Customer Showcase November 2024: Community purpose, data, and tangible business impact

Hi all! We're Peter (@padams) and Maureen (@mrice) and we lead customer enablement and customer marketing at ChurnZero, an industry-leading customer success platform that helps subscription businesses keep customers and keep growing. Our community is where our customers share ideas, learn from each other, and engage with our brand meaningfully.

After a dip in engagement in 2023, our primary goal for 2024 was to improve our members’ experience in the community. We revisited everything from UI and UX to content and engagement strategies—and saw immediate boosts in both the quantity and quality of member engagement that validated the data-backed theories that drove our re-design. Here's what's worked, what hasn't, and where we're headed.

Don’t overcomplicate your community’s purpose

Communities often suffer from "mission creep"—trying to do too many things at once. Early on, we found ourselves pulled in a thousand directions: Should we focus on product feedback? Technical support? Peer-to-peer discussions? After listening to our customers (and honestly, some candid feedback from our internal teams), we realized we needed to narrow our focus.

Our community is now purpose-built for two things:

1. Fostering discussions about customer success strategies.
2. Driving product adoption.

That clarity transformed how we prioritize initiatives, design content, and measure success. It also made it easier to communicate our community's role internally. If a feature or program didn't support those two goals, it didn't make the cut.

Takeaway: The clearer your purpose, the easier it is to align your efforts and resources.

Measuring community data alongside customer data for deeper insights

If you don't measure it, you can't manage it—or at least, that's how we approach our community strategy. Here are the key metrics we track to evaluate success and prove value across the business:

• Discussions started and comment rate: Our leading indicators of engagement.
• Days spent using ChurnZero (Community Members vs. Non-Members): On average, community members log 112% more days working in ChurnZero per quarter.
• Support ticket deflection: Active community members log significantly fewer support tickets, freeing up our CS and Support teams for higher-value activities.
• Impact on customer health scores: Customers with high community engagement show consistently better health scores, which helps us retain and grow accounts.

By connecting community activity to broader business metrics, we've been able to demonstrate ROI in a language that resonates with executives.

Takeaway: If you're not integrating community data with your CRM or customer success platform, you're missing critical insights.

Lessons learned: What's worked (and what hasn't)

Streamlining our community’s UX/UI

When we launched our original community design in early 2021, we thought we'd hit the mark. Turns out, we'd made it harder for users to find what they needed. Our redesigned interface brought discussions front and center and made it easier for members to engage. The payoff?

• 564% increase in discussions started.
• 97% faster response times.
• 402% growth in comments posted.

Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the most effective.

Example: 2024 community redesign - before and after

Example: 2024 community redesign - homepage real estate intentionality

Empowering internal teams with community data

We realized that our CSMs are the bridge between our community and our customers. By integrating community metrics into their dashboards, we gave them real-time insights into their accounts' activity. For example:

• Automated alerts notify CSMs when their customers post in the community.
• Engagement reports highlight which accounts are thriving and which need attention.

This small shift brought strategic attention to our community as a proactive tool for customer success and account management.

Example: Automated alert notification via community data

Example: Engagement report sample

Establishing Member-engagement personas

Not all users engage with a community in the same way. Coupling community analytics with customer data, we established personas—like observers, contributors, and engagers—to segment levels of engagement activity. This data informs content and strategies, like adoption campaigns, to drive awareness and spark engagement for underrepresented personas.

Example: Member-engagment persona filters

What's next: Expanding the impact

We're proud of what our community has accomplished, but we're just getting started. Here's where we're focusing our efforts in 2025:

1. Content expansion: Building out tailored resources for executives and technical administrators who don't naturally gravitate toward the community.
2. Adoption campaigns: Reaching and converting currently non-community users to active community members through personalized outreach and onboarding.
3. Deeper integrations: Strengthening the connection between community activity, ChurnZero, and other systems to inform strategy across teams.

Our vision is to make the community indispensable—not just for our customers, but for our internal teams as well.

Your turn: Share your community journey and plans for 2025

Managing a community is as much art as it is science, and we're all learning as we go. Have you integrated your community data into your customer success platform? What's worked for you? Drop your insights in the comments below—we'd love to hear your thoughts.