How the SAP Concur community team used customer input to pivot fast

Executive summary

SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for travel, expense, and invoice management solutions. When the team that manages the SAP Concur community initially partnered with Khoros to build an online community, they wanted to provide a platform for existing customers to engage, collaborate, and exchange best practices. But when they researched community performance and customer feedback using the Khoros Value Analytics Survey, they discovered that many users also wanted easier access to more support options. To meet this customer need, the team worked with Khoros to quickly build a new, easier-to-navigate support-related section on their community website.

In the summer of 2020, the SAP Concur team began working with Khoros to deliver an extended support presence within their online community. They created more than 100 end-user-focused blog posts within a dedicated support and FAQs section, leveraging the expertise of the company’s customer support team. They also added a link to the help section of their community from within the product website, making their community their main source of online support.

The SAP Concur team also developed an automated personalization system leveraging a CRM integration to drive engagement, and offer a gated environment where vetted members can discuss relevant topics with peers in their industries. When users join the community with their corporate email address, the Khoros platform automatically fills out part of the registration form with their company name and country. The system also does a look-up into the SAP Concur CRM tool to add a member’s industry and role at their company to their profile. The community then uses this information to recommend relevant content and community groups. Users connected to about a dozen industries are also presented with a personalized view of the SAP Concur community and website. Khoros’ website personalization capabilities have helped the SAP Concur community automatically assign 2,000 of its members a personalization role so far, which is very helpful for brand stakeholders.

Not only does the SAP Concur community now offer robust support, the updates improved the user experience of both its community and its website as well. One of the support-based blog posts the team added to their community was aimed at customers who are unsure where to begin with the SAP Concur tool. In just two weeks, the post earned more than 24,000 clicks. Recently, the SAP Concur team used Khoros to develop a new, more granular survey. It asks users if the content provided in the support and FAQ’s section was what they were looking for and how they could improve the content if it wasn’t. Feedback from this survey will help the SAP Concur team to continue to improve the customer experience.

“We leveraged Khoros’ open API to provide a personalized user experience to more than 2,000 of our members.”

— Beshoy Maoud, Site Manager, at SAP Concur

Results

After adding an additional support section, the SAP Concur community realized higher traffic and registrations, and the community was 31% more engaged based on posts and replies. The SAP Concur community deflected approximately $1M in support costs during 2020, and it’s on track to deflect even more in 2021. Automation has meant that the community team spends less time managing user roles, meaning more time for optimizing content, engaging with users, and planning additional new features and functionality.

Transformed

their community into a primary online support channel by linking to it from their product website.

Designed

their community with both SAP Concur-created content and user-generated content in their peer-to-peer forums, blogs and groups.

Employed

the promoted search feature within the Khoros platform to match keywords from user searches to specific articles.

Partnered

with Qualtrics to tag and sort open text survey feedback and easily surface keywords.