To increase participation, the initial strategy was to use email notifications. “There was an opportunity to target members of the community who have specific expertise and pair them with members of the community who have questions that need to be answered,” says Bradley.
Later, in a shift to focus on nurturing shared expertise and community between its customers, Autodesk sought to increase customer engagement to help provide answers more quickly and an optimized user experience to more customers. “We can push our support capabilities closer to the customers and engage with them automatically much earlier.”Īutodesk originally intended Community Match to be a space where customers could connect with internal Autodesk experts. “Similar to how we think about skills-based routing, we can start to serve our customers as part of the digital experience and in an intelligent way long before a person has to get involved,” says James Bradley, director of data science for Autodesk. The company has a strategy to principally use AWS for its entire development practice: in 2017, it moved its data science and machine learning development practice from on-premises machines to AWS, and recently it created a machine learning skills model to better route customers to support agents.
#AUTODESK FORUM SOFTWARE#
And whereas previously customers sought Autodesk support only to troubleshoot problems, now they take advantage of the knowledge within the shared community to use Autodesk software more effectively.Īutodesk makes software that enables people to “make anything.” Its solutions, featuring emerging technologies such as 3D printing, artificial intelligence, generative design, and robotics, are designed for builders in architecture, engineering, construction, media and entertainment, and manufacturing industries. The model would match the expertise of forum members with questions posed on the forum-the idea being to encourage community members who are experts on a particular subject to share their insider knowledge on Autodesk solutions. The company wanted to expand the forum’s reach by empowering customers to not only absorb community expertise but also offer their own.Īutodesk chose Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions to build and rapidly deploy a machine learning model for a new iteration of a forum called Community Match. In fact, the forum’s most engaged users were those best versed in Autodesk’s offerings. Software provider Autodesk has hosted a community forum called Autodesk Forums for its customers since 2000, but while many customers were using it as a resource, fewer were taking the next step in engaging with the community.