Podcast: creating a better CX community

Every customer community starts as a support queue with better manners. The ones that last are the ones that stop being run by support within the first year.

Introduction

The first mistake is launching a forum. A forum is a building; what you need at the start is a reason for twenty people to talk to each other, which is usually a recurring problem rather than a platform.

Find the problem, host the conversation somewhere your customers already are, and only build the destination once people are annoyed that the conversation keeps getting lost.

Moderation is the whole job. Not deleting things — deciding what the room is for, saying it out loud, and repeating it patiently for eighteen months.

Give the most helpful members something they cannot buy: early access, a direct line to the product team, and public credit. None of these cost money and all of them are harder to fake than a discount code.

Publish what you are working on and what you have rejected. A roadmap without rejections reads as marketing; one with them reads as a conversation.

Software and tools

Pick whatever your customers already have open. Migrating a community is far more expensive than migrating a database, because the data walks away if it disagrees with the move.

Keep search working. Almost all of the value of a mature community is people finding an answer written three years ago by somebody who has since moved on.

Other resources

If you are starting from nothing, three moves matter more than the rest:

1. Name the problem the community exists to solve.
2. Show up every week, in public, for six months.
3. Hand the microphone to a member before you feel ready to.

The metric to watch is not membership. It is the share of questions answered by somebody who does not work for you, and how quickly that happens.

When that number stops depending on your team being awake, you have a community rather than a channel.