Embedded Files
Home > Blog > Listening to Community
Published on Nov 1, 2022
Context: The author's inspiration is derived from his 7 years experience in creator SaaS tools industry. For over two decades, several creator tools have continued to maintain their brands' monopoly by mastering the art of community-listening and developing the products mentored by the millions of genius creative minds (gamer, music, or filmmakers), leading to a revolution in DIY content world as we all know it today. He believes that most of the work practices and team culture are applicable to any SaaS organisation.
Without a Community, there is no Brand.
The existence of a brand depends on the presence of a community. As social creatures, humans have always preferred to join communities for various reasons, such as sharing resources and knowledge, establishing identity and belonging, seeking security and protection, and obtaining emotional support.
A successful brand or culture is often attributed to the strength and cohesion of its community, which serves as an embodiment of the brand's values and mission. A robust community functions as brand advocates, generating positive word-of-mouth promotion and building a favorable reputation for the brand.
Why is it important to build an online User Community for your SaaS business?
Feedback: A user community can provide valuable feedback and insights on the product, including feature requests, bug reports, and usability issues.
Support: A user community can provide support and resources for other users, helping them to troubleshoot issues by acting as the first level of support. This can reduce the burden on the product owners and improve the overall user experience.
Engagement and retention: A user community can help to foster a sense of engagement and community among users, which can increase user loyalty and retention. This ofcourse leads to positive word-of-mouth referrals and organic marketing at almost zero cost.
Innovation and collaboration: A user community can provide a platform for innovation and collaboration, allowing users to share ideas and collaborate on projects. This can lead to new product features and use cases that may not have been discovered otherwise.
Why Now?
In today's environment, where for businesses the operational (cost) efficiency is crucial to survive the economic uncertainties, many executives are looking for ways to become more resilient and reduce expenses. One way to do this is by leveraging the power of a user community for respective functions:
Help for Tech Support: By creating a user community, teams can tap into the collective knowledge and resources of their users, reducing the burden on support and service operations. For the first line of troubleshooting issues, users and voluntary-based-moderators can help each other, reducing the overall support tickets.
Product Development: Furthermore, user communities can help to improve product development by providing valuable feedback and insights on user needs and preferences. This can reduce the risk of developing features or products that don't meet user expectations, saving the company time and money.
Customer Loyalty Multiplication: User communities can be an effective way to increase customer loyalty and retention, which is especially important in a cost-cutting environment where new customer acquisition may be more difficult or expensive. By fostering a sense of engagement and community among users, teams can improve user satisfaction and reduce churn, leading to increased revenue and profitability.
Business Resilience: A strong user community can be a big support in promoting new product releases without the need to spend significant marketing or branding budget.
How to Get Started?
Define your community: Start by defining your community's purpose, values, and goals. Consider the demographics of your target audience and their interests and needs. Think about what kind of content, discussions, and interactions will be most relevant and valuable to your community members.
Be realistic about how large your audience will be in the first 2 years. Initial traction is crucial, and hence setting right expectations of the goals in the first phase is important to avoid disappointment. This step will help you guide your selection process of platform type and estimation of development resources to build such platform. Just because you get 10 posts in a thread per week, doesn't necessarily mean they're worthless.
Choose the right platform: This is an important step! Choose a platform that aligns with your community's purpose and goals. Consider the features and functionalities of different platforms, such as discussion forums, moderated or unmoderated administration, media types (text, video, image), chat functions, and choose one that fits your needs. Whether its Discord, Slack or your own in-house developed forum - it doesn't matter as long as it allows to scale at a later stage. For example, if majority of the discussions are expected around how-to questions, then focus on building a platform that's suited for knowledge base with large text files and interlinking functionalities (or NLP based glossary) rather than a forum that can process and store large media (video, image) files or integrating chat eg. Slack.
Foster engagement:
Encourage engagement by creating interesting and relevant content, asking questions, and starting discussions.
Use polls, surveys, and other interactive tools to gather feedback and insights from your community members.
Post regular video content with valuable insights or learnings. Here are some tools for quick and quality DIY video creation.
Start small: Often community managers miss out on engaging the early adopters by mistaking the low volume as 'lack of traction'. However in reality you just need 5-10 engaged power users of your product to create meaningful and constructive discussions on the topics that appeal to the the majority of users.
Listen to feedback: Actively listen to feedback and suggestions from your community members, and use it to improve your community. Respond to questions and concerns in a timely and helpful manner, and show your community members that you value their input.
Encourage collaboration: Encourage collaboration and interaction among your community members. Consider hosting events, challenges, or projects that bring your community members together and create opportunities for them to collaborate and learn from each other.
Assign moderators: One of the simplest way to ensure engagement is by finding and assigning moderator from the audience. This is cost-effective as well as sends a sign of trust to the community that you're growing something together with them. Over a period of time there could be several moderators spread over different time zones to ensure 24 hours guidance for global users.
Be consistent: Consistency is key when building an online community. Post regular updates, respond to questions and feedback promptly, and stay active and engaged with your community members.
Reward participation: Recognize and reward active participation in your community. Consider creating a leaderboard, offering badges or rewards for certain achievements, or highlighting outstanding contributions from community members.
How to Listen to Community's Feedback?
User Forums
User Feedback Tools
User Feedback Validation Tools
Bug or Error Monitoring Tools
Google Sites
Report abuse