Case study: How Unqork creates a unified customer experience with community
When Unqork’s Director of Community, Danny Pancratz, joined the trail-blazing no-code platform in July 2021, he was excited to leverage inSided for a second time. With the goal of creating a unified customer experience through community, Unqork launched the Unqork Community Hub. A mere 9 months later, more than 85% of users are active multiple days per month, a number that signifies the value of the community.
We spoke to Pancratz about where the need for community came from, and how Federated Search and customizability have made the community experience sticky – keeping customers coming back for more.
Creating a unified customer experience
For a lot of companies, the need for a community comes from bringing content that lives in multiple destinations together in one single place, for easy access and knowledge sharing. Where can you find answers to FAQs? Where do you find specific documentation and resources? Initially, a Slack channel served as an MVP for what they needed internally, but as Unqork grew in both employees and customers, it needed a central platform to house its knowledge base. Pancratz emphasizes, “As we grew, as we added customers, as more people got trained and skilled up on our platform, we needed to be able to extend that knowledge base of questions and answers someplace accessible to everyone who needed it.”
Goodbye multiple platforms
For about a year and a half, Unqork used a different solution to help reduce repeat questions and create an initial knowledge base. But a lot of the content was still spread across multiple platforms and places, creating a cumbersome customer experience. Pancratz notes, “Very quickly the number of things that a creator, a customer or partner of ours, might have bookmarked got to be over 10. In the feedback collected through NPS and CSAT, we learned that our resources were great, but people were struggling to find them or know what to use.”
Looking at this from a customer experience and a customer success point of view is what kickstarted Unqork’s journey toward realizing their vision of a customer hub – a single destination. The answer? Community.
Choosing a community platform vendor
When choosing a community vendor, the Unqork team prioritized a partner that matched its open approach to integration; Insided’s API and extensibility was a key factor.
“As a software development platform for the enterprise, we’re often going to be building our own resources or building things for our creators, our customers, and our community.” Insided’s API and ability to customize or extend allowed us to take functionality that fit our use case and make it our own and not be painted into a corner,” Pancratz says.
But the ability to realize their vision of a customer hub wasn’t the only differentiator. For Unqork, inSided’s robust and flexible API was a huge part of bringing that vision to life.
Creating a sticky community with Federated Search
Using the Unqork platform itself, Unqork built an application that connects to inSided’s API, curating and updating what’s fed into the API and subsequently what’s shown in the search results. This removes outdated search results and adds in the new content in regular batches, putting the newest and most relevant content in front of users in seconds.
By using a simple script and redirecting a link here and there from a navigation perspective, end users can feel like everything is connected and together. “The API allows us to create a cohesive customer hub experience without having to move every single thing onto your community platform,” Pancratz emphasizes.
Utilizing the API, Unqork has seen both adoption and engagement increase. By pulling in content from their LMS, CMS, and Marketplace, the community is positioned as one comprehensive federated search across every resource. By centralizing all their content in one place, Unqork’s customers know exactly where to go – no matter what kind of content they’re looking for. And it’s exactly this that keeps Unqork’s customers coming back for more.
In Q4 alone, less than six months after launch, active users in the community increased by 25 percent. Three months later in Q1, 85% of active customers are visiting the community 3+ days a month and averaging more than 25 visits per quarter. The same is true with Partners, with 91% of active users visiting frequently each month. This signals that community is a valuable resource to users as they build on the Unqork platform.
What’s next for Unqork’s community?
Unqork is actively making the community a key component in their digital-led customer success strategy. CSMs point to it as a key resource not only during onboarding but throughout the customer journey. Upcoming projects build on this approach with a focus on integrating the right content and resources into the onboarding experience, helping customers make the most out of the platform.
The team is also focused on what Pancratz calls “expanding the value proposition and use cases for our community.” This means new forums, topics, events, user groups, and other initiatives the team is building out for increased community engagement.
Pancratz concludes, “our community started with Q&A and that remains a key part of our foundation. However, we don’t want the community to become less valuable as you sharpen your skills and have fewer questions. We want super users and experts to become more engaged over time. We’re looking at what types of resources, events, and programs, like user groups, can most help our customers be successful after onboarding. If we get that right, community will truly be our customer success launchpad, nurturing customers into champions.”
Check out the Unqork Community Hub.
Find more resources here:
- Close the Loop: Improve collaboration between Customer Success and Product
- Customer feedback: the core of community-led growth
- A step-by-step guide to establishing a Customer Success-driven feedback loop
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