Jive integrates with salesforce.com to serve the needs of an email marketing and social media firm

Business trigger: customer growth, siloed systems

StrongMail entered the marketplace in 2002 with solutions based on their patented email marketing technology, which they typically sell to the marketing organizations of large enterprises.

Over time, as the adoption of email marketing became more sophisticated, digital channels for marketing grew, and social media became a mainstay, StrongMail's offerings also evolved to social media technology and services in 2009.

In 2010, business was booming, but the company began to feel the limits of its existing communications infrastructure, which wasn't effectively scaling with their growth. Given StrongMail's background in social media, their first instinct was to look for a Social Business Software solution.

Solution focus: fix it and fix it fast

StrongMail had two goals they wanted to achieve. On the customer side, they wanted a way to scale their current customer support model to improve service levels. They also wanted to find a better way to communicate and connect with their customer base on an ongoing basis.

On the corporate side, a half dozen siloed systems inhibited communications and triggered a desire to build a community in which employees could collaborate on "all things StrongMail." StrongMail wanted to address these issues in parallel—and they wanted to do it fast.

Jive at work at StrongMail

StrongMail deployed two Jive communities to address these needs. An external, customer-facing online community now complements their formal case management processes, promotes self-service, and gives StrongMail a platform for engaging more broadly and more frequently with their customers.

An internal, employee-facing online community connects employees across the U.S., Europe, and India and transforms how they communicate and collaborate as a company, with each other, and with their customers.

Business value: mission critical

Jive is now one of the business-critical backend systems that StrongMail depends on to run its business every day. Adoption and participation run high on both communities: 100% on the employee side and 86% on the customer side, which is growing.

The improved service levels and scalability of customer support has justified the purchase of Jive, reports StrongMail. How do they rate the enthusiasm of employees and customers for this new way of engaging with StrongMail? Priceless.

The backstory

StrongMail knew what it wanted—and quickly got what it needed—by engaging Jive
When StrongMail's executive team tapped Dave Cormier, Director of Product Marketing, to lead the search for a Social Business Software solution, Jive percolated to the top very quickly as a leader in the space. Forty-five days later, the deal was closed. Just a few weeks after that, the first of the two communities was up and running.

"A quick review of industry literature revealed that all the top industry analysts regarded Jive as the leader in this software category," says Dave. "And the reputation of the companies using Jive just strengthened that referral power."

In talks with Jive, the company's bench strength in professional services became an additional positive factor, reports Dave. "Change is never easy. Jive made us feel very comfortable that they could guide us through the process."

Spark, the StrongMail customer community

Before Jive, customers had only a couple of paths to talk to StrongMail—technical support and their account manager. While customers with support contracts had additional access to forums and a self-service portal to open support cases, customers preferred to pick up the phone. To most of StrongMail's customers, a call to their 800 customer support number seemed the easier path for just about any question they had, technical or otherwise. Often, the questions revolved around best practices and strategy, which then needed to be routed to StrongMail's account management team.

"It was as if every time you needed to talk to the police—say about a traffic ticket—you dialed 911, whether it was an emergency or not!" says Dave.

Like most companies, the size of the staff needed to provide customer service at StrongMail was driven by a formula: as you grew your customer base by "x" you needed to add "x" headcount. That, explains Dave, makes customer service and support an expensive channel. "Because we were growing very fast, it was not a model the company could sustain."

To complicate matters, StrongMail's sales and customer service teams were dependent on salesforce.com for specific parts of their jobs, and they didn't want those processes to change. In addition, StrongMail didn't want to put their customers through username and password changes. Could Jive, StrongMail asked, spec out a connector to salesforce.com as well as a widget that mimicked the software in Jive? Yes, said Jive, we can!

"We had every confidence that Jive was going to deliver," remembers Dave.

How the salesforce.com connector works

In implementation, the Jive connector and widget leave the existing salesforce.com application alone. Sales and service users log into Jive and are authenticated against salesforce. com. Because the Jive software mimics salesforce.com functionality and synchronizes the data, from a process perspective nothing has changed for StrongMail's support team.

A different approach was taken for the self-service portal for customers: it was actually shut down and recreated within the customer community, which Jive was able to do without requiring new user names and passwords. "From a process perspective, that meant that nothing changed for our customers either," says Dave. "They create a case within Jive, and Jive automatically updates the salesforce.com system."

Soft launch comes first

StrongMail introduced Spark with a "soft launch" involving about two dozen key clients and prepopulated it with content to give it life. Today 86% of StrongMail customers on support contracts have at least one user registered on the Jive community. Most customers have three or four users registered.

"Our customers flocked to Spark. We now have over 1,000 users and it took us only seven to eight months to get to there," says Dave.

Immediate business impact

Customers and the StrongMail support team LOVE Spark, and Spark quickly had a business impact across a number of fronts, reports Dave.

• Living up to its name, the community is sparking a great deal of activity, including one activity that is very valuable: customers answering other customers' questions.
• Customer engagement in almost any form on Spark— discussions and views of educational material, for example—directly reduce the number of calls the support team must field.
• StrongMail personnel other than the support team are talking to customers and strengthening connections with the company's customer base.

"This latter point is very important," says Dave. "With Jive, customers have a deeper bench they can reach out to, talking to software developers, for example, about web services and to product marketing about email best practices. It also gives us a platform to establish thought leadership with our customers as well as help them with very specific issues around the latest trends and techniques."

StrongSpace, the community for all things "StrongMail"

Before their Jive implementation, internal communications at StrongMail took place in discrete, siloed systems. Engineering collaborated via a wiki. Members of the sales organization, of which almost a third were remote, were users of an internal website called "Insite", salesforce.com and email. Client services and support used a variety of different tools and systems, including salesforce.com, which they relied on heavily for case management. None of the systems were integrated, which meant that the company had no centralized knowledgebase and no common repository "for all things StrongMail."

"All told, each employee had six or seven passwords and usernames, which contributed to abandonment" says Dave. "Not only did our communications systems not scale as the company grew, but an unacceptable amount of information was out of date and located in a variety of different places."

StrongSpace transforms communications

The launch of StrongSpace was faster than Spark because StrongMail didn't need to configure and implement custom software. StrongMail did, however, take the time to look at the content residing on the various siloed systems and review it for accuracy. Prior to launch, they prepopulated StrongSpace with the scrubbed content. Once live, the adoption ramp up was quick.

"We took a pretty tough stance internally," says Dave. "We shut down all the siloed systems, moved the content to Jive, and said to our employees: 'Here's where you go now'." Because of this hardline, StrongMail now has 100% adoption internally.

Productivity gains were immediate. Single sign-on reduced frustration and abandonment rates. Most importantly, open access to content gives users a centralized knowledgebase that is not only topical and pertinent but accurate and searchable. "I can't overstate how beneficial our employees find this centralized resource," says Dave.

Long chains of email conversations are often not effective for a distributed organization, he points out. "People were tuning out. We've been able to migrate many important business discussions to Jive—this was a surprise benefit for us."

On a day-to-day basis, StrongMail uses their Jive community for a number of key business tasks, many of which were difficult and time-consuming before Jive:

• Engineering: collaborates on projects and posts documentation
• Marketing: posts the latest messaging, presentations, news, announcements, and case studies
• Sales: shares competitive information and accesses a library of sales material, including sales presentations, pricing, training scripts, and demo scripts
• Services: collaborates on escalations and other postengagement services
• Cross-functional groups: answer and catalog customer questions and responses daily
• Corporate: communicates company-wide on a variety of tactical and strategic issues

StrongMail by the numbers

• 86% adoption rate by StrongMail customers
• 58% login to Spark regularly
• 95% received answers to their questions or had issues resolved via Spark
• 69% search for an answer in Spark first, before contacting support
• 50% have decreased their usage of technical support
• 90% find Spark helpful

Next steps

Because customer adoption has nearly reached saturation, StrongMail is shifting its focus to improving engagement on Spark and, at Jive's suggestion, has designated a community manager to manage the effort. StrongMail is also getting ready to launch several new Jive modules:

• Ideation, a module that breaks down the barriers to capturing and developing the best ideas from employees, customers, and partners. Ideation will allow StrongMail to let their customers drive software development and feature enhancements. Customers will be able to vote up or down on new features, which will help StrongMail gauge which features have the strongest demand.
• Bridging, a module that directly connects Spark and StrongSpace and ensures broad internal visibility to the conversations customers and partners are having on Spark.
• Mobile, a module that gives users instant access to all the rich content, resources, and contacts on Spark wherever they are—a feature StrongMail customers have been clamoring for.

Learn More About Jive

Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.

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