Best practices for managing B2B community users no longer at company

Hello @Amanda Rothbard, thank you for bringing up this important topic within our Community. While I don't have specific details about your Community, I'd like to address this from a broader perspective.

Infact addressed this exact dilemma a few years ago from my own experience:

A Community, not your HRIS

Communities thrive on inclusivity and a sense of belonging. Members join our Community voluntarily, driven by shared interests, and goals.

And that’s exactly why it is so crucial to consider whether removing members who change companies, really aligns with the overall purpose of your Community?

What we do is manage Community membership via access controls, i.e. changing their access levels via ‘Custom Roles’, removing them from invite-only groups, et all; taking care of the InfoSec.

Changing jobs is a reality for all of us, and when it happens, we simply update their email addresses in our system. This ensures that members can continue to be part of our Community even as they transition to new roles and companies.

We have made that into a discussion we feature on the homepage, infact it is one of our most popular threads!

You can see how members who have been part of our Community across different stages of their careers which serves as a powerful testament to our mission of fostering ongoing involvement, "Once a GameChanger, always a GameChanger."

That’s what has contributed to Repeat Visitors and long time members: 5, 7, 10y+ members.

Community Engagement, in part is reflected in email open rates and other engagement metrics. These metrics are outcomes of the vibrant Community atmosphere you mentioned yourself, you’ve worked hard to create, where members have contributed to building their profiles and hence supporting each other’s growth.

For your particular usecase of sending emails that land better, DH has created targeted segments to do exactly that

My recommendation is, always keep the doors open. The Community's strength lies in it’s ability to adapt and evolve with its members over the long term. So build it for the long term.

Hey @anirbandutta 👋 Thanks for your thoughtful reply and perspective! I really like the idea of fostering ongoing involvement, regardless of what company your community members are at. 

I unfortunately left out a fairly important part of our community process — as of today, all of our members must sign into our community using their company’s SSO. As far as I know, once a community member leaves their company, they can’t gain access to their community account with that email. Unless they happen to be at a company that is another customer of ours using SSO, I don’t see how this solution could feasibly work for us. 

I appreciate your call out of the DH targeted segments. In this specific instance of sending emails, I was trying to engage with folks in our Dormant Users segment to promote re-engagement. This is when I received the bounce back email notifications. 

Do you know of any other members that are in a similar position to me? Ideally a B2B SaaS community using SSO only for accessing their communities. 

Thanks for your help!

Ah… yes SSO indeed makes it a different scenario.

Lemme try tagging some of our experienced DH CSMs @Julian, @Vishwas Katti 

Thanks for tagging me here, @anirbandutta, apologies for the delay in sharing my thoughts on this.

Currently, I believe the easiest option to go about this would be to simply add a note in the "Welcome” notification email, that asks users if they had a community account already. If so, you could include either an email address or a link to send a private message to a community team member, so that the records can be updated. 

If you need more details on how to switch / update account records (basically you need to update the old account with the new email & SSO id), just let me know!

There might be other ways to go about this that are more scalable / automated (e.g. identifying and “fixing” the SSO id during registration, or adding a hidden profile field that asks if a user had a community account before), however each of these flows would require some addtional work or come with technical challenges that I personally would not know to overcome.

Here’s what I do when I know someone has left and will definitely not be coming back (typically just my colleagues, not usually customer/partner users). 

I update their Signature on their profile. It says “Note: This user is no longer active and unlikely to reply.”

Here’s why I like it:

• Better than deleting/anonymizing - keeps the context of their expertise like badges, rank, number of replies, profile info, etc
• Signatures show at the bottom of all their posts, so it’s highly visible 
• Subtle enough, not a flashing light sign that “this user is no longer here!” which can have negative impacts (especially as your community ages and plenty of valuable content will be authored by inactive users)

Sometimes, I’ll also update their profile with a custom user title like “Former Product Manager” if I think that’s valuable context to show prominently on their content. Mostly for the same reasons above. 

(We use SSO with our SaaS platform, so they can’t access the community if they’re no longer a customer/partner/staff member with access.)

Btw, for any employee member who leaves the company, the removal of an employee-Custom role would remove that co.logo insignia on their avatar images and after their name that gives you a hint but Love the idea of updating their signature to set expectations even more plainly, yet subtly.

I update their Signature on their profile. It says “Note: This user is no longer active and unlikely to reply.”

@Julian @DannyPancratz @anirbandutta All excellent suggestions, thank you!

I plan to move forward with all of these processes for my community. Thank you for helping me avoid removing users — agree that that “Anonymous” user content can be a bit unusual. 

Thanks all 🙌