Building a community from scratch is difficult. Back in November 2018 I took a position to build Imperva’s first open customer support Community. Although I have built communities in the past, this will be my first in the tech industry. Since I was a newbie in the industry in building a community I setup a goal for myself to talk to several Community Managers in the tech industry.
One of the people I spoke to was @Asha May from Veracode. She is a Director of Customer Engagement. They launched their community about two years ago, so I thought she would be a perfect person to talk to. The couple of times we connected, the conversation flowed. We talked about everything around community management. There were several nuggets I got out of the conversation with her. I hope the group finds these helpful.
A key conversation we had was around internal adoption. Asha said that you must align with the Customer Success organization. When she said that, I told her that I am under that team, and she told me that I am in a super awesome spot! Customer Success Managers are the closest people to the customers. They have long lasting relationships and because of that, they can introduce them easily to the community. Customer Success Managers know who the potential super users are. Finding customers that are very excited about your product is gold.
When we spoke about content, we both agreed that Sales Engineers, Research, Technical Account Managers, Product Managers, Product Developers and Support can be great resources to get deep rich product information. I think that some of the moderators and experts will come from these places.
Lastly, Asha left me with this nugget and that was around the digital customer journey. She said, “If you do not have one, then put a simplified one together”. I just thought, great, that’s something else I have to do. I think it is highly important though. If you can understand the journey, you can then understand the destination on how build a great community. I will need to study some on that before I dive more into it!
Key nuggets from our conversations so far:
1. Figure out what your customer journey is digitally. If you don't have a customer journey, put a simplified one together.
2. When you focus on ideation connect with your product managers. They are the key for successful program when it comes to ideation
3. Creation of content should be everyone's job. Task SE's, Support, PM's and other smart people to come up with questions that are relevant to what customers are asking. Then have a pizza party for them to answer the questions on the Community!