Loneliness continues to be a rising epidemic in our society. The cure for this is community.
Our mission is to create a thriving culture of community within the technology space. We do this through Pulse events and wanted to create this with our Community Unplugged event. This immersive virtual event designed to empower you with the knowledge, strategies, and insights to cultivate thriving URL and IRL communities in 2024 and beyond kicked off with Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight and Kellie Capote, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. The pair dove deep into why online communities are important within the workplace and how to start building them.
We believe that community brings a sense of belonging to our customers. Traditionally, we think of community within three distinct categories: Personal, Business, and Customer Relations. All of these categories require a different ‘version’ of ourselves in order to effectively build a community. If we truly want to build a culture of community and belonging, we need to be the same person at home as we are at work and with our customers.
This new mentality will help create more authentic relationships which will lead to a greater culture of belonging and loyalty for our customers.
“Your customers want best practices but most importantly, they want to belong.” – Nick Mehta
Creating customer communities that foster belonging for our customers requires us to have a human-first approach to business. It can be so easy to simply enter customer info into our CRM and go through the motions of addressing customer needs that we often forget that there is a human being on the other side of the screen.
Gainsight’s GameChanger Community is all about a personalized experience. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach where customers can enter a forum and ask product-related questions they may or may not get a good answer to. Many of the aspects of our customer community are tailored to help our customers get the support they need and also gain inspiration and knowledge from a broad network of Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, and Product professionals.
Some highlights from our community include:
- Over 10,000 global community members
- Over 10,500 ideas generated within the community since it started
- A 50% peer-to-peer response rate (average response rate ranges from 15% to 40%)
“Engaged customers through community drives customer health,” says Capote.
It’s important to create a safe place for customers to ask questions and interact with each other. Engaged customers are happy customers and when customers are engaged, they are more likely to see faster Time to Value.
We use the DEAR framework to measure if our customers are being successful.
- Deployment
- Engagement
- Adoption
- ROI
Community engagement is a key part of the “E” portion of this framework. Seeing how our valued customers engage within our customer community is a great way to gauge just how engaged they are and how well they are adopting our product. It’s also a key way to identify customer champions and potential customers who could provide testimonials and success stories, and even participate in beta launches and advisory counsels.
At Gainsight, every internal team benefits from our thriving customer community. Marketing gains more brand awareness which fills their pipeline with new ideas and resources. Customer Success sees benefits from increased retention rates, opportunities to grow and expand accounts, and higher NPS. The feedback received within the community can help the Product team improve the roadmap to better align with customer needs. And of course, this takes a lot of time off the Support team’s shoulders so they can handle more complex technical issues.
Building a community of belonging is a winning strategy for everyone involved.
