How Zapier Uses Gainsight Customer Communities to Keep 2.2 Million Businesses Engaged

Business automation company Zapier creates products that help their customers make productive connections, so it only makes sense that their online community would follow the same playbook. Zapier needed a community that would allow any user to connect with the information they needed without disrupting their workflows. But with 2.2 million businesses using Zapier, 5,000+ partner integrations, and an infinite number of use cases, accomplishing that goal would require both flexibility and scalability. Using Gainsight Customer Communities (CC), Zapier designed a personalized community experience that could accommodate any user journey, while empowering their Community team with automation that supercharged their effectiveness. As a result, they enabled self-service support that delivers an answer to 100% of user questions within 6 hours.

For workflow automation leader Zapier, having an open online community is a crucial component of their customer experience strategy. They want to provide a place for customers to get knowledge in the moment, without having to disrupt their workflow by submitting a ticket, and without needing to log in. The challenge was that, with close to 5,000+ partner integrations, every customer’s use case is as unique as a thumbprint.

“We needed an any-size-fits-all solution for community management,” explains Rachael Silvano, Community Operations Manager at Zapier. “It’s our job to help users at whatever stage of the customer journey they are in, from beginners to experts.”

“And because we don’t have locked content, we need to lead with value,” Silvano continues. “A lot of users only ask us one question and then never return—and we’re actually fine with that.” In fact, the Zapier Community team does not track whether users are free or paid, and 90% of community visits are driven by search engines.

With this open-access model in mind, Zapier needed the flexibility to be able to run a large-scale support community based on self-service for a wide range of user journeys. And they needed automated moderation tools that would empower their internal team to manage the community at scale. To achieve those goals, Zapier migrated their community to Gainsight Customer Communities largely for its ability to export to moderation tools and deep integrations.

Using Customer Communities, Zapier has prioritized and shifted user behavior within the community toward search, which alleviates the need for users to ask questions. The Federated Search tool, in particular, has helped drive that transformation. “Gainsight lets our users search all the things,” says Silvano.

Gainsight has also helped Zapier design their community to help move users forward in their unique journeys. “Gainsight Digital Hub (now Customer Communities) helps us assist users at key friction points and behavior triggers,” says Jillian Bejtlich, Director of Self-Serve Customer Experience at Zapier. One example is Ada, a Zapier Community chat bot, which facilitates workflows that lead users into the community.

“More and more people are discovering the Zapier community and arriving there by different pathways,” Bejtlich continues. “Gainsight tools help us be more dialed in on what the user sees when they visit a specific topic page, rather than on the home page or the site nav.” Zapier is using Gainsight to create engaging spaces that draw users further into their content and drive them to realize more value from Zapier products.

Zapier, as a leader in automation themselves, takes full advantage of the power of Customer Communities to automate their moderation system. Using Gainsight, they can auto-triage posts based on the difficulty of the question, the level of resources needed to resolve it, and how long the question has gone unanswered. They have also developed an exhaustive moderator playbook around handling feature requests and bugs.

“Our team really enjoys the custom moderation views we’re able to set up, but even more than that is the fact we’re able to use the Zapier + Gainsight integration to push out flagged topics to our moderation Slack channel,” Bejtlich says.

Zapier’s robust community management program supercharges Gainsight with the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to summarize their most important customer experience signals, which in turn allows the Community team to take better resulting actions and focus their efforts in ways that will be most impactful for customers.

Gainsight tools have also been deployed to make it easier for the Community team to cross-pollinate customer feedback with Product and other stakeholders by capturing product ideas in their community. The result is a holistic cycle that helps Product create more customer-centric products.

The moderation workflow has paid dividends for the Community team in terms of productivity. “Because we have Zapier and Customer Communities technology, we’re able to do so many things,” Bejtlich says. “We can operate as a much larger team than we are—three people can do the work of 30.”

And in terms of business objectives, the impact has been clear, with 100% of user questions being answered within four to six hours and tens of thousands of questions now have answers. “We have consistently met our service level agreement (SLA) metric for 16 months in a row,” says Bejtlich. Given the enormity of their community—with 125,000 unique visitors per month, and 240,000 monthly page views—enabling their users to find the content they need is a huge success.

What’s next for Zapier and Gainsight? They plan to continue building out an automation-collaboration space and will deliver a unique value proposition to their users. “Custom pages from Customer Communities will help us keep the experience fresh and begin implementing group-specific pages,” says Bejtlich. As Zapier continues to expand their community footprint, Gainsight will provide the flexibility and scalability they need to design an optimized customer experience.