Fortinet’s Story
Discover how Fortinet creates a centralized and reusable knowledge center to boost self-service success rate.
Summary
Fortinet, a rapidly growing leader in cybersecurity solutions, aimed to streamline customer support by harnessing the power of collective knowledge. With over 50 products in the security arena, the company continues to rapidly evolve.
Today, with Khoros powering its community, the growing tech company has improved customer self-service success, scaled support efficiently, and created a hub of collective knowledge that benefits customers, the Fortinet partner network, and many cross-functional internal teams.
COMMUNITY SCALE
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41 M
page views per year
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6.5 M
unique visitors per year
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125 k
registered members per year
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
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77 %
self-service success rate
“One of our goals of the program is the promotion of centralized and reusable knowledge within our support ecosystem. We operate on the Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) principle that 'all of us are smarter than one of us' and we work to capture that knowledge so that it can be reused to help our customers again and again.”
— Kate McMillan, Service Technology Manager at Fortinet
About Fortinet
Fortinet, a global leader in cybersecurity, was founded more than 20-years ago in Palo Alto. Today, the +13,000-person tech company serves more than over 800,000 customers with a comprehensive suite of 50+ products, securing global networks and data. Fortinet also boasts one of the largest open cybersecurity ecosystems in the industry, with 1,000’s of global partners working together to provide end-to-end security solutions for businesses around the world.
As Fortinet grew, the company needed a more scalable way to provide information and answers to an extensive customer base on its growing range of products. The company launched the Fortinet community to create a centralized platform for self-service, streamlining access to support information across its product lineup and enabling efficient problem-solving through shared knowledge.
Rationale for change / Business use case
As Fortinet grew, the company needed a more scalable way to provide information and answers to an extensive customer base on its growing range of products. The company launched the Fortinet Community to create a centralized platform for self-service, streamlining access to support information across its product lineup and enabling efficient problem-solving through shared knowledge.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“Fortinet’s mission is ‘Securing people, devices, and data everywhere’. To do this, we must provide customers with the information they need, at the time they need it, facilitating quick solutions with minimal effort. Our community connects them with the most relevant content from our wide network of experts so they can focus on keeping their people, devices and data secure.”
KATE MCMILLAN
Service Technology Manager
COMMUNITY JOURNEY
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Inception
Inception
In 2021, the company created the Fortinet community to bring together multiple information sources. The primary community objective was to provide customers a single place to find answers, collaborate, and share ideas. The company also aimed to make the wealth of knowledge and technical expertise within their organization available for an increasing number of customers to find, whenever they needed help. Fortinet’s Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program embodied that idea, and the community would play a huge role in it.
Technology: Fortinet selected Khoros Community management software with advanced community moderation to address customer’s growing preference for self-service, scale agent support, and help the business build and promote a wealth of centralized and reusable knowledge across their support ecosystem.
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Growth
Growth
From 2021 to 2024, Fortinet experienced three years of sequential growth in community membership, engagement, and content. To drive organic growth, the cybersecurity company focused on extending community value to new channels and enterprise systems to improve the customer self-service experience it can deliver. Internal teams also worked diligently to scale internal knowledge creation and collaboration among cross-functional experts.
Technology:
Khoros live chat rollout tied to the community, enhancing Fortinet’s ability to provide world-class support. As customers seek support, agents can engage, suggest community knowledge articles and relevant forum threads, help solve issues, and feed answers back into their ever-evolving knowledge base.
Integration with SearchUnify for federated search, giving customers one unified UI to find answers from distributed support and success sources, including the community, documentation, websites, video content, and the FortiGuard library.
Integration with Tableau for reporting via Khoros APIs, enabling Fortinet to combine critical community and knowledge metrics with people and case related data to create insightful, actionable views of activities. This helps Fortinet see and track performance across all teams and regions, and measure the impact of community and broader self-service initiatives.
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Maturity
Maturity
Looking ahead, KCS principles and the reuse of knowledge from the collective experiences of Fortinet’s community, will continue to be at the forefront of the company’s strategy. The Fortinet team plans to create more custom group pages for different user segments, expand the super user program, and keep collaborating with cross-functional groups to create high-quality, relevant content and enhance community experiences.
Technology: Fortinet sees a huge opportunity to use the collective knowledge within their community as the foundation for customer and internal Gen-AI initiatives. The cybersecurity leader plans to take advantage of some new capabilities Khoros offers, including AI-generated agent assistance. Combining community knowledge with Khoros and Fortinet’s own Gen-AI technologies, the company aims to further enhance the customer and agent experience.
Lessons learned
Cross-functional collaboration
Cross-functional collaboration
To deliver on their KCS vision, Fortinet’s Community team places major focus on partnering with cross-functional colleagues globally, including collaboration with:
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TAC Support teams, Advanced Support, Sales Engineers and Specialists to capture knowledge and craft it into articles for the Community. Articles must constantly evolve as engineers make product updates to ensure content remains relevant and current.
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The Documentation department to cross-promote content between the Fortinet Community and ‘Doc site’. The cross-links between these two information sources enables Fortinet to further improve the customer experience, getting customers the information they need, as quickly as possible.
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The Marketing team for SEO, optimizing community content for findability, ‘getting started’ initiatives for new customers, and more. This work has played a big role in driving more organic traffic growth year-over-year.
The Community team also helps varying internal teams build dedicated ‘Group Pages’ on the Community for special interest groups and business needs. These groups bring people together to solve problems, share knowledge in specific areas, and collect ideas.
“The perspective change for our engineering teams has been massive as we shift the mindset towards capturing knowledge and creating articles. We work closely with this audience, running frequent communications and feedback sessions, and providing incentives to show appreciation for strong contributions.”
KATE MCMILLAN
Service Technology Manager
Change management
Change Management
To build and extend a knowledge sharing culture, the Fortinet team invested time to change behavior and maintain continued engagement among employees, customers and partners.
- The team creates regular newsletters, training sessions, recognition programs, and constant feedback loops. Monthly newsletters call out top contributors, with rewards and recognition for those who go above and beyond to help grow the Community. When a colleague embraces the KCS principles, teammates can nominate them for a ‘KCS Champion’ award, highlighting their contributions and building program awareness across the business.
- Internal global KCS ‘coaches’. Fortinet also built a global network of KCS ‘coaches’. These coaches work within support teams to promote the benefits of creating reusable knowledge, and guide teams as the business continues to navigate the huge shift towards KCS principles.
“The perspective change for our engineering teams has been massive as we shift the mindset towards capturing knowledge and creating articles. We work closely with this audience, running frequent communications and feedback sessions, and providing incentives to show appreciation for strong contributions.”
KATE MCMILLAN
Service Technology Manager
Senior leadership management
Senior Leadership Support
Strong buy-in and support from senior leadership also plays a huge part in the success of the KCS strategy and the Community initiative. Luckily, Fortinet executives realized it needed a solid knowledge foundation to meet customers' growing preference to solve problems quickly, on their own. To scale self-service in a growing company, leadership also saw the importance of addressing questions once and sharing with the masses to offset support calls to answer the same question from all corners of the Fortinet user base.
“The Fortinet Community has become the go-to resource that Fortinet employees and customers alike trust. We know that if there are answers, they can be found quickly via the community. This also enables us to gain back time for thorough research and resolution of tougher cases. Hats off and big thanks to our Community team for providing the launchpad for the next step in the journey - knowledge-centered customer support.”
DAVE MONEY
Global VP Support
Results
Fortinet’s integrated knowledge-sharing community delivers substantial results, helping the business efficiently scale support and enhance user satisfaction across its global base.
Now, the KCS program and Fortinet community benefit a broad ecosystem of internal teams, partners, and customers, enhancing security access and collaboration on a global scale. The Community’s value is proven by feedback from the diverse end-users it serves.
Higher self-service success rate
Higher CSAT
Fewer tickets per customer
Why Khoros Community software
The Khoros-powered Fortinet community empowers their employees, customers, and partners to take part in developing content and knowledge at scale. The company highly values the Khoros Communities platform for:
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Platform flexibility & custom workflows
Enables Fortinet to create content workflows to match their business rules, such as who can submit articles, what review steps must occur, and how and when articles get published. Easy role and permission management ensures processes work for distinct user types.
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Platform scalability & stability
We have seen massive amounts of growth in the Fortinet community over the last three years. The Khoros Community platform has handled more than 20M visits per year with minimal services interruptions. With the knowledge base housed on the community, this is critical to Fortinet successfully delivering customer support 24x7x365.
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Khoros chat
Combining the community platform with a feature rich chat tool enables Fortinet agents to gain a complete view of the wealth of information available to them, solve issues faster, and feed new knowledge back into the loop.
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Ability to merge other communities
With the Khoros platform, Fortinet can merge newly acquired businesses into the Fortinet Community, a critical requirement as the business continues to grow.
Power your community’s success
Fortinet’s self-service win started with Khoros Community. Take control of your knowledge management and elevate your customer experience now.