It’s not uncommon to hear customer-facing teams answer the same questions time and time again. The questions could be about functionality or general how-to’s. Sometimes, these questions become feature requests, and it can be challenging for teams to record this information in an efficient manner so product teams can prioritize feature requests accurately.
That’s where the customer community comes in. Gainsight offers a community solution called Digital Hub that offers the ability for you to empower your customers to ask questions about your product, log feature requests and interact with other customers. If done well, your customers will answer each other questions, and you will have a well-formatted report of feature requests, votes, and revenue associated with the features. In fact, in our new book on customer communities set to be published in November 2023, we talk about how you can integrate community into every part of your customer journey and the importance of doing so.
Getting both new and existing customers to join your community, however, can be another part of the challenge. By leveraging both Gainsight CS’s Journey Orchestrator and Gainsight PX’s in-app engagements, you have the ability to promote your community with a multi-channel approach, increasing the visibility of your community along with the number of registered and engaged participants.
Getting Started
Start by creating an email template inviting customers to your community. Ideally, this would come from your community manager but if you prefer it could be from your Chief Customer Officer or even the customer's account team (i.e. - CSM or CAM).
Then create a simple, but engaging in-app message encouraging your customers who are yet to sign up for your community to do so. Don’t forget to add a CTA with the link directly to the registration page.
Once you’ve got both the PX engagement and the email created, you can start to create the journey inside of Gainsight CS’s Journey Orchestrator but make sure to exclude existing community members from the audience criteria. This will help avoid any emails from customers asking why they received it when they’re already registered.
Now that’s all done, it’s time to sit back and watch as your community grows, one member at a time. In fact, we at Gainsight recently launched a similar program to this and saw a 20% increase in registrations within the first week.
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. Follow me for more useful tips and tricks like this in the future