Celebrating Innovation in Online Communities and Customer Engagement

Ultra Mobile | Winner, Best-in-Class AI 

This nationwide prepaid mobile carrier is powered by its mission to enhance customers’ lives by connecting them to their world through surfing, streaming, swiping, posting, texting, or calling someone nearby or across the globe. To combat numerous challenges related to growing pains, including accelerated growth and increased customer need for troubleshooting and tech support, Ultra Mobile realized they needed a fresh approach. The team partnered with Khoros to deploy a new agent desktop and chat experience, AI platform, and mobile messaging channels. By taking fast, unified action to transform their customer engagement teams’ workflows, software, and AI capabilities, Ultra Mobile experienced extraordinary results: 63% chatbot containment rate, $2M in support cost savings, and a 95% NPS score across all channels to name a few. 

Kudos, Ultra Mobile!

Qlik | Winner, Best-in-Class Community

Qlik is on a mission to ensure their more than 40,000 global customers get the most value from their data. Committed to empowering members with valuable information and support, the team first introduced their community to provide a one-to-many service model. However, Qlik quickly recognized that the community could be so much more - a platform purpose-built to encourage knowledge sharing, engagement, event participation, and customer feedback. Along their community’s journey of maturity and transformation, the team confronted challenges, including a significant increase in spam infiltrating the community. Through hard work and enhancements to their spam filter, incorporating gamification elements, and seamless content organization, Qlik reaped the benefits, including 26% YoY growth in community engagement and $1.4M savings from community support deflection.

Kudos, Qlik!

Lucky Mobile | Winner, Best-in-Class Customer Service

Lucky Mobile, a Canadian prepaid mobile virtual network operator, is committed to providing first-rate phone plans and mobile service at a low price. In addition to this vision, Lucky Mobile also strived to drive an unmatched digital peer-to-peer, self-service experience for their customers by implementing a support platform that would be available 24/7 as well as alleviating call center and live chat volume. The team launched the Lucky Mobile community, offering valuable community content to deliver on their goal of self-service and peer-to-peer support. By leveraging tools including after-hours automated response and Khoros Care social media, Lucky Mobile has equated an 18.75% reduction in Minute to First Response to 1.3K minutes (a significant 300 minutes faster than before), a contact deflection savings of $327K in 2024, and now boasts an impressive 88% CSAT score. 

Kudos, Lucky Mobile!

Fortinet | Winner, Best Time-to-Value Community Strategy

For more than 20 years, Fortinet has been a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security. Fortinet’s mission is ‘Securing people, devices, and data everywhere.’ The mission-driven Community team at Fortinet aimed to connect users with the most relevant content from their expansive network of product experts, allowing them to keep their people, devices, and data secure. By creating a centralized and reusable knowledge center within its support ecosystem, known as the Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) program, Fortinet has seen a 179% YoY increase in the number of Knowledge Articles created by internal experts and the number of members registering with the site is up 357% YoY. From a 14.5% YoY increase in their self-service success rate to explosive community growth of 6.5 million unique visitors, the value that Fortinet’s community brings speaks for itself. 

Kudos, Fortinet!

Upwork | Winner, Best Education & Learning Community

As the world’s work marketplace, Upwork is dedicated to creating economic opportunities so people have better lives. To support Upwork’s expansive ecosystem of freelancers, clients, and internal teams and offer them a space to learn, collaborate, and grow, the Upwork team built and launched their community. Today, the community is an interactive hub featuring over 100 groups, events, an academy, podcasts, and AMA sessions. With the development of a custom-built Learning Management System on the Khoros platform in addition to an integrated academy, Upwork is empowered to provide its audience with a fully immersive learning experience complete with learning paths, quizzes, SCORM support, and opportunities to ask questions and discuss best practices. Notable measurable outcomes range from business impact (increased completion rates and doubled community retention rate) to progress impact (the team has seen that independent professionals who complete a learning path are up to 3x more likely to be hired within a month of submitting their first proposal or project, compared to those who do not complete a learning path). 

Kudos, Upwork!

Zoom | Winner, Best Customer Support Community

A household name among unified communication and collaboration platforms, Zoom aims to make video communications frictionless and secure by building the world’s best video product for the enterprise. Zoom proudly takes a customer-first approach and infuses that mindset into everything they do. So when users worldwide needed a place where they could ask questions, find solutions, and collaborate with peers as well as seek 24/7 online support, the team responded by launching the Zoom community. The Zoom community has evolved since its inception in 2021, now boasting SEO optimization to boost visibility, a customer success forum and on-demand learning to allow users to share successes, collaborate, and access valuable webinars, and the Happy Rewards program to recognize and reward members. Through these efforts, the Zoom community has driven significant business outcomes, resulting in a 48.6% reduction in average time to first reply and a YoY increase in customer satisfaction scores from 84.5% to 93.6%.

Kudos, Zoom!

Instacart | Winner, Most Innovative Community User Experience

Instacart is a leading online grocery platform in the U.S. committed to reshaping how people shop for groceries. A vital part of the company’s business model is to foster and grow its large  network of shoppers who support its customer base. Instacart utilizes Khoros Communities to support, retain, and celebrate its shoppers. By building and maintaining strong relationships within the community, Instacart ensures shoppers feel supported, valued, and connected. This not only enhances their satisfaction and loyalty but also empowers them to provide exceptional service, directly aligning with the company's objective of making grocery shopping effortless and more enjoyable for customers. Instacart’s community team fosters a community of support and information sharing–both between Instacart and shoppers as well as shopper-to-shopper. This connectedness aims at enhancing shopper engagement, reducing churn, and increasing the overall effectiveness of the company’s service by helping shoppers grow and learn. In 2023, Instacart took a strategic step to upgrade its community and adopt Khoros’ next-generation communities platform. The modern tech stack allowed for faster innovation and made tangible impacts on the user experience. Post-upgrade, Instacart observed a 33% increase in page views and a 5% uplift in page views per visitor.

Kudos, Instacart!

Atlassian | Winner, Best Community for Product Adoption & Innovation

Atlassian’s mission is to help unleash the potential of every team. Community has been a native concept to Atlassian since 2006. Now, as a global company, Atlassian continues to unite users by centering the customer experience around its community and learning programs. The challenge Atlassian sought to solve was how to successfully influence and scale community-led growth across a global organization. In 2024 Atlassian formed a team of community strategists to guide internal platform and product teams on how to effectively leverage community programs in their go-to-market strategies. The group has already driven successful changes resulting in increased engagement from Atlassian team members and users, an enhanced product feedback and ideation loop, and increased product and feature awareness. One of the company’s best-known product lines, Confluence, benefitted from these community strategies that led to a 13% increase in accepted answers, a 62% increase in Atlassian speakers at events, and a 74% increase in community engagement. These early wins have demonstrated the value of community-led growth strategies, leading to wider adoption across the organization and positioning Atlassian’s community at the center of product development and user engagement efforts.

Kudos, Atlassian!

HubSpot | Winner, Best Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Sharing Community

HubSpot is dedicated to helping millions of organizations not just grow bigger, but grow better. The company understands its brand-owned community is an amplifier of customer-facing efforts and programs, and its focus is to provide a human touch at scale using its community’s superpowers - scale, perspective, and passion. The Hubspot Community Team is responsible for building and scaling a network of HubSpot customers, partners, users, and developers to drive peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing and ensure questions are resolved with fast, consistent, and invaluable expertise. Evolving from a support community aimed at answering single, point-in-time questions to a recurring, lively success destination has been the company’s major innovation and strategic shift in 2024. Before, customer success content lived in emails, events, and other cobbled deliverables; there was no home base for customers. Now, customers can access all the resources needed to drive product usage and retention in a single space. Solutions are self-serve or provided by peers and partners whose unique perspectives are able to help customers apply HubSpot tools to their needs efficiently and effectively. Since 2016, the HubSpot Community has grown in visibility and use cases with over 400,000 members, >1 million monthly page views, 3,000 net new monthly conversations, and 25,000 monthly active users. The Product Success Community deflects over $300k in support costs for HubSpot. Over 50% of members state the peer-to-peer solutions provided them the answer they were looking for.

Kudos, HubSpot!

SAS Institute | Best Use of Data and Insights for Community

SAS is a software company with roots in academia that has grown to become the leader in business analytics software and services. The company’s community plays a vital role in expressing SAS’ customer-centric ethos built over five decades. In the past year, innovative use of Khoros Communities’ bulk data APIs has enabled SAS to gain insights to shape strategic decisions for how the company engages with its community members—particularly new community members and new SAS users. The SAS Support Community delivers significant value throughout the customer experience. Having grown beyond its customer-support roots, today it also drives customer satisfaction (according to net-promoter scores) and brand awareness (for example, as the digital home of the popular SAS Hackathon), and increasingly is a leading source of information on new solutions and innovation (exemplified by community content syndicated in SAS solutions.) It has become the hub of SAS expertise online and complements other channels such as GitHub and YouTube.

Kudos, SAS Institute!