Personio launches new Community with inSided
We’re absolutely delighted to announce that Personio—the all-in-one solution for HR management—have launched their new community on the inSided platform. We caught up with Thomas and Selina, Community Managers at Personio to find out how their launch went and what their vision is for the community:
Thanks for chatting with us and congratulations on your new community! Are you pleased?
Thank you Ben—it was a very exciting project and we are overjoyed to have launched our community within only three months.
That’s a great turnaround! Before we dive into the specifics, could you give us a little background into Personio’s mission, product, and your role at the company?
Our core purpose is to enable better organizations. We want to improve business performance by driving excellence in people operations and strategy. Our goal is to become the leading HR Platform for SMEs in Europe. In our role as Community Managers, we can help our company to provide the best customer service experience to our customers and thus increase the feel-good factor for our customers.
Fantastic. When did Personio first decide to start a community and why?
We decided last year (2019) that a service community was the perfect next step for us and our customers. We strongly believe that our community will enable us to provide an even more effective and successful experience for our customers, as well as strengthen and expand the communication and interaction amongst our customers concerning HR topics and our software.
How would you say your community fits into your overall strategy? What happened after you first launched, and how did you manage to get your customers and Personio employees involved?
Our Personio Community is the next step in expanding our service offering to our customers, giving them even more service options and flexibility.
We divided our launch into two steps. The first step was the “soft launch”, where we published and made the community accessible for everyone but didn’t start any great marketing actions. We were also able to complete the last tests during our soft launch. Four days later, we communicated the new community to our customers in a comprehensive marketing campaign (including InTool notifications, newsletters and social media posts).
Since the beta test, which started four weeks before the soft launch, we have involved our colleagues in building and shaping the community.
A real team effort then! Good to hear. Moving on to the new platform: Why did you decide to go with inSided? What specific features were you looking for and how is the project going so far?
We chose inSided because inSided offers a great variety of features for content, events, users and design—but most of all, because inSided has created a tool that is specifically designed to meet the needs of a community rather than a sales-oriented website. A community may have different logistics and features than a conventional website.
What is the primary business goal of the Personio community?
Our main business goal is to strengthen our customer relationships by making our customers feel that they are never alone. We want to provide an excellent service experience by supporting our users with individual help but also by referencing and linking to our self-service and help content.
What are the main community KPIs you’ll be tracking?
For now—at the beginning of our community—we are looking at KPIs like new users, active users and daily sessions. It is important to us that we make the community and the associated service options known and usable to all customers as quickly as possible.
How do you measure these and make them actionable?
We’re currently still in the learning phase, but have decided to make use of the possibilities with Google Analytics as a first step. Further analytics possibilities, for example via the API of the community, are still a work in progress at the moment.
Any great tips on engagement strategies for people that are looking into community options?
It’s super helpful when every department is involved. Since all of our departments are familiar with the community project, new and existing customers are getting in touch with the community in different ways and through different contact points at Personio. We didn’t just create the community to enable our customers to exchange information through Personio, but also to discuss all topics related to human resources and in return benefit from each other. An individual and unique gamification concept, that fits the company and reflects the appreciation of the users in the community for their commitment, is a must-have. With this concept especially, dedicated users are publicly rewarded for their commitment and others can see how experienced they are in Personio & HR topics.
Finally, if you had to describe the project in one word what would it be?
#customersfirst
Thank you to Thomas and Selina for taking the time to answer our questions! We’re really proud to have Personio as a customer, and we’re looking forward to a great partnership.
Interested in seeing how more of our customers get tangible business results from their community? Check out our case studies!
