Empowering Brand Advocates with Verint Community

Thermomix is one of the most popular kitchen appliances in the world. With a fan base of over 10 million enthusiasts, there’s a good reason why the Thermomix quickly becomes the heart of your kitchen.

Thermomix is seamlessly integrated with their recipe platform Cookidoo, giving users direct access to more than 40,000 international recipes and ideas on how to create delicious and healthy homemade dishes with minimal effort. For example, one superfan runs a Facebook group with 40,000 people. 

Thermomix realized the moment they can connect with these superfans they will be able to engage with all of these additional people. Thus, the Community Stars program was established to give these fans the tools, messaging, and assurance that they should continue to be a brand ambassador and advocate for the product. 

Thermomix found a lot of micro-influencers are superfans and active Thermomix users who have successfully built their own independent audiences and careers around cooking with Thermomix.

The Limitations of Facebook Groups

Due to budget limitations at the time, Thermomix couldn’t invest in a dedicated platform, so launched its ‘Community Stars’ project via invite-only Facebook groups. However, they quickly ran into common frustrations with the platform. 

For starters, Community Stars is intentionally kept small and exclusive. Unfortunately, if the group size doesn’t reach a certain threshold, you can’t access analytics. Even if you do reach the threshold, the data is still very limited. For a data-driven company like Thermomix, this was a problem. 

It meant they had to pay someone to manually scroll through post by post to collect what they could, and without concrete data, the Community Stars team couldn’t back up the inclusion of group members in additional activities like product testing with actionable data. 

For a community primarily driven by the recipes their superfans share, getting them to submit their ideas with Thermomix was also cumbersome, as members had to send them via external emails, rather than staying within the community platform. 

Thermomix quickly recognized this lack of control and the inability to add the additional functionality that would help support their specific member base was restricting what they could achieve and decided to migrate to a dedicated community platform.

The Solution: Verint Community 

With the level of control and functionality they required, Thermomix found after reviewing the platforms on the market that Verint Community was the solution that ticked most of their boxes, and felt confident awarding the project to Verint partner 4 Roads. 

Thermomix highly valued the robust out-of-the-box features, the superior, deeper analytics, and the flexibility to extend core features and services – an area where Verint Community excels. It’s built for extensibility and allowed Thermomix to build experiences that are as unique as the brand itself. 

For a brand that is always striving to improve member experiences, it was vital for them to choose a platform without a functionality glass ceiling, and being able to develop additional elements to suit their needs provided this. 

Thermomix also heavily weighed up the user interface for both members AND admins (community managers), as enabling the community managers to do more independently was a key factor.

As a multinational brand, the final decision on Verint Community came when Thermomix realized they could easily segregate by country and allow each group to operate in their native language. Many of the other community platforms are based in the US and are limited to English. 

This also meant every country could have their community using the same platform, without paying license fees for each. One solution, one standardized format, one license fee.

Today, Thermomix’s Community Stars is a truly thriving superfan community. 

Like with anything new, it took a little time for members to find their way, but now they see the potential, what Thermomix is trying to achieve, and how much investment has gone into creating their new home. It shows Thermomix genuinely cares about them. 

The recipe creators now enjoy added visibility and promotion from the brand. However, having a direct link to the brand they love is the biggest driver of continued membership and engagement, and provides Thermomix with a way to touch the followers of these select superfans. This is why engagement in the groups is so high.

Community Stars Goes Global

Due to the success of Community Stars in Italy, Thermomix has since launched the project in the UK, Ireland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, and Poland.

With the Community Stars project being positively recognized within the wider company, the long-term goal is to integrate with other areas of the company. 

Additionally, having seen the success in Italy, other countries not in the original scope are also looking to launch a community for their country. 

A Blueprint for Engaging Customers via Community

The community has boomed and become an ‘aha!’ moment, but even so, there is nobody else doing what Thermomix is doing. 

They have forged a new way to connect with superfans in a genuine, two-way dynamic that provides value to everyone, and now other brands are asking them for the roadmap of how they did it. 

However, this would not have been the case had they continued to operate using Facebook Groups. 

To deliver the kind of functionality and customization Thermomix needed to continue supporting and engaging their most valuable fans, it was imperative that they moved away from hosting their community on Facebook. 

Thermomix now has a truly thriving community, and they can continue to engage and leverage the passion and enthusiasm of their key advocates.