Delivering Best-in-Class Service through the Power of a Community

Hello everyone, My name is Jason Parocho, Product Marketing Manager for Community Cloud, and thank you for joining our webinar Deliver Best in Class Service through the Power of a Community. Today I would like to welcome Greg Mourier, our Lead Solution Engineer from Service Cloud, Paul Rosier, our Senior Direct Manager for Technical Support, and Erica Kuhl, the Senior Director and Owner of the Salesforce Success Community. Now, before we get started today, I would like to review a couple of ways you'll be able to interact with us throughout the broadcast. First is the Ask a Question button in the upper left corner of your screen. If there's anything you'd like to ask today's press presenters, please click the button and type your question. We left time to answer audience questions at the end of the presentation and we'll get to as many as we possibly can. You may also use this button if you encounter any technical issues during the call. Additionally, we want to make sure our webinars offer valuable content and meet audience expectations. So please take a moment after the presentation to tell us how we did using the Rate this button and you'll see to the right of the Questions button. To access additional information on today's topics, please access the Attachments button to the left of the Rate this so you can get a deeper look into today's content. If you wish to revisit the presentation, you can do so after the live broadcast on this website under the Live and Recorded section. Now, without further ado, let's get started. As always, regardless of today's webinar, please make sure your personal decisions are based on functionality we've already built, not based on the functionality we may or may not build in the future. Now the one truth about business today is no one can be successful acting alone. Businesses must engage a broad ecosystem to be successful. Now what do I mean by that? Let's take a look at a product from Inception to Consumer Engagement in order to create a successful product, you have to engage your employees and give them the tools to work together in order to be successful. Now part of that means coordinating with your agencies, your vendors and your suppliers to make sure they are getting the necessary information and materials to your employees. Even once you have that product, you must engage your retailers and your resellers to ensure they are on message with the right promotions to maximize your profit. And finally, when your product gets into the hands of your consumers, they are going to want to learn more about your product and maximize their investment. Unfortunately, today's customer facing technology falls a little bit short. We have Websites, and they're great that branded and open experience, but they're not personalized or interactive. FYI, Flash animation does not count as interactive. Portals are extremely beneficial to a business because they connect to business data, allowing you to capture relevant information. But they are not mobile or personalized. Finally, there are social communities which truly do give a business the opportunity to have live interactive discussions. But those communities, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, are not connected to your business processes. If I were to go to one and ask your company a question, I can only hope to get an answer, leaving me with an incomplete experience. If no one answers my question, I'm just sort of left on my own. Which is why we created Community Cloud. This isn't a product that we just sell. This is a product that powers our entire 1.8 million member success community. Using Community Cloud allows us to deliver personalized content to ensure we're making sure we are delivering only the most relevant content to each user. We understand that every company doesn't have an armada of developers, which is why we made this product simple and quick to stand up with our enlightening template communities. And finally, the community allows us to connect to our business processes right from the community. E commerce ties directly to your SFA targeted recommendations, tie into your marketing solutions, and case resolution ties directly into your service offerings so you can escalate a case right from the community. Now to talk a little bit more about case installations, I'm going to turn it over to Greg Moyes to tell how it's done through Service Cloud. Great.

Thanks Jason, appreciate that. Yeah, as a lead solutions consultant here at Salesforce, I'm always happy to talk about Service Cloud and obviously that is a critical component of our Service Community's offering. The Service Cloud is the number one world service application on the market today. It essentially is built to enable companies of all sizes and across all industries to support their customers anytime and anywhere. So with the Service Cloud, your customer support agents can service smarter. They can deliver a more personalized experience across all channels using powerful collaboration tools, mobile capabilities and a simple console that's configurable and at the same time provides that complete 360 degree view of the customer. So while the Service Cloud is really purpose built to drive agent efficiency, and it's the combination of Service Cloud and the Service Community that provides a complete customer self service experience. So through the self service experience, customers can help themselves by quickly finding answers to common questions anytime, anywhere, from any device. Customers can also engage with each other, asking questions, providing answers, sharing best practices through efficient peer to peer self service interactions. So these powerful self service capabilities really make for happier customers as well as increased customer satisfaction while at the same time freeing up your agents to focus on more complex issues and thus really decreasing costs through more scalable service operations. Now it's the community cloud along with the service cloud that combine to bring or provide the seamless integration between customer self service and agent assistance service. So this combined service community as we refer to it, is a solution that really enables companies to provide an effortless customer experience through a highly configurable and mobile interface. So connecting customers to relevant knowledge base articles, cases, documents, files, even community question and answer content or that peer to peer self service that I mentioned before. So community members can immediately benefit from recommended resources, groups or experts that are being surfaced to them through the self service community. And this is all based upon their unique questions and their areas of interest. And of course members posts are automatically tagged and organized into topics, constantly growing the utility of knowledge within the community. And it's important to note that because this service community is built on the Salesforce platform, configurable business rules allow us to automatically create cases from customer posts using defined keywords, time parameters and other triggers, ensuring that all customer questions and posts never go unanswered.

Next one.

Ultimately, as you can see here by this slide, as companies assess their customer self service offerings, they really need to take a look at the actual details of their self service channel. Because self service is really what the customers want. So a recent survey that was conducted by Forrester Research actually found that 70% of customers prefer self service over actually speaking directly with a company representative. Research has also found that over 40% of people who contact a call center first or actually first went to the website or looked for a self service or looked to self serve themselves prior to contacting that customer. So again further supporting the need for companies to provide an effective self service site for their customers. And you'll notice here there's some additional metrics through our recent annual customer relationship survey that we conducted, I believe it was April this year, we'd asked companies who had deployed our self service solutions what they felt on average or what on average was kind of the types of improvements they were seeing following that deployment of the self service solution. As you can see here, over 48% faster case resolution times were reported by our customers, over 31% increase in case deflections. And something that's critical to any contact center, any company is customer satisfaction. Our customers sell actually over a 45% improvement in their customer satisfaction rates following the deployment of a self service solution. So with that said, what I'd like to do is pass it over to Paul Rozet, the Senior manager of Salesforce Tech Support. He can talk in more detail about how Salesforce Tech Support is using this combined service cloud and service community solution to to deliver improved results across key metrics as well as deliver exceptional customer experience. So over to you Paul.

Thanks Greg. Hi everyone, my name is Paul Rose, I'm a senior Manager here at Salesforce with our technical support team and I wanted to talk about how we utilize the service cloud in support to help our customers. So to start with, here a little bit about Support. We have 1,000 agents in 19 countries across the globe supporting customers in 11 different languages. We're assisting customers 247 and handling about 70,000 cases a month. So we have a lot of work we're churning through every day for our customers. Our customers can raise cases to us via email, chat and phone, but primarily via portal. That's where we're seeing most of our case volume. We've successfully driven with strong online content over 70% of our customers to access us in creating cases for technical support via our portal. So that's been a great success story for us. Now the portal itself is new for us, this version of the portal we just launched this week. So this is an updated experience for our customers, providing a host of resources that customers can access to address their technical support and training needs. Customers can simply dive in via the Help and Training portal and find any answers they might need by using a revised search engine. We have across all of our knowledge repositories at once. From the Help and Training page, customers have direct and immediate access to our success communities which are extremely important for us as we're going to scale and grow over time. We'll be diving more into this later on in the conversation today, but it is key to our customer success. Customers also have easy access from the Help and Training portal to product documentation, training materials and our new trailhead learning path where they can gain expertise with Salesforce. Finally, customers can always reach out to technical support directly by logging a case with technical support from the Help and Training portal. Now, once we have cases logged by customers, our agents are using our Lightning service console to manage the case through to resolution. The console itself is highly customizable and extensible and it can access allows agents to access all work in all cases that customers have submitted, no matter the origin, whether a customer submitted a case via phone, email Chat or portal, an agent can work with that case. In our agent console, all the relevant case details are readily available for agents contact information, account information, case details, and any notes that the customer may have logged on the case itself, or any notes from a prior agent who may have worked on that case. Most importantly, agents have integrated access to knowledge right in the console. Relevant articles are automatically displayed based on the case details and agents can always search for new articles as needed or create new articles directly from the case itself. Now what I mentioned here were articles, knowledge and articles. This is key to our success and our growth. Knowledge articles are central to our ability to scale technical support. As we continue to grow. We need and we encourage all of our agents to participate in the knowledge creation process. Our goal is to solve one from use. Often, if we find an answer, if an agent finds an answer, we want to attach that answer for a customer to a case. If we don't find an answer or we find an outdated article, we either want to update that article with the relevant information we've learned from a customer engagement or create a brand new article if it's something some new troubleshooting tip we've uncovered or some new bit of technical information that might help a future customer. Ultimately, we want our customers to self serve. We want customers to be able to find the answers they want online when they need those answers. And ultimately we want to deflect cases. So with that brief overview of technical support, I'm going to turn the reins over to Erica Kuhl, our senior director of community for Salesforce. Erica, let me turn that over to you now.

Great, thanks Paul. All right, great. We've heard a little bit about the community in Paul's representation there. So I'm going to dive you deeper into how Salesforce leverages the community cloud and really drives exceptional customer support even further. So for me it's really important to talk a little bit about how our team is structured because you heard from Paul, large number of agents and I think it's really interesting to take a look at the team structure of how my team is structured. And I would say that we are built for exceptional scale. We have a small team, a very, very mighty, but small team that's able to service our now 1.9 million member customer community. We break our team into a series of different structures. On the left hand side we have two advocacy programs that they run, the Salesforce MVP program and our user group program. I'll talk a little bit about those. We also have Phoebe and Claudio who are really are driving our customer engagement, two individuals that are driving engagement on a 1.9 million member scale. And then we have two individuals that are driving our voice to customer. Really taking the voice of our community and bringing it into our product, really affecting our product roadmap. So this is again a very small team that's driving for scale. But I think it's also important to note that the team that I run is also a very, very extended cross functional team. The way that we have built our community is a real hub and spoke model. We depend and really rely on many different departments across the organization to ensure the community is built into the DNA. So you can see that this is also a very, very strong team that I have across the entire organization. I heavily rely on dedicated support reps which I'll talk about. We have moderators in different organizations for really powerful groups that we have in the community. We also have a strong development team that's building an exceptional customer community for our customers. And then we also work very closely with help and training and the portal team on the IT side as well as numerous, numerous sub community managers that are running groups across our community. I wanted to set that framework so you could see the difference between having a large customer support agent set up, also having it supplemented by a very strong and powerful scale team for community. Real quickly, I do want to flash back in the past. I think it's really important when you're thinking about building and leveraging community in an organization to see the evolution of where we came from before we jump to where we are today. So we've been at this for about 10 years now. Starting with a one page website back in 2005 was not an interactive environment. It was really just a place to put presentations and some documentation that we needed for our customers. In 2007 we flash forward and I think this is really where we became a true community. We introduced the ID Exchange at this time. This is where our customers had the ability to log feature requests. We changed the whole way we captured feature requests, we brought that out of the case and into the ID exchange, made it very, very public. And we have the ability for our customers to be able to see it right there in front of them, transparent, without any authentication and be able to vote and comment and contribute to our product roadmap. And then we're able to take those highly voted on ideas and actually implement them into the product. And this is truly when our customers really felt like we were listening. We were truly taking community seriously. In 2010 we decided to streamline the Process a lot, really make it very simple for our customers to get their questions answered, really focus on what Community meant to Salesforce, really focus on getting questions answered, sharing ideas and building networks. So at this point, we rebuilt completely on our platform. From 2010 to 2013, I laid in wait because I knew we were going to be building a product. And in 2013 is when I was one of the first in line to launch on the Community Cloud platform. And what this was able to do for me is add that final piece of the puzzle to this already great evolution of community. Up until then, we'd have the ability to great question and answer and the ability to launch feature requests and vote on those features and bubble up the best features and have them implemented in the product. We're missing one critical component and that's the ability to actually connect with one another and share information with one another and build each other's networks. So that happened in 2013 when we launched on Community Cloud and something incredible happened. We saw from the launch in 2013 to just six months later, we saw a million member mark. And just to give you context, in 2013 when we launched, we had about 540,000 registered members to our community. And just six months later we had a million members. And actually, I can't keep this information updated fast enough for you. We just actually hit 1.9 billion members and this is less than a year later. So the growth momentum has been incredible. Now, the next question I usually get asked when I say that great information is what on earth drove that incredible adoption? And there are many things that actually drove that adoption. But I want to focus on three things that I think really, really brought us to this point. The first one is that our customers were asking us time and time again for a single place to get all this information. They want a single place to get their questions answered, to log their feature requests, to get their help and training and documentation. And they also wanted a single place where they could connect with us. And finally, at this point, we were able to do that. And not only were we able to do that, but we were able to make it very easy for them to access. So because all of our customers use Salesforce, we're able to leverage single sign on. One of the biggest barriers to entry with any community or getting people to engage in a community is logging in and remembering any URL. But with having single sign on, it was very simple. They simply click to engage and it it seamlessly signs them on. Not only is that excellent for our customers, but it's also really, really excellent for our employees. And as I mentioned before, we thought that this was going to be a place where people wanted to build their network. But when we saw the launch and we saw the huge adoption, we knew that's exactly what people were looking for. Not only were they looking to connect with each other, they were looking to connect with us. And they wanted to continue the conversation year round. They didn't want to wait until Dreamforce or an event in their area. They wanted to talk all year round and connect all year round. And what we saw is that by adding this feature and by adding the ability for our customers to connect, it really, really drove just amazing adoption. The final bullet I think is probably the most exciting for us is now we have a way for our own employees to really get engaged in the conversation. So we really had incredible peer to peer engagement, but now our employees had a way to get involved. And the examples are just staggering at how they are leveraging the community to drive great, great customer engagement. There are things from entire organization like the customer for life organization is built onboarding journeys, using marketing cloud, driving directly into the community and having dedicated community managers in the community, really onboarding each of our new customers to make certain they're successful right from the very start. We also have examples of our product managers that are running really successful engaged groups about their products, continuing the conversation all the time, talking about best practices and adoption and pushing out white papers and really engaging in the conversations all the time. And then we have examples of our AES that are continuing the conversations with their customers just through the sale and then past the sale. They really can have this high tech experience through the entire sales process. And really the examples go on and on. Those are just three very exciting examples that we've seen. One of the things that's very, very important to me is that I'm making certain as the individual running the community is that I'm tightly aligned with my organization goals. Community is something that is definitely picking up speed. But in order to really, really ensure that a community is successful, you have to definitely align and think about the organizational goals. Depending on where you sit, you can sit in customer support, you can sit in a customer success organization, you can sit in user experience, or in my case, I actually sit in the product organization. The reason I sit in the product organization is that key fundamental thing that every single person in our organization or our community, excuse me, cares about is our product. Whether they are using the product, whether they are selling the product, however they are, they have a Deep interest in our product and they want to make certain their voice is heard. So that meant to me, just to embedded right in the product organization was the best way to get that voice, the loudest voice. And so what I think about is what are my goals and how am I going to drive success for my organization while I'm also driving success for my community. And so it really boils down for me to these five goals. Peer to peer success, customer based innovation, customer collaboration, brand advocacy, and continuing Dreamforce all year round. I'm going to dive into each one of those. So this is how my goals are in action. And again, it's very, very important for me to constantly be relooking back at my goals to make certain they're tied directly to my organization. So the first one is peer to peer success. And Paul mentioned this as well. We have a very powerful peer to peer network on the success community. We get about 4,000 questions asked per month. And a staggering, staggering statistic is that 100% of them are being addressed per month. And we have 98% of those questions are being answered by our members. Now this is something I couldn't believe. I had individuals run this metric on my team. I run it multiple times to make certain that this truly was the case. And it absolutely is true. 98% of them are getting answered by other members. These are not Salesforce employees. The way that we have driven this success is we've taken it one step further and made certain that we get to 100 by really, really partnering with a support organization. So what we do now is we have two individuals from our support organization that we tightly align with. And what they do is they come into the community and they look for questions that are over 24 hours old. And those are the questions that they pick up. They don't want to stifle the innovation that's going on and the engagement that's going on with the peers, peer to peer. So what we've seen is that if a question sits for more than 24 hours, that that means it needs to get picked up by an agent. And so by aligning with the support organization that way, we've been able to get 100% of our questions answered per month. And that is a community dream. One other thing we've done to make certain that the quality of these questions is in fact as high as we possibly can because this is such a strong peer to peer network is we do a quarterly look at the actual satisfaction of these questions. So individuals on my team, they Pull off a sample set of questions to make certain that we're looking at a good representation. And they rank the question on a scale of 1 to 4, 4 being that it absolutely answered their question, that either marked it best answer or it says you absolutely answered my question up until one where it did not answer your question. And we then rank it. And what we've been able to achieve this last quarter, which was pretty amazing, is what I've been gunning for for a while is 90% satisfaction. So we make certain that again, because it's a peer to peer network, we have to ensure the quality is up to standards. And so we do that quarterly satisfaction survey. Another thing that's really critical to the fundamentals of Salesforce is customer based innovation. So this is our idea exchange in action and just some statistics around it is that we have 1800 community delivered ideas. So this means these are ideas that would not have been delivered in the product roadmap have our community not stepped out and said that this was important to them and rallied the support around those ideas. To date we've had 2.4 million points delivered. And if you think about it, each customer gets 10 points. So this is some huge, huge engagement going on here. And you are telling us directly what's important to your success. And just alone in the last year we've had a million points delivered. So we are really, really taking a huge stock in the Idea Exchange and building it into the core of who we are. On average, we're doing about 300 ideas in the last three releases. So that breaks down to about 100 ideas in the last each release. And we have support all the way to the top that each cloud leader is to be looking at the community and determining what ideas they are going to dedicate in each release. And this starts months before each of our planning process. Another thing is customer collaboration. This is a critical component for us. And not only do we have official Salesforce groups, but we have also community run groups. We also have a very, very powerful user group program which I'll talk about in just a second. But these are regional and industry groups all over the globe. And this is the ability for us to knowledge share and network at scale. And then to continue on with the goals. We have two advocacy programs that are fundamental to the success of our community. We have this user group program, as I mentioned, these are, we have over 300 now groups all over the globe, broken down by region, broken down by vertical and broken down by affinity. These are volunteer customers that are running groups within their region, and we support them on the community team to do that. We give them the tools and the resources they need to drive these groups within their region or within their vertical or affinity. And we find that this is a great way for us to get to different regions and different verticals in a really authentic way. We also have an MVP program which rewards and recognizes our top contributors across all of our community channels and social channels. And this is really taking stock in our small 1% that drives an enormous amount of content. We pour a lot of energy and effort into them because they have a huge impact on our community, providing us over 35% of the questions on our community are answered directly by our MVPs alone. This is something that we really want to nurture and scale. Another thing we do is we want to continue the vibe and the feel of Dreamforce all year round. We find that anyone that comes to Dreamforce, it's a very, very lucky thing to be able to do. But we feel like we want to open that up to everyone. So we have that vibe and that engagement and that collaboration that goes on at Dreamforce and we have that going on and that's our goal, to keep that going on on the success community year round. So we have not only all the groups, but all the sessions all the presenters are engaging in here all year round. And what we've been able to see with having that is not only does that open up success for the rest of the individuals that can't come, but it also enriches the experience for the individuals that do come so they can jump onto the success community, engage and meet individuals and start talking about content prior to the event. And then it really enriches their experience. They can put that face to a name directly in person, and then afterward they can continue those collections and those networks all year round. So now I want to talk about another really exciting thing, which is how we measure community success. This is something that's critical to the success of any community. Like I mentioned, it's important to align your goals to your organization. It's also very, very critical to be able to show those success metrics to those individuals in your company. So the individuals in my company, there's a huge key stakeholder group that gets dashboards sent to them on a quarterly basis that really they're invested in the health and the success of the community. The ones you're looking at right now are standard kinds of metrics that you see. Because we're tied to our actual sales force, we're able to be able to see rich, rich experiences directly on a dashboard. So I have all of the information tied directly to all of my data in Salesforce because we're built on community cloud. So these are kind of metrics that many different community strategists want to see. You want to see page views and visits and registration. You want to keep posts and votes and comments and the quality of interactions and the growth of your program. So these are very critical components and fairly standard across the board. What I want to show you is some other deeper metrics that I've been able to prove out in the last year that's really opened the eyes of our executives and our company about the success of community at Salesforce. And I would say that almost single handedly my team has grown from about one and a half individuals to that team of seven. A lot around these community ROI that we've been able to show as I'm sure many of you on the call today are struggling to prove out ROI with community or determining whether even if you want to invest in community and hoping you get one community manager and this is a way you're going to start thinking about it if you really want to drive success. And maybe you can't do this right away, but this is something that you should gun for with determining actual bottom line community roi. What we've been able to do in the last year, again because our community sits on Salesforce, we have all of the underlying opportunity and account and contact data of individuals that are logging into our community. So we were able to run some very, very powerful data. And what we've been able to determine is that individuals that are members of our community are driving 2.5 times larger closed deals. So they're actually driving more deals for Salesforce. And it makes sense, you would expect that individuals that are engaged in a community would buy more from you. And that makes sense as a statistic that you think would exist, but when you can actually show it, it is incredibly powerful. We've also been able to show that members of our community that are engaging in our community versus customers that are not in our community are are driving two times more pipeline. That means they're bringing in more deals into the pipeline. We've also been able to look at cross sell upsell and all we did in this case is we asked a simple question to our 1.9 million member community that said simply do you buy more products and services because you engage in our community and because we have a large and engaged population, we can actually tap into them for questions like this, we have a huge sample set. We actually got 450 responses back by asking this simple question. And we came up with a statistic that 86% of them do buy new products and services because of their participation in the success community. And then finally, we looked at product adoption. This is very critical to the organization that I sit in, in the product organization. So we definitely wanted to show that by engaging in our community, we. We were seeing higher adoption of products. So in this case, we took a look at one product line called SalesforceOne. Many of you might use that. And we have a group on the community called SalesforceOne, and we have product managers engaging in there. We have product marketers engaging there, putting out great content. And we wanted to prove that individuals in that group adopted the product higher. And what we found out is that individuals, like I said, in that group, they had 33% higher product adoption in SalesforceOne. And that is incredible. And not only is that great for the customers because they obviously want to adopt the product, it's also very incredible for our product managers to see this because this really proves that they need to be getting engaged in the community. And many times it's very difficult to get individuals in your own company to engage in a community, but when you can show them this kind of statistic, it's fairly staggering. And it's been critical to the success of getting our employees engaged in our community. So that is about all that I had to cover. I can see there's questions, and we certainly wanted to leave plenty of time for Q and A. So I'm going to turn it back over to Jason, who is collecting the questions. And this is the time where you can ask any of the presenters any questions, even on things that we didn't cover. Feel free to ask any questions. So, Jason, you want to fire up some questions to us?

Yep, not a problem, Erica. All right. I'm seeing the questions start to roll in right now. And actually, Erica, the first question is for you. And the question is, so what kind of resistance did you get from the organization, from Salesforce, and how did you sort of address it with implementing a success community?

Yeah, that is a great question and one I hear pretty often. And I think what for me was really important from the very beginning is that I build the base. So what I did was actually focus on my community first. And I really felt like if I focus on making them wildly successful, engaging with each other and building strong networks with one another, that I was going to then be able to take a step back and prove out the metrics. So I would say that really, really early on, whatever metrics I could attach myself to, even if it weren't the ones that I showed just now, even if it was just about the number of questions that are being asked or whatever metrics I could find that was critical to my success. So if you can show any metric early on to the success of the community, that is what started to break down barriers for this. It's also, of course, critical to get an executive sponsor. I know everybody talks about this, but early on I was able to find a champion for this community that would help me shepherd this forward. It's also critical for me that I didn't try to bite off too much. I focused really narrowly at first. I started with my question and answers and then when that was running successfully, I moved on to ID Exchange. So for me, it was really, really critical to start small and powerful and then build on from there. I didn't try to take on everything all at once. So I would say those were some of the critical ways that I was able to break down some resistance.

All right, thanks, Erica. We got another question you. So what does the support panel, such escalation look like after 24 hours? Is it taken offline? Is there a dedicated queue? How does it all sort of work?

Yeah, that's really important. What we do is we use the moderation component of our tool now, and in there you can build filters that you're able to see questions that are older than 24 hours. You can build filters that are tied to reports. And so the support organization, they have the two individuals that are dedicated, they go into the console and they run a report or they run a filter and they engage with those questions only. So they're actually not taking it offline because that sort of defeats the purpose of the community. Generated content is we want to make certain that, just like Paul was saying, that we really scale and we deflect as much as we can. We want to be able to find this content over and over again. And so what we do is we have the support organization, they're engaging right there in the community just like everybody else. But we find that because it's 24 hours, it means our community is not able to pick it up. So they just dive right in and start answering those questions and they're answering authentically with who they are. We have their profiles updated with who they are. So they know exactly. And then what I'm able to do is, because it's Very easy for me to generate reports. I can then generate reports that to the support organization on the success and quality of their interactions. So I do that on a regular basis. I actually don't need to do it. They can do it, they can do it themselves and they can run and build dashboards on the quality of interactions that those individuals are making on the community.

Great, thanks Erica. I see that. I got a question here. Are there any other examples of customers that use communities? One of the big ones that I would like to refer back to is the company called Eway. Now Eway is a payment processor in Australia who handles 25% of the online payments there. And what that means they have 18,000 business customers, over 4.6 billion payments in 2014. Now before communities, they sort of had a back end system in which people would just email them and it would take them over four days to get back to service them. But what they said of communities, which they did in only four days using our lightning community templates, they immediately saw service tickets reduced by 50%. Now the way they went about reducing those service tickets by 50% is that they looked out at their service community and they asked what were the 26 most prominent questions that were constantly being asked. And what they did was they built knowledge based articles around those 26 most frequently asked questions. And by just taking that one little step, that's how they were able to reduce those times down to 50%. Now there was also a layer of agent load that was reduced to average response time from 65 minutes to 16 minutes. And the community templates once again were able to quickly stand up and be able to implement it throughout. Looking through our next question to Erica. So how long does it take to bring this community solution live and make it a real success? You mentioned it took you 10 years to get where you are. What did you experience with other Salesforce clients who brought this live?

Yeah, well I will speak for myself that certainly I don't expect that it would take you 10 years because I think the great thing is that we have this amazing tool and Community is far richer and far farther along than it was when I started this. I mean there was no such thing as community back in the day when I started doing this at Salesforce. So it took a lot more proving out and a lot more creative solutions back then. And I was actually sitting in the marketing organization for the first about six or seven years proving out the community. So I feel like your time to success is going to be a lot faster using tools that we have Today because also they're all together in one place already with a tool like Community Cloud. So that is already a step in the right direction. But it's hard for me to answer that question because it absolutely depends on how you're building your community and what does your population look like. I feel pretty lucky because we have a pretty passionate base of customers. And I started out at Salesforce 14 years ago teaching system administrators how to set up and configure the system. And so that was my first glimpse into a community because those were individuals that beyond the classroom wanted to keep talking about how to set up more successfully and what were they going to do and how were they going to build up dashboards and reports to be and continue their success. So I could see the passion early on. So I felt really fortunate and lucky that we had very, very early on a very, very engaged, passionate group of individuals. So it really, really depends. But I certainly don't think it's going to take you the ten year evolution. I only show you that so that you don't think it's an immediate success. But I do think that you need to invest. Invest in a community manager, invest in an executive sponsor, invest in what your plan and your goals are and then you're going to have a quicker time to success. Absolutely. If you do some of those critical first steps.

Okay, last question here. So Erica, again for you, what should the strategy be around transitioning an organization from an existing non salesforce community to a Salesforce community? What would be the key performance indices that need to be taken into account, like standing up the community?

So transitioning from one product to another product. Is that the question, Jason?

Yes.

Well, I mean I certainly dealt with this as well. I think that there's, you know, it. It certainly depends on how you're going to do it. For me, I did a number of different things at the beginning that I think worked out pretty well for the transition. I think this goes for any transition. I took a critical set of our customers that were engaging on our old community and I used them as a very, very strong base for getting them engaged in the new community. So I took them offline and had special webinars and special looks at what it was going to look like prior to actually even having it completely done. And what I thought that was critical to do is make certain that we have an engaged, excited group of individuals to help me through a potentially rocky transition. So I had their buy in early on and that was really a lot of our MVPs, a lot of our powerful user group leaders. And I really, really banked on them being great mouthpieces and great messaging for the new community. I also listened to a lot of their concerns and I was able to really, really craft a very good FAQ by all the things that they saw. They're the best ones to engage in. I always do things with my community members if I can, prior to doing any sort of new transition. Another thing I was able to do is create a lot of video assets. I created two critical ones. One was a video asset for our own internal employees on how they can start leveraging the new community because it was incredibly different. And then one was a critical aspect of how the community can start getting engaged. And I only boiled it down to five critical things I needed to do. Basically things like how do you post, how do you update your profile, how do you ask a great question? And things like that. Really focused just on four or five key pieces of information. And then I knew there were going to be things that didn't exist. So we were very open and honest about feature parity and what things weren't going to be existing in the new community versus the old community. And we fielded questions and one of the things that we do is we actually leverage our own IP exchange for updates to our own success community. So we have a category on the IP exchange where we capture feature requests for our own community. I know that's kind of meta, but we know that there are many things our community wants out of their own community. And, and so we make certain with each release and with each transition, we listen to those ideas and address those ideas. And another thing I think we're able to do is partner with organizations to make it a big, bright, successful splash. So we partnered with marketing to really, really get the excitement and the momentum around this big change. And we really had individuals standing by for that big transition and getting people off the old infrastructure onto the new. And I know this long answer to this question. One final thing I'm thinking of is that we kept the For a while we had messaging on the old community that pushed them to the new community. We didn't shut them down at first, we kept those alive for a while and slowly phased out the old community when we saw the engagement kicking up. So it's very difficult to run one community, let alone two. And then eventually, after approximately six to eight months to stand it, we shut down the old community and we moved everything over officially to the new community. So it absolutely can be done. I would say it needs to be a very, very thought out launch. Almost like any marketing launch. You need to think through all of the pieces and take care of all of the members and then end it with a big bang. A big bang marketing launch.

All right, thank you very much Erica. And before we all go, I just want to let everybody know that if you'd like to learn more, we encourage you to check out the attachments to this webinar. First is the Service Cloud Data Sheet which will give you a general overview of the key benefits for using Service Cloud as your back end support. Second, There's a Community Cloud 101 ebook that we created to give you insight into everything that is possible with a customer community. And finally, we encourage you to reach out to a sales rep if you have any further questions that you may have. As always, thank you for attending today's webinar. We hope you have all learned something and take away some valuable information and best practice we use here at Salesforce to deliver best in class service to our community. Thank you and have a great day.