Community of the Week: Flexera
Calling all IT professionals! If you’re not a member of Flexera’s Community, then you’re missing out. Flexera has made it incredibly easy to find support through a bounty of content. Let’s take a deeper look:
What I love:
Community is linked in the header drop-down of Flexera.com. In my experience, the single most effective source of community referral traffic from a company’s website has come from having the Community linked in the website header. That can be quite difficult because the header is a coveted piece of real estate. The next-best-thing? Having it show up in the drop-down from the header. While I don’t know Flexera’s referral metrics, I applaud this move as its maximizing visibility of the community for everyone visiting their corporate site.
The vitality metrics. These are the numbers on the home page showing the discussions, members, and solutions. These are important because they convey two important points to new users: 1) Signs of life that people are most definitely conversing here. 2) Signs of volume that reassure users there’s a wealth of information and a good chance the user’s solution is here.
Solutions are clearly marked. I can’t emphasize how important this is if you’re using your community for support purposes! Not only are the solutions clearly marked in the overall post feed, but this “jump to solution” link allows a user to go directly to the answer when looking at a specific thread.
The Community Hub. This one-stop-shop page is great for pulling together the critical information around events, thought leadership blogs, community how-to’s, and more. Particularly, I LOVE the Video Gallery! In fact, I wish it were placed or linked to further up the screen because it includes important info for new users. And yet, while I love these aspects of the Hub, I do have some wish list requests for it…
My wish list:
A more inviting & informative home page. The vitality metrics and current design are not enough. In a perfect world, this page would have more of the content that’s actually on the Community Hub today. In fact, while the Community Hub does a great job of hosting all of the critical info that ideally should be on the home page, it doesn’t PRESENT that information in an ideal way. I would take that info, move it to the home page, and redesign the way it’s all presented.
Product Discovery Program. I’m so glad to see that this program exists, however, if I’m a user looking at this page, it’s not immediately evident as to the real benefit it brings to me. I would edit this page to include a Benefits section that comes right after the program description. The benefits are what the user cares about (think “What’s in it for me?”), so addressing them early and calling them out in a bulleted list will help draw the user’s eye to that section without first making them read through all of the FAQs.
The Ideas experience was aligned with the rest of the community. Submitting ideas and feature requests are some of the greatest perks of a support-focused community. Here, when I went to the Ideas page, I am presented with a different design and experience altogether, and this could be confusing to users. I know the Ideas section is hosted on a different platform, but it would be a more cohesive user experience if this could all be experienced in one platform.
*Full disclosure: I have had the honor of previously working with Flexera to establish their strategy when the community launched.
What do YOU think of the Flexera Community? If you’re reading this in your inbox, just hit reply to send me your response privately. If you’d like to share publicly, scroll to the comments section below (or, again, if you’re reading this in your inbox, click on the title at the top of the email. Then, scroll down to the comments section.)
This is part of a weekly series where I’ll select a community I’m inspired by and write about it. Sometimes they’ll be ones that I’m a member of. Sometimes they won’t. Sometimes they’ll be clients. Sometimes they won’t. Each post will share what I enjoy the most about that community, and if you’re familiar with it, I hope you’ll share what you like about it, too.
Do you have a nominee for Community of the Week? If so, send me a brief email with the name, URL, and a few sentences as to why I should highlight it and check it out.
Great insights!