When I first heard that Gainsight acquired inSided, a market leader in Customer Communities, I took a moment to think about the bigger picture. Having worked at an organization that leveraged both the power of Gainsight and inSided, I knew just how valuable this acquisition could be.
Your customer community, after all, should be a vital tool leveraged by all customer-facing teams, at every part of the customer journey. With the power to provide customers with a safe space to ask questions, log feature requests, and view recent and upcoming changes to your product.
When you think about your customer community, you may wonder how exactly it fits into the full customer journey, from pre-sales through to renewal and growth. Your customer community holds its unique place in each of these stages. For example:
| Pre-Sales | Onboarding | Adoption | Nurturing | Renewal/ Growth | Loyalty | |
| Objective | Use content & advocacy to convert new customers | Show initial value by implementing the product & training the customer | Become an integral part of the customer’s daily activities and operations | Continue ‘business as usual’ | Keep & grow customers | Turn customers into advocates that share success stories |
| Community integration | Case studies References Meetups Reviews Content that increases knowledge & trust with prospects | Integration articles Content for tips & tricks emails New customer user groups & training | Customer roundtables Customer use cases Highlight underused features & functionalities Product feedback | Self-help content
Product updates New user training Customer case studies & benchmarks | Case studies Feature requests Roadmap updates Customer challenge discussions | Super user programs Loyalty programs Private groups Beta programs |
All of the above examples have one underlying theme. Self-Service. It’s important to empower your customers to self-serve. In fact, at Gainsight we recently completed a survey of customers that are using our customer community and found that if customers didn’t have our community available, they would have contacted our customer support teams. This equated to over 3,000 tickets circumvented every month!
As customer success teams look to do more with less or execute a digital customer success strategy, it’s important to remember that your community will be a vital part of this experience for your customers. Whether it’s directing recipients to an article in a new customer welcome email, or integrating your community knowledgebase with your in-app knowledge center bot.
If you’d like to learn more about how community can be integrated throughout your customer journey, be sure to check out Gainsights’ new Customer Communities book where I cover how customer community is a vital part of the customer journey in Chapter 7 (Law 3 - Community should be at the heart of the customer journey).
About the Author
My name is Aaron Hatton and I’m a Digital Program Manager at Gainsight, helping develop Digital Customer Success strategies to elevate the Gainsight experience for all our customers and products.
As mentioned above, I also wrote a chapter within Gainsights’ new Customer Communities book where I cover how customer community is a vital part of the customer journey.
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