Executive summary

Data analytics and integration software leader Qlik launched Qlik Community over a decade ago and it quickly grew into one of the largest and most-trusted online communities in business intelligence. Today, Qlik Community contains multiple points of connection across the Qlik brand and includes thousands of customers, fans, partners, developers, and Qlik employees. Qlik Community has become a knowledge backbone for many functions and is currently viewed as a key onboarding asset for the company’s entire ecosystem. Qlik initially launched its Community on Jive, but moved to Khoros Community to better support a significantly scaled experience for well over 100,000 members.

One of the areas Qlik prioritized for the Qlik Community relaunch in late 2018 was a significant increase in planned employee participation, as well as a much more complex moderation process to transform engagement across the platform. Since partnering with Khoros, Qlik has dramatically increased employee participation across the organization and developed a sophisticated “moderation framework.” This has helped break down internal silos to foster collaboration and par tnership between Qlik Customer Success and Suppor t (CSO), which houses the newly formed Digital Support team, and their Global Customer Marketing organization, which houses the Community team.

Whether assigned to the Qlik Community or volunteering as a moderator, Qlik employees are on-hand to help with complex questions, demonstrating how Qlik is invested in every user’s success.

As part of the Global Customer Marketing organization, the Community team now collaborates with every major organization across Qlik – from products and training to advocacy, support, and customer experience. Demonstrating its shifting role into the “heartbeat” of Qlik, the company has recently launched ideation into the Community for the first time and unveiled advanced gamification to enhance the overall “stickiness” and usefulness of the Community. Next up? The Qlik Community team plans to relaunch its Community MVP recognition program later this year.

Post-migration, Qlik blew past growth expectations, attributing this success to internal enablement, external promotion of the crisp new look and functionality, and internal buy-in across the global organization led by Customer Marketing. Once existing members saw the increased investment Qlik made in their Khoros-powered Community, they responded in kind, raising their own engagement – and ultimately, increasing the value generated by the community for many parts of Qlik’s organization. Qlik has also accelerated its pace of innovation in the Community, by deploying a few hundred (minor/major) UI/UX updates in the last 18 months.

Looking to the future, Qlik plans to implement performance, search, and user experience updates to the Community based on results from a recent audit with the Khoros Professional Services team through the Success Services program.

Results

When Qlik migrated from their previous software platform to Khoros, the goal for Qlik Community membership growth was 20%. The Qlik Community team far exceeded that goal by growing from 58K members to 85K by the end of year one. Today, the community boasts well over 100K members and is still growing.