Naturally, this common challenge in product-based companies has an impact on support metrics. Since customers had a difficult time finding the information they needed, it was easier for them to contact support. As a result, the support team was seeing higher-than-normal ticket volumes, which makes it difficult to respond to customers in a timely manner. "As a mid-sized company, to see an average monthly ticket count in the 400's, causing response time to increase by even an hour, is a lot," explains Nichole. "We're used to having an agile team that can respond quickly, and so having an increase in customer queries showed us we weren’t delivering the type of customer experience we were aiming for."
And so, Nichole and her team began their search with a simple goal in mind: find a solution that can provide the easiest, most efficient self-service experience possible. As Nichole noted, "We wanted to decrease our support ticket count while also improving response time. Our goal was to see a 10-15% decrease on both of these metrics, and we knew there had to be a solution out there that would deliver these results."
“With Vanilla, we were able to create an eye-catching home page that got people excited to participate in the community—something we didn’t have before.“
“We knew that finding the right information was a challenge, so we customized our homepage in a way that highlighted our new search function.“
“In order to help streamline our communications, it was important that we had a notification system to create a more consistent experience and let our members know what’s important.“
“We absolutely needed a long-term self-support solution that could centralize our information, and Vanilla provided us with everything we needed for the long run.“
Perhaps the biggest success that Nichole noted was that the new community made her initial goals seem quite small. SecureAuth’s initial goal was to see a 10-15% decrease in support ticket volume and response time, but after the community was up and running, Nichole reflected, "in hindsight, it was a pretty low goal. We are seeing numbers that we didn't even think were possible!"
The multi-media aspect of Vanilla was a feature that wasn't initially on their must-have list, but now, Nichole says they couldn't go without. With this feature, the SecureAuth community is able to embed videos, which turned out to be a great bonus since they had a large amount of video content. "We have a lot of customers that want to view our previous webinars and training videos," explains Nichole. "Now we have a video library where our customers can access any and all video content in one place."
The community that SecureAuth built with Vanilla is a huge success, and Nichole is looking forward to continuing that. As she concludes, "after seeing what we were able to build, our choice to go with Vanilla was absolutely the right call. I am excited to see where this community takes us."