Community & Social

Communities and forums are more vital than ever.

Where's the proof? Go look at the gaming industry. Look at the credit & lending industry. Look at SaaS... They all invest heavily in teams and workflows for communities and social. Why? Because that's where customers live.

You've been hearing a lot about AI and agentic workflows lately. These new solutions, involving all forms of automation, need a physical place to "set up camp" -- a platform to capture the constantly updating data about your customers, their usage, their conversations, their needs, and so on. That's a community! 

Modern communities continue to be the top choice for bolstering your CRM, your AI (and thus your segmentation) with such information. Communities are an always-on solution. They are the engine that feeds AI, surveys, and digital automation.

Communities are the environment where a company's investment in trust finds its mirror. They provide data capture & sync to your CRM, support portal linkage, support deflection, and user profile notifications (which add to your eComm reach-out). 

No product is perfect. No customer is perfect. A modern community fixes this. Your customers have expectations for how they get treated in a 2025+ world, and communities are a huge part of that. It is a primary tool and profit lever in any company's suite of solutions. It is the first "non-product product" you should build for your customers. 

Who benefits?

Marketing & Lifecycle Teams: You may have the best GTM strategy, the best onboarding materials ever created, perfectly scaled and segmented 0-30-day adoption lifecycle emails, bolstered by SMS texting... But you still need a community. They are where demand generation, user engagements, and trust are in an endless feedback loop.

Sales Teams: 

B2B & Enterprise Sales Renewal Teams: 

eCommerce Teams:

Product Teams:

Customer Teams (CSMs, CX, etc): Modern communities provide secure, private communities for enterprise-level customers.

Community as a strategy

• One SSO for all user profiles, tied to their accounts in your CRM.
• Private (NDA-verified) user communities for beta & alpha testing.
• Private (NDA-verified) user communities for B2B customers, which can be paid upgrades as part of a Premium Support model.
• Public user communities for each product.
• Numerous communities for users in D2C, SMB, and B2B.
• Semi-private forums for bug tracking, support escalations, and offline chatter.

Support Deflection

• Peer-to-Peer: Customers can ask questions and receive answers from other users or experts without waiting for formal support. 
• Shared knowledge: Community members often share best practices, use cases, and workarounds that may not be in official documentation.

Retention

• Increase footprint of Lifecycle Campaigns: Higher open rates and retention rates for lifecycle team promotions and campaigns.
• Tie Community data directly into your CRM. In fact, having your Community sign-up REPLACE your subscription account sign-up is a key trend now, because it forces participation. 

Enablement

• Onboarding Content: Whether using a formal Knowledge Base or an Enablement Hub, communities are where introductory marketing emails can point to FAQs, guides, tutorials, and troubleshooting tips. 
• Feed Google with "Living Documentation": Unlike static documentation, community content evolves dynamically as products and use cases change.

Engage!

• Sense of belonging: Being part of a community builds emotional ties to the brand.
• Active participation: Engaged customers are more likely to continue using the product and advocate for it.

Product Teams

• Direct feedback loop: Communities give customers a platform to suggest features or report issues. 
• Early warnings: Trends in complaints or bugs can alert Customer Success or Product teams to widespread problems.

Data Capture

• Behavior tracking: Engagement levels in the community can indicate customer health or churn risk. 
• Cohort & Persona building: Helps Customer Success teams better understand user types and tailor outreach.