Akamai is the world’s largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform, making it easier for companies to provide the best and most secure digital experiences today and in the future. With over 6,000 employees, plus customers and partners spread around the world, Akamai turned to Jive’s Interactive Intranet and Customer Community solutions to power seamless collaboration across departments and provide online support.

Recently, we had the opportunity to chat with two of Akamai’s community strategists, Kirsten Laaspere and Judi Cardinal, to find out how Jive is powering human connections both inside and outside the company.

Kirsten helps manage Akamai’s intranet, called Aloha, which is helping boost employee engagement and improve global collaboration. Judi supports Akamai’s external community, providing its customers, partners and guests with an environment to learn, collaborate and share across industries and technologies.

Akamai uses Jive's Interactive Intranet and Customer Community solutions to power seamless collaboration across departments and provide online support.

Jive: Tell us about your journey to Jive and the key challenges you were trying to solve.

Kirsten Laaspere, enterprise community manager, Akamai

Kirsten: Akamai has grown rapidly over the past few years and we recognized a need to simplify and consolidate our approaches to communications and collaboration. We were facing siloed knowledge, a need for speed and a strong desire for universal technology solutions. The first step in our journey was to migrate from our static, homegrown intranet to a central, interactive collaboration hub on Jive. This provides a single source of truth for employees, enhancing our cross-team and cross-continent collaboration, increasing access to subject-matter experts and core company content and creating a self-service archive of corporate knowledge.

We reached 89% active users in the first three months of implementing Jive, and have over 80% of our employees now consistently using the platform. We’ve also seen steady growth in participation, one of our core metrics for determining the interactive intranet’s success.

Judi: Akamai is a “customer-led” company. Our customers — what they value and how to best serve their needs — are at the center of our business strategy and operating model. With that in mind, we adopted Jive as the underpinning for a unified online community that fosters a “self-serve” model for our customers’ digital support journey.

The Akamai Community is where our members go to ask questions and get answers about Akamai products and services, read our research reports and whitepapers and connect with our industry thought leaders. In addition, we have built out over 300 private, unlisted secure groups to support customer account team collaboration.

Jive: What are Akamai’s goals for adopting this kind of digital collaboration across the business?

Kirsten: We started simple: get everything off the legacy intranet and out of email, and then focus on maturation and a programmatic roadmap. Now that we’ve migrated the company’s historical knowledge base to Aloha, our new goal is to take the employee community to the next level.

We’re working on our first major audit, news and other curation techniques, executive engagement and thought leadership, making use of our champions and focusing on profiles and the people aspect of the Community, including implementation of the translation service. We’re also looking forward to leveraging the Jive mobile app so we can round out our corporate communications and on-the-go sales enablement capabilities.

Judi Cardinal, community strategic program manager, Akamai

Judi: Our goal for The Akamai Community is to drive increased customer engagement with high value content via user-oriented navigation. This enables visitors to self-serve in support and product discussions, increasing brand advocacy and customer stickiness.

We are focused on continuing to build a superior group of experts, establishing a steering committee to align with company objectives, better understanding what our customers want and then doing more of it, increasing engagement and partnership with marketing, creating excitement for easy, self-service support and improving our overall community culture and satisfaction.

Jive: What are the results you’ve seen from these best practices?

Kirsten: Each of our corporate sub-divisions have reached over 93% active users, with a quarter of these groups maxing out at 100%. In addition, our division leads are inspiring their teams to move to Aloha. Perhaps surprisingly, the legal department is actually one of our top users, with an extensive employee-facing intranet site and an extremely active private team collaboration group. We also have successful Q&A forums managed by departments, replacing old mailing lists. One of these forums leverages Jive’s ideation function to help prioritize questions for CEO response. In Q3 2016, we reported 84,340 views of answered questions, about 13 views per active user.

Judi Cardinal, community strategic program manager, Akamai

Moving to a Jive Interactive Intranet also freed two web developers and a project manager to focus their time on akamai.com and other essential, customer-facing marketing projects. Those roles were replaced by one community manager and some oversight from our director of corporate communications — demonstrating that our transition to a more self-service intranet model had clear business value.

Judi: The Akamai Community has grown to over 25,000 registered members since its launch. More than 1,500 thought leadership blogs have been published and over 97% of customer questions in the community have been answered, receiving 1.4 million views in the past year.

Other highlights from 2015 to 2016 include:

• 67% increase in registered users
• 48% increase in active logged-in users
• 107% increase in visits
• 141% increase in total annual users (including anonymous users)

In addition, our community has helped enrich our annual EDGE customer conference (see my colleague’s great video on this) by providing an online environment where we can continue the conversation throughout the rest of the year.

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