Creating a "Success Hub" in your Community

Aynot2000

We are beginning our DCS journey, including creating a foundational success hub in our community. I'd love to hear what other success hubs look like? What kind of content do you feature? Is it a separate "hub" in your community or integrated within? How do customers leverage it? Etc.

Rich Rans

If the functionality exists in your community, I highly recommend creating a secure space where your CSM can interact with their customers. The benefits of this are:

• a running history of key interactions, so other stakeholders or a new CSM has easy access to the history
• The customer goes to the community more often. Want to see the last QBR deck, or ask your CSM a question, its in the community. When they are in the community, they are more likely to see or engage in other community activity.

Shauna McClemens

Hey @Aynot2000

I had the opportunity to take over leadership in our community this year — it was a bit of a transition to shift the focus from a community full of mostly product feature requests to a community more focused on Success. 

One challenge I had early on was getting folks to post (no-one wants to be the first person on the dance floor, right?), especially when the ask to post was too broad — recently, however, we started a #TIpTuesday series and I reached out to staff across CX and got commitments from them to post on a regular basis — I think it’s easier for folks to get posting and build those habits with a bit of scaffolding like a #TipTuesday type series. These are more proactive and thought out pieces of content, but they’ve been super well received by the community so far.

I’ve also spent time chatting with different members of staff to try and change the mindset from the traditional 1:1 that so many CSMs are used to to trying to move the conversation to the community - not just so that others can benefit from the conversation you’re having with the customer who’s asking the question, but so that the customer asking the question can benefit from the community’s input as well. That kind of content is a bit more reactive in style, where a customer has come to you with a particular question and you’ve brought it to the community, given your ideas, and solicited the rest of the community for their valuable input. It’s partly about getting your client the information they need, and partly about building the behavior to go to the community first to get the most complete answer.

Another key part I’d recommend is having some kind of live office hours or meet ups - we do topical sessions as well, but I’m always amazed by the lively and engaging conversations that come up in our open sessions. Anecdotally, folks that engage in the live sessions tend to post more in the community and provide advice and input to other clients’ questions. 

We don’t have a success hub as a special section in the community, per se, but rather our entire community is focused on customer success (actually called the Success Community). 

Cheers,

Shauna