STC: Tafani, a Verint Community intranet where its people ask, share and put forward ideas
4 Roads built Tafani, STC's intranet on Verint Community: questions and discussions, ideation challenges, surveys and knowledge, on 54 custom widgets.
Verint Community
The IET: one-click sign-up and a profile built in stages, completion up 62%
4 Roads moved The IET's community to Verint Community, then rebuilt its onboarding: one-click sign-up, a profile built in stages, and completion up 62%.
The implementation of progressive profiling has been a significant step forward in improving the user experience on our platform. By making the profile completion process more manageable and user-friendly, we have been able to increase completion rates, gain better insights into our users, and foster a more engaged and collaborative community.
The brief
A community that had outgrown its platform.
The Institution of Engineering and Technology, one of the world's leading professional societies for engineering and technology, had more than 168,000 members in 150 countries. Its online community had run since 2012 and grown to over 23,000 users, with on average 26,000 unique visitors and 115,000 page views a month.
User research showed that the community had outgrown its platform. Content was hidden away in silos, members struggled to find their way around, and a growing membership needed search, filtering, tagging, flagging, groups, archiving, integrations, Q&A and webinars.
The IET also needed trust between members: a safe, credible place where engineers could ask questions, share information and show their industry knowledge. Without the features to support it, The IET struggled to keep a sense of community.
- Client: The Institution of Engineering and Technology
- Community: IET EngX
- Platform: Verint Community
- Timeframe: a year
The community
A community shaped by each engineer's interests.
After extensive research, The IET chose 4 Roads to build its new community on Verint Community, whose features come ready out of the box. 4 Roads let members choose their areas of interest and specialism, so the activity feed, the discussion forum and the digest emails surface what matches: a robotics engineer need not see railways unless they want to.
An explore page filters questions, blog posts and events from across the site by interest, and unanswered questions are put in front of members with the right expertise.
To make the advice credible, 4 Roads added badges for members whose contributions have been helpful, so others can judge what they are told at a glance, and members are encouraged to build the reputation and recognition that lead to working together.
Members can search for each other by name, interests, expertise or location, find speakers and people to collaborate with, start private networking groups, add professional accreditations to their profile, and archive helpful answers in a wiki. They also see related content from other IET sites: IET Events, E&T magazine, IET.tv, E&T Jobs and Books.
On the new community, 80% of technical queries were answered the same day.
"Engineers need to be able to resolve problems quickly and accurately. At the IET, we are uniquely placed to connect engineers to one another and facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Our previous community wasn't serving that purpose. Thanks to 4 Roads, it is now much easier to connect engineers with one another, and with events and information related to their technical interests," said Evanna Gale, Content and Engagement Manager at The IET.
The first onboarding
Detailed, and too easy to leave.
Personalisation only works if members complete their profiles, so onboarding sets the stage for how engaged, and how loyal, a member becomes. 4 Roads built a detailed onboarding for new and existing members, asking for their interests, specialisms, a short biography and more, with an option to skip it and finish later.
Twelve months on, too many members skipped it, took too long, or dropped out altogether. They were sent to create a single sign-on account on The IET's website before returning to the community, which tired them before they began, and a long profile in one go was too much for busy engineers. Sign-ups were below expectations, and the community knew too little about its members.
The fix
One click to join, and a profile built a step at a time.
A one-click registration page now takes a member from single sign-on into the community after three questions: their preferred name, why they are there, and their acceptance of the community's terms. Back from signing on, members choose to carry on with their profile or pick up where they left off.
Then progressive profiling: the profile is completed in small stages over time rather than all at once, which also shows The IET where people stall. A widget on the home page shows how complete a member's profile is and suggests what to add next, for new and existing members alike.
Results
Profiles completed, and engineers finding each other.
Completion rose for every onboarding task, by 62% on average. Completion of the People Search task rose by 93%, which means far more members can now be found by their specialism, interest and country: every member with a technical interest in aerospace, say, in one search.
- Job title: up 94%
- People Search: up 93%
- Specialism: up 60%
- Bio: up 35%
- Interests: up 27%
Profile completion up 62% on average, and 93% for People Search
The rise in completion of each onboarding task after progressive profiling went live.
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