With the rise of help centers, chatbots/virtual agents, automated diagnostic tools, and support staff, there’s growing confusion about where a community fits into the picture.

I’ve stopped being surprised by organisations that spend thousands, even millions, of dollars each year on a support community and then ask us to tell them why.

This raises some critical questions:

1) Who exactly does the community serve and how?

2) Why would a customer visit a community instead of simply using a growing number of other tools – often tools which are easy and quick to use?

3) What is the unique role of a support community in 2022?

The Golden Rule About Customer Support

Putting aside the (many) outliers, we can abide by a simple rule about how people (notably customers) will resolve any problem:

Like water, people will follow the path of the least resistance to achieve a goal.

Or, to put it more succinctly:

Your customers will follow the path of least mental effort to resolve their problem.

The goal of a support community is to reduce the level of mental effort to achieve their goal.

There are several very specific areas where a community does this better than any other channel.

But first, we need to understand how people resolve problems these days.

How People Resolve Problems In 2022

This diagram below is illustrative rather than comprehensive, but it gives a standard overview of how people resolve a product problem today.

First, people fiddle around with a potential problem for a few minutes (typically some variation of turning it off and on again).

Next, they go to a search engine and type out a phrase or two that best describes their problem. The search engine will hopefully either surface documentation or a community discussion that contains the solution.

If the search engine doesn’t provide an answer, the average person visits the company website and looks for a ‘contact us’ button to file a ticket.

Community Resolves The ‘Inbetween’ Questions

Community fills the gap between the problems which are common and can be easily solved by typing an answer into Google and those which require the responder to have insider expertise or the customer’s personal data to resolve.

You can see this in the example below

If the community didn’t exist, a lot of customers would have to expend a lot more mental effort (and potentially wait a lot longer) to have their problem resolved by support staff.

Or to put it in more financially viable terms:

A community reduces support costs, increases satisfaction (or NPS), and retains customers who would otherwise give up and seek an easier product to use.

And it does this by reducing the effort required to resolve the intermediate problems.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Simply Visit The Community?

It’s best to use a real-world example here.

Recently the left earbud of my Sony WX-1000MX3 earphones stopped working.

I didn’t visit the Sony website to find the answer because the website is huge and it feels like a lot of effort to navigate through to find the specific piece of information I needed. I didn’t visit the community because first I would have to find it and then I would have to navigate through it.

Most importantly, I couldn’t remember the name of the model of earphones I was using at the time. This is what we call an indescribable problem. Communities are also good places to go when you don’t know how to describe a problem.

It’s far less effort to type “left earbud of Sony earphones not working” and see what pops up.

Not only did Google retrieve the precise article I was looking for from the Sony support site, but it also retrieved walk-through videos others have shared as you can see below.

Why Don’t Community Results Show Up On Search?

They often do! Most traffic to most customer communities comes via search.

But most of the time this traffic is from queries that are too specific (or narrow) for a broad help center article to resolve.

For example, if you search ‘Sense Fitbit Sync Problem’, you get a generic help center article on Fitbit.

But if you’re more precise about your problem and search for ‘Sense Found But Setup Aborts’ you get a community search result.

This is again where the community fills the gap between the help center and support. If you know exactly what to search for, you might land on a result.

Likewise, if you don’t know what to search for, you might eventually ask in the community (as opposed to contacting a support agent and asking what your problem is).

The Single Biggest Driver Of Engagement In A Support Community

The single biggest driver of engagement in a customer community is the number of questions your audience has which lie in the mental effort gap between the help center and a support agent.

You can have a huge customer base with lots of questions, but if not enough of those questions fit within the gap above, the level of engagement in a community will be small (as the diagram below depicts).

This is helps explain why brands with similar numbers of customers can have very different levels of engagement.

Some simply have more ‘inbetween’ questions than others – questions which are too niche for support but don’t require personal data or insider expertise to resolve.

The (Occasional) Exceptions To The Rule

However, there are some exceptions here.

You might be targeting a specific audience (e.g. gamers) who would rather eat off their own arm than phone a support agent. They’re more likely to switch products than make the extra effort of resolving their problems.

There are other audiences/fields, like software developers, where the problem is part of the process of collaborating and learning together. It makes sense to visit a community first and collaborate on a new solution to the problem.

There’s also plenty of organisations that only provide support during working hours (the very hours ironically where people can’t spend 20 minutes on the phone trying to resolve their problem). In these situations, a community can provide 24/7 coverage as an added benefit.

But these are the exceptions, not the norm.

Implications Of The Customer Support Experience in 2022

This has implications which change how we think about and value a community. Going forward this is going to have several key implications for all of us.

1) Calculate the theoretical potential of the community. The estimates of engagement are typically wildly inaccurate. The best estimate of potential engagement is to take an (ideally large) sample of customer support queries and tag what percentage could theoretically have been answered by other customers. Then you can estimate the cost of resolving a support ticket and come up with a defensive estimate of the community’s potential value. You can measure this % later on to estimate the community’s potential impact.

2) The unique role of the community should be clear internally and externally. A lot of pain and confusion arises when colleagues and customers don’t really understand what a community is for. If you can clearly communicate to both groups the unique purpose and value of the community, everyone will benefit. You can use this to optimize your customer journey for example. In all of your customer onboarding materials (and on the site) it could be clear which questions go to which channel.

3) Your community should be laser focused on reducing the effort a visitor expends to find the result they want. I’m looking at you private support communities! This means reducing the complexity of information and the sense of ‘overwhelm’ a member might experience. Keeping the community tidy, well organized (properly tagged, good taxonomy, archiving old material), and ensuring information is up to date goes a long way here.

4) Cater to niche and indescribable problems. Don’t try to dominate generic search terms (i.e. ‘[x] isn’t working’). Far better to focus on getting answers to the niche questions (i.e. where someone knows the problem they’re getting answers to) and situations when someone doesn’t know what terminology to use to get an answer (the former is far more important than the latter).

Win The ‘Inbetween’ Questions

While some might dream that the community might one day replace the majority of support functions. This probably isn’t going to happen. Other tools are often the better option because they require less mental effort. There’s a danger in trying to be ‘just another support channel’.

Where community really shines is in solving the ‘inbetween’ questions. If you get a lot of ‘inbetween’ questions, then you should build a community to resolve them.

The value of answering a lot of ‘inbetween’ questions can be extremely high. If you don’t get a lot of these kinds of questions, then you might seriously consider if a traditional support community is the right option for you.

In one of my first consultancy projects (over a decade ago!), I interviewed two dozen members. The majority mentioned the community platform was ‘too cluttered’ and difficult to navigate.

My suggestion was to declutter it by “removing stuff”.

You can probably spot the problem. It’s a lot easier to make simple recommendations like this than to really get into the causes and solutions to clutter.

To declutter a community platform you usually need some combination of:

1. Undertake internal interviews to uncover why the site is cluttered in the first place (there’s usually competing internal interests).

2. Gather data on which areas are being clicked and why.

3. Interview members and use tools like hotjar to see how members progress through the community.

4. Use the above to prioritise every aspect/feature of the community.

5. Develop a criteria for which things can be removed and gain support for this criteria.

6. Identify the benefits of decluttering (i.e. what metrics will increase in exchange for the internal/external backlash you will get for removing areas of the community).

If you’re planning to improve your community by removing ‘clutter’, be warned clutter masks a level of complexity you need to dive into to reduce it.

P.s. Quick aside, 90% of the time, a ‘clutter’ problem is really symbolic of a ‘strategy’ problem. Sometimes stakeholders aren’t aligned on the value of the community so try to cater to multiple goals. Other times it’s not clear who the community is for and what each of those segments need.

Over the past decade, the steps we’ve used to increase retention of members have changed significantly. We’re using an entirely different toolbox with our clients now than we did ten (or even five) years ago.

On Jan 12, I’ll be hosting a free live seminar to share a case study in how we used new techniques to triple a client’s retention rates. Some of these steps might validate what you’re already doing. Others, I suspect, will give you new ideas and insights you can use.

• Who: Richard Millington (Founder, FeverBee)
• What: Tripling Member Retention Rates Webinar
• When: January 12, 2022 @ 5pm (UK), Noon (Eastern), 9am (Pacific)
• Where: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_f6TWAN2xQNmR8IiNcpeAtg

What Will You Learn

During this webinar, I’m going to take you step by step through the actions we undertook to achieve the results below.

You’re going to learn that the majority of things we tried didn’t work. This probably includes many of the actions you’re taking today.

You’re also going to learn what does work. You will learn what we did and in what order to achieve the results above.

You can sign up here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_f6TWAN2xQNmR8IiNcpeAtg

In my experience, it’s 10x harder for a brand to build a community about the topic than about the product. This is because you’re trying to create demand rather than satisfy demand. And creating demand is extremely hard.

Some organisations have succeeded here to various degrees (FitBit, Hubspot, and Monday.com spring to mind). But the successes are few and far between.

Yes, given the choice people probably do want to have industry-level discussions.

But (and this is a big but), why would they do it on your community and not Twitter? Why would they not do it on a platform which offers the maximum exposure with the least amount of effort? Why do it in a brand community where people will naturally be suspect of the brand’s motives vs. an independent community created by a passionate amateur?

It’s no surprise that the overwhelming majority of successful industry-related communities are founded by people without being employed by one of the major players in that industry.

This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, but it means you have to leverage your unique advantages and tell a very different story.

This might be a story about exclusivity. Perhaps only the top people get to join and participate in your community. But that story limits what the size of your community can be. Perhaps you tell a story about focusing upon a particular niche that is underserved at the moment. But, again, that has natural size limitations.

Or it might be a story about influence and making change within an environment that is being supported, but not led, by the brand. There’s no shortage of stories to tell.

But, trust me, just giving an audience another place to have these kinds of discussions won’t be enough to get them to visit. The competition is far too fierce for that.

See you in the new year.

I have a confession, I only began using Calendly this year.

Before that, my (fab) assistant Clare handled scheduling. The process seemed to work well enough, so I didn’t change it for 6+ years.

But once I switched to Calendly, I realised how cumbersome the previous process had been. I’d connect Clare with the person(s) I wanted to speak with and she would negotiate a time that worked for everyone. The back and forth took time.

Simply sending someone a link with all my (and my colleagues’) available times (which show up in the recipient’s time zone) reduces all this down to a click or two. In hindsight, it’s such an obvious move.

It makes you wonder what obvious moves you might be missing.

I recently recommended exploring a Zapier integration to an acquaintance. She replied, “I don’t have time to explore new tools”.

Understandable perhaps. But keeping your head down and ignoring the technology changes all around you is also a sure-fire way to become a digital dinosaur. Staying abreast of technological developments would appear to be a pretty important part of the community building process.

p.s. Maybe the reason you’re so busy is that you never invest the time to become more efficient?

About five years ago, I began to notice a trend in our follow-up calls with past clients.

About half the clients were executing on the majority of the strategy and half weren’t – one or two had hardly executed any of the strategies they had paid for (and enthusiastically approved).

So what was going on?

The answer was half didn’t have the systems in place to execute a strategy well.

They couldn’t turn the steps listed into the strategy into an immediate action plan (i.e. who will be doing what and when). No one was assigned to execute the tactics listed in the strategy by specific dates. And not only do you need to give the member accountability, but also the training, support, and confidence to ask for help when they need it.

Strategic success only happens when the strategy gets executed. We learned we had to not only complete the strategy but guide the implementation as well. This was such an important insight, in fact, that we made the final lesson of our Strategic Community Management all about execution.

I was reminded again last week just how important great execution is. If you make it a habit, you’ll reap the rewards.

Worrying if a platform migration might affect your search traffic is like worrying if changing schools will affect your childrens’ exam results.

It’s going to have an impact, for sure. But whether it is positive or negative depends entirely on where you move and how you move. The basics of redirects don’t need to be covered here, a few things to look out for though:

1) Ignore the first few weeks’ of data. In the initial months after a month, search data can fluctuate considerably. It often begins much higher (or lower) before reverting to a baseline. It’s that baseline that matters.

2) Category titles matter. If you change the category titles or move to (or from) a platform with URL friendly links (i.e. /topic/discussion-title) to/from one without (i.e. question/0D52J00008kXTjJSAW) expect a big change.

3) Watch out for images. Migrations tend to break images – lots of broken images aren’t good.

4) Watch out for thin content. Some platforms by default create multiple pages to convey information that a previous platform might have used just one. For example, where one platform might have a single profile page, another might have distinct pages for badges, messages, about me all connected to the profile page. This is known as ‘thin content’.

5) Subdomains vs. subfolders. There are differing opinions on this, but if you’re moving a community from a subdomain to a subfolder, you should expect a big impact and tread carefully. Subdomains are generally better for the user experience and organisation, subfolders are often thought to be better for SEO.

Either way, get experienced help and tread carefully.

I’m not a huge fan of using NPS to measure a community.

NPS is a (rather simple) tool to measure advocacy. But most communities aren’t designed for advocacy. It also has some rather obvious problems for some companies. It’s affected by too many variables outside of the community team’s control.

I prefer optimising for two related metrics.

The first is task completion rate. This is a simple pop-up (or top navigation survey bar) which asks members to answer three questions.

What brought you to the community? (drop-down list)
Were you able to complete your task? (yes/no)
If not, why not? (open comment box)

I’ve found this data infinitely more useful than any NPS measure.

You can also combine this with a CSAT score:

How satisfied were you with your community experience today? (1 to 5)

By combining this data you can start to see which topics and areas need the most improvement. It gives you both a standardized score you can work to improve each month and specific instructions of what to improve.

If you’re still stuck for what to measure, this would be a good place to start.

The majority of automation rule systems I’ve seen are an exercise in wishful thinking. They assume members are far, far, more interested in the community than they are (and don’t receive dozens, even hundreds, of emails per day).

More critically, they assume:

• Members want to go through a journey (and not just get information and leave).
• Members open emails they receive.
• Members read the emails they open.
• Members click the link to take action based upon the emails they’ve received.
• Members take the desired action after they’ve clicked on the call to action
• And members remember the emails they’ve received.

Looking at a couple of onboarding journeys at the moment, the click-through rate of a single email seems to vary between 0.5% and 3%. The odds of anyone successfully completing a 5+ email onboarding series are minuscule. Put simply, they’re not worth the time.

A better approach is to begin by mapping out the current journey (or journies) most members have (here’s an example). Now systematically go through each phase of that journey and look to optimise it stage by stage. The things that have the biggest impact are often in the areas you least expect.

In my experience, the biggest wins are in places like:

• Improving the technical SEO of the site.
• Reducing information required on the registration form (while adding affirmation messages).
• Ensuring members receive a fantastic response to their first post.
• Quickly ensuring newcomers find the most useful content in the community after joining.

It’s far better to improve the experience members are currently having than persuading them to have a different experience.