Hi! My team is looking at making select pages in our customer community publicly viewable. These include user profiles, homepage, certain discussions, and events, all of which previously lived behind a login. The goal is more discoverability, showcasing the value of the community to prospects, etc., but there are concerns we want to address before we move forward.
A few things I'm trying to figure out:
Customer trust: we have always been a private, customers-only community, so our members posted in a space they assumed would always remain this way. How did you approach communicating this kind of change? We’re of course planning to offer to change any profiles or remove/edit discussions upon request before going live in a community post, maybe also an email. Any messaging that landed really well (or really poorly)?
UX weirdness: When you have a mix of logged-in customers and anonymous public visitors on the same pages, things can get a little awkward. Did anything unexpected crop up in the experience that you had to scramble to fix or explain? Or that caused major customer annoyance?
General lessons learned: Anything you wish you'd done differently, or something that worked better than expected?
We're trying to be really thoughtful about this and make sure our customers feel respected through the transition/are not super put out or inconvenienced, so any firsthand experience or advice is super helpful. Thanks in advance!
