, not a platform. It's so much more than a platform, and you can't look at it like a platform. It is an operating model, and you have to think about it, and your company needs to think about it like that.

Ownership after launch is the real work. You do have to factor that in. Either you've got a dedicated team, or like we do, you have to have the stakeholders owning their parts to make sure you're driving and improving and making sure that the community is evolving.

Three, launch V1 without the exciting things. That was certainly important for us. If you're tight on a date and a launch, and I think everyone is today, all companies are asking, if you say eight months, they say, okay, great, give it to me in four.

That's been my experience in everything that I've set out to develop or to implement. There's always less, whatever you aim or whatever you scope it to be, leadership will always say, okay, that's great. I'm happy for you, but can you do it in half that time or 60% of the time?

That's fine. That's okay. Be ready to deliver something.

I'm an advocate of always delivering something. I'd rather deliver in pieces and in stages, but I'm always delivering as opposed to saying, oh, I can't deliver. I'll never make it.

Then you're just not giving anything. It's not good for you. It's not good for the people who are investing.

You have to make sure that you're delivering something, even if that something is not everything, because you can build on that later. Four, put every sign-off on the timeline. Make sure you're managing those stakeholders properly.

Make sure you're signing off those requirements and make sure you're agreeing so that you don't run into those confusing conversations mid-project where people are not sure what they set out to do, and they're not agreeing with each other. You have to make sure you're managing that very rigorously. Measure outcomes, including the customers who never post.

That was the last lesson for us. Certainly, don't just look at who's engaging. Make sure you're seeing all the value that community is bringing.

This is our lessons learned for our journey in building the community. Now, I do have my two solutions architects in my team. I didn't start by saying I was supposed to say, Hi, I'm Denise, mother of two.

I was in a presentation yesterday where someone said that, and I thought it was really interesting that we don't define ourselves just by our profession, but by our personal lives, and it never came to my mind, so I was opening to say, mother of two and sister of two, big sister to two, because I have my wonderful team who's always calling me, what do you call me? I'm a millennial, but they keep telling me I'm a boomer. I'm not a boomer.

I'm not a boomer, but they keep me sharp. I love them for it. They're always bringing me to the new age.

I'm always the conservative, but is this safe? Is this secure? Can we do that?

What about the AI policies? What about the legal? I love them so much for it, and I wouldn't be here without them.

I mean, love to manage them, so big sister to them. I bring Joao and Alex, and I invite all of you to ask us any build questions you may have, any technical questions you may have, or any curiosities really, and guys, get up and stand here. I'm doing that.

I'm 100% doing that. So, yeah, that's me. Thank you.

[Speaker 2]
Applause Applause Wonderful presentation. Thank you so much. There was a lot to cover, but I think so many insightful, practical things.

We have many questions. We try to cover at least a few of them before it's time, but definitely, of course, you're happy to connect with them later afterwards as well. Maybe we can get the questions up.

Actually, like, fun fact, while we're waiting. I used to have, actually, to meet those wonderful guys yesterday at the dinner table.

[Speaker 1]
I'm the boomer. I went to the hotel early.

[Speaker 2]
So, if we talk about this topic, actually, the first question, why do you have a closed community website and how does that align with the principle of an open community? I think that's a very important question.

[Speaker 1]
That's an important question, and I'm coming out of this pulse going back to my leadership and saying, what can we open about it? So, yesterday, I was in a session, 100%. I think leadership was conservative.

We're in FinTech. FinTech is a conservative environment in general with a lot of privacy, and, you know, there's always concerns. And in the session I was in yesterday, they had part of the community closed and part of the community open, and they had 20,000 users, and I popped up a question and said, how many of those members are part of the closed?

And she said less than 20%. So, I'm going back and saying, guys, what can we open up to? 100%.

I don't advocate for a closed community. I think it just makes it more difficult, and you do have the opportunity within community to create groups that are closed to specific people. So, this is what we have today.

I don't think it has to be what you do. It was the decision we made, but I'm certainly coming out of this going back and saying, rethinking that, and really looking at, what can I open to more people?

[Speaker 2]
The example was Cognite. Actually, I helped them.

[Speaker 1]
They started as a private company. So, it's part of the journey.

[Speaker 2]
Every community that started would be private and went public and never went back. There we go.

[Speaker 1]
There we go.

[Speaker 2]
That was the question we actually discussed. Would you say running a community needs a dedicated manager or should it sit under a CSM role?

[Speaker 1]
So, that's a tough one. We don't have that yet. We are looking to hire that.

I think community depends, based on the presentation yesterday, they were alone. They didn't have the internal sponsorship. For us, it was much easier.

I actually came out of that session thinking, wow, I was complaining about my issues, and they had the opposite issue. Isn't it interesting that we're always learning? It depends what your buy-in is, because for us, even without a manager, we've actually gone really well because we have each team owning their bit, right?

I think you always have to have one resource. You should have one dedicated resource, and that's where we're heading as well, just to make sure you're driving those metrics and you're driving that engagement and you're planning everything and keeping everything cohesive, but I don't think you have to have a dedicated team, and coming out of Pulse, I do think it should sit under CSM. Ultimately, I do, because of what I've learned with the skill jar and how it reduces retention and all of that, it's definitely you get so much more, and especially the signals from community.

For me, I don't think any other team is as equipped to interpret signals as much as CSMs are.

[Speaker 2]
Now, about the reference customers, how much did you do for the moderation of the community, and what's been your experience compared to what you've been told?

[Speaker 1]
A lot of the reference customers hadn't gone to the bells and whistles yet, so they were self-managing that. They had dedicated resources looking at every post, and I was like, I don't have that. That's not an option for me.

You've only recently rolled out the AI moderation as well. It's working well for us. We've not had any massive red flags.

Right, team? Keep me real. Thank goodness.

Let's hope we keep it that way. I'm enjoying the AI moderation, but I think that's a choice. Everyone does it, and it depends how many resources you have.

For us, this was like gold. We needed an AI moderation. AI was transformative for us in our community today.

[Speaker 2]
For me, it was eye-opening. Also, for so many years, I've been leaving the community to itself over the weekend, just go away, and now it feels kind of scary to do that.

[Speaker 1]
Yes.

[Speaker 2]
More about reference customers. You asked them what they have stopped measuring, and what was the most surprising practice that you decided to abandon as a result of that?

[Speaker 1]
Well, as I said, I decided to abandon looking at only the engagement that customers are doing on the community, because there's all the other signals that we weren't paying attention to. That's where we're focusing our roadmap in community. We have a good roadmap, and it's all focused on everything that you can't directly measure.

[Speaker 2]
Let's take one more question. How do you keep Salesforce data in the community accurate, and who owns it after launch? Is it your job, Joao, or Alex, who's running that?

[Speaker 1]
Both. You guys.

[Speaker 3]
The data is owned by the teams that manage the data in Salesforce. Now, how do we keep it clean? I guess everyone knows that getting data downstream from Salesforce is going to fall as it is, but we need to make sure that we correlate that data with what we also have in Gainside CS, where it's a bit better because we have the CS apps, and we integrate, we launch CS also this year, so we could have a good groundbreaking education for them, you know, how to keep the data clean, and what else was...

[Speaker 1]
This was the question?

[Speaker 3]
Yeah. Community-wise, the data is accurate. We didn't break it yet, and I hope it stays like this.

[Speaker 2]
Well, yeah. Thank you so much. One big round of applause, Alex, Joao.

[Speaker 1]
Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you.