Our community is support community and alongside it has couple of “sideroles”. For the next year and onwards we started to think about maybe we should build new strategy for the community and focus only certain role(s). To be even more efficient.

Very good question, thanks for sharing this here!

I personally have seen many communities master peer-to-peer support first, then spreading out to different use cases / personas or roles. 

I do not think that you must exclusively only focus on one use case or role in the beginning neither, many communities nowadays start with a combination of those - they also do not necessarily have to dillute your focus, as there can be quite an overlap. E.g., I see that onboarding and service have a lot in common in terms of demand. I understand that you are concerned about losing focus, and I think it is important to ask yourself this question when reflecting on the main use cases.

Most service communities usually branch out to either branding (more focus on non-service, editorial content) or to product feedback. The (German) o2 community here stands out as a good example with e.g. o2 news, test device reviews etc… They felt this was a logical step for them, seeing that support is running smoothly and is not as challenging as in their early years. Needless to say this needs additional ressources to manage, but with an active & helpful user base and also other departments having a stake in this, it might not be as big of an extra investment.

In general, I believe that communities can be benefitial for people on each stage of the customer lifecycle, and for most of the different personas who are engaging with your brand. A healthy way of growing / re-defining the strategy could be to collaborate with different teams and have them “own” these areas and processes. E.g. our own product team manages ideas & Product Updates themselves and thus reducing the impact on others focussing on the service experience.

Hi @revote I agree with Julian and will add that Community can have multiple roles but if that introduces multiple personas into your audience it’s important that you have the resources to service the primary needs of each of those personas.

Presale and post-sale audiences need different information and both need an experience that serves them content relative to their interests.  A presale audience can get overwhelmed by the technical content and questions post-sale audiences have and post-sale audiences can be frustrated by the lack of technical info in marketing. You can service the whole lifecycle from pipeline generation, to renewal and growth in a community if you have the resources to invest in ongoing content and experience design for each stage. 

Totally agree with all the above. My turn next I guess? And this time, it’s me as an end user.

As a Super User on the OVO Forum, I’m pretty deeply involved in the entire community and I’ve watched it grow over the last two years since I came along. While the OVO Forum was originally just a general community using no other modules, it’s since expanded to using Events (we do have a few, honest!), Groups (which is amazingly good!) and Ideation. The latter of which makes use of the internal product teams and I believe they get notified via Slack or Google Chat whenever an Idea gets accepted by a moderator. It’s a really good example of how to use the modules together, but there’s also tons of others so I highly encourage you to explore other communities that run on inSided. You’ll often get a lot of inspiration that way.

But lets think about me for a moment. For this example, don’t look at me as Blastoise186 the OVO Forum and inSpired superhero, but as just a regular Joe Bloggs stopping by for the first time. Just so you know, this is a simulated example that’s based on actual hot topics and discussions we’ve seen on the OVO Forum recently, but I’ve modified them slightly to (hopefully!) make them a bit easier to understand.

I’m a really upset OVO member because my smart meter isn’t working with OVO but I can’t figure out which Landis+Gyr meter it is, my energy bill support scheme hasn’t been paid in and I’m worried about sudden beeping noises coming from my meter. On top of that, I desperately need to get my supply to my flat split off from the other 10 flats in the building. And I really, really want OVO to finally add a dark theme to the online account because I can’t stand light theme.

But where do I go? I found this forum thing but I’ve never used them before.

This example above is based on a LOT of threads I’ve handled over the last two years. Fortunately, there’s not been a case where one user got that unlucky but I feel it’s a great way to demonstrate the roles that the forum can play.

Let’s start with the smart meter not working. The user already knows it’s L+G and it’s probably an E470, so they’ve probably already discovered my guide on Google which is what brought them to us. The advice and guidance I’ve written solves many of those issues rapidly and can be a good future candidate for a knowledge base article. But It also works in the main community since it’s so easy to surface. The information in that guide also encourages the reader to post on the forum if they’re still unsure and given that I actively respond to any comments on that thread, gives the user tons of assurance that I’ll stop by if they need me. Or if I’m not around, that someone will pick it up and reply.

It’s probably one of the most helpful guides I’ve written to date and given how much traffic it gets, probably answers tons of questions without people having to go any further - and I suspect it probably also helps OVO’s own support teams out a ton as well, with something useful to refer to.

As for the energy bill support scheme, the current Featured Topic is this one, which draws people’s attention and does an absolutely outstanding job of reducing the workload of all the forum volunteers - and probably helps to deflect contact away from the support team as well.

When it comes to the beeping noises, posting in the community is generally the easiest way for that to get noticed, especially in the Smart Meters category that several of us monitor. You post there and there’s a strong chance I’ll see it within a few hours. In at least one case, it also allowed the user to identify that it was actually a carbon monoxide alarm with a low battery. Which is my way of saying that sometimes, the solution is much, much simpler than you might think. And yup, it was just a case of swapping out the battery if memory serves.

Another role the community can play, is doing very unique solutions to very unique problems. Here’s a really good one we had a few months ago. In the context of Joe Bloggs, it’s similar to splitting up a block of flats (and yes, we have seen those too!) but for an entire school. OVO isn’t a non-domestic supplier but our ability to reach out to external resources means we can often solve tricky puzzles pretty easily!

And yes, there’s always the Ideation section too! :)

If we take Joe Bloggs, we’ve already got an idea open for Dark Theme support, so we can signpost to that and recommending upvoting. The product teams also get involved too, like in this example.

This is just a glimpse at how the community can integrate and play several roles. We’ve got more stuff planned and Tim wants to make the forum even more integrated. But if there’s anything I can recommend, it’s definitely ask for advice on inSpired! We’ll always be happy to offer tips if you need them.

I agree with what’s said above - but I think it’s important to set reasonable expectations for how long it should take when you have a small community team, until you get the buy in from other teams where they take ownership of some part, as Julian says.

From my experience it can be challenging to balance it all with a small team, but taking it one element at a time makes it more manageable.

For example, our community started mainly as a support channel (esp. for new users of our product) and we needed to work closely with the support team to establish processes for that to go smoothly. Next we wanted to focus on product feedback discussions (targeting more experienced users) and had to give attention to making this work with the product team. Now we begin to focus on blog content that can interest even another audience (some pre-sales) but need to work more closely with marketing. And so on.

Thanks for the comments, I totally agree all of them.

Mostly this is matter of resources, as @Julian and @JessEs mentioned. It was good tip to co-operate with different departments and get them to be responsible for “additional role”. This is the easiest way when you have small community team, though, but generally speaking it is the key for success also.