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How Reckon Limited Secured a Better Future for Its Members

Reckon Ltd is an Australian founded and based financial software company. They create and offer financial software, and a range of products catering to businesses of all sizes in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. With clients from large international accounting firms to the Mom and Pop shops they cover the full spectrum of the financial world.

The

Challenges

After spending 7 years with their previous community provider, Reckon Ltd. made the switch to Vanilla in 2020. As the Reckon Community grew, they started noticing a lacking functionality and support, their current provider simply wasn’t moving in the right direction for them. In the end, Covid triggered the sunsetting of the platform and Reckon had to act fast to ensure their community was not lost.

The

Search

Reckon was clear on one thing – they wanted to improve their offering value to drive the Community further. They wanted a provider that was going to consistently develop so they could too. They wanted to move from a standstill platform to one with consistent innovation.

The

Launch

With 7 years of historical content and data at stake, a successful community migration was super important to Reckon Ltd. It turned out to be really simple; the Vanilla CSM offered reckon a checklist to cross reference the data that needed to move and the process ran incredibly smoothly.

The

Results

Reckon’s Vanilla powered community has been a huge success. Not only has SEO traffic increased by 7%, but they have seen a spike in discussions around product campaigns of 1200%. The community has become central to the success of certain campaigns and has created a cohesive experience for the Reckon organization.

“I really liked the feel of Vanilla as a platform but also of the culture. It’s something that resonated with me; that’s where I wanted our community to be going.”

Community Manager, Rav Singh

The Challenges:

A Stagnant Platform

In 2013, Reckon Ltd founded their first community as a way to offer better product support to their growing customer base.

Rav Singh, the Reckon Community Manager joined the team in 2015 and quickly noticed that the community was evolving much faster than the platform. “The platform we were on was good, but it definitely wasn’t great; we wanted to evolve in terms of features, functionality, and what we could offer our users but that just wasn’t possible.”

Not only was the platform coming up short but there was also lacking support coming from the provider itself. “Bugs and issues we had on the platform weren’t being addressed or solved, we would reach out to support and nothing would happen. As a CMGR it’s bad, but as a user, it’s terrible.”

The most important aspect of the Reckon Community was to serve their customers and the failing software was making that incredibly difficult. Aside from creating a great space for their members, Rav noted that in terms of cost they were really losing out. “We weren’t getting the value we needed to drive the community further,” he explained.

With disproportionate costs for a failing service, Reckon were in the process of looking for a new provider. However, Covid triggered the sunsetting of their previous platform and they were forced to find a new community software with only a month’s notice.

They had to move quickly!

Pain Points

No Feature Development

Bugs and issues with existing features weren’t being addressed let alone new features or capabilities being rolled out.

Lacking Functionality

As the Community Manager, Rav found the functionality to be insufficient, especially with the costs, but for users, the experience was especially lacking.

Minimal Support

The support team wasn’t just difficult to reach, they were non communicative: “there was no support,” Rav explained.

The Search:

Feeling the Pressure

With only 4 weeks notice to find a new community software provider, Rav had to move fast. “I reached out to a CSM at Vanilla when we were in our consideration phase and it really clicked.” Rav told us.

Rav had been on the outs with Reckon’s previous provider as it was and the closure of the product left a sour taste. But in the end, Rav was happy to move the community over – he really wanted to find a provider that could help him elevate the community, and a provider that had the same kind of vision for the future.

There was a pressing need for a platform that was innovating rapidly for their short term needs, but also with extensive plans for the future. There was a list of must-haves for the Reckon Community that they had been missing out on until now.

“We really wanted a solution that was a community platform at the core – not just a module of a larger CRM system or something to that effect, we needed a purpose built community platform."

Community Manager, Rav Singh

Customizability

“We really wanted to create a community that was our own, the Foundation theming Vanilla offers – being able to drag and drop or even just the simple option to create a gif, is so great.”

Excellent Support

“Obviously our previous support was lacking so this was something really high on our list – a support team that helps and takes your concerns seriously. The CSM at Vanilla was really great.”

Scalable

“We wanted a solution that was going to grow with us – not stifle our capabilities but expand and evolve as we did.”

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The Launch:

Remedy Found

Reckon had 7 years of data, content, and users that needed to be migrated over to Vanilla so Rav definitely felt the pressure of getting it right.

“There’s a lot a historical content that was still relevant and keeping data intact was super important,” reflected Rav, “there were some questions we needed answered and worries we needed calmed.”

But the Vanilla Success Team has been there and done that – they provided Rav a checklist to cross reference which content was necessary and what could be left behind. “It was really simple honestly. I have no complaints about the migration process,” he said.

The launch was smooth as ever and the Success Team proved successful once again. The Reckon Community was up and running and performing better than ever!

The Outcomes:

Feeling Great

“Coming from a standstill platform, the move over to Vanilla was incredible,” Rav said; ‘They were good, but definitely not great. Vanilla on the other hand just felt great.”

A Community that was previously seeing great SEO results started performing even better. Reckon was seeing pretty strong SEO from the get go – but it’s actually improved since their migration; with a 7% increase in Google SEO traffic since the move to Vanilla, the community content is performing exceptionally well.

“Not only did we maintain our strong SEO, we actually improved it,” Rav explained.

73%

Migration of Active Users to New Product

7%

Increase in SEO Traffic

1200%

Increase in Product Discussions

Another great improvement from the Vanilla community? Over the course of 3 months, Rav noted a 1200% growth in discussions on a product category. Reckon went through the process of retiring a free mobile app service and migrating 13,000 active users to a brand new mobile app service that is future proofed and packed with more features and functionality for users to take advantage of. With the help and co-ordination of the Reckon Community Reckon were able to achieve a 75% active user migration which is a huge success.

“We saw a bunch of traffic around all aspects of this campaign especially migration. Feedback from active users was sent to product development and was also used to fix issues in quick time which ensured we kept any hiccups or disruptions in the process were as minimal as possible for our users” explained Rav.

It became a super successful campaign, cohesive for marketing, dev, and product teams, and the community was central to the success of the campaign. “It’s opened up the ability to convert these users to potentially become paying customers so it’s provided massive value to the company.”

The Reckon Community is currently sitting at 24,000 registered members right now and it’s growing week-on-week, Rav told us, “it’s proven to be a great communication tool and our members get so much value out of it.”

What’s next for the Reckon Community? Rav wants to explore the ranking feature to identify and highlight the Accredited Partners who volunteer their time to support fellow users. He’s also super excited to move from the Legacy theme to Foundation!

Reflecting on the Reckon Limited Journey

Reckon Limited’s community potential was being stifled by a provider who couldn’t evolve at the best pace. On making the switch the community is able to grow and serve its members at full power. If you’re thinking about making the switch or starting your own community, make sure you reach out to the experts at Vanilla. Reach out and find out how we can help you achieve your potentiality.

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