Securing a Better Customer Experience For F-Secure with Community
The Challenge
F-Secure was paying top dollar for a stagnant community, whose vendor had halted community development, updates and features to work on their other product lines.
Choosing Higher Logic
Migrating a community with nine years of data was daunting for the team at F-Secure, however it went without a hitch and was completed in a few short weeks.
The Results
20% increase
Call Deflection Savings
A previous trend that continued when they moved to Higher Logic Vanilla.
47%
Customers Intend to Purchase
Community has contributed to their revenue by impacting customer purchasing decisions.
Smooth Migration
From Their Previous Community
We migrated nine years worth of data from their old community to ours in a matter of weeks.
“Our security review of Higher Logic Vanilla passed with flying colors, which as a cyber security company, is exactly what you want to see!"
Anna Blomstedt
Senior Manager, Self-Service & Digital CX at F-Secure
The Search for a New Platform
F-Secure is no stranger to community, nor the benefits that it offers to organizations and its customers. With their first community launching in 2011, they had a good 9 years behind them when their contract was finally coming to an end with their vendor.
Anna Blomstedt, the Senior Manager, Self-Service & Digital CX, had known for a while that they needed a new community platform, but with their contract finally coming to an end, she was ready to migrate to a new platform.
Anna and her team had noticed issues with their vendor from day 1, but it was clear that things were going south when their vendor stopped releasing new community updates and features. As Anna explained, [The vendor] began to focus most of their efforts on their social media tools and other offerings—and anything they added to the community platform cost extra. So there we were no longer getting new features or upgrades to our community platform – which was already very expensive.
This was difficult for Anna and her team since although their community had been around for years, they were by no means done scaling. “The technology on the back-end [of the vendor’s community] was just so outdated,” explained Anna, “we are an innovative company and like to change all the time; it eventually came to a point where it was too tedious and difficult to make changes when the platform’s backend wasn’t being updated or improved.”
“We would look at companies like Higher Logic Vanilla and see that you were releasing stuff on what seemed like a two-week schedule, and continuously developing your product."
Why they chose us
Scalable
“We needed to work with a vendor who continues to develop their product. We knew this would allow us to consistently scale, and it was obvious that Higher Logic Vanilla was able to deliver.”
Customizability
“As an innovative company, we needed to have a flexible platform; one that gave us the control we wanted within the given resources we had. Higher Logic Vanilla was simply the perfect match.”
Top Tier Support
“Vanilla is truly a breath of fresh air for us. With CSM’s that we work with and the responsiveness of the SuccessTeamTM, we just feel so taken care of.”
The Launch
The F-Secure migration was one with a tight deadline. With the end of their contract quickly approaching with the vendor they wanted out of, they needed to have the migration
complete before the end of the contract, otherwise it would
be renewed. With an extremely large community to migrate, holding 9 years of data, this only added pressure to the
situation.
“With a 9 year old community, we were obviously worried; there was a lot of data that needed to be moved and it was extremely daunting,” Anna admits. “Would things be migrated where they needed to be? Would we lose any information? Would our categories translate over with all their content? These were things that were highly concerning for us.”
Anna and her team experienced the concern that’s come to be expected when any mass migration occurs. But for Higher Logic, well let’s just say that it wasn’t our first rodeo. Having migrated hundreds of communities with highly sensitive and large quantities of data, the team at Higher Logic was not phased in the slightest.
After all the worry, Anna was very relieved to find that the migration went off without a hitch and that it was not only fast, but also very easy.
The Outcomes: No Disruptions and Room to Grow
After the migration, Anna was pleased to see that moving the community and all of its content to a new platform did not disrupt their member’s activities. “Year after year, we have seen a 20% increase in call deflection savings, and based on the numbers we are seeing now, our migration will not impact these numbers and we are still on track to meet our goals” explains Anna.
This now puts the F-Secure team in a great position: they are continuing to deflect a large amount of support calls while also saving thousands of dollars with the Higher Logic Vanilla platform. In short, only paying for what they need has put F-Secure in a position where their community savings are actually fully paying for the platform itself. As Anna puts it, “The amount of money that we make from the community pays for much more than just the platform; by measuring revenue contribution alone we are able to pay off the platform.”
Moreover, the community has also had a profound impact on purchasing.
According to our survey, 47% of our customers intend to purchase because of the community,” says Anna. “Our new Higher Logic Vanilla community really has everything we need and we couldn’t be happier.
While Anna and the team at F-Secure are now saving more money than ever while still maintaining the same numbers and trends they had with their previous community, the best is still yet to come. This is because they haven’t even started to take advantage of Higher Logic Vanilla’s huge array of features, many of which they have never used before since it wasn’t included in their previous community.
One such thing includes gamification. This is something that Anna is really looking forward to—finally being able to form their own unique gamification system. “We’ve never had gamification before because with our previous vendor, you had to pay extra for it,” explains Anna. “This is a huge deal—we’ve done 9 years without gamification and are excited to see how much of an impact it can have on our engagement and participation rates.”
The best part, however, is that Anna and her team are now working with a vendor that still works hard to ensure it remains the most innovative and updated platform on the market. As Anna adds, “When [Higher Logic Vanilla] comes out with new features, which is something that happens quite frequently, you aren’t asking us to pay for it,” exclaims Anna, “it’s really a big deal for us!”
