Launching a community product leadership trusts

A customer marketing leader I spoke with recently was asked to launch a customer community.

Marketing and customer success were on board. Product was skeptical, and worried it would turn into a place where customers just complain.

That gap is common. If leaders don’t share a purpose for the community, the doubt wins.

Here’s the advice I gave her:

• Start with the why, not the platform. Get your executives to agree on what the community is for. Advocate pipeline? Lower cost to serve? Self-service onboarding? Retention? Without a clear business case, it’s easy to cut later.
• Ask your customers before you build. Where would they engage? What would they want to see? How often would they show up? Leave an “other” box, because they may already gather somewhere you haven’t thought of.
• Pick the technology last. Crawl, walk, run should scale the purpose, not the tool.
• Plan to measure from day one: retention, expansion, satisfaction of members versus non members, and cost to serve.

And when you launch, don’t open the doors to an empty room. Seed it with answers to the top questions your support team gets.

Then keep people coming back. Invite your top advocates to take part, and have your support team answer questions in the community so the answers stay accurate and people see it’s worth returning to.

This is the kind of problem I love helping teams work through.