Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, and welcome, everyone. So glad you're here. My name is Jon Allen, and I'm the Vice President and General Manager of Verint Community here at Verint. I am so excited to introduce our next speaker. Earlier in my last session, I talked about how important it was to use Verint Community to engage your customers and employees for better customer experience. And in that talk, I told you how important it was to create critical mass and have people keep coming back to your community to self-serve and to support each other. Well, Lisa Allison is an expert, and we're so glad to have her here. Lisa Allison is a Senior Community Strategist at Analog Devices. She's going to talk about how she can amplify customer engagement with Verint Community. It's going to benefit customers, partners and employees. So with that, Lisa, welcome.

Hi, Jon. Thanks for having me. I'm very excited as well to be presenting today. So today, I'm going to be talking about how to amplify customer engagement with Verint Community, and let's get started. I always like when I -- I'm talking about community or community strategy to start with this slide and this quote from Thomas Edison, "Vision without execution is hallucination." Because let's face it. If you have a great idea, but you don't have a solid strategy or a strong partner, you're all just hallucinating. And nobody wants that. It's been proven that best-in-class communities have the highest engagement rate. And you can see here from this chart, from the community round table that they've proven this. I encourage you to check out their research if you haven't. So now that we know that we want to be a best-in-class community, how do we get there? When we think about communities, we really want to reach our audience. We want to engage them, and then we want to convert them. So we want to think about who that target audience is. What is that shared purpose? What is that valuable transaction that we can give our members? We need to be able to support them, so we need to be able to support them in the community, whether they have an issue about a product or whatever your community is about, but we also need to support them on the basics of our community, which leads into transparency. We need to have transparent governance throughout our community. You want your members to know what are the dos and don'ts. You don't want that to be hidden from them. That's going to make for a better, more robust community when everybody knows what they can do, what they can't do, and they can self-govern. And then metrics and measurement. I haven't met a community manager yet who isn't thrilled to talk about metrics and measurement and how we can dig into our communities and see how they're giving back to the organization, what that ROI is. And then, of course, members, right? Members are the key to your community. So whether you have a user community, which is people of shared interest, that trust your community and they're going to create content because they trust your community and they share that common interest, or perhaps you have an expert community. These are industry experts, universities and influencers. These are people that are networked and are bringing extra individuals to your community when they join. Or perhaps it's a producer type of community. And your members are leaving things like content and IP back in your community or they're a product or service provider. Whatever type of member you have, you need to start thinking thing about your member retention strategy. So when I think of member retention, I really like to drive in on to 4 key motivators: learning, extrinsic, intrinsic and social motivation. And in the next couple of slides, I'm going to talk to you about how I've used Verint to amplify each one of these 4 key motivators and how we're leveraging the platform to enhance this and make a better member experience. So when we talk about learning motivation, this is like one of the easiest motivators to understand. You want to know what you're going to learn when you go to a community. Am I going to get a certificate? Am I going to take a class? Am I going to solve a problem? What is it, excuse me, that you're going to achieve, right? So if you look at the left of the screen, you can see where we're using the groups in Verint to showcase our webcast program. So webcasts are an educational source that we use as a company to teach and message about new products or innovations or just simply maybe share a skill. You can see that we're using a Register Now button and an Ask a Question button in this group, so you can register for the webcast ahead of time or you can ask a question ahead of the airing of the webcast. You can also continue that conversation after the webcast in the group. We have a profile for our presenter. We have an intro about what the webcast is about. And then we also have a means for them to download the presentation that was presented during the webcast. So this is a great way to keep that conversation going after the webcast is over. On the right-hand side, you can see that we're using video galleries. So this is one of our groups, and this is the gallery tab or the video tab, as we call it, in the group. And this is where we host videos from -- that could range from tool demos, problem-solving, whiteboarding sessions or one-on-one sessions. And we found that videos are really great content. People love video. And I recently read that Gen Z and millennials are consuming 2 to 3 hours of video a day just to learn new skills. So that's something to think about as you're starting to build your communities. So moving on to social motivation. This is where we're talking about, are we giving back? How do you feel about the organization that you're about to engage with? Are they socially motivated? Do they care about causes that you care about? So what we've done here is, on the left, you can see we're highlighting a program called Project Playtime. We're doing this through the blog series. And the blogs are a great content feature in Verint. You have that striking banner and you can tag and people can subscribe to that one post or they can subscribe to the entire blog series. And this happens to -- be Project Playtime is -- this was a campaign that we ran where engineers around the globe partnered with organizations to build toys for disabled children. So it was a great way to get that message out. We saw a lot of engagement. People commented on the blogs and it was a really nice way to showcase this program and what we were doing and how we were giving back. So that's just one way in which you can do that. Another way, again, is to utilize the groups like you see on the right. We're using this for our education community. And really in this one, on this example I'm giving you, this is focusing on student competitions. So the competitions are robotics competitions in this case that we support. We give product donations, and we support the students and help them troubleshoot their issues in building their robots. So the students get engaged. They send us the answered questions in the group to give us ideas of how they're progressing throughout the competition, what their build phases are like. They send us pictures. We upload them to a gallery. So it's a great way to interact with the students and for them to see themselves being showcased in the community. Next, we have intrinsic motivation. This is probably the hardest one for people to kind of wrap their mind around, right? And I'd like to just say this, you don't eat ice cream because you have to. You eat it because you like it, right? So you want to make your community a place that people want to come. They like to be there. So a great way to do that is through engaging content, which we've talked about a little bit in the last 2 slides. But it's also about making a member feel like they're being heard. So on the left, we have what we call My EZ. Our support community is EngineerZone, and so we have what we call the My EZ dashboard. This dashboard is tailored to the accessing user. So I can go in and I can look at all of the questions I've taken part in. I can look at ones that I've authored. I can see anything I bookmarked. I can also follow the activity of people that I follow in the community, which is very helpful, especially for people that have teams or perhaps you have a salesperson in your organization and they want to see what certain individuals in the community are doing, if they follow them and you set up this widget for accessing user for their followed activity, can see those people and what they're doing throughout the community. And we're very open about this. In our member agreement, we tell people that this is something that you can do, and I would make sure that you do that as well so that people are aware that -- what it means when you follow someone and what they can see. So beyond the My EZ dashboard, people also want to feel heard, right? I'm more likely to go to a community where I know that what I'm saying is being not only listened to but acted on. So very similar to the Verint community, how they have an idea portal, we also have an idea portal. We want to know what our members want to see for content. Maybe there's something new or exciting happening that we're not covering, so we want to know about that. But also, we want to ask them how to improve the community. Is there something that we're not doing that we could do better? Is there something that we should implement? All of those ideas we take in, we review and then we put them into a queue of whether they're going to be planned or we give feedback on maybe a feature that is already in play in the community that they weren't aware of. And then on the right-hand side of that, you can see where people are voting up ideas, you can see more popular ideas and the recent ideas as well. And it's a great way for your members to come in and engage with one another. Vote those ideas up and down and add their comments about how that idea could better serve them. So now extrinsic motivation. This is the one we all know, right? So this is the bells, the whistles, the achievements, the points, the badges. This is the fun stuff, right? So on the left, I'm showcasing one of our super users, and his name is KJBob, and he has -- he's very active in our community, and this is just one page of the badges that he has achieved. But you can see here that you can assign out of the box gamification. You can automate it and you can assign these really cool badges, which you can design yourself or you can use them right out of the box. They come with badges assigned. We decided to make some of our own, and we ran some campaigns. So you can see that these vary a little bit, right? We had some campaigns where we had people complete certain actions during a certain time period, and that gave them the springtime warrior badge and there was a series of those. You can also see badges that are associated with levels. So everything throughout our community is attributed to points. And as you move up the leaderboard by accumulating points, you also get level badges, and you can see some of those here. And then on the right, we have 2 types of leaderboards. The first one shows you our top 10 members, and those are the members that are nonemployees because we are a support community. We have a lot of employees in there because they're helping the customers. So we want to show 2 leaderboards, one that is just our members so that they can see where they are in the top 10 and then our own employees and where they are in the top 10. And you also see that green shield with the EZ, that's a super user [ Fabi-kun ] or avatar. And that is associated with anyone in our community that is a super user. And those folks can get nominated by individuals in an open forum. They can nominate one another. And then when they are nominated We give that individual 250 points, and we assign that avatar, and that follows them throughout the community. So when they're answering questions, it gives even more validity to their answer because people know, wow, this person is a super user. So I really want to see what they have to say. So now that I've shown you those 4 key motivations, right, how do we know what's working? So we need to look at our metrics. Participation metrics, this is one of my all-time favorite reports that Verint offers. This is where you're looking at originators, interactors, viewers and engagers. So an originator is someone who's creating content. An interactor is someone who's liking or rating or bookmarking or suggesting an answer. Engagers are people that are subscribing or downloading files or maybe they're voting on one of those ideas I mentioned. And then you have viewers, which quite simply are viewing content. So on the left, I've anonymized this, but it's just one of the reports that you can run that shows you how do those different types of participation, how do they stack up in your community. So you can start to track whether your viewers are sort of converting over to engagers or interactors. Are your originators growing? Is there a peak time where origination seems to be at a higher volume than others? And then you can take this to tailor your content strategy and any engagement -- excuse me, engagement campaign or maybe gamification campaign that you're going to run. When you run that, you can come back and see, did I see an uptick in engagement based on the actions that I designed for that campaign? So that concludes my presentation, and I'd like to turn it back to Jon now to see if he has any questions, or if anybody sent in any questions.

That was great. I do have some questions. So the participation metrics, I know you love metrics, and you love to dive into them and understand what's going on. What are some of the other things that you're measuring? Like, what other types of insights are you gleaning -- watching for? And what are you learning from those?

Sure. Well, being a support community, we're definitely looking at the forums, right? So we're looking at the forum details report to understand what's that response time, how many unanswered questions versus answered do we have, what's the actual response time. And it's really great to be able to look at the forum and know, wow this person is meeting their SLA, right? And also give access to our managers so they can view that. That's something new that we never had before. Everything was hidden for the regular managers and only the admins could see reporting. So when we moved to Verint, it was great to be able to give access to the managers and let them see that themselves. We also look at active and viewed content that's really important to us as well because that way, we can see what kind of content are people engaging with and how many views they're getting.

So can you talk a little bit about view versus interacting with? What's the difference?

Sure. So the active content is telling me are people bookmarking or downloading that content, or subscribing to it versus are they just simply viewing it? So that's really helpful to me to understand, especially if we're rolling out a campaign, maybe a blog series or we use a lot of FAQs, structured FAQs in our community. So when we publish those, it's good to see are people engaging? Are they bookmarking those FAQs? How are they interacting with that content? Or are they simply viewing it? And another great, I would say, overall report for anyone is the community health summary because that's showing you all of your groups, your members, your content. It's showing you the total and your growth depending on the period of time that you choose in that report.

Okay. Okay. So you talked about members and the support community for your customers. What about your employees? Are you seeing any benefits for your employees that are serving the customers?

Absolutely. We're -- it's interesting because now that our community has grown quite a bit, we're seeing our employees using the community almost as a, I'd say, a training device, right, for new employees. They're having them read up about the product within the forum, pointing them to the FAQs and to the answer discussed. So that they get a good sense of what the customer is asking about, about that particular product. And we're also, basically, your community, while you want the engagement and you want everyone to interact, in those off hours when people aren't in there and someone just goes into your community, it's a real-time research library. Anybody can go in and they can browse and they can find a plethora of topics and self-educate without anyone being there to answer.

Okay. Okay. So here's one. What about customer success? Your account management or whoever is looking after your customers, are they gaining anything from this experience?

Well, that sort of goes back to that My EZ when I was talking about that. It touches on that a little bit. Our salespeople have been more engaged in the community just to see what people are looking at and what -- how customers and they're asking and what they're asking about. But also, I'd say for us, I mean, customer experience is top of mind. And we use some of the -- most of the content and search reports. So you can see the searches that don't give you a result. Those are actually more beneficial to me than the ones that tell me what everyone is searching for, right? Because then I can see what are my customers looking for that maybe we don't have content on yet, and that's when I reach out to the other forum managers and ask them, do you have content? Or can we create content around this subject matter?

It looks like there's a big focus on customer support use case. Did you start out that way? Was it originally an engagement community and then you started supporting people? How did you go about that?

So this community predates me. It actually started in-house to support one product group, then they expanded it externally to support a parent customer base. And when I joined, there was a small handful of groups of products, and it was basically all for support. And now our community has expanded into education. I gave you a little touch on that with the student competitions, but we also highlight our international education programs. They all have a group there where they can talk to the students. They can showcase recruiting efforts. They can share any information about their program. Also the student competitions that I talked about, that's global. So we have -- we're involved in [ Onvation ] in India and a bunch of competitions in the Philippines, and those are all showcased there. And we also have a virtual classroom for students that can come and ask questions about kits that we give to universities for their basic engineering kits, and they could come in and get support from the engineers. And then we've grown it beyond education as well to partners. We're starting to really expand our partner footprint in our community. Right now, we're working with design partners, and then we have plans to expand beyond that. And of course, the blog program, which is very beneficial to us. We use the blogs for many different topics throughout the company, whether it's new product introductions, maybe thought leadership pieces, It could be a wide range, could be events that we're talking about in some of the outcomes.

Okay. So it's interesting. So you're using blogs for that type of communication. I mean are you still using newsletters as well, typical marketing techniques in addition to the blogs? Or are they -- do they work together?

We use a range -- yes, we use a range of techniques to push out information. But just to give you one example, we have a blogger, his name is Tom Meany, and he has been writing now, and he has quite a following for functional safety. So he's a functional safety expert in our company, and he started blogging 2.5 years ago. And he's kind of his own little rock star in functional safety now. So yes, it's been great. Across the lines, have been great. But yes, it's just one part of a multipronged marketing strategy, but we've had great success.

Well, not only marketing strategy. It sounds like it could be quite an HR strategy, right? Finding people that are -- everyone's using your brand. Because, listen, when we first started out many years ago, one of our best engineers came from just a community member, always answering questions. I never thought the person slept. It was amazing. And we wanted to hire him. We're like how old are you? Oh yes, wait a minute. I think we have to wait a couple of years, but I'm glad you're engaged in this. So again, excellent way to find the right kind of talent. Looking forward to have people be part of the bigger program.

Absolutely. I agree. You can -- you find not only people that you can connect to on things and hobbies outside of work because that happened as well naturally. We had one of our engineers answering the question, and then he happened to mention that he was building an antique radio just offhandedly And someone responded and then he said, "Oh, I'd love to hear about it." So he started blogging on another blog that we have, which is more about the engineers and some of their projects that they're working on. And that took off, and there's a whole bunch of antique radio enthusiasts that kind of go in and comment on the blog, and follow the blog. So yes, it's organic like that. You can find great talent and also people have a common interest in community.

You bet. I mean, look, I mean, we all know that once you can find a common ground with a hobby or a sport or an interest or a cause, you tend to be able to work more effectively together on business problems, on solving problems together. You have a common ground.

Absolutely.

It might be a home. It might be something that you find in someone's social profile, for example, right?

Right.

So very exciting. So we're getting close to the end, but I have a couple more questions. Are there any aha moments that you've had recently with your community?

Well, it's not an aha moment so much -- well, it is an aha moment, but it's not one I can share.

Okay. That's fair. I won't ask you for your secret sauce.

Yes. I've been able to do some research and about -- and I'll just say this, I've been able to do some research around ROI, and I found out some really great information that I've shared with the executive teams recently. I'll leave it at that. How's that?

Okay. So then my last question for you is, it's kind of a follow-on to that, is with the strategist and you having access and supporting so many parts of the business with the community, what are some of your ways to effectively communicate with the executive team on the value of the community? You've got metrics, right? And those are things that you can quantify. But do you have any best practices on how you communicate up and across about the community experience and the value of the company?

I think When you're talking to the executives, obviously, everyone wants to know what's the dollar value assigned to your community? What is your ROI, right? How are you giving back to the company in that way? But I also think if you can go beyond the metrics and you can find some of those anecdotal success stories of how you help the customer or how maybe 2 customers work together, improve those points, that goes a bit further. When just your standard, we have X number of page views or we're -- this is our time on site is improving, those different metrics, those stories are pivotal, right? You need those stories. You need to go back to those customers and then say, "Hey, are you willing to talk about this and how our community helped you?" Because that, again, builds a relationship with that customer, but it also shows a collaboration between you and that customer as well.

Sure. Sure. Certainly builds that relationship up and amplifies the customer engagement. And we're teaching strategy, right? When people trust you, they buy from you, they stick around and they support each other, and that's the beauty of something like a community. So outstanding.

I think something -- I'm sorry, I was going to say I think one more thing that people should look at is not only what's going on in your community, but where do people go and where do people come from? That's important as well. So how are they finding your community? And then from your community, are they staying in your ecosystem and going somewhere else? Because that's also a good proof point.

So how are you doing that? So how are you letting people know it's there, drawing people in? You showed us how you're keeping them there to keep them engaged. But how are they finding it? Like are there special ways that you are introducing it to the new customer or prospects or partners?

Well, we have a variety of ways that we showcase the program. We showcased it on our community on our website. It's involved in e-mail campaigns. We even have our logo and a little advertisement on our packaging for our products. So we're definitely getting the message out there. We also do some social media campaigns as well. But honestly, organic search is really the key. You want to make sure that you've got your SEO and you're showing up in that. You're doing everything you can with marketing, but SEO is also key, which is another thing that I like about your content because you have all those SEO keywords and all those things that can help me boost by content and get it up there on the Google [ engine result ].

We do. When people are talking about you online, you want them to find you first and not somebody else.

That's right. That's right.

All right. Well, listen, this has been fantastic. Thank you for spending some time with us. I'd love to talk with you to learn what you're doing and how you're really maximizing your investment in Verint Community and Verint in general. So thank you very much.

Thank you.