For years, our company's online presence resembled a digital "elephant graveyard" (Where are my Lion King fans at?)—a scattered, overlooked, and daunting space. Fragmented knowledge bases, outdated forums, and separate product feedback systems frustrated our customers.
Yet, within this disarray, we saw an opportunity: consolidate these disparate platforms into a single, unified brand community hub. This vision became paramount as our 30-year-old company underwent a monumental shift to a SaaS model. We realized a thriving, centralized brand community would be foundational, directly supporting our SaaS success and transforming our customer experience.
Here’s a look at our previous sites when the user wiki, forums, and support pages were not mobile-friendly and separate domains.
The Strategic Imperative: How Community Supports Our SaaS Success
Our revitalized brand community has become a strategic asset, directly aligning with our SaaS objectives:
- Reduced Support Burden: Empowering customers through self-service.
- Improved Customer Retention: Fostering loyalty and engagement.
- Increased Product Adoption: Centralizing learning for deeper platform usage.
- Accelerated Feedback Loops: Driving product development with direct customer insights.
- Enhanced Brand Advocacy: Cultivating a network of satisfied customer supporters.
The Transformation Journey: Consolidation & Building New Foundations
Our transformation began with a significant consolidation effort, bringing critical legacy sites into one cohesive platform:
- Unified Knowledge: Once disparate user wikis and release notes are now a single, unified knowledge hub.
- Integrated Feedback: Our isolated product feedback system from Feedbear is now fully integrated with idea statuses.
- Revitalized Forums: Outdated, fragmented forums transformed into a vibrant, consolidated discussion space.
We also integrated our support team's webinar calendar and enabled customers to search Zendesk articles directly within the community using Higher Logic Vanilla's capabilities. Our migration involved multiple test runs and design iterations, with a continuous commitment to improving user experience.
Crucially, our success hinges on robust internal programs and processes:
- Internal Communication Hub: A dedicated Slack workspace for our staff members centralizes community updates, questions, new ideas, and documented processes, ensuring company-wide alignment.
- Stakeholder Alignment: Our @Community Managers Slack group facilitates swift communication with stakeholders and managers , supported by a shared, visible task list.
- "Behind the Curtain" Program: We invite volunteer community power users (our MVPs) to our staging site for early feedback. This "peek behind the curtain" builds excitement and deep investment in our future direction.
Forging Cross-Company Buy-In for Migration and Management
A common hurdle for community success is gaining cross-departmental buy-in. This was true for vision casting, our platform migration, and our day-to-day management today. I would give full credit to insights from Joshua Zerkel’s Community.inc interview, where he emphasized consistently demonstrating vision and value to each team. We applied this by ensuring our internal Slack workspace fosters company-wide alignment and direct communication. Our @Community Managers group on Slack streamlines stakeholder discussions , and even our "Behind the Curtain" MVP power user program implicitly builds buy-in by showcasing early feedback to product teams. These strategies transform our community into a truly collaborative team asset.
Proving Impact: Measuring Our Community's Contribution to OKRs
Demonstrating our brand community's value means aligning its performance directly with our company's Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). We track key metrics to prove its impact:
- Increased Contributor Monthly Active Users (cMAU): Our leading goal is to boost cMAU—users who actively contribute via posts, reactions, comments, or other actions. We've benchmarked this metric and are focused on increasing it significantly by EOY.
- Support Cost Reduction: Seen through decreased support tickets and increased self-service rates.
- Customer Satisfaction & Retention: Measured by engagement, sentiment, and correlation with retention data.
- Product Adoption & Engagement: Evidenced by feature adoption, webinar attendance, and active user counts.
- Accelerated Product Innovation: Quantified by community-driven ideas, feedback, and their translation into product enhancements.
- Improved Time-to-Value: For new SaaS customers, faster onboarding and knowledge acquisition are facilitated by the community.
These insights, regularly reported, confirm our brand community is a critical engine driving efficiency, loyalty, and innovation, directly impacting our bottom line and OKRs.
Looking Ahead: Our Dynamic Community's Future
Our journey to a revitalized brand community is far from over; it's a continuous evolution. We are excited about future enhancements, including deepening integrations with our product roadmap, exploring advanced gamification strategies to boost engagement further, and expanding our regional user groups to foster even more localized connections. We envision our community growing not just as a hub for support, but as a vibrant ecosystem where customers actively contribute to our product's future and celebrate shared successes.
We are currently exploring the formation of specialized community groups targeting specific audiences and product applications. By focusing on these distinct niches and engaging users within their own contexts, we aim to build stronger connections and provide more tailored support. This strategy is crucial for establishing a robust and enduring SaaS support community.
Wrap It Up: From Graveyard to Growth Engine
Our experience proves that even an "elephant graveyard" of a legacy platform can be transformed into a powerful, strategic asset. By consolidating disparate resources, implementing thoughtful internal and external programs, and rigorously measuring impact against business OKRs, our brand community has become indispensable. It directly supports our SaaS model, enhances customer experience, and drives innovation. For any company looking to breathe new life into an older community—or establish a strong one from scratch—our story is a testament to the transformative power of a truly customer-centric digital hub.
