Building a Global Community to Drive Customer Engagement

A Single Solution to Replace Five Community Platforms

Leading companies around the globe trust Sage to deliver software solutions for everything they need to manage accounting and financials, operations, people, payroll, and payments. Such success has meant tremendous global growth for Sage, including an ever-expanding set of features and functionality.

In North America, Sage offers 22 different solutions for customers, primarily centered around Sage Business Cloud, an end-to-end business management platform. With such an expansive portfolio, meeting customer expectations and providing agile customer support is a major priority.

In particular, providing omnichannel support, which customers fully expect in today’s digital world, took precedence in efficiently and effectively engaging with customers. However, this was not without challenges.

“As the number of software solutions we offered increased, so did the need to provide an online channel for customers to engage with us and other users,” says Derek Vink, manager of online communities at Sage. “So, as we added new solutions to our portfolio, we added online communities in an effort to better support customers. Unfortunately, we wound up with five different communities, which only created turmoil for us and our customers.”

Each community platform required a separate login and each functioned differently, leading to an inconsistent customer experience. On top of this, maintaining community content was difficult for Sage, since features were different across platforms.

Recognizing an opportunity, a customer experience team was assembled to assess all facets of supporting customer needs. The team identified the desire to increase net promoter and customer satisfaction scores, with inconsistent branding and messaging being a primary impediment. Leadership recognized that creating consistency would empower the organization to offer customers a better support experience at a lower cost.

The Founding of Sage City

Sage’s customer experience team concluded that moving to a single online community platform was critical to its effort of achieving consistent branding and messaging within the market and among customers. After reviewing its five existing community platforms, as well evaluating a number of vendor solutions, Sage chose to deploy Verint® Community™.

“With content in five different platforms, we knew it would be challenging to move to a single solution, but it quickly became obvious that Verint was head and shoulders above other community platforms,” notes Vink.

“Its intuitive integrations and robust feature set mitigated the need for technical skills, making it extremely easy for us to administer.” With strategy and plan in hand, Sage’s online community team began consolidating community content, while simultaneously working with the customer experience team to improve branding and messaging. Here, the teams spent considerable time debating what to call the community and the job titles of administrators.

“It was all boring stuff like ‘online customer support forum’ and ‘online system support administrators,’ which made us all cringe,” Vink fondly recalls. “Then someone suggested that we were building a customer community not unlike a city, and suddenly someone else said ‘Sage City.’ At that moment, we all realized that Verint Community would help us deliver a powerful brand image and, at the same time, enable us to take our customer support to a whole new level. It wasn’t long after that I became the mayor of Sage City.”

Increasing Customer Engagement and Satisfaction While Reducing Costs

With the advent of Sage City, the organization has significantly reduced licensing and maintenance costs by consolidating on a single community platform.

Additionally, as Sage City’s prominence grew internally, leadership knew the online community was strengthening the Sage brand. However, it wondered how else Sage City was influencing the organization and its customers. Analysis provided insight that both surprised and delighted everyone. Since its launch, Sage City has generated a year-over-year increase in engagement and now averages more than 20,000 visits each weekday, which is four to five times its initial traffic. Moreover, Sage has seen a sizable rise in return customers.

“Return visitors make up more than two-thirds of total traffic, demonstrating the value of a strong community in driving ongoing customer engagement,” explains Vink. “Furthermore, customers who repeatedly engage in Sage City and other self-service resources are more satisfied and loyal, making them more likely to renew their support plans.”

Sage built and manages Sage City with only three administrators. Vink points out that such a feat would have been unattainable if not for Verint Community. “The ease of building Sage City was remarkable, which, in turn, helped us elevate our image and brand. More important, our customers love it. In fact, we had such success in North America that we have expanded the community across the globe.”

A Consistent, Consolidated Community Enhancing the Customer Experience

• Reduced licensing and maintenance costs by consolidating on a single community platform
• Increased customer engagement to more than 20,000 visits each weekday
• Grew return visitors to account for two-thirds of total traffic
• Improved branding and messaging consistency, in turn enhancing the customer experience