On this month’s episode of The Customer Success Channel Podcast, brought to you by Planhat, I chatted with Anna Poorna, Head of Community at Freshworks, the customer engagement software company that enables organizations of all sizes to deliver better experiences. A true customer advocate at heart, Anna has 8+ years of experience in Customer Success and Marketing and in her previous roles helped run and scale the Customer Success teams for the EMEA market at Freshworks.
As Customer Success organizations start to scale, most businesses consider creating an advocacy program or at least a customer portal where your customers can share their insights on what they think about your product. As your business grows you want your end users to get the most out of your product while being happy customers and true advocates, but how do you do that? Anna has been building up a customer community for years and has held positions like CSM, and CS lead and for the last year, she has been working on building out a CS customer community at Freshworks.
The aim of the podcast today is to show you how to start an online customer community but also how a customer community can be used to scale your customer success efforts effectively while making sure you are maximizing your communities potential. I discuss with Anna, how to start an online customer community and also how a customer community can be used to scale your customer success effectively while making sure you maximize your communities potential.
The main purpose of a community is to help bring people together. In the SaaS world, this can be crucial. The common goal is to find ways to revolutionize the way businesses deliver experiences and win customers for life. It’s a space for people who care about customer experience to come together, and it enables participants to learn from each other and grow.
Once you have created a successful and engaged community, it can help develop advocacy for your brand, increase adoption rates and enable you to directly connect with your users. Anna sees this movement trending, with more and more companies dedicating their focus to building a community. She believes that it enables you to see the direct impact of the community on your other strategic business goals. Communities can also be a USP, being the strategic differentiator for SaaS companies.
What should be included in the community? How do you start? Anna’s suggestion would be to create the basics first and start by creating a forum. This allows your customers to talk to one another, get tips and encourage engagement. Then, create content to add value to the community, and enrich your users with blog articles, videos, podcasts, white papers, and research to ensure the community continues to grow. Encouraging engagement is key, building an engaged community will build advocates for your brand.
In our discussion Anna helps answer some of the tricky questions when it comes to building a customer community:
- At what point should a SaaS business consider building out a CS community? What is the first indicator?
- Do you have onboarding information in the CS community for low-touch customers? Should companies have materials in their CS community for tech touch?
- Do you integrate your community with your CRM/CS tool to track metrics and create a health score? If yes, what are you tracking?
Some key takeaways from this discussion:
- Building an engaged community is a key to customer advocacy, it can help develop advocacy for your brand, increase adoption rates and enable you to directly connect with your users
- Communities help enable participants to learn from each other and grow
- Communities can also be a USP, being the strategic differentiator for SaaS companies
Make sure you listen to the full episode and let me know your thoughts in the comments!
