Company: SAP SuccessFactors
Company background: SAP is a global enterprise software company with a mission to help the world run better and improve people's lives. SAP SuccessFactors supports this mission by delivering cloud-based Software as a Service for Human Capital Management. Founded in 2001 and acquired by SAP in 2011, SuccessFactors helps customers connect their workforce with purpose to move the needle. Our community is closed – private to existing customers – and intended to make our customers’ system administrators more effective and self-sufficient.
Contact: Brigid Colver
Title: Customer Outreach Manager
Related URLs: https://community.successfactors.com
Lithy category: B2B Community Innovator
1. Describe the innovation(s) and how you settled on the decision to innovate (user request, Lithium suggestion, internal idea, etc.)
Our closed community launched in 2012 and has steadily grown in membership, usage, and content. Two years ago, we performed an in-depth assessment of the site's structure and layout. We reviewed leading practices and engagement metrics, interviewed users, and validated our core audience and goals. The findings were clear: users wanted a better mobile experience, more intuitive navigation, and more easily accessible content. Non-English speakers were also seeking more translated content. We identified 4 innovations to address stakeholder needs:
- Restructured content. Pages contained similar information but lacked cohesive structure. Too many forums led to spotty engagement, tags and labels were out of hand, important posts and events were quickly buried in blogs, and page design translated poorly to mobile. We needed to consolidate information and strategically restructure our product, home, and events pages.
Example of our Product Pages before: All information was tucked into blogs and forums and easily lost as new posts were added.
- Robust search functionality. Because our customers sometimes need information located in SAP platforms outside of the community, we wanted a search capable of pulling results from these outside channels. We also wanted in-depth filter options, autofill suggestions, and reporting.
- Comprehensive Resource Center. Our resource center was well-loved for its content, but scrutinized for its wordiness and cumbersome navigation:
- Simple, comprehensive translation capability. Our goal is to support customers' success globally, not just in English-speaking regions. We wanted our community to reflect this with easily translatable content and copy.
We also wanted a clean design across the board, beautifully aligned to SAP’s other platforms, that would make mobile use a snap. Our Lithium CSM resurfaced the idea of Lithium Responsive, and we decided to start there.
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2. Tell us about how you made it happen
We prioritized! Because we engaged three outside parties (Lithium, Grazitti Interactive, and SAP Translation) to support our goals, we needed to be very clear on timing, desired outcomes, and the cause-and-effect nature of each change. We put together a horrifyingly large and detailed project plan, with waterfall phases.
First: Search. We contracted Grazitti Interactive, a design team that had previously provided services for our community, to implement their AWESOME SearchUnify tool. This tool allowed customers to Search both in and beyond the community, to other SAP platforms.
Second: Page design. We rethought the structure and look of our product pages to reduce forums, set rules for labels, surface more content to the landing page, and align with SAP branding. We mocked up a new version of our Resources center to reduce clicks and wordiness while simultaneously providing more information. We also completely overhauled the way we wanted the homepage to look and operate to be more focused on the new Search functionality and to reduce tabs and pages overall. Finally, we wanted our events to be easily found by their target audiences. Based on our requirements and initial mock ups, Grazitti created mock pages in their own development environment. We reviewed and reworked until we felt each was right.
Third: Initial development. Lithium set our development environment to Responsive and Grazitti rebuilt the redesigned pages there. Because our requirements included customizations, moving to Responsive required us to review those along with out of the box elements to ensure each worked well with Responsive.
Fourth: Final development and testing on stage. Lithium set our stage environment to Responsive and copied our code from development to stage. For the third time, we carefully reviewed and worked with end users to refine pages' appearance and functionality, and to ensure the correct user experience for different roles.
Fifth: Launch! We continue to review and make small updates, but the major go-live took place this Spring. To keep the refreshed site in this peak condition, we have established a governance process to ensure that all content is aligned to the community strategy, strategically placed, and relevant to our users.
Sixth: Translations. While design changes took place, we selected, formatted, and submit content to SAP’s Translation service. This, too, required phases, as some content couldn’t be translated until the community updates or other translations were complete. We had to partner closely with both Lithium and Grazitti to time the translation launch, as Lithium delivered the translated skin, while Grazitti ensured that translations would carry over to attached content.
Throughout each phase we engaged with users to validate changes. We shared updates along the way to build excitement for the upcoming updates. Once launched, we provided customers with a “cheat sheet” of changes, in addition to webinars and guides. We have many well-established Community users so ensuring a smooth transition was key.
The entire project took 6 months, and we continue to iterate in small ways as we gather feedback. However, feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. See below…
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3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business.
In addition to the redesigned homepage and search functionality shown in the above answers, these are a few of our "After" shots:
Product pages:
Resource Center page:
Updated Events Page
In the quarter since launch, we have received heartfelt feedback, including:
- I am looking forward to using the new Community with new powerful search and subscription options. That brings a lot of benefits into my work.
- This upgrade is cool and user-friendly, I like it!
- The final product of enhanced Community UI looks very sleek. Especially, it's nice to see some of the feedback we provided were considered and incorporated. Great Job!!
- This is a wonderful example of how to make our (customer's) lives easier.
Quantitatively, we are seeing positive trends for:
- Use of mobile/tablets to view community content
- Use of non-English default languages
According to a case study of our Search Unify feature by Grazitti, “Engagement spiked as searches without results dropped by 75% & cross-channel content garnered over 60% clicks”
And WE, as a team, are proud of the results every time we enter the beautifully refreshed site.
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