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: Digital Design Excellence
1. What are your digital goals? And how does your community platform and/or social media management platform support your overarching brand experience?
Our members are system administrators at our customer companies. We want them to be as effective and self-sufficient at managing their companies’ software as possible. Therefore, we want our design to guide them to what they need when they need it, or even before they need it.
2. What design elements make your community/website/social channels unique and stand out from the rest?
We placed a robust search front and center so that instead of hunting for information, users can simply begin typing. The search bar predictively autofills, so even if users aren’t sure what, specifically, they need, they will see recommendations. Better yet, users don’t need to know whether content lives on our community, support platform, or documentation management platform; the integrative search handles that by pulling from all three sites.
On our product pages, we leverage labels to categorize blog posts in a way that catches users’ attention based on their area/s of interest.
Our Release Updates page – an area virtually all users rely on – is especially sophisticated. We make it simple and beautiful for customers gathering release information to think “hey, I wonder what’s coming down the pipeline on this product roadmap” or “have there been patches delivered for this release?” They don’t even need to leave the page to find out; they simply click the label to surface relevant content.
We have an events page that makes it a snap to filter by region or event type so users can quickly see upcoming events relevant to them.
Plus, we make it simple to identify and update subscriptions across all forums and blogs through our customized My Subscriptions page. Users dynamically select and view the latest activity across boards or labels of interest.
At a more granular level, we have embedded a personalization software called Evergage to gather information about users’ interests. We aren’t a sales-focused community so we use this information to target users with content we believe will better support their needs. Some examples may include inviting regional users with events, walking new members through resources they have not yet viewed, or recommending potentially compelling articles.
Finally, we have improved languages. We’ve created a drop down on the home page – no hunting through settings in a language users don’t understand – that will instantly update all static content on the site and the content of attached resources. This makes it easy for all users, including non-English speakers, to be more effective and self-sufficient.
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3. How did you execute your design? Share metrics to prove the success of your design excellence.
We work closely with an amazing design team – Grazitti – that has been able to execute our wild requests, from cross-platform search to connecting content translations to skin translations. Our personalization campaigns are made possible through a software called Evergage.
Our redesign went live only two months ago, but we have positive returns. This may sound crazy, but our engagement metrics went down after our redesign and we consider this a good thing. Why? The metrics that shifted down were page views (-15% YoY). Yet the number of visits increased (9%), and we received only positive qualitative feedback from customers thanking us for the new user experience. Meaning? Our search capability allows users to cut out wasteful hunting through pages by taking them right to the source. A report by Grazitti after implementation showed that “Engagement spiked as searches without results dropped by 75%, and cross-channel content garnered over 60% clicks.”
Some feedback from users:
We couldn’t say it better ourselves!
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