Why Are Most Community Experiences Still So Bad?
Perhaps the single biggest error in the design of most community experiences is a failure to properly understand who visits a community and why they visit.
Too many people still believe customers decide to visit the community, land on the homepage, and then browse around looking for interesting content and questions to answer.
I’ve undertaken hundreds of user experience calls and not a single person has ever highlighted anything close to that.
This mindset leads us to violating the number one principle of developing successful communities; relevancy.
In this post, I want to share who visits enterprise community experiences, their state of mind, and what you need to offer them when they visit.
Who Really Visits Enterprise Communities (And Why?)
For the enterprise communities hosted on a custom platform, we can split the journey into three tiers you can see here:
Let’s go through each group in turn.
Group 1: Problem Solvers
The first category is those information-seekers. This represents the vast majority of people who visit an enterprise community today.
They’re looking to resolve a problem with the product or service. While the below is a little dated in the world of AI, the most typical journey is shown here:
When designing the community experience, keep this journey in mind.
There are five key takeaways here:
The vast majority of visitors don’t land on your homepage. They land on a question/discussion page looking for an answer. If they don’t get the answer, they will then click on either related questions or visit the homepage. Which means they’re in a slightly frustrated/disappointed state of mind.
Invest resources into great search functionality and related discussions. The search functionality and whether related discussions appear alongside existing questions is more important than what’s on the homepage for the member experience. If members can browse a couple of responses they can soon get the answer.
You will soon need AI-generated summaries/agents. The introduction of chat-bot style AI agents and AI-generated summaries will also be helpful here. I suspect we will soon have more Coveo-style experiences where AI presents the best possible answer from information shared in the community and other sources
They need to easily see where they can file a ticket. They need to easily see on every page where they can file a ticket or contact the company for support if they are unable to resolve their problem. The goal for this group is to resolve their problem as quickly as possible.
Remove everything that gets in the way. This group doesn’t want to join groups, complete member profiles, sign up for newsletters, or receive badges. They just want to get the information as quickly as possible. So, eliminate every possible step in the onboarding journey to make that happen.
If you want to deliver the best experience, these are the five things which need to be present in the community today.
And since this represents the majority of visitors, these are the five things that should be a priority today.
Group 2: Casual Visitors
The second group are the people who click a link from somewhere they were exploring to find the community. This can include:
Invitations from their CSMs or an email to ‘join the community’ when they become a new customer.
Links from social media or mentions in the newsletter.
References or links from elsewhere.
This group is the one most impacted by your onboarding efforts and will take the time to explore areas of the community that other groups may not. However, this group also includes a large number of newcomers to the product. So we design with this in mind:
This includes:
Beginner-level expertise. This includes examples of the product in action, breakdowns, how-to guides, and equipment configuration recommendations.
Surprise value. Give this audience the surprise value discussions. This includes upcoming events, topical discussions, and new articles they can immediately use. Finding the best and most useful is more important than the most recent.
Finding people who can help. They may not have a specific question, but they’re open to finding people who can help them on their journey in the future (or simply people like themselves).
If you have an onboarding journey, this is what it should include: guiding them to the best articles, surprising them with unexpectedly useful information (that they can’t find elsewhere), and connecting them with peers in the same situation / possible mentors.
See: How FeverBee tripled a client’s retention rate doing just that
Again, this should represent just 5% to 10% of the primary real estate on a community experience. This information is primarily shared in the onboarding journey.
Earning trust: How do you earn the trust you need to deliver the message? If someone doesn’t know or trust you, it doesn’t matter what you say. That’s problem number one. How do you even get on the person’s radar?
Ensuring understanding: What’s the best way of describing the community? What’s the right metaphor, analogy, and comparison to use? How do you properly position in the minds of someone outside of this world?
Mitigating fear: How do you make the community seem less risky? This isn’t just about finding the words; it’s about making the community less risky to host for the organisation. Pre-empt the issues that can arise.
Boosting status: How can you align the community to raise the status of individual(s) involved in supporting the community? How do you make it easy for them to see themselves the way they want to be seen by saying yes to the community?
Generating Excitement: How do you make it fun to be involved with the community? When so many aspects of organisations are dull and stodgy, how can a community generate excitement and something people want to associate themselves with?
Only then do we get to the metrics, goals, and data side of things to demonstrate the community’s value to the business.
Group 3: Regular Participants
The final group are the beloved regulars.
This is the rare group which bookmarks the community or types the URL directly into the browser. They often visit due to digests and notifications in response to past discussions.
This group has three key desires.
They want to feel useful. They want to feel like they make a difference in the community by helping others.
They want to feel unique. They want to be appreciated for their own unique contributions and not as a general group. They need to be seen for who they are.
They want to feel connected. They want to have direct access to the community team they can contact with any questions and build relationships with other top members.
This is the group that progresses through the member motivation model, and where you have to gradually engage them by increasing their sense of competence, autonomy, and relatedness within the community.
In the vast majority of enterprise communities, it’s only the regulars who are really part of the community. They are ultimately the people who keep the community going by answering the majority of questions which arise.
From a design perspective, this means a community should include:
A list of unanswered questions to respond to. This should be easily accessible and visible from the home page (but not take up as much of the page as we believed in the past).
An easy means of finding past answers to questions. This is often overlooked but critically important – members need to be able to find and review past answers to questions.
Access to a private peer group with direct access to the community team. They need a direct line to the community team and the ability to engage with other regulars – typically in a private area inside the community or elsewhere.
What does this mean for building a modern community experience?
It means we need to ensure our communities are properly designed for the members we really have. You can see the overview below:
If you want to learn more about community design and optimising your site, sign up for the Strategic Community Management course.
Register For The Strategic Community Management Course
On July 28, we’re launching our Strategic Community Management course.
The Strategic Community Management course is designed to help you think strategically, not just tactically.
This course distils all the lessons we’ve learned working with the best community professionals in the world into a set of templates, models, and practical steps you can take to ensure you’re doing precisely the right things to create the best community you can.
This course covers:
How to diagnose your community and prioritise what you’re working on.
How to improve the community experience through great UX research.
When, where, and how to engage strategically in third-party platforms.
How to powerfully and effectively position your community in the minds of your members.
How to bring new communities, groups, and other initiatives to life.
How to optimise every aspect of your community.
How to gain and sustain internal support for your community.
The course will also include:
Five live workshop sessions will be taught by us (beginning on July 14).
Access to the templates and resources we use for our own clients.
Our entire video library of resources.
Feedback from myself and a community of learners.
The fee for this course is $750 – I think it’s a bargain.
