You Can’t Ship Your Way Out of an Adoption Problem: Community Leaders on Digital CS

[Speaker 3]
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to our session. Excited to be here. So I'm VP of Education Strategy at Gainsight.

My name is Samantha Murray. I oversee our learning products and solutions at Gainsight. So that includes the Skilljar platform and Gainsight CE.

I am joined today by Lisette Bull, Senior Program Manager of Community at Jamf, as well as Lizzie Hipkins, Senior Community Manager at Google. I want to talk today about some of what Chuck shared in the keynote this morning. So you heard Chuck talk about the diffusion gap, right?

And this concept that we are shipping new product innovation at breakneck speed, and the problem is no longer shipping features. It's actually getting people to adopt those features. And that problem, to be clear, is not new.

We all know this in this room, right? We've always had this challenge of getting people to adopt the products, the features, the solutions that we're shipping, but that problem has 10xed because of the speed at which we are now shipping product innovation. And so one of the ways that we can solve for that challenge is through digital customer success.

Community, learning programs, content orchestration, you name it, we have the opportunity to close that diffusion gap through the programs that we run. So very excited to dig into this conversation with our two experts today. To kick us off, why don't you tell us a little bit about the basics of your community program?

So how long has it been around? What's the size and scale of the program, and what types of programs are you running today?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, you Lisa. So I work for a company called Jamf. So we are a tech company that focuses on creating software that allows companies to manage, secure, and AI govern their Apple devices en masse.

So we have a large online global community of over 160,000 members. And then we have smaller subset communities within that, such as our advocacy community and our user group program. It did start as a newsletter actually like 20 years ago, but it's been in a format of a community for the last five years.

[Speaker 3]
20 years, that's wild. All right, how about you, Lisa?

[Speaker 2]
So our companies aren't too distant from each other. Just an enemy. Not an enemy, my gosh.

[Speaker 3]
Frenemy.

[Speaker 2]
Definitely not an enemy. But yeah, I run the Android Enterprise customer community. And we have a shorter history in that we're about three years old.

And our main reason for starting the community was that we were hearing that a lot of people wanted to speak directly to us. And it was a little bit difficult because we are seen as quite a large company. And we wanted to speak directly with customers as well.

We're a very partner-led team, and so we do a lot through with partners, including like Jeff. So we launched the Android Enterprise customer community like three years ago. But since then, we have launched other products which sit well aside Android Enterprise, which is people who use Android devices for work.

And so now we have four product communities underneath our umbrella, which includes Chrome OS, Cameo, and most recently Chrome Enterprise, which is a browser.

[Speaker 3]
Thank you. Before we get too far deep into the weeds, I should mention, if you have questions, if you can go into the Pulse app under track four. Those of you that were sitting in this room, you already know the drill.

But under track four, you can submit your questions through Slido, and I'll be able to pick those up at the end. There will be an audience Q&A towards the end of our session. OK, so what purpose does community serve at your company?

We all know that community can serve the purpose of ticket deflection, adoption. There's a whole bunch of different reasons why we might launch a community program. What purpose does it serve at your company?

[Speaker 1]
So for us, we never started as a ticket deflection platform. That was never the goal. We're really fortunate in that one of our values has always been the company to give customers a sense of belonging and a place where they can come and troubleshoot and network with their peers.

So it's never been about ticket deflection for us, actually. As it's grown and as we've looked at different ways of bringing new initiatives and bringing other teams across the org, we now work closely with our education teams, our training teams, our product teams, and working together with our CS teams as well as we move forward. But yeah, it's quite unusual that for a tech company, it was never about ticket deflection.

Naturally, it does that, though, because a lot of our customers will come for help and to self-soothe and support one another.

[Speaker 3]
Before I jump to you, Lizzie, just a follow-up question. So if it's not about support ticket deflection, what do you point to as evidence that your community is actually working?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, so a lot of it is before the AI came into it, a lot of it was looking at how we could prove our ROI, which has always been famously very difficult in community. But now we work so close with other teams and we use AI as a way to measure. So we look at how can we prove out the value of a customer that's in community or part of our advocacy community versus not part of it at all, and how does that impact her and how does that impact ARR?

So we look at it and measuring it in different ways, but we're really fortunate that our company really values the sentiment that you can get from community as well. So because we don't look at it from ticket deflection, it means that we can be creative in the other ways that we do look at it. And at the moment, it's through initiatives that we drive to foster connection and belonging with our community.

Amazing.

[Speaker 3]
And we'll get into the metric stuff in a little bit as well. Lizzie, how about you? What purpose does community serve at Google?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, so I mentioned that we lead a lot through working with our partners. And so they would still be very much the first place to go to with any help questions. So we're not there to replace that at all.

So what do we actually create in the community? We do, as you've mentioned, we have people who come and ask questions. But more at the operating level, maybe features which are core to the product of Android.

And then we've built community programs around feedback and really pushing best-in-class programs and actually building those relationships. So we have a NDA area within our community, which is like our advisory board. We have a lot of in-person events where we have roundtables and feedback sessions.

But we also then move that onto the community platform so that we can speak to people throughout the year. And we've also, late last year, we introduced the Trusted Testers. We call it an insiders area, where we're starting to get features where we can either help people through something that's just gone GA, or we're hearing it just before it's going out.

So they've been through all the different other areas of the community. So we've really worked with our product team and other stakeholders to build this end-to-end flow where the community can help to give their voice to all these features that they're using on a daily basis.

[Speaker 3]
Fantastic segue into our next topic of adoption. So as I was mentioning earlier, we all know that community can be a significant driver of adoption. But I'm curious how you're actually leveraging the community, and more specifically the programs within your community, to focus on driving adoption.

Is that I know in our prep call, you mentioned that you had launched, I think, product office hours recently. So how is that going? And what are you seeing so far in terms of the impact that it's having on adoption?

[Speaker 1]
Yes, so for context, we launched a new product in the summer. And it was a massive area of interest and push for our company. So our CEO actually came to us and said, we want to, how can we get this in front of customers, basically?

And earlier in the year, I've been developing something called product office hours. But I just hadn't given it enough effort and thought. But when your CEO asks, you ship it straight away.

So within two weeks, we had launched a product office hours. So basically now, every Thursday, we have a live call, Q&A, where we bring in senior leadership and product teams and product leaders to have an open dialogue with our customer base. It's open to everybody.

Anyone can join, customers, partners, competitors. It's truly open to anybody. And this really allows us to have our customers feel really heard and recognized, give them FaceTime, which is so valuable, and something that they can't source through AI.

They can't go and search from it. It gives them that human connection. And it makes them feel really valued because they have a really active voice that we can then use.

And we can use that feedback that we receive that goes back into our product teams to then iterate and innovate moving forward. But we also look at what are the other areas of adoption. So it means that if we have need areas, we can really complement the content and the themes with the need areas that we have as a business.

So every week, because the theme changes, it means we can really focus on what that adoption looks like. So at the moment, it's been started in August. We are looking at, at the beginning, it was really just to get traction and build traction.

And as we move forward, we're now working closely with the product teams to understand what that looks like from an adoption lens, how we influence it. But again, it's not necessarily the key area, but certainly something we will report on because we know how much it can influence the scope and the exposure of the different tools and products that we have, and how our customers will embrace those and begin to adopt more of the different features.

[Speaker 3]
Lizzie, you mentioned just in your previous response around this program, I guess, the concept of if something is launching, pulling the community together, and giving, I guess, early access or something along those lines, how does that help to drive adoption? And what about the feedback loop that you get back into the product for continuous iteration of product innovations?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, I think the idea is, as I mentioned, is to be able to start throughout the whole of the process of the lifecycle of products. It doesn't have to be like that. But using the general public side of the community to do pull surveys and things, which might be a bit more anonymous at a very high level.

And then we can start getting into the nitty gritty with all the other programs that we have. So when it gets to the GA stage or early adopter stage, there shouldn't be too many surprises at that point. And then we're actually introducing a new learning training area with SkillJar before Christmas.

And that's gonna be the other bit of the journey so we can go into the really early stages if you're just starting out with a product to actually just the new products that are going on and actually getting feedback that way on how people are finding these features. And can we use that feedback also to help to talk to other people about how you might wanna use the feature. So I think all of it, the community voice can go through all these different lenses of how you build a product out.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah, I think it's so underrated to be able to leverage community as a drive. Like the context that comes from another community member in terms of how they're using a feature, a product, right? And to hear, to be able to have that opportunity to hear from another community member, I think is an underrated lever that we can pull to drive adoption.

And it's so underused, I think, in our community spaces.

[Speaker 1]
Peer-to-peer exposure is so valuable.

[Speaker 3]
Yeah, what about the connection to learning? I mean, you just mentioned the introduction of some learning programs. How do you anticipate being able to leverage some of your learning programs in your community to drive product adoption?

[Speaker 2]
Well, I think, because we've got lots of different programs now, and I think everyone learns in a different way. And so we're not gonna be like, oh, you know, just read all these guides. But that might be perfect for someone, you know, just independent.

So we're trying to kind of give different ways for people that they can interact with our features and our products or get involved. So I think learning is just a big part of that. And making the community and our programs as accessible as possible.

We've just launched AI translation to kind of widen that a little bit and allow more people to be able to feel like they're part of the community as well. So I think information is something where there's so much out there. But I think with all our programs, with the difficulty and also something we're looking at is just how do they all flow together?

Even if you don't do all the bits of it, how do you get that continuity between the information you share, whether it's in the community or whether it's other customer resources like help centers and who knows all the things that you've got. Yeah.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, very similar. We recognize that everybody comes to community for a different reason and they digest information in different ways. So for us, we are looking at the moment of integrating SkillJar with our Gainsight instance.

And we're working on that at the moment. So that'll be really good to have that as more of a cohesive experience for our customers. But regardless, we ensure that they can get to any of the resources they need within the community.

So we'll have the product office hours, which allows when they prefer to join those types of calls and learn in that way. We've got video content that they can consume. We've got the written resources that they can get to, or we've got an entire training page actually where our training team actively work.

They write blogs every single month about the training experience so that people can learn and they can have information that resonates with them and they can engage with what they want. But from a learning perspective, yeah, we are working on having that integration, which I think will be really good.

[Speaker 3]
I mean, a little biased, but no, I'd love to see it. Lizzie, I wanna call back to something that you just mentioned, which is like the overwhelm, I guess, of information. There is so much information out there.

I think we're all probably facing some of this challenge within our own organizations. Content is being created all over the place. Various teams are building some form of content or another that they're trying to get in front of customers.

And it can be quite overwhelming for, as a user, to try to figure out what is relevant to me, what is accurate versus what is noise, where do I need to focus to actually move the needle on what I'm trying to do? So when you think about personalizing the experience for your end user, how do you personalize that experience within the community to allow them to self-serve with relevant information that's useful for them and their objectives?

[Speaker 2]
So I think I've probably said some of this already, but I think making it clear where certain information lies. And it's not just in the community. I remember when we first started thinking about launching a new community, and we had a help center on one platform, we had a solution directory on another platform, we had the website, and we were introducing a new platform.

And I think, realistically, it wasn't possible to put everything in one place. And it was gonna take time if it was gonna happen. But I think one of the functions that we did was, why do we have this here?

And if everything has got a place and it hasn't, then the way that you write the content in and display the content in those areas makes sense to the user, and hopefully also to the people who are writing it. So I think when we thought about the community having federated search and bringing that to one place if you wanted to have it there, that was really helpful. And yeah, and then I think it goes back to just having that continuity of when you're launching a product, how do you then link it up with other programs that you're launching if they wanna go further?

If they don't wanna go further, that's all cool. They've got what they need to, they might come back in a couple of months or something. But I think it's just having that clear vision.

And I think when you're building it, it gives you a bit of a clarity on what do we do here? How do we make the experience for everyone as best as possible?

[Speaker 1]
Anything to add? I think personalization is a really interesting thing at the moment because I think as people, we've got really comfortable with everything being personalized to us, like algorithms, like Netflix knows what we like, Spotify knows what we like. And I think there are ways that I'd love to be really innovative in our community to have things be personalized that we don't currently have.

But I think for us, it's easy to send a newsletter with somebody's name on, but that's not necessarily personalization. I think for us, we try and not be necessarily quite so granular and instead look at it like you. It's like, what is that cohesive experience for them?

How can we ensure that we are meeting people in the ways that they need and ensuring that there's enough content or experiences or initiatives or programs that can engage and relate to people with what they want from the community? So it's less about thinking of the individual and more about how can we ensure that there is something for everyone in some capacity.

[Speaker 3]
One of the challenges, though, that I think I've personally experienced in leading these teams is the, like you mentioned, the seamless experience that we're trying to create, but the reality behind the scenes inside our organizations is that it's hard because we don't always have the same reporting structure. Community might not ladder up into the same leader as education. Knowledge base is sitting in a different part of the organization.

And so how do you think about creating those relationships and getting the buy-in organizationally to be able to drive that seamless experience externally?

[Speaker 1]
It's critical to get your internal buy-in and I don't suggest that that is easy at all, but it is the most important thing that I do. So for me, to quote Hamilton, I like to be in the room where it happens. So I join meetings.

I join meetings that seem completely removed from what I do, but then I can understand what their need areas are and I listen more than I contribute. But I also go to different sides of the org and I find out what their KPIs are. What do I do that matters to them?

So if it's a CSM and they are KPI'd on churn, well, I'm gonna tell you that churn, being in the community, will reduce churn by five times the normal rate. So I can encourage them and I get the buy-in that matters. If it's executive level, then it's the ARR.

So what are we doing that positively impacts? And what I mentioned before, we're looking at that comparison between if you're in the community versus not. How does that impact their ARR growth and upsell?

Or if we're trying to tap into certain regions, well, we can have user groups there that will actually foster connection and community and learning for us on our behalf. So I just try and learn the different ways I can appeal to different people and really try and flex my communication style. You don't always get buy-in immediately.

Quite often, you don't. It's really just perseverance. I annoy myself with how often I appear in their meetings, but it works.

You just have to grind them down.

[Speaker 3]
I mean, I've always said that advocacy- I just advocate for myself. It's an internal job just as much as it is an external job with the customers. If you're in advocacy in any kind of community or advocacy program, it's just as much an inside job as it is external.

[Speaker 1]
You become your own ambassador. And then you find people that become ambassadors for you internally, and then you get the in because they really like it and they celebrate it. And you're like, they just did my job for me.

That's fantastic. So it's just finding those people. That's how I do it.

How do you approach it?

[Speaker 2]
I think, listen, I find this really interesting because I think it changes over time as your community grows as well. Because if you start off with a very young community, it's quite hard to get buy-in. Obviously, hopefully you're building it and you've got buy-in from some people, or else it's very hard to launch it.

But I think over time, it should, in a way, become easier, theoretically, to get more buy-in. But I think there's something, as you said, like it's the constant kind of, I think often sometimes it's easy for people to get an idea about what a community is. And maybe it's like, oh, it's just like lots of help questions and stuff like that.

So I like to send, if someone has created like a user-generated guide or something on like his bug, how to do bug testing or something, or like, I made a pizza at the weekend and it's got an Android face on it. It's got, someone did sushi and it had an Android logo and it's like, it's brilliant. So I send those to like the engineering team sometimes.

I'm like, happy Friday, look at this guide. So that people kind of just generally hear about the community in all different types of ways. I think it's just like constantly popping up in a varying degree of fashions, really.

But there is one story, like what you were saying about like other people doing it. Some colleagues of mine, they've done a very good job of like presenting the community to some of their stakeholders. One of them's in the room here.

And I was at a summit recently and I was on a table at lunch. And they, without prompting, knowing who I was, they started presenting the community to their customers. And it was so interesting because you then hear how they would frame the community and they did a way better job than I did.

So I was like, right, I'm noting that down. Also, here's a flyer. So yeah, it's really interesting to see how people do it.

[Speaker 3]
Like, you know community is working when your community members are actively promoting the community. Like that's evidence that it's working. How do you quantify that for your executive team though?

[Speaker 1]
We're working on this at the moment because I'm really curious about gauging sentiment across the different areas that our customers show up. For us, for an executive level, we will show it from, we will look at the metrics that they care about. We'll look at it from a growth, from a churn perspective.

We'll go quite granular with that. And then we'll share to the executives that we know have a lot of buy-in. We will share some of the sentiment that is shared.

But it is, it's the hardest part of it is to prove out the value of the advocacy that is done on your behalf. It's really easy if you have a references program, for example, because you can quantify that. Which I would definitely recommend having.

But yeah, it is a lot harder with sentiment. You just have to have leaders that care about it or find the ones that do, in my experience.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, and I think it's like there are, so one of the things about when we release a feature, one of the nicest things that I like is that we can almost get feedback like straight away. And if we're, you know, I said we were partner-led. So normally getting feedback from a customer might have to then go back to the partner.

Then they would have to share it to us and then, yeah, but actually for like internal emails where you're like, hey, we just launched this feature. Oh, here's some community like quotes here as well. Like it's really impactful.

And they go, ah, great, it's so nice. And people spent months and years building these features. To have instant feedback is really, really powerful.

But they're little things, aren't they? They all kind of add up to each other. Yeah.

[Speaker 3]
I think this is one of the things that excites me most about some of the new capabilities that we've released at Gainsight, the MCP capabilities specifically, the instantaneous feedback that you can get via the MCP to understand sentiment on new features. It's just like we've never had access to this level of tangible information so quickly. And to be able to give that back to the product team on behalf of the community is just a really exciting opportunity, I think.

Okay, speaking of AI. Let's talk about what you're leveraging AI for on the community and what you're actively deciding not to AI-ify. That's not a word.

We're gonna make up words. It is now. It is now.

Yeah, what do you use AI for and what are you not using AI for?

[Speaker 2]
Oh, okay, okay. So I think we're trying to be quite thoughtful about what we kind of turn on and do. Some things, we just need some time to actually just look into it to work out.

So that's kind of in one pile. I think immediately, the stuff which is, as a community manager, I'm hoping you guys will agree, there's a lot of jobs that have always been quite laborious to do, very slow, kind of manual jobs. I think AI can be really helpful kind of partner there to help hopefully give a community manager a bit more time to actually just do relationship building and or talking behind the scenes or planning and stuff like that.

So I think that's a really good advantage. And from actual feature perspective, we recently turned on AI translations. I think we've got about six or seven languages, but we did test those quite a lot beforehand and we are testing things like Japanese at the moment.

We haven't released that one yet because I think there are some things that you really don't want it to be quite wild when you release it. So there's things where we are like deliberately going, hey, this is gonna make it easier for people to just interact with our content. So those will become more priority.

But yeah, I think there's a lot of things that could help also with internal messaging. Writing reports internally is quite time consuming. So if there's a way that you can use AI to bring all that information and then even if you're rewriting it, but it can feel like a long time if you're summarizing things.

So I think it can help just be a really good assistant there and then maybe even like do creative ways. You could do a video on the results in your community rather than just kind of always report based. So I think it opens up the gates.

But I think it's also like getting that balance because we're also staying away a little bit from any helping me to write content at the moment. But I think it's something that's gonna come up more as members use AI to write their answers and how do we deal with that. Sorry, one other thing is that safety in the community, like foundations of when people come in.

If there's a way that can kind of be the first barrier against spam and I think, yeah, we use that as well.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, we, because of the size of our open community, we have to have AI spam moderation on. It's chaos without it. So we definitely use AI from a spam and user profile generation perspective.

We don't use it for any content and I can't see that happening. Why is that? I think we're fortunate in the fact that a lot of our content is generated by our users and they respond to one another.

So in terms of the content we have to put in, of course, we'll maybe use it to sharpen our text or improve my grammar. But we don't, it's unlikely we would take the human out of it because I think that's an area that they're so passionate about. So even if I put content on, for example, I'll sometimes just leave an error in because I'd rather like, because sometimes they'll come, they'll, I'll post something, say I want to do a Kahoot quiz or something, they'll be like, that's AI slop.

So then I'll just put an error in and they'll all come to me and say, I did it wrong. I'm like, well, a human wrote it. And I'd rather have that human piece of it.

And they really want that too. So it's just unlikely we'll ever use it for that. We definitely have used it for data cleansing.

So because we've had so like, it's been live or had a version of it for so long that we've done it for like duplicative text or archiving things. We've used it for more of a data cleanse. But it, yeah, it's unlikely we'll ever use it for content.

But that depends on how the content progresses and the different things we want to use for it. But in terms of writing those posts, it's unlikely we will.

[Speaker 3]
Let's talk a little bit about the things that will deliberately remain human. I think during the keynote, you all heard Chuck mention at the end there that the human connection piece is the most critical. It's the thing that doesn't go away.

As the world turns more and more agentic, the human connection element is what becomes so, so, so critical. And I myself, just in speaking with prospects and customers, I see so regularly, almost like a resurgence of in-person community-based events, like meetups, et cetera. So are you seeing the same thing inside your organizations?

And if so, how are you leaning into that so that you can foster that human connection?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, massively, actually. So we actually just had our equivalent of Pulse in the US last month. And we had a survey at our community booth that surveyed hundreds of people to ask them how they like to communicate.

And they had an option of five. They could pick two. And 63% said they want in-person.

That's how they like to communicate is in-person, followed by Slack, followed by user groups, which is perfect because we can build for that. We already have a user group program in place. In terms of Slack, some of you have maybe had this yourself.

A lot of people now communicate in Slack versus your community. That's actually okay because we can look at, with our community, how we can provide value that they can't source elsewhere. So that's just a learning for us.

And then in-person allows us to look at, okay, where can we show up? Where can we be visible? Where can we add on visibility and community events to our larger communities, or go to some of the events that they, where our customer base is?

But we recognize that's not always affordable either for our budgets or our customers' budgets. So we're really utilizing our user groups because they're peer-led. We have 78 around the world, but they basically nurture the community for us and they allow people to meet in person, which means that we are ticking those boxes and allowing people to meet and to connect in the way that they want.

And then we also asked them in that survey how, what kind of topics they wanted to connect on or what they want to talk about. We gave them, I think, eight options. I think we could pick three.

And I think over 50% said professional development and growth. So now we can look at how we build that into our community with our professional development series. They wanted product information or AI integration.

I can do that in product office hours. Or, but that also means that we can look at how we can integrate that into our user group meetings so we can arm the user group leaders with the content, the conversations, the speaker catalog of those topics so that we can nurture the community and encourage them to meet in the way that they want to all year round without us necessarily having to have as high a lift.

[Speaker 3]
Sure. I mean, I love the, like, again, not to keep going back to the learning piece. I'm biased, but the professional development is so important.

I think another underrated area that we don't leverage enough, connecting education and the community together because so many of us are going through a massive transformation in our roles right now. Our roles are being disrupted. Where do you turn to when your role is being disrupted and you don't know how to navigate the new expectations?

You go to your community. You go to your peers. You band together and you figure it out together.

And so I think having those two things interconnected with one another is so critical. Lizzie, how about you?

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, I mean, we've had some recent events. We have a couple of events currently at the moment per year, but we, and when we see them, it's like old friends, people coming together. Actually, we were in one in the U.S. in the summer, and yeah, I was like, where are all our members? And other members were telling, oh, we've just seen them. We just hung out with them and stuff. So yeah, it's really, really nice.

It's definitely easier to kind of jump like five steps in a relationship when you meet in person, I think. But I think it's, yeah, from a logistical point of view, it's not always that easy. Budgets are getting tighter.

So I think it's just like when you do come in to meet in person, how do you make that really, really significant to people and worth their time? Because yeah, everyone's very busy. So we try and move some of that, like carry on the conversations onto the community.

So as you're saying, having that connection between the online, the offline, the training, this is why we're really focusing on building this continuity between all of our programs. So that if you can't go to that meetup this time, you can still participate and get value from the conversations that are happening outside. Sure, yeah.

[Speaker 3]
All right, well, speaking of providing value for in-person events, you all came here to ask your own questions to our experts. And so I'd love to turn it over to the Q&A, if we can, and we'll get to some of our live audience questions from all of you.

[Speaker 4]
Oh, fun.

[Speaker 3]
Okay, let me take a look at what we've got here. I'm gonna go with the third one there. Have you leveraged community to run onboarding programs with new customers?

And if so, what does this look like? Do you have one, two?

[Speaker 4]
Have either of you done this?

[Speaker 1]
Yes, so we're actually working on this at the moment. When we definitely have community integrated in certain parts of their onboarding experience, even internally, actually, we have it as part of their onboarding experience, and externally, from a partner and customer perspective, we have it mentioned, but it's actually an area that I'm focusing on within Q4 and Q1, is looking at how are we integrating that? Because we know that if you capture a community member quickly within their experience, if you harness them in the community, they're more likely to stay.

You increase that stickiness, and they understand the value. Also, you can avoid them getting stuck in a troubleshoot trap, or a ticket trap, when they need help, and they just don't know where to source it. And you can't always rely on your colleagues and your CSMs to do that for you, because they forget, and it's not in the forefront of their head, their brain, all the time.

So for us, we will be looking at where community comes into onboarding. I think it's really important for it to exist in onboarding, but come back to me in a quarter. Find me on LinkedIn and ask me how I did it.

I'm curious.

[Speaker 2]
Yeah, and I think getting started, it's such a varied period of time. So you could be just researching, or you could be pretty far in that journey. So I think we've been looking at how do we do this across our resources?

And actually, that's gonna be one of the first things that go into our learning area, because we've done so much documentation about it, but actually, it might be easier to consume it through a training course than just reading documentation. So I think we're trying to just have it so that it's in a lot, that information finds people in the logical journey that they might be doing, and it might be in very, very different places. Right.

[Speaker 3]
One of the things that we actually did at Gainsight recently, in working with our own digital customer success team, we just developed a net new onboarding program for a new product that we released, connecting across learning, our community, as well as in-app experiences using our own tech stack. Obviously, we like to drink our own champagne. This is a very, very new product and a new onboarding program for us, but the results so far have been phenomenal, because for the first time, we're able to actually connect the dots across not only these programs that we're running, but more importantly, they're all triggered based on how a user is interacting with the product, like inside the product.

And so our user group is exclusive to these new customers that we've onboarded. They have a space to be able to ask questions. We're in there providing new guides constantly.

And so far, the results have been phenomenal. It's unfortunate, the team who actually built this, they were talking about it in the same time slot. Otherwise, I would have said, go check it out, but if you can check out the recording from Shruti, incredible program, and she shares the results that we've seen from this program.

So highly recommend checking out the recording if you've got time. Okay, let's go with a question for Lisette. Can you talk a bit more about the practicalities of the product office hours, and how it works so it's not a product presentation?

How do you moderate it and get the audience actually engaged?

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, so the actual practicalities of it. So it's all, I mean, I'm gonna go so in the weeds. It's set up on Zoom events, which was a learning.

So it's every Thursday, by basically the way I approach it, so that I can manage any fall through any issues, which actually hasn't happened, but I announce the theme every single week in Jamf Nation in our wider community. We have a page specifically dedicated to it that they can subscribe to. So every week, the theme and the speakers are released.

And then after each session, I use AI very transparently to get together the transcript because we recognize that not everybody can be present, and we want to ensure that it's also searchable and that content and that information is available. So I use Q&A and I drop it into that thread after every week as well. But in terms of the, so it's not just a product presentation and how do you moderate it and the audience get engaged?

So the content, we really allow flexibility. So we had our CEO just dropped in the other week. So I had to flex on like in the moment and just have that Q&A and that Q&A.

But I basically allow, I set some parameters and we know that the things that get our customers really excited is demos that they're able to show. So anything behind the scenes, any personal opinions from leaders and product teams, we know are really engaging. I generally will say it's a 45-minute session every week.

I'll say 20 minutes, try and fill with some content, whether that's just showing them something behind the scenes or talking to something. And then we allow, naturally we allow Q&A throughout. So that actually draws out and then we ensure we have some time at the end for Q&A.

So some of it will be, it depends on the person and the character. I'm very flexible with people that come in. I just try and give them suggestions of how they can practice it.

And then it's kind of, I'll intro and outro the session or one of my team members will if I'm not available. So we have an advocacy group. So if you have an advocacy group or a super user group, utilize them, get them to join because they will start the conversation and they are so helpful to us because they will come in, they'll ask questions.

I'll always start with an icebreaker. And it's never, from my perspective, it's not cringe because it'll be something I'm thinking of that day and I'll just ask them openly and we'll have a conversation just to get it flowing. So generally it's, sometimes it does feel like you're pulling teeth and other times it's really nice and you just have to go ebb and flow with each week and see how it lands.

But we're fortunate that we do engage really closely with our super users, our advocacy program. So they do really help with the engagement but we're seeing new people come in and that is so rewarding. Seeing them comment and seeing them engage and ask questions has been brilliant.

With the moderation, sometimes I just have to tell them that's the end of that, we won't be continuing that discourse or that thread. It rarely actually happens. Normally I give them community guidelines at the beginning and I make them stick to it.

And that's the way I manage it. Awesome.

[Speaker 3]
There's a couple of questions.

[Speaker 1]
I was like, where's that? No, I was like, do you think that?

[Speaker 3]
There's a couple good questions in here that I'm gonna sort of combine together. So one of them, what's the ratio of content created by your organization versus the content that's created by your members? Then balancing community input with official knowledge base.

So what is coming out from your organization versus what you rely on members to create? And then what's the interconnection with knowledge base help center in terms of where you put the content that your teams are creating?

[Speaker 2]
So I think you've got to keep an eye on this because if you swamp your community too much with the content that you're doing, it's a bit of an echo chamber of your own self. So I think it is always a constant balance and as your community grows, you can increase it or decrease it. And I think it's also like what type of content you're giving as well.

Because I think if there's things like release notes, then people are gonna probably want release notes. But if it's like more engagement pieces, then you've got to find that balance really. And I think all communities are different.

Regarding the help center knowledge base, I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier. And I think it is good to define how you talk or what information goes in each. And then there's clear boundaries in terms of like how you write content and where you share it.

And I think it's been easier also for internal teams to go, oh, I need a help center article on this. But I think it's also, we have this internal process that we have around like launch documentation. And it kind of triggers off all these kind of like journeys for different content that's created.

But sometimes it will only need a community article, blog article, or it will only need a help center article. So I think, yeah, just having those boundaries on like where it should live at the beginning will help you a lot.

[Speaker 3]
I'll flip to you just to like focus on the other part of this question. I think that was implied by this person asking this question. No, that's fine.

There are lurkers inside our community, right, that never actually post. So like how do you balance creating all of the content versus kind of setting the expectation with your community members that like it's for you guys. And so you all need to be asking the questions and posting and sharing with one another.

[Speaker 1]
Yeah, I think we're in quite a fortunate place as I'd say that 80% of our content is created by the users. But that doesn't mean that they're always answered. And so then we will have to come in and maybe tag people to answer.

Or we just, I was mentioning to you earlier, we had a new product, that product that launched during the summer. And when questions came up, we knew that adoption hadn't yet, it wasn't yet fully exposed to all of our customer base yet. So we knew that we wouldn't necessarily get an answer.

So then I bring in our product teams or engineering teams to come in and answer those questions. So a lot of it is generated by our customer base and I have forgotten the rest of the question.

[Speaker 3]
How do you combat the lurkers? Just lurkers. Oh, the lurkers, I think they just lurk.

[Speaker 1]
I think, yeah, so like, so like we have, we have like, I think it was something like on average, like 700,000 viewers each month, like page views each month. They're not in there logging in at all by any means. But I think for us, I went to this conference last week and it was really interesting the way that they spoke about it.

And I do agree is that you can see the tide go out and that's maybe the lurker is just not really engaging, not logging in. And you feel the need to chase it when actually you need to look at, you need to stay on the, stay on the, by the coastline. Work out what you're doing, see your value in that and pursue the value in that because they will come back.

And if you're looking, if you're ensuring that you are providing initiatives or programs that can meet them with the need areas they have, they're gonna come back when they have a need and when they want to. We cannot always make the lurkers commit to something. What we can do is ensure that we create little windows until they find the door they wanna walk through and stay.

And I think it's really important that we don't just chase and we stay true to what we're looking at. We be creative, we be innovative, but we also recognize that we can't control the lurkers all the time. We can just try and build for keeping them coming back.

[Speaker 2]
And if you turn lurkers into readers, that sounds a lot nicer, I would say. Yeah. And then they're just consuming your content.

[Speaker 4]
Great. Yeah, perfect.

[Speaker 2]
I'll even use it since you're negative.

[Speaker 3]
Lurking. I am realizing that we are unfortunately running out of time. There were a few more really interesting questions that you all threw in there, but I would encourage you to find Lizzie and Lizette.

We're here for the next couple of days. The whole entire purpose of this event is for you all to connect with each other. So find me, find them, ask your questions in person to the best of your ability.

Thank you both so much for being here and for sharing your expertise with our audience. We really appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the conference.

Thank you so much all for coming.