Community for CS

Tim Loughrey

Hi, All. I am sure this has been discussed but we are aiming to focus more on Community here at my firm in 2023. I am curious about what people have seen work, particularly what has been reasonable to execute at a high-growth company. 

Brian O'Keeffe

Wow, it is the topic dejour! I have launched two communities and look forward to my next community venture. It is my passion.

1. I see Community as an arm of Customer Success. Enterprise Mid-Market and Tech Touch, where Community is the avenue for CS. All customers get community access, tech touch customers start are community assigned CS customers. 

2. Staff appropriately and find a community manager with a passion for digital engagement to lead it. In the example above we had about several community customer success managers where engagement began in the community for that assigned tier. We created closed groups specifically for that tier. I might rethink the closed part and make it dedicated, but open to all, where you can more easily leverage expertise internally and externally from all community members. 

3. Evangelize community internally and grow your support before you launch. THIS IS WHAT MAKES OR BREAKS COMMUNITY. See it as low touch, low value, and understaff it? Don't be surprised when everyone else sees it having little value. Community is the center of Customer Success, self-service support, education, training, events and advocacy. Everything emanates from community. Start with this! 

Poll internal stakeholders and your customers before you launch to gauge support and determine what customers want. 

Good luck! 

Sarah Patel

@Brian O'Keeffe - what are your thoughts about great community tooling / applications? Do you have any recommendations about what to look for? Thank you

Brian O'Keeffe

@Sarah Patel I have extensive experiencing using Salesforce's community platform. With Salesforce also the tool we were using to manage support cases and the knowledge base it made it a no-brainer choice. Prior to that I used shelf-ware to launch a community and it was a sad, creaky, self-hosted experience but what we had to do when we had zip to spend and a start up mentality. 

I am evaluating platforms right now. I have not come to any conclusions but can share my feedback when I do. 

Sarah Patel

Brilliant - thank you @Brian O'Keeffe - I'll go take a look at the Salesforce community platform, and I'd definitely love to hear your feedback from reviewing other platforms. 

Successful_lion

@Brian O'Keeffe That is a very interesting approach. Do you mind me asking how the groups differ by tier? How are the conversations or resources different in the private tier groups?

kmulhalljr

I've helped launch two community spaces, a monthly recurring webinar series ("virtual office hours"), a weekly open AMA ("coffee with kevin") and am working on beefing up our youtube channels (co-branded with our vendor partners) and fingers-crossed, a podcast by the end of the calendar year. 

Open to all verticals: VOH & Coffee with Kevin

Closed Yammer Group(s): defined by overall associated net spend within a product vertical (limits are set by our PM's)

'Quad': a paid members-only community forum

I'm the furthest thing from an expert on marketing/community/content but tiering can be tricky - at least in my experience, because even if you build out a platform for high value customers or clients that doesn't always translate to engagement. In fact, our highest spenders are typically the least engaged with us.

Brian O'Keeffe

@Successful_lion All customers are invited to the community. I strongly advise setting it up so all customers have access automatically. A big mistake was setting up a community then inviting contacts to join. (Yes, I want another user name and pw!) Of course it was difficult to get anyone to sign-up and we had to backtrack and auto-add people. Resources are available to all customers from all public groups. 

Private groups are set up for tech touch customers. You have a CSM, here is how you contact them. You have a team of CSMs? Contact them in the private group. The Customer Success team pool manages the private groups and is alerted to every post and responds within a set amount of time. In this example it is one business day, but really was one hour or less. Killing it on response time and follow through was a key to it being successful. The private group is invite only and all contacts assigned to tech touch are given access. Need to engage your Customer Success team? Add your post to the group. The answer is often linking to another thread in a public group, or connecting them with a public user, leveraging the larger community and resources. Private issues, escalations, specific issues that required a direct exchange or had proprietary data were taken off-line. 

This allows all customers to have access to be able to leverage customer to customer interactions regardless of assigned sector. Enterprise and mid-market customer contacts are part of the larger public group and there expertise and advice would often feed the smaller customers and vice versa. 

Getting buy-in was easy, from customers, and almost all resistance came internally. Slowly buy in was achieved. Who resisted most of all? Enterprise and Mid-Market CSMs and managers, who saw the community as having little, or no value for its assigned customer contacts and did not enthusiastically steer customers towards it or participate. That was always hard, but seeing tech touch equal and often beat all other sectors by every measure showed the value to all. 

Successful_lion

@Brian O'Keeffe
Thank you for the in-depth explanation and learnings from the experience. Truly appreciated!

I do see internal resistance as the greatest blocker. Our field-sales and customer-facing teams are resistant to change. They're concerned with their quota and don't want to invest time into anything that might even indirectly help them hit their quota. 

What I was worried about was setting up a success group without resources or content, but it sounds like your private groups are mainly fueled by incoming questions from customers and then the pooled CSMs moderate the group.