Schneider Electric’s Story
Explore Schneider Electric's impactful use of community to enhance customer satisfaction and foster innovation and co-creation.
Summary
Schneider Electric is a global leader in energy management and automation that seeks to create impact by empowering all to make the most of our energy and resources, bridging progress and sustainability. It is a global industrial technology leader bringing world-leading expertise in electrification, automation, and digitization to smart industries, resilient infrastructure, future-proof data centers, intelligent buildings, and intuitive homes.
With Khoros as its online community partner, Schneider Electric has created a vibrant and engaging space for all its users, delivered higher performance and employee engagement, and enabled a hub of shared knowledge that benefits customers, partners, and internal teams alike.
COMMUNITY SCALE
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2 M
users (2022)
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6 M
minutes of user interaction (2022)
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+ 253 %
increase in unique visitors YoY (2024)
BUSINESS OUTCOMES
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90 %
solution rate through crowdsourcing (2020)
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550
full-time employee equivalent impact (2022)
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€ 28 M
in savings (2022)
“At Schneider Electric, we are committed to providing an engaging and efficient customer experience. Our goal is to enable customers to find the information they need, connect with peers and experts, and maximize the value of our solutions.”
— Zineb EZ-ZERROUQI, Global Customer Engagement Leader, Online Communities at Schneider Electric
About Schneider Electric
Schneider Electric, founded in 1836, is a multinational company specializing in digital automation and energy management. With operations in over 100 countries and a workforce of approximately 168,000 employees, the company integrates leading process and energy technologies to deliver comprehensive solutions for homes, buildings, data centers, infrastructure, and industries. Schneider Electric is committed to sustainability, efficiency, and empowering customers to make the most of their energy.
Rationale for change / Business use case
Schneider Electric had ambitious goals of broadening its audience and boosting engagement by creating a network that would connect all its key stakeholders and focus on customers. When the company realized it couldn’t grow customer support resources to keep pace with the increasing size and complexity of its end markets, the team decided to build a Khoros Community.
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
“We wanted a way to make our support more collaborative and provide easier self-service so that our entire industry could move faster into the digital and Industrial IOT space. We also knew a lot of knowledge and expertise was trapped inside our network, and within Schneider Electric itself.”
Jean-Philippe Bonnafoux
Global Vice President - Customer Online Communities at Schneider Electric
COMMUNITY JOURNEY
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Inception
Inception
The first significant milestone for Schneider Electric’s community with Khoros was around 2017 when they launched their platform for technical support and knowledge sharing. In the early days, Schneider Electric leveraged self-serve and assisted peer-to-peer support in forums and knowledge bases to empower customers to solve their own business problems while reducing the cost-to-serve for its technical support teams. The primary focus was on providing a technical support channel for both customers and agents.
Technology: Schneider Electric implemented Khoros Communities software to support self-service, scale agent support, and facilitate knowledge-sharing across a global customer base.
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Growth
Growth
By 2020, the community had already reached 42K members and 1 million views per month. After incubating Khoros Communities within the Schneider Electric Digital division to leverage technical support resources, the company experienced significant growth and eventually involved its marketing team in the community as well. The scope of the community expanded with the new intent to promote brand loyalty, extract customer insights, and generate more revenue opportunities.
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Maturity
Maturity
By 2023-2024, Schneider Electric’s community had grown to 2 million users and had delivered €28 million in savings. The community gained momentum and gathered endorsements over time within the organization by showing clear measurable outcomes — namely solving customer problems that influenced its brand experience. Early adopters now help spread the word and bring other lines of business or country organizations to join the platform, driving consumption and content generation across forums and knowledge bases.
Lessons learned
Executive buy-in and cross-functional support
Executive buy-in and cross-functional support
Schneider Electric leveraged their Digital division's resources to launch the community, gaining early successes. The community was then championed by their Chief Marketing Officer, emphasizing the strategic shift toward using the platform for customer insights and revenue generation, thus garnering wider organizational support.
Streamlining knowledge management
Streamlining knowledge management
Schneider Electric significantly improved its knowledge management approach by consolidating various formats and documentation resources (e.g., PDFs, manuals) into a unified Help Center within the community platform. This centralized hub made it easier for users to access necessary resources and for technical teams to manage documentation more efficiently.
Collaboration across teams
Collaboration across teams
Schneider Electric successfully convinced traditionally siloed teams to adopt the community platform for documentation management. By demonstrating its flexibility and user-friendly features, the platform now supports various departments in delivering real-time updates and gathering customer feedback, driving cross-functional collaboration.
Results
Schneider Electric’s Khoros-powered community has delivered significant business outcomes, enabling the company to scale engagement, enhance customer support, and drive measurable financial impact.
Today, the Schneider Electric Community continues to be a cornerstone of the company’s digital strategy, fostering collaboration and empowering customers, partners, and employees to make the most of their energy and resources.
2 million boost in users
€28 million in savings
550 full-time employee equivalent impact
Why Khoros Community software
Schneider Electric values Khoros for its robust capabilities, scalability, and ability to support enterprise-level knowledge management.
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Advanced AI moderation
Community managers can get more done in less time with workflow automation, enhanced analytics reporting, and AI-drive content filters. This helps with efficiency and enables small community teams to perform like big ones.
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Open APIs to extend and integrate
Organizations can bring community to the heart of their brand's digital ecosystem with a reengineered platform designed to connect with virtually any other system — allowing a unified approach to community management and data analysis.
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Community engagement and content types
Teams are enabled to cultivate two-way dialogue with members. They can leverage a host of built-in styles to fuel interaction, including blogs, discussion forums, Q&A, ideas, private messages, and more.
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Unmatched expertise
Khoros provides the most modern community architecture with the longest history of enterprise-level scale, security, configurability, and uptime.
Power up your community growth
Schneider Electric enhanced feedback and co-creation with Khoros Community. Discover how it can power your community.