Executive summary

Unit4 is a global enterprise-software company operating in more than 20 countries with 40+ years of experience. Their aim is to support a more meaningful and inspiring work experience for their customers with self-driving, adaptive, intuitive software. Before partnering with Khoros, Unit4 had a customer partner portal where customers and partners could access relevant documents, but it didn't include a peer-to-peer interaction element. When Unit4 began their journey to become a cloud-based company, they wanted a better way to support their customers. They wanted to build a community that could offer a peer-to-peer element, customer support, and access to product news and roadmaps. They also wanted to encourage customers to reach out to each other for best practices. After a comprehensive search, Unit4 decided to build a Khoros community. Unit4 partnered with the Khoros Community Strategy Services team to build their community. They sought guidance about peer-to-peer interaction, potential community pitfalls, immediate and long-term objectives, gamification, and the importance of moderators. Unit4 also held strategic meetings with company stakeholders to define goals for the community. The Unit4 community is not publicly accessible and is only open to customers, partners and the Unit4 team. This focus on customers means they are driven to help drive not only answer product questions, but ultimately drive customer success, adoption, and expertise. The community helps customers get the most out of Unit4’s products, ensures they are aware of product updates and changes, solicits feedback and ideas from them to improve, and helps them share best practices and advice with each other.

Unit4’s community is oriented toward self-service. This has increased customer satisfaction while simultaneously decreasing support volume, though of course Unit4 care agents are still available as needed. To encourage continued interaction beyond Q&A, Unit4 built gamification into their community, including ranks and badges to reward users for engaging and helping each other. They also interview their most active users on a podcast, which is available through the community, to recognize and amplify the contribution of the brand’s biggest proponents.

Unit4’s Khoros community has helped them steadily reach more of their customers; community membership, visits and page views have increased by almost 50% year-over-year. The community’s success has been recognized by Unit4’s global leadership team. An even bigger achievement is that engagement has more than doubled! Posts and solutions are up over 125%!

In the future, Unit4 plans to create a space for more internal company members, while still keeping the main focus of the community on their customers. Unit4 plans to use their community to encourage brand advocates who can promote Unit4 products to other customers. The Unit4 sales team names the community as a selling point with prospects: knowing customers will have a robust community to turn to for support makes Unit4 products more appealing and demonstrates how much Unit4 cares about their customers. Unit4 looks forward to exploring other offerings from Khoros and determining which might fit well within their community, such as Khoros Events. Unit4 recently redesigned their community to place a greater focus on visual elements, drive customer engagement, and aid customers in using their community effectively.

Results

Since partnering with Khoros to build an online community, Unit4 has experienced significant call deflection. The Unit4 community continues to steadily grow: it logged 45% more visits and 46% more page views year-over-year from February 2020 to February 2021. During this time, Unit4 also achieved impressive engagement gains: