Onshape's Customer Support is a Roaring Success

After carefully considering the options that were out there, OnShape quickly identified Higher Logic Vanilla as the best fit for their needs. Not only did they have expert experience setting up product focused communities, but Higher Logic Vanilla also offered maximum flexibility to grow with OnShape and connect to their existing ecosystem of Hubspot, Salesforce, Zendesk and Jira.

OnShape wanted a community provider that not only understood what they needed, but could help them to understand their customers further than they already did. Until this point, customer feedback was disjointed and analyzing it was incredibly difficult for support and product teams alike.

Something that really mattered to OnShape was ensuring their community could allow their support team to be as efficient as possible. That meant ensuring the forum was the first spot for questions and feedback. Without a dedicated space for their customers, OnShape knew they needed a Q&A feature that could be used to encourage support between members, not just from the support team.

They also wanted a way to reward engagement; they wanted their users to enjoy contributing and offering support. Higher Logic Vanilla could help them to understand their users and reward them with out-of-the-box functionalities such as a knowledge base, Q&A, and gamification. Using badges to not only reflect the OnShape language but to help them to connect with their users. The Higher Logic Vanilla software could offer them invaluable data that, to this point, was unavailable to them.

The Launch: Streamlined Success

The launch of the OnShape community went off without a hitch. OnShape wanted a space for their customers to help one another, share product feedback and ideas, and to facilitate efficient, clear communication between employees and customers.

The integrations that Higher Logic Vanilla offered allowed OnShape to push support issues, work assignments and bugs to ZenDesk and Jira. This alone was a huge boost to the support team – they found their community to be instantly helpful.

There was a surge of membership in the first weeks and the support from Vanilla was top class. OnShape knew they were in capable, caring hands. The Higher Logic Vanilla SuccessTeam walked OnShape through the motions to ensure their community was as streamlined and successful as possible.

The Result: More than Just Support

OnShape has been a Vanilla customer for over seven years now and their community has gone from strength to strength. The community was a success almost immediately!

“We used to get 35% of tickets from pro users, and the rest was from free and EDU users. However, when we encouraged members to use the community for support instead of tickets. We saw things flip. Now 65% of tickets are from pro users and the rest are from free and EDU users. It was pretty substantial. The number of tickets dropped. We saw a reduction of tickets of up to 20%”.

There are over 4,000 questions answered in the OnShape community and more than 65% of these have been accepted by the community members.

With the adoption of the community for support purposes by freemium users, OnShape has been much better equipped to support its paying customers.

The forum also had a huge impact on growing the business. It’s a key to success for our Director of Partnerships. It has allowed new partners to find the common questions getting them up to speed super quickly.

The community has become the hub for product knowledge. The product team can track new products and features that need to have an API and the community has been central to that.

They have a rapid release cycle, with new changes every 3 weeks. They needed a space that made it easy to communicate these changes. Higher Logic Vanilla is used extensively in this way and is very popular with their users. As Lou notes ”We definitely see a surge, like a 75% jump in traffic when we do a release. Everyone knows it’s the place to get the info. We have a lot of regular visitors too, but we also have these jumps when we have these new releases.”

Finally, as a long term user of Higher Logic Vanilla, we asked Lou what his biggest surprise benefit was something simple. “I know it sounds simple, but just pinning the question ‘Have a question? Ask the community’ upfront brought us surprising results. The community has taken to really helping one another and its positively impacted the workload for the support team. We couldn’t be happier.”