Advice for Integrating Community into Onboarding

Ive worked at organizations where we put the community url into onboarding documentation. We had users go to a specific page designed around new folks to the SAAS products. There were some how to guides (including how to subscribe to locations in community), support questions of the week, and an overview of the site. 

This helped by creating usernames for those new individuals and letting them know where to find product release documentation. 

When it comes to dealing with getting users into community I think it can start even before the sale.

The community can be introduced during sales cycles and solutioning. Using Community discussions as examples of real life use cases, show how engaged your company is with the customer.

That being said, during onboarding and initial engagement, referring to resources within the community is an easy starting point. Even more so if you have your academy within the community also (we do). So referencing onboarding courses “via” community in the initial communications is a good start.

More integrated is using a engagement from PX to ‘nudge’ users towards community content from within your product.

Like this you take out the situation the user propensity of reading email communications.

We include a few slides specifically for our Sales team to support their discussions and then something similar for our implementation team and then Client Success team who they go to after. 

We also use Pendo in our product and I’ve worked with our Pendo administrator to create a knowledge centre that highlights the community (see below). Lastly once they are a member we have a 3-email onboarding campaign through Gainsight CC. 

As ​@Alistair FIeld said, it’s really useful to mention the community before the sale is even completed. I’ve found that if it’s pitched right, community can be quite a differentiator in pre-sales. I’ve given colleagues in sales and success 1-2 slides to quickly explain the value of our customer communities. This way, prospects are aware of the community early on. 

Depending on the complexity of your software, it’s fairly straightforward to just ask your colleagues in success / implementation to add community registration as an onboarding step when customers are implementing. 

One of the more long term things we’ve done in the past is ask success colleagues to treat the community as a more scalable way to answer customer questions (rather than ad hoc emails where answers can easily get lost and email chains can go on forever). This way, the community serves as the first port of call for customers when they need to engage with your company digitally.

Hope this makes sense!

-Moe