Expedition Luminate: How We Built It, Scaled It, and Made It a Gainsight Gamechanger

[Speaker 2]
Thanks everyone. It really doesn't seem like a full year since Pulse Europe in Dublin. That was my first Pulse conference and the highlight we've seen Sam go on stage to collect the Game Changer Award for the Community Architect.

Fast forward 12 months and here we are, delighted to share our experience and what we've built. So my name is Alan Blair, I'm the Senior CX Manager at Ideagen and this is Sam, our Community Genius and Extraordinaire. So to start I'll put a bit of context as to who we are.

Ideagen is a business-to-business software company. We are headquartered in Nottingham in the United Kingdom with offices all over the world. It's a trusted name in governance, compliance, risk management.

We've got solutions that are used in so many industries. You can see some of the stats on the screen just now. We touch so many areas of regulated organisations.

If you've been in a plane, if you've been in a hospital, if you've eaten a bar of chocolate, our software is somewhere in that process. Not only that, they're used in universities, accounting firms, you know, anywhere the sky is the limit for where our solutions are used. And one thing that we really want to get across is the scale of growth that we are currently seeing in the business.

Ideagen is an acquisitional company and as you can see we acquire a lot. It was in one of the sessions the other day and somebody at our round table said we have eight products in our community. It is very complex.

You can see the number of products that we are juggling with on a daily basis. In the last few years we've really ramped up those acquisitions. Some of them also include hardware as well as software, which is a whole new realm of community support that we need to develop.

Adding to that is the layer of complexity with international languages, different culture requirements and different requirements across all the regulated industries that we cover. Being so acquisitive means that we have customers covering a huge spectrum, both from technology and what they're willing to accept. So if you look at one side, we have this highly regulated organization.

Their software is on premise. They probably don't have the internet. Everything is completely locked down.

Think nuclear safety sites, government contractors, defense contractors. We cannot get the community into those organizations. Then at the other side, we have these SaaS organizations, the companies who can embrace agentic AI, they can embrace community and they're very willing to engage with us.

And then somewhere in the middle you've got that variety where security is still a concern, they're security conscious and sometimes our software is so customized it's unrecognizable to anyone on our community. And how do you create a community where the experience is so different? So a quick poll we've got is, is your community a single product or a multi-product community?

[Speaker 1]
That's a good question.

[Speaker 2]
Mostly multi-product? Yeah, multi-product. So hopefully some of the stuff we're going to go through will resonate with you.

You'll start to see some of the challenges that we've had. You may have had the same challenges. So with that, I'll hand you over to Sam to walk you through what we've built.

[Speaker 1]
So when we first started, we were given a task to build a community forum and that kind of exploded into a kind of customer hub. So we inherited three distinct systems. The first one was a knowledge base that came about in 2019 and that was from a move to Zendesk for our ticketing system.

It mainly offered step-by-step guidance where our email was still the kind of primary way that our customers interacted with us on a support level. So customers were basically coming in through the front door, finding the answer, and then just leaving. And we were seeing roughly around 700 unique visitors per day.

And then we had our e-learning resource, which was built on a bit of a legacy learning management system called eFront. We had a bit of a small free catalog, but a higher tier paid plan. But only a couple of our products were covered in that system.

And it felt very standalone, very much like its own product and not part of any coherent journey. And then the new kid on the block, which was the community, which was built on Gainsight CC. It was built from scratch by myself with very little knowledge, very little community experience whatsoever.

And our goal was to get our customers across all of our products to connect, learn, and engage with each other. And it had a really good momentum with management at the start, but then over time, that momentum just kind of died. And yeah, from the kind of customer side of it, they were just thinking to themselves, oh, this is just another one of these systems.

We already have our knowledge base. We already have our e-learning. Why do I need another system to then create an account for, another password for it, and another place to remember?

So for us, our lesson was to take a step back, because we weren't short of content, we weren't short of the tools or the systems, but we were short of the reason to see them all as one coherent experience, because they all had value. But again, together, they just weren't coherent. So let's take a look at Luminate today.

Luminate is our central self-service customer hub. It contains absolutely everything that our customers need in order to succeed. We've got everything from product updates, announcements, our community forums, knowledge-based articles, e-learning events, and our support tickets, in both cases of raising those support tickets and managing them.

And in terms of who owns it, myself, I run the platform, so all the technical backend stuff, including all the widgets, integrations, et cetera. And Alan leads a team, a very small team, of about three content specialists who deal with all the products that we have. They also interact with our product teams and our customer teams.

And in terms of coverage, we support almost all of those acquisitions that we showed on the screen earlier. But I do want to point out that not every single one of those acquisitions have every single one of those services that we just mentioned. They may just have one, they may just have two.

And in terms of numbers, we have just recently passed 5,000 members. Now, that's big for us because we are business-to-business. We're not business-to-customer, which typically, you know, we will only see one person from an organization come and join us.

So that's really good to see. In terms of knowledge articles, we've got over 10,000. We've got over 600 e-learning courses.

And of course, we're still growing, so that number is set to increase. But let's take a look at the journey and what we did in order to get there. So we have a sort of five-step approach that we do in a loop.

Our first step is to take a step back and ask yourself, if you were the customer, how would you feel about your current scenario? For us, the answer was extremely confusing. We had different names for all of our services.

We had different URLs to remember. There was no links between them. You couldn't go from one place to the other very easily.

And of course, an inconsistent user interface and user experience. Internally, all our staff understood the structure, but our customers didn't. And especially new customers, trying to sell that to them is not a good experience.

So that's when we identified the opportunity. We stopped thinking of these as individual platforms and instead of as one singular destination where customers could come and learn and solve problems, connect with their peers, and engage with us. So we've created that one experience that customers can recognize and then trust.

But aligning the business wasn't always easy, and that's why you need to bring your teams along with you for the ride. For us, I think, personally, we don't like to rely on presentations, text-based presentations. We like to be more visual.

So we've physically built things in the past. We've done mock-ups, prototypes, visual journeys, maps. Even when we can't change our live systems, this is the best way to do it.

And I think our stakeholders then saw the potential from those visuals. And something that we didn't have when we first started was the AI advancements. When we first started, I think AI was basically just text formatting.

Now you can ask it to prototype something from start to finish, and it will build it out for you. So the biggest tip is utilize AI to the fullest for that. And one of the big things for us is working with what you've got already.

I'm sure everyone in this room will understand that you can't just remove a contract for a system you already have in place and pick the perfect solution that does everything in one go. So we obviously couldn't either. Some of our platforms weren't the newest or the most flexible.

But we didn't see that as a barrier. But instead, we chose to get the maximum value from there. It's never going to be perfect.

I'll be honest. It still isn't perfect for us. We've still got some barriers in place.

But it will be a more connected journey than ever before. And of course, lastly, is reflecting and adapting. You won't get it right first time.

And again, we're still on that journey. But each loop of this, putting yourself in the customer's shoes and getting to that reflect and adapt step will get you closer to that ultimate journey. And we do see proof that it's working.

We, I guess, recently heard from some customers who say things like, oh, I saw that on Luminate, or oh, I got that information from Luminate. The name is now getting embedded in people's minds, and it's now starting to click that that is actually the place they go to get all of this content. So taking a look at where we are today, sorry, not where we are today, my bad, making people care.

[Speaker 2]
So one of the key things in our strategy wasn't to go out to our customer base and tell them about Luminate. We've got salespeople, DSMs, CSMs, professional services. They should be our cheerleaders, our champions, our ambassadors.

We wanted to get them to go out and tell us or tell customers about our services. So key to that strategy was just to make them care. If they don't care about it, the customers won't care about it.

If the customers don't care, they're not going to come back. So when we done the relaunch, we did a series of launch events. And you can see some of the team there with our Luminate merch.

I think the last presentation mentioned swag. Absolutely stand by that. Everyone loves swag.

So they all kitted out, we'll talk to customers. We hosted those international launch events. In the UK, we had pop-up stands, we had the branded donuts, we had webinars, we had the presentations, just talking to staff about the Luminate launch.

We gave each of the international teams their own opportunity to celebrate. Our teams in the Philippines had a pizza party and we connected and done presentations to them. And the teams in India and the U.S. had similar events. And we had our champions in those organizations or those offices that all got their merch, which meant they were representing and other staff were asking, how did you get that? How did I get that? Which really encouraged people to learn more about Luminate.

We also built a SharePoint page to keep all of our resources together. Because we're aware that as we launch this experience, we're bringing new people into the business every day. We can't take them on the same journey.

We can't keep doing the same launch experience. So we created a SharePoint that has all of the resources that staff would need to champion Luminate. That included newsletters, battle cards, flyers, templates, everything they need to go out to customers and talk to them about it.

Those battle cards had an elevator pitch, it had conversation points, tips, screenshots, everything that sales would need to sell it, everything professional services we need for the handover, everything customer services we need to introduce it to a customer. The whole idea was to arm them with what they need to do their job and take Luminate into the conversation. And as part of that, we brought out a newsletter, which allowed us to recognize those who are starting to engage with us, who are going out and being those champions who are contributing to Luminate.

And that allowed us to tag them and recognize them across the business. And taking that one step further, we have an internal recognition scheme called Idea Gems. You can see we had some e-cards designed to actually recognize and reward staff across the business of when they've earned those awards.

And again, that started the conversation of what did you do to earn that? What did you do to achieve that? And it just encouraged other staff to want to get involved and to really care about Luminate.

So, the real answer I'll give for getting people is just to get people interested, get people to care about the platform. They will do your job for you, essentially, and getting that out to the customer.

[Speaker 1]
So, now I can talk about where we were today. So, as you can see on the screen, we have over 60 solutions currently supported through Luminate. These include a variety of things like community forums, help documentation, e-learning under that one roof.

In terms of traffic, obviously, I mentioned earlier that our knowledge base started off with, you know, averagely about 700 unique visitors per day. We are now sitting at over double that just from creating less friction and making it much easier for a customer to come in and find value. In terms of our communities, we are sitting at different maturity curves.

Like our solutions, every community is different. So, some are growing membership at the moment, they need a bit of work, some are building engagement, and some have just skyrocketed from day one and are just scaling at a great rate. And, of course, no one size fits all, and you just need to meet your communities where they are.

Something that I think, me personally, maybe not so much Alan, is very proud of is our logins. We started off, like I mentioned, with these ancient systems, let's just say, as four completely separate logins. So, customers would need to remember where to go and what their usernames and passwords were for each system.

We have now brought that down to just two, and we've got plans in place to then simplify that even further just to one. Now, something I do want to mention here is that in terms of our logins, obviously, everyone's probably thinking, oh, just use SSO. That doesn't work when you've got 60 solutions that all use different technologies and different stacks under the hood.

We just can't do that. It's just not possible. So, everything has to be a local login.

And, of course, I can't come here and not mention our game changer win last year. As much as it was fantastic for us and our team, I think the biggest takeaway from that is just the validation that what we were doing is kind of the vision of Gainsight. So, Luminate isn't finished.

I don't know if it will ever be finished because our customers keep evolving, businesses keep evolving, AI keeps evolving, but we just need to keep listening, keep learning, and keep adapting to those changes. And with that, you know, how many people are actually using AI to help with their communities at the moment? Are you using it in your customer-facing systems?

So, in front of the customer, or are you mostly using it in your back-end systems if you're not using it or if you want to?

[Speaker 2]
Probably the most intense pull-off scene over the last few days.

[Speaker 1]
Cool. Okay. Well, for us, we use it predominantly in our back-end systems.

We're at a position where we are starting to use AI to build experiences for our customers that are personalized. So, we have done this in such a way that we've connected some of our third-party systems like Salesforce with the help of AI in order to get our customers into an experience that is more personalized for them. So, we recently moved quite a lot of our customers onto a tiered success plan model, and one of the biggest selling points and benefits of that is a growing list of online learning content.

Now, unfortunately, we don't have SkillJar, but we do have that eFront instance that I mentioned earlier on. Now, this is understandably outside of Gainsight, and therefore, we have that wall. That is a problem where we have the extra username, the extra password, and the extra place to go to log in.

And just having that barrier alone cuts engagement immediately. So, what we found from experience of doing this for many years now is that customers will tend to pick one single system, sign up for it, and stick with it. They won't cross-pollinate regardless of how easy it is to navigate between the systems because as soon as they hit another login wall, that's them.

So, we needed to make a system that felt effortless and baked into the one solution. So, this is a completely custom solution that works in the backend. It is built with AI, like I said, and all of the available Gainsight APIs, webhooks, and connectors.

When a user logs in to Luminate, it automatically recognizes who they are based on the data we have in various systems like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Gainsight PX. And we can also see what organization they're from, what success plan level they're on, as well as various other bits of information. And for us, it means that we can then start supplying the right content to the right people and keep that restricted content like our e-learning locked.

In terms of like a commercial bonus, it actually works out quite well because we have people on lower tier plans who can actually see what's available. They can tangibly see that content there, but they just can't access it. So, it's almost like a subtle, clear, low-pressure reason to upgrade.

So, it benefits us in different ways. And the win for us is that our customers only need to sign in once to Luminate. They can do their learning without needing another username or another password, and everything gets set up automatically for them in the backend.

And on the screen, you'll see that number there. 70% of our customers inside of Gainsight have now been identified and have been personalized because there's no less friction for them, there's better access management for us, and it's created that one seamless experience. And in the screenshot there, you'll see our training catalog and our course dashboard.

This is actually all built inside of Gainsight. The only time the customer actually transitions into the eFront system is when they actually go to do that course. So, in terms of this, what did it do for our numbers since our lockdown?

So, you'll see here, we locked down the system actually very recently on the 1st of June this year. Since then, we saw a 47% increase in the total number of registrations, a massive 211% in new registrations. Now, obviously, you'll all be sitting there going, you know, oh, everyone just wanted access to the eLearning.

Of course, the numbers went up. But there is actually a deeper story here, and that is because we removed the friction. They're now starting to engage with the other parts of Luminate that they wouldn't have typically before.

So, we're now seeing that cross-pollination, which we wanted. So, you'll see there the 26% increase in user posts and a 5% increase in user-to-user replies. So, the customers are no longer, say that sentence again, they're no longer just consuming, they are participating and they're helping each other out.

And again, I think it's been mentioned a few times today, but we always go back to that typical 1 to 9 to 90 rule, which is, you know, if 1% of your users are creating content, 9% should be replying and engaging, and 90% should be lurkers who are just consuming the content. And we are sitting at a comfortable 1.78% at the moment, which obviously beats that benchmark. However, the big focus for us now is to then start to bring up that engagement piece.

We want to get to that 9% engagement and get to that perfect balance. And with that, I'll hand over to Alan.

[Speaker 2]
And just another final poll of the session is, are you automating any content that goes through your community? A couple of options we have is yes, no, thinking about it, or you want to, you just don't know where to start. It seems to just change constantly.

So, where we are now is we're at the point where we're trying to automate as much content as we can. I've heard a few made up words over the last couple of days, like AIFI. The word I'm going to use is automagically.

We want to have content automagically created. So, the process we have just now is we've got 60 products, a very small team. How do we get that content out of product and into the customer's hands?

So, we use Atlassian to manage all of our product specs, our product releases. So, we've now built a custom integration that will look up the project in Atlassian, pull the content, pass it to Claude. Claude will take our tone of voice, our look and feel, our style sheets, and it will build a release note.

It passes that release note to Zendesk, publishes it, and sends it to my team for review, because all the AI content must be reviewed before it goes live. From there, it will build a script to introduce the release, passes that to Synthesia, which builds a video with an avatar walking you through the update, and then once that video is rendered, it will pass it to community, and it will automatically publish a community post with the video embedded in there. It's what we call the quick, slick release process.

The product manager picks the product release and then hits go, and then they can walk away from the process, and we get all of that content cascading across Luminate automatically. And with that, as Sam mentioned, we're not done. We don't think we'll ever be done.

So, we have a lot of work still ahead of us. Next on our agenda very much is to boost that gamification experience. We have gamification for community.

We're looking to start to integrate that with our eFront eLearning gamification. We want customers to get certified and for that certification to show on community, so that when a customer responds, they have that extra credibility because they have got that accreditation. We're moving the support experience into Gainsight.

So, just now, all of our support tickets are driven through Zendesk. We're looking to build those pages in Gainsight, and through APIs, pull all of that information into Gainsight pages, which gives us greater control and a greater user experience for our customers. And very much the same with our knowledge base.

It's all held in Zendesk. It's managed in Zendesk. It's published in Zendesk.

But if we do it right, the customer will never touch Zendesk. They will have a Gainsight page that pulls all of that information in, and it gives us that greater control. We're going to do that through a data warehouse, and that allows other parts of our organization to start to pull from that warehouse.

We're launching our own agentic AI within our products. It means that AI can start pulling from that warehouse, and it becomes a single source of truth, rather than different knowledge bases scattered around. And the fourth thing is we're going to refresh our UI a little bit.

The screenshots that we showed has service first. Are you going for skills? Are you going for community?

Are you going for the knowledge base? We're finding customers don't want to go through that route. They want to go product first and then to see everything.

So, we're going to flip that UI, and that's listening to the voice of the customer. And the final option we've got here is commercial routes. I'm starting to get direct messages through our community saying, I want to buy this.

I want our account manager to talk to me about training. My account manager has not responded to me. So, we're having to go and drive that through sales.

So, what we're now doing is building a funnel through Salesforce PowerDot, and that's going to lead into the Salesforce funnel, and it's going to target back to us with what we've identified as a Luminate qualified lead. So, we will get the credit for generating these leads as they go through the commercial pipeline. And that's going to take us away from being a reactive site when customers have a problem to make us a customer first proactive enablement site.

And with that, our top five takeaways. The very first one is start where your customers are. Put yourself in the customer's shoes.

We could have started technology first and started to connect everything up, but we took a step back and tried to look at what does the customer want to achieve? What do they need? And then we looked at technology second.

[Speaker 1]
And then we looked at removing friction and creating that value. So, I mean, the challenge for us wasn't that we lacked the resources. It was just that the customer had to work really hard to find them.

And every login, every separate portal they had to go to, it was just creating friction everywhere. So, once we started removing those barriers, the engagement started to increase naturally because the customer could actually focus on just achieving their goals rather than spending all their time navigating through our systems.

[Speaker 2]
And the third one is bring your people with you. We kind of talked about how we made people care. These are the people that really champion your product.

They're going to champion your community. So, bring them with you on the journey. Don't leave them behind.

Technology can only take you so far.

[Speaker 1]
And get value from the tools you've already got. Like we mentioned earlier, I think a really powerful thing for us was understanding that improving the customer experience doesn't mean that you need to go away and spend thousands on a brand new shiny tool. We certainly couldn't scale every time that we acquired a company and we needed a very specific use case.

We just found ways to make it work with our existing tooling. Whether it was personalization, integrations, or AI automation, a lot of our progress has come from unlocking the value that already existed in the existing tool set.

[Speaker 2]
And the single piece of good advice I think I've ever been given is don't be afraid to fail and fail fast. If you fail fast, you get time to recover. So, I would say that to yourselves.

Don't be afraid to fail. Learn from it and keep iterating. That's the only way you'll learn.

You'll learn more from something goes wrong than you do when something goes right. So, just keep iterating what you have. And with that, thank you very much for your time.

If you've got any questions, we'd be more than happy to answer them.

[Speaker 3]
Thank you so much. For me, working with you so long, it's super insightful. Super proud of you.

We have so many questions. Let's jump right into them. Emily, 600 courses.

How are those kept up today? What is this reported on? Tell me.

[Speaker 2]
With tremendous difficulty. So, we use quite a few automated tools. I mentioned Synthesia during the presentation.

Guide is another one. We work with our SMEs who know the product. Those tools have browser extensions, et cetera.

You switch them on. You walk through the process and narrate it. And it builds the course pretty much for you.

Our documentation can be done in the space of two minutes and you have a full article written. Very much the same for the eLearning. You switch on Synthesia, narrate what you're doing, click done, and it creates the video eLearning content for you.

They have just built in a new feature where you can just feed it into the AI and it will build the course, it will brand it, it will style it. I think I showed you some of the ones I've done the other day. I've just done 20 courses while I was here at conference.

It is that quick and that easy to work with.

[Speaker 3]
Reporting question also. How do you report on the impact of your community with such a variety of products and customers? What's the main KPI you're measuring?

[Speaker 1]
Very good question. You know what? This is the strange thing.

Because we've moved so fast with so many products, I think we haven't actually taken that step back yet to actually sit with you, sit with the team, and actually determine what is success. And that's something we need to work on ourselves. I think we're just at the cusp of looking into our data and analyzing that a lot more.

But I think the main focus for us has to get things done fast for all those products.

[Speaker 3]
And also, of course, you're a few months in now with properly changing big things in the community. You want to have some data first. It's also going beyond the summer holiday peak, I guess.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, absolutely. Great. Sorry, that wasn't an answer.

[Speaker 3]
Could you tell us more about the incentivized programs to encourage engagement?

[Speaker 2]
So we're about to launch a new initiative called Content Fest. With those tools, guidance, and thesia, they've given us a three-month window of completely unrestricted access to the tooling. We're opening up to the entire business.

And we pitched it to our CRO, who was very supportive and has given us a budget of two and a half thousand pounds for prizes. That's going to be loaded through our corporate reward system, where we earn idea gems. Each gem corresponds to a cash amount.

And we're going to be encouraging staff to contribute content that we need. We've done a gap analysis. We used the data from Atlassian.

We plugged it into Claude, and we had Claude crawl our Illuminate site. It's identified all the gaps we have. So what we're looking for is our SMEs in the business to go and plug those gaps.

So those 600 courses will hopefully be 1,000 courses before long. And obviously, we will start to reward staff for their engagement through those programs. And we're hoping that will become part of an ongoing experience as well, rather than just a one-off event.

[Speaker 3]
Cool. Next question. Do you use AI to generate also the internal resources, the battle cards that you spoke about, the assets, to ensure the content stays up to date?

And if not, how do you manage this across the team?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. So we do use AI. Some of the resources are done by hand, because some things are just easier to be done by hand.

But a lot of the work we do, we will get our design team to provide us the templates. We push them into AI. He's a Claude skill.

And Claude will then go take that information and build it for us. So AI is pretty much used for most of the things we do. The newsletter format, we're about to just change that format and, again, push it through Synthesia as a video, which is much more engaging.

And Synthesia also has its own analytics in the back end, so we can actually tell what people are reading, when do they switch off the video, so we can see where they're starting to zone out, which gives us so much more information as to what kind of information we should be putting in the newsletters.

[Speaker 3]
Interesting. Interesting. Thanks.

On to the next one, then. How do you decide what gets creators learning and what goes into the help center, which fuels the decision, and how do you keep your content libraries then up to date? Lots of update questions.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah. So we follow a model called Diataxis. I don't know if anyone's aware of that, where you kind of have this kind of matrix.

It's split into four quadrants. One quadrant is very much is it for your work or for your learning? Is it theoretical or practical?

And that creates a quadrant system. One will be your help center, one will be your e-learning, one is your community, and one will be just in other locations. So we pretty much just plot that across those quadrants, and that will tell us where it should be.

If anyone wants to see that, I'm happy to show you after the session. I want to see that.

[Speaker 1]
I think another thing as well, just to mention on that, as you've said it a couple of times in the past, but it's that comparison between the manual you would find in your car against a YouTube video showing you how you would actually go about doing something. If it's a step by step, step one, you do this, step two, you do that, it's typically a help article, right? But if it's helping you achieve something, do something more than just step by step, how do I open a document?

That should be a learning.

[Speaker 2]
Help center will never teach you to drive, but if you've got your car and something goes wrong, you'll get that manual out of your glove box, you'll find what you need to do, and you'll carry on with your day. That's your help center. If you want to learn how to drive, that's when you want to go turn your learning experience and go and get some lessons.

[Speaker 3]
Thank you. How do you connect communities and learning, and how do you ensure the content stays GDPR compliant?

[Speaker 1]
Very good question. A lot of hack work, to be honest. The easiest way I can describe it is there is a very convenient API that is available within our eFront system, which is called auto login, which is great.

Basically what it means is you can plug in someone's username against an API, and that will return a unique login code that will be used in that one single session. So the way that we do this is it's all smoke and mirrors disguised. The user signs into community first, so there has to be an authentication step, and like we mentioned, we've got that identification piece now where unless you're actually a customer and we know who you are because we can attach that to it, you can't get access to the eLearning.

So the way it works is you go to the page as a logged in user of Gainsight. Some fun stuff happens in the background with connectors and APIs. I'm happy to talk about this in depth.

I don't want to bore anyone in this room just now, but basically it does that API call to say this username also matches that username on eFront, therefore they're the same person, therefore give them that login code, and any link they click on that page that takes them to the eLearning has that link attached to it, so they click on it, they're automatically logged in. So there's that seamless experience of the community user has logged in, but now they're also logged in an eFront, but to them nothing has happened. They just think they're still in the same system.

[Speaker 3]
If you don't know by now, you're an absolute wizard. Again, hacking, hacking. What are the key drivers that set your high engagement communities apart from those that have less engagement?

[Speaker 1]
For us, I think we've only got a key, maybe three or four major communities that have really kicked off. I think for us it's been legacy products, products that have been around a really long time seem to have a much higher engagement value, and I think sometimes, especially in the past, we've enabled communities for products that maybe we shouldn't have, and I don't mean that in a nefarious way. I just mean that the customer base isn't mature enough for it yet, and I think we've seen this argument that we come back to quite a few times where we're now asking the question, should we enable this community, or should we just leave it and see what the appetite is for it?

[Speaker 2]
I think some of the challenges is the type of people that use our software. Some of the clinicians, they will more than happily get involved in a community, but if you're a minor working on your own out in the middle of the outback in Australia, you're not going to go into a community. You just want to go out, do your job, and get back to a cabin with Aircon, so you're not going to use a community, and we start to see that with some of the use cases of our products.

Some are very much engaging of that experience. Aviation is another really great sector because if a plane falls out of the sky, it's not just that airline that's affected, it's the entire industry, so sharing and engaging with others who are competitors is very much inherent in how they operate, and so our community is the perfect place for them.

[Speaker 3]
Is size for you also a matter? Because I just know that in a community, you need a critical mass, right? There need to be enough people.

If you have three people in your community, it's not a community, essentially. Is that also something you're looking into when you're evaluating communities?

[Speaker 2]
I think so. I think the biggest challenge we've got is actually getting some responses from acquired businesses that we've got, because they very much come in and engage with the customers in a much smaller, more personal way. It's trying to move customers out of that one-to-one experience and into that more community-driven experience.

[Speaker 1]
And I think a part of that as well is when we acquire a product, they usually have never had a community before, so again, it's that mindset shift of you now have this available to you, which you didn't have before, so a lot of people will come to Luminate from an acquisition and will immediately zoom into the support area and raise a support ticket, rather than interacting with the other services that are now available to them, just because it's habit.

They don't know any better.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. On to the next question then. How do you measure the impact of Luminate on course completion rates and number of support tickets raised?

Of course, again, going beyond community and actually showing the business impact also.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, so the course completion rate and tickets are still slightly disconnected. The courses are still very much aligned to commercial, because they're part of that success plan. What we do see is customers who want to take those courses, they'll go into a higher success plan and take out that contract, but from the help center, we 100% do see a correlation between articles being consumed and the support tickets.

An example is one of our products released version 8.4. We put loads of content out of 8.4. We have not received one ticket for that version. We can see all of that content, the hit rate. It has completely deflected all of the tickets that we would have got from that version.

It does take a little bit of AI to draw all those bits together, but we can absolutely demonstrate that with some of our product updates.

[Speaker 3]
Great. Next one, also interesting. Gangster first, tickets.

Wow. How are you working to bring this to life and how will it work?

[Speaker 1]
Hacking. Hacking again. Yeah.

I guess, again, like everything else, everything is all API-powered. Like we mentioned, we've got Zendesk that does our ticketing, it does our help system just now. We're not looking to replace or get rid of those things.

They will still act as the backend of these systems, but what we do want to introduce is an API-first approach, where someone will come to a page in Gainsight that will be specifically designed to retrieve that data. For example, a new ticket page where they fill out a form, that will live in Gainsight and simply by clicking the submit button, it will be an API call that will send through that data to the Zendesk ticket. Nothing changes for us from a process perspective, but for the customer, it means that they now have a single login to then get to that ticket form, rather than coming to Illuminate, being confused that there's a login for one area, and then hitting the support site and going, oh, I need to log in again.

Great. So, yeah, it kind of kills that with two stones.

[Speaker 3]
One stone. Yeah. I think it's good to have it all in one page, and they don't send you from A to B to C.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah. Yeah. And similarly to, I know you've seen tickets there, but similarly mentioned it as well with the knowledge base.

Again, we're looking to pull out all those resources into a central warehouse and be able to retrieve it through Gainsight using the connectors as well. Lovely.

[Speaker 3]
We're getting through all of the questions. It's amazing. What works best for getting your own teams to promote Illuminate, and what didn't?

We'd love to know more about you and talk about incentives, but that part of the question you can answer.

[Speaker 2]
Merch and swag is honestly the best. So, one thing we actually done is we actually used the merch budget to buy these fancy silver pens engraved with Illuminate logo, and we gifted them actually to the C-suite because we thought that's the best way to get executive sponsorship. So, whenever they're signing a contract, they're signing it with Illuminate pen.

So, it meant Illuminate was very much in the C-suite and the SVP's mentality. But people just like a pat on the back. So, if somebody does contribute with us, find a way to give them that pat on the back, give them that recognition.

The newsletters are a perfect way for us to do that, just to tag them and let them see that we do appreciate their ongoing engagement.

[Speaker 3]
I want to add maybe like as a CSM, I often get questions like, oh, do you know a customer XYZ who does this and integrate like sending them to the community makes a lot of sense. For many people in China, it also just makes sense because they have an added value. It will offload them as well, and I think that's a win-win.

You've been in the loop. In your release notes automation, where does a person actually review before anything reaches the customer?

[Speaker 2]
So, we get two places. If it's going to be the release note that goes on to the help center, it generates a ticket in Zendesk for my team to pick up. So, we will have our own ticket queue and we will go in to pick up the ticket, review and publish, and then we'll just respond to the ticket.

And that gives us analytics. If there's someone who's submitting absolute rubbish, we've got that record and we can get those analytics. But if somebody's doing really great and putting some really good stuff in there, again, we've got that analytics there as part of our fields that we fill in when we process that ticket, and that gives us that data.

For some of the other parts, like community, we've got our own interface that we built using Cloud Code. They'll present the community post to the team and the team have the option to build that in that custom interface. Wow.

[Speaker 3]
Cool. Thank you so much for inspiration and thoughts. One more round of applause, please.