Skip to main content

Looking for some inspiration and ideas on how we might utilize our Community for both the products we have. A few years ago, we acquired a similar company (similar solution, different setup, modules, customers) and we want to be able to use our Community to serve these customers as well. 

Does anyone have a similar use case and how did you solve it?

Some other critieria

  1. We don’t want them to freely speak to each other in open forums
    1. While they use the same product and are after the same goal (digital asset management) the products are different and behave different
    2. The other product is aware their product is part of the larger company
  2. They would care about the same type of connected ecosystem so there is a small opportunity of the conversations to be collaborated between the two products in a dedicated space
  3. Ideally we have the main part of the Community for our main customers, a small place to collab, and another place for the second product 

Would this only be able to be solved by adding a private group for just the second group? If that’s the case, how did you setup that group? How customizable are they?

A few thoughts: 

  1. Separate community categories and use custom roles to permission which types of customers can see the forum, post, or reply to topics. 
    1. This would require a solution where you give a custom role to each customer user depending on the product(s) they use. If the one product has a smaller customer base, you could potentially only do it for those customers.
    2. Hopefully you could automate something from your CRM to add a custom role via the API. 
  2. Each should have a “Product Area” setup for Ideas and Product Updates.That way you can setup the product updates with the ability for them to filter by their product. 

And if you do #1 and have someone who can really get into custom scripts and custom CSS, you could even personalize your home page for some widgets to show to some users and others to show to others.

But, if it were me, I’d probably repurpose the community overview page or the knowledge base overview page into a niche “home” type page for the second, smaller product. Or do something like InSpired has for the home page that links to two main areas, and then use the Community and KB overview pages to make micro-home pages for featuring the most relevant links and posts for each customer base. 

Adding to what @DannyPancratz said, I wanted to give you a good example how you can customize the different areas to match the branding of the different products. 

Hello bank! is a smaller brand of BNP Paribas, so they do have their own sub-communities and Knowledge Base on the same platform. They have added some custom script to change the styling elements in pages that are about Hello bank!:

Hello bank! Knowledge Base

BNP Paribas Knowledge Base

Regarding the other points: I would create a seperate space for the smaller group of the two, only giving access via custom user role. If that space is hidden to the rest of the users, and you message to users that they have special access, this would also make it less likely that users would end up in the wrong category with their question. You can automate that e.g. by giving these users a special rank that is tied to such a message.

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings