Company: Upwork Company background: Upwork is the world's work marketplace connecting businesses and talent to unlock their potential. Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Director, Community Related URLs: http://community.upwork.com Kudos Category: Keep Calm and Carry On 1. How did your team shift your existing strategy by using Khoros technology to better engage customers during a crisis? In 2023, we’ve had our ups and downs when it comes to having to make it through a crisis, but we always seem to come out stronger in the end. In early 2022, we had little operational plans for how to deal with a crisis, and we went into what became the war in Ukraine with little planning of how to handle such a large crisis that impacted so many freelancers on our platform. In 2023, this was entirely different. We used our learnings from the year prior, and created a playbook around how to handle a crisis end to end, with Khoros being at the center of this. 2. What operational processes did you create or change to respond in a time of crisis? How were you able to be innovative using Khoros? With the Community platform, we were able to communicate effectively through many different ways. A big change was creating a centralized spot for Global Updates. We utilize this throughout the company to centralize all updates have clear communication to our end users (Luckily at the time of this writing we have none actively going on). Through community subscriptions, users can choose to receive real-time updates as we publish them.   In the past year, we've had major hurricanes as well as a major Earthquake. In the case of the hurricanes, we were able to proactively get ahead of them, provide communication to our users, and have a slower rollout. When an earthquake hits, it's a much faster moving process where we pull it all together in the span of a few hours. We utilized our homepage and announcements to get the word out when major news was happening, we used roles in Community to segment these announcements to those it impacted the most. We’ve setup a process to launch a Group (hub) when a crisis occurs, allowing those impacted or in the region of the incident to communicate, share updates, or work together on efforts.   3. What success metrics did you use to determine if your shifts in strategy and process had the desired outcomes? What were those quantifiable outcomes? Please be as specific as possible. We don’t have much in terms of success metrics outside of real-world impacts we have seen on our users. This work has less to do with revenue or creating a better experience in our core product, but instead around just taking care of our community. It does help prepare our users for issues that could be coming there way though, and proactive steps they can be taking just in case. We’ve worked with our internal resiliency team to help provide early indicators to potential issues. As a global company, both in terms of workforce but also our user base, what may never be an issue a U.S. based company hears about, may become a major issue for us. Utilizing the Community, we’ve been trying to get more ahead of these issues, before our users start contacting Customer Support, or blowing up the forums with questions or concerns. So in that regard, we’ve been successful. While it’s hard to compare one crisis to another, we’ve been able to minimize contacts into our org by being proactive with our Updates. Special Thanks: NA Case Study Opt-In: Yes ... View more

  Company: Upwork Company background: Upwork is the world's work marketplace connecting businesses and talent to unlock their potential. Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Director, Community Related URLs: https://community.upwork.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how? Relationships and people are at the core of our business. Our Community team is essential to ensuring that the needs of the talent on our platform are heard and met. It’s been approximately 14 months since we ‘relaunched’ our Community, going from primarily a support forum, to unleashing the full capabilities of what a Community team & Khoros can do together. In the past year, we've expanded our Academy, Groups, and Events programs, we've become more closely integrated with our Product and Support experiences, while also testing how Community can drive revenue for the core business.     2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved?   In the past 18 months, the Upwork Community has gone through a large transition. This has allowed for a more engaging and interactive experience for community members, with a stronger emphasis on collaboration and knowledge sharing. Throughout this transition, the community has remained steadfast in its commitment to providing valuable resources and support to freelancers and clients alike. Major focus areas over the past year have included enhancing user experience, expanding the breadth and depth of available resources, and fostering a sense of community and belonging among members.   One of the most notable initiatives has been the Academy, which provides valuable training and resources to help freelancers succeed on the platform. Through this program, users can access learning paths, courses, interactive modules, videos, one-on-one coaching, and more. Our Academy is home-grown, built entirely out of the magic that is the Khoros Community platform. Having launched to the general public about a year ago, we’ve now had over 50,000 members go through at least one learning path, with growth continuing at a rapid rate, with great results (see below!).     Gamification and badges are another exciting development, allowing users to earn recognition and rewards for their contributions to the community. We've created badges that coincide with our learning paths, activity throughout Community, as well as holidays and special occasions. We send out on average ~100,000 badges a month, and have used this opportunity to engage with our users through customizing the emails that go out for each badge. Many of our Academy badges will provide suggestions in the email of what steps the user should take next for example.     Groups are a crucial component of the Upwork Community, enabling individuals with comparable interests or objectives to come together and interact. We’ve launched well over 100 groups, 30 of which allow users to interact in their native language. These groups serve as a platform to connect with like-minded people, share ideas, and engage in meaningful discussions.       Community Events at Upwork are a set of live and custom event programs that allow freelancers to engage and learn in real-time and build long-lasting relationships. Our virtual educational events with tailored content for different customer segments are focused on providing actionable best practices to increase success on Upwork. Community-focused events build and nurture community through experience sharing and networking.   "I heard stories of persistence, resilience, and great talent. There was idea sharing and peer-to-peer encouragement and lots of enthusiasm. I am really looking forward to interacting more with Kenyan freelancers at our next virtual Talent Huddle"   They also include virtual peer coaching sessions for top talent and virtual or in-person meetups for local communities. Localized events give freelancers the opportunity to learn and engage with fellow local talent in their local language, helping them to form their network and grow their careers. With ~200 events hosted, ~40,000 attendees, and an average NPS of 70, it’s been a huge year.     We’ve become much more closely integrated into our Support experience this year. We’ve launched our Known Issues and Workarounds section, allowing users to quickly get back up and running when they run across an issue. Our Support team now directs users to here when an active issue or ongoing workaround persists. We've also integrated our platform status widget into Community, and even integrated Zendesk help articles directly into our Community search, ensuring our users will get to the right spot, regardless of where the content may be hosted.   We’ve launched a Community Contributors program. We get dozens of submissions a week from users who would like to have their content showcased in our blog.  We created a simple workflow within Khoros for users to self-submit content, and our content team will review, provide feedback and edits, and move forward with publishing the content when ready.     3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible. We take immense pride in our Freelancer+ program, which has been a subscription service for years. Recently, we had the chance to innovate and expand the program, introducing six new features centered around community and collaboration. These features include access to an exclusive group, personalized 1:1 coaching, expedited learning opportunities, and monthly exclusive events. With the introduction of these features, we witnessed triple digit growth in our subscriber base. The new and enhanced Freelancer+ program has been rolled out permanently, so that our users can continue to benefit from these exciting features.       When our platform rolled out an updated pricing this year, Community was front and center. The announcement was in our Community Announcements section, with an extensive FAQ continually updated to support this major change. While this brought much feedback into our forums, through a lot of content and planning, we came far in under what was expected for support volume.       Within our Academy, we’ve seen tremendous results in how users have become more successful after going through our learning paths or coaching. These results have had a significant impact on the earnings of our Freelancers. As Upwork, our mission is “...to create economic opportunities so people have better lives has taken us so much further...”.  Our Upwork Academy built on Khoros has allowed us to do exactly this with over 50,000 users.  With improvements across the board as users interact throughout Community, we saw an 18% increase in the likelihood of landing a contract within 90 days for talent who completed an Upwork Academy learning path, and a 10% earnings bump in the 30 days post-cohort for coaching.     We also have focused on expanding tools to help our freelancers. One of these include our rate calculator, helping freelancers calculate what to charge. We're looking to expand these interactive modules as we move into the back half of 2023.   Improving the efficiency of our moderators has been top of mind. While our traffic into Community has doubled in the past 18 months, we’ve actually been able to promote members of our team into expanded roles (engineering, analytics, leadership), while for the most part keeping up with our volume. Some of the improvements we have made to accomplish this include building our an enhanced moderation toolset. This allows our moderation team to see all incoming topics, additional information on users, and even an entire Q/A system for our leadership team to review and provide feedback to the team on how they are doing.     We're also testing new Gen AI capabilities such as using ChatGPT to help provide the initial draft of messages, and integrating Coda.IO to improve workflows of our team members. We have a lot of predefined replies in Coda, so we pull the list of those into a search box for our mods to quickly find and paste. With ChatGPT, we can summarize each response so it's unique. It's a lot of early learnings as we understand the full impact GenAI will have the future of Community.   Special Thanks: NA Case Study Opt-In: Yes ... View more

Company: Upwork Company background: Upwork is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to over 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential. Our talent community earned over $3.3 billion on Upwork in 2021 across more than 10,000 skills in categories including website & app development, creative & design, customer support, finance & accounting, consulting, and operations Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Director, Community Related URLs: https://community.upwork.com/ Kudos Category: Bottom Line Savings Rock Star 1. Tell us how you are implementing Khoros’ digital engagement technologies (e.g. community and/or social media management) to meet your customer engagement/experience goals. Please highlight unique programs or campaigns, technical upgrades and/or API usage to help reach these goals. At the start of 2022, we transitioned Social Support to our Customer Support team. This allowed to to refocus and dedicate our attention to the Community. We started to enable a lot of basic settings that had never been configured on our side - Reminders to come back and mark a solution as accepted, changing the survey prompt times to encourage more users to take the survey to get feedback on their experience, and revamping our Community to provide a more seamless experience. We relaunched our entire Community. After years of no change, we listened to our members. We provided an easier to utilize navigation through our header and navigation tiles. An aligned styling allows you to easily get back to the start, or navigate to different areas to browse, explore, learn.  We've been having lots of fun experimenting with the bulk data API and V1/V2 APIs as we integrate all Khoros data with the rest of our business data. From providing our moderation team with easy to use dashboards that can provide them any and all data they could ever imagine to be available at their fingertips, to being able to quickly look at trends by overlapping our Upwork data on top of Community data has shifted the speed at which we can operate.       2. How did the new technologies enable your business or organization to change or drive business impact? Group Hubs, and the forums inside them, have been a huge change for Upwork as we rolled these out. In addition to our select Upwork forums, we now were offering users the ability to connect with those in their own Country, as well as other more specific groups such as Veterans, Moms, and Family groups. Localization is not easy, or cheap.  We like to cheat our way to doing things quicker when we can, and we've been able to do that with Group Hubs. The simple act of allowing users to speak their native language, and not being forced to use English, tremendously improved the engagement of members who otherwise never visited. We've launched over a dozen local country groups, membership limited to those living in the country. Users who otherwise never visited have found these to be a great place to connect. This funnels them into all of the other areas of Community that we have been launching. We also launched our Upwork Academy. This is arguably priceless in terms of savings to our company. Rather than to purchase an expensive learning management system that is not in any way connected to our Community, we built one on top of Community instead.  In the span of a couple months time, we built an entire Academy experience that not only provides a great experience for our members, it's a tremendous cost savings to our organization.  No additional yearly fees, nothing additional to integrate, manage, or maintain. We wrote more about this here and here. 3. What are your customer care and business results in quantifiable metrics? Include support savings metrics (e.g. cost savings, decreased response time, call deflection, reduced case escalations, increased agent productivity, optimizing campaigns, increasing conversion rates or CSAT, increase in digital commerce, and efficiencies gained with collaborating, publishing and reporting). Our average time to first response in our discussion forums is under 120 minutes. Our team of moderators do an amazing job (sometimes to amazing) at ensuring our members are getting taken care of. We average over 3 kudos per topic, with around a 20% accepted solution rate in our primary forums.  Topics on average have 4 replies.  As we have revamped our Community, and enabled additional Khoros features, our NPS has been steadily rising over the past year to new highs.   Here is some information on our support deflection - We can't provide all of the sensitive information, but our savings is in the multi-millions!! ... View more

Company: Upwork Company background: Upwork is the world’s work marketplace. We serve everyone from one-person startups to over 30% of the Fortune 100 with a powerful, trust-driven platform that enables companies and talent to work together in new ways that unlock their potential. Our talent community earned over $3.3 billion on Upwork in 2021 across more than 10,000 skills in categories including website & app development, creative & design, customer support, finance & accounting, consulting, and operations Contact: Stan Gromer Title: Director, Community Related URLs: https://community.upwork.com/ Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community 1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community? Do you use your community for support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.? Has the community charter evolved in any way since launch? The Upwork Community was initially founded as a Support community when the merger of two companies formed Upwork. For most of its existence, the Community has remained focused on providing support - Up until October of 2021, Forums were the only part of the Community platform we had been leveraging. Over the nine months since, we've transformed the Community in endless ways. Our Community team consists of our Community Platform team (Content, Forums, Groups,  Technology, and Operations), Events (Local events, Community-wide events, larger conferences), and our Upwork Academy team (On-Demand content, Upwork Skills Certifications, & Coaching)   As we grow the community to become a space for all, we are focused on enablement and learning; product innovation, education, and acceptance; a dedicated platform for our customers to share their stories and advice. We will continue to help customers with general support needs as we track support deflection, bug fixes, and workarounds. Looking forward, we aim to track customer acquisition and growth.   Our mission is to activate, elevate, and amplify our talent community through a content-driven platform where they can network, learn, and grow. The Upwork community will drive engagement, brand awareness, and aid talent onboarding. Community will help build trust, allow talent to engage, and foster connections with like-minded peers, top talent, and Upwork—spanning every aspect of driving a successful freelancing business.   2. Tell us about how you are using your community and how you made it happen. Did you get executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was your process to gain this buy-in? How have you achieved cross functional support, added stake-holders and increased organizational adoption? Working in the product organization, we grew the team focused on cross-functional support and collaboration. With a leader in a VP position, we can access the company's leadership team and provide transparency and visibility into what programs and projects we are launching and why.   For company buy-in, we align our strategy and goals with the company's big-picture objectives. In doing this, we can show how and where community ties into different overarching goals, whether monetary, awareness, or retention-based.   Below are just a few of the ways we are using Community to push the company forward:   Content A consistent complaint from users was the difficulty in finding the content they were looking for. With that in mind, we built a taxonomy using Associate Products as Category hubs for common topics throughout our company and platform. Using standard tags that corresponded to Associated Products, we created libraries of information throughout the Community that will auto-populate content as it is created and tagged. We then used custom tags as audience identifiers to better serve content to the right person. Lastly, we implemented labels at a local level to help with navigation within each section.   After launching our first contributor program in late Q1, we have seen over 60 members join our group and 5 unprompted submissions in less than two months. Additionally, we have grown traffic by 108%, MoM, since expanding our topics relevant to best practices for the platform and trending work and career content. Since revamping our product updates content and formatting to meet the needs of multiple audiences, we saw a growth in views by 85% MoM.     Groups We've launched almost 40 Groups (Group Hubs) that range across four pillars identity, impact, interest, and industry in roughly six months. Our Local groups far outpaced the growth we initially forecasted, with thousands of users joining after our initial round of invites. We're getting ourselves in trouble for increasing support ticket volume; Users are so excited they can't wait for their own country to launch and keep asking for updates on when they will have their own space.   Additionally, with the support of dedicated group guides, we've seen an increase in positive engagement across the platform. All of our groups are run by volunteers, a mix of internal Upwork staff and community members. They have been such a valuable resource in helping launch so many groups in such a short amount of time.   Academy We've launched the first-ever Upwork Academy, built entirely on the Khoros Community platform. Having dealt with the unconnected experiences most organizations have between their Community and Learning experiences, we were determined to get this right. Each step of the journey is tracked inside of Community the same as any other user activity, with users awarded badges upon completion.  We talked a bit how we built this here and here.     Within the Academy, users can take one-off courses or entire learning paths. Our learning paths include dedicated courses, articles, videos, and activities to help further understand the course material. We are working on personalization and recommendations based on courses completed and areas visited within Community.    We'll soon be launching gamification within Academy, including badges, ranks, and roles impacted by your progress in Community. These completions will also soon provide a more personalized experience.      Coaching Within Academy, we also offer Coaching Cohorts. These leverage Group Hubs, usually time-based for a few weeks to months, where users will often interact together during the cohort. Some cohorts are for brand new users of Upwork, some based on specific skills or improvements, and more. These cohorts are all led by members of our Academy team. These spaces have received excellent feedback from our members, and the Group Hub functionality has allowed us to quickly test many different concepts and ideas to see what works. Forums Our forums made up the entirety of Community until October 2021. In Q1, we expanded our forum strategy to include a support-focused forum. Our moderator team provides more hands-on support within this dedicated forum, allowing them more time to respond to our other forums.   Events We've just kicked off using Khoros Events in our Community. We are using these a bit creatively at the moment, and we are using them as a way to organize years of past events. We've had events take place over Webex, Zoom, and various platforms, and we're now aligning the experience within Community. In Q3, we'll be making significant changes as we integrate Bevy into the overall experience, combining the best capabilities of multiple platforms while having a singular experience entirely hosted on top of Khoros. Reporting With the help of some incredible internal teams, we set up and utilized the bulk data API—enabling us to have a granular look at the data between the Khoros platform and Upwork's platform. With this access, we quickly built out reporting, such as traffic and engagement, which helped us begin to investigate the impact Community has on our freelancers.   While we're still early on this part of the journey, we've shown that those in Community deliver more significant results than those not in Community.      Utilizing the bulk data API, we set up some creative alerts to proactively deal with bad actors in Community. For example, we monitor anyone sending more than 5 PMs daily and send an alert to our moderator team if that occurs.   3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible. One significant metric we are tracking is an increase in diverse locations and languages among users—which can be attributed to our location-based groups launching this past quarter. As a global company, we're excited to see our user base continue to grow worldwide and look forward to expanding our language capabilities. In a matter of months, we have launched 6 local groups with over 1000+ members, with many more planned.   We're also tracking increased searches with results and registered visitors, which correlates with our growth in support deflection savings. Our Traffic in Community has gone from years of flat growth to rapidly increasing as we revamped our Community, turned on new functionality, and started reminding our users that we existed! Surveys in Community have had a significant impact on the data we are collecting monthly. They have also enabled us to track our NPS score, which has continued to trend in a positive direction with the continued changes we have been implementing.   Support deflection has always been a major component of our Community, and using the commonly provided. ... View more