TLC - How do you manage communications?

Has anyone here tried using groups and alerts? For example a community group PRODUCT A with a subscription option for alerts about that product, including unscheduled maintenance and release updates. Posting is limited to a select few, comments to all members. I am trying to move away from all email, all the time and introduce more customer friendly and self-service options. It also solves the issue of walling off updates that might be fodder for competitors in a more public solution.

Thank you @PiperWilson ! I am looking at a status page to manage planned and unplanned maintenance. Possibly an alerts group too. For all product updates it will be strictly an alerts group by product. The struggle is for a customer to know what products they have. Right now I do not have a simple way for them to look and know. (There are legacy, current and acquired products and a customer can have any combination that look like a single product from the user perspective.)

How did you roll alert groups into onboarding or new administrator creation? I am thinking of a default option where we manually subscribe the user to the right alerts (I used a proxy feature) and then introduce it to them and at that point they can adjust subscription options. I found doing the reverse failed too often. Showing them and expecting them to have a motivation to subscribe is not realistic. Subscribing them (and I got lots of pushback internally on this idea) then allowing them to adjust subscriptions was a lot more successful. Same thing for community membership. I folded it into onboarding and join everyone automatically. Lots of pushback on this one too but it worked and we had 100% membership VS 60% with an invite and wait approach.

Thank you for sharing.

I have used two strategies for Community membership. The first was to invite every administrator or potential member to join. Some did, some didn't. Not having access created problems. How do we share a thread with them? Or introduce them to another member? Having a Community allowed us to point to threads that had the answer of frequently asked questions, to introduce contacts to champions with similar struggles, and to move questions following an announcement or update into the community, all very powerful ways to seed self-service. We often went right into support cases and linked the customer to the community thread where the answer or relevant discussion lived too. (They were fully integrated.) By automatically adding everyone we were always able to point to the community directly whenever needed and not risk a NOT AUTHORIZED message. I even used the proxy feature to post questions that customers asked on his or her behalf as the user. (I asked first and only did it if they were ok with it. No one ever said no.) This was a great way to move serial emailers and ticket generators into the community without ever having to tell them to please go there directly.

You are correct that it hurts the engagement rate. A small percentage engaged in the community on any regular basis. Many more came only when needed. We reported on member growth in the community over time (obviously adding them automatically turbo charged this) and number of tickets opened over time. The more we had in the community, the more the ticket queue shrank. This is the real win. The added bonus was identifying and adding advocates we found in the community who we rewarded for community engagement.

It was easy to do with the two being integrated. We did a lot of things that raised eyebrows and blurred CS with support, a giant no-no for some. For example, going into tickets to link to community, link to a case in the community to move an issue to support (closing the thread at the same time) and lifting from a support ticket to create a thread on a customer's behalf to move an issue to community from support.

I focused on #1 how we give the customer the best experience possible #2 focus on the right behavior. There was some fighting going on as we did this. Support was not comfortable going into community, some support team members and CS reps refused to go into community (it's not my job, I don't have time etc.). If we sat around trying to create and enforce the rules of community engagement first (as some wanted to do and as is commonly done) we would never have gotten anywhere. It created some friction. In the end we had a thriving community, a lower number of support tickets, customers who could more easily self-serve and a less blurred line between support and CS. It never vanished totally and never will.

FYI: Those that refused to go into community often got linked to threads with the answer they needed. That broke down some of the resistance!