User Groups?

Tim Gilhooly

Hello Everyone,
I am working on creating a User Group. Our CSM Team of (5) is taking the lead on this project.
I am curious to hear if anyone has experience starting a User Group at their company?
My org is 50-75 ppl. Vertical Saas (Construction Project Management)

Grant Jones

@Tim Gilhooly - Are you looking for a platform as well?  I spent the last 10 years at Higher Logic, an enterprise community platform.  In fact, GGR is using it today.  That being said, lots of community/forum solutions out there which could work well depending on your requirements. 

Tim Gilhooly

Platform? Great questions. I would like to build out a solid process before setting up a tool. I am curious. What processes for User groups worked well during your last 10 years?

Harsh Shah

Hey @Tim Gilhooly, I hope you're having a relaxing weekend!

If I understood it correctly, you wanted to start a user group that could bring your users together with your solution. If so, then it is a great initiative as your customers can leverage this medium to share their experiences which will equally help your organization and other customers. It's a great way to get product feedback and find enthusiastic users. The aim to start a user group should be to support each other, spread best practices, and share experiences. You can use the below processes to create an amazing user group program:

1. Create user groups with similarities (segmentation) rather than just location-based
2. Focus more on users rather than your company while creating a user group
3. Make it easy for them to escalate when they are struggling and address it proactively
4. Leverage user groups to test concepts or new ideas for product development
5. If a product is enhanced with their contribution then do share it with them
6. Motivate and appreciate users for active participation

This approach will surely help your organization to make customers successful while gaining invaluable customer insights.

Mark Flanagan

To follow up on Grant's comments, Tim: https://www.higherlogic.com/blog/starting-a-user-group-save-time-by-answering-these-10-questions-first/

Grant Jones

@Tim Gilhooly this might also be helpful - https://www.higherlogic.com/online-community-guide/

I think the first thing you want to do is identify the purpose of the user group. Is it simply to improve customer experience and onboarding?  Reduce support tickets?  Grow brand advocates?  Product Ideation?  Collecting engagement data to better serve/support users and increase up-sell/cross-sells opportunities?  All of the above?

Once you have that you can then align KPI's from a community platform.  

Higher Logic also has their own user group called HUG which might give you an idea of what it's being utilized - https://hug.higherlogic.com/home

Evelien Sanders

@Tim Gilhooly We have been running User Groups for a couple of years now in different countries (Uk, Dach, Benelux, France and Nordics) - basically for us this is a platform (virtual or f2f) where we make it possible for our users to connect, share best practices, lessons learned and receive an update from our side on product releases. We organise the meeting, arrange the guest speaker (a customer) and connect the users. These have been very well received. We also make it a practice to make sure that 'sales' is not part of these sessions - we want to make sure the users feel that they are able to share freely. Happy to further discuss if you want :-)