Executive summary

Autodesk is a global leader in design and make software for the architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and media and entertainment industries. Some of their best-known products include AutoCAD, Civil 3D, and Revit. Autodesk has been in business for 37 years and the Autodesk Community has been around for over two decades. They primarily used their Khoros-powered community for support, but theyalso wanted to support peer-to-peer engagement.

During the decades that Autodesk has supported an online community, they’ve built up a lot of great content, and they now have an active superuser program. They wanted to increase the number of verified answers within their community while also increasing the number of superuser customers answering questions. The company decided to reintroduce a program called Answer Days that experienced previous successes on a much smaller scale. During their first revamped Answer Day, Autodesk set aside a 20-hour period in which team members from multiple departments across the company spent time answering customer questions about topics like technical support, development, workflows, and more.

Autodesk had a few important goals with Answer Day: They wanted to increase the amount of peer-to-peer answers in their community, drive monthly active users, and they wanted their audience to become comfortable with getting answers from the community and understanding the value of doing so. Autodesk also wanted to improve workflow for customers and increase adoption.

Autodesk set ambitious goals for Answer Day. In addition to in-community promotions, they coordinated across marketing, product support, customer success, and even HR/facilities to create an effective event. The marketing team promoted the event on social and organic channels. They also created internal assets to help customer-facing teams drive attendance and they encouraged employee participation across multiple offices. Communities aren’t usually tied to one specific moment in time, but with Answer Day, Autodesk created something unique: a coordinated event hosted on their community. The event lasted for 20 total hours and included more than 100 people company-wide.

Autodesk’s Answer Day was highly successful: not only were there huge spikes in questions and answers, but it engaged employees who had not participated in the community as well as tens of thousands of customers. Based on the success of their revamped Answer Day, Autodesk plans to host an Answer Day each quarter for different product groups and regions moving forward.

Results

Answer Days are a celebration of Autodesk’s products and community, and they’re a celebration of team members connecting with customers directly. With their revamped Answer Day, Autodesk increased community engagement, traffic, and employee participation. They also increased the amount of peer-to-peer answers in their community, meaning that future searches will produce more results and they’ll earn a higher SEO placement. Verified answers increase search rank even more, meaning more traffic for the brand.