�ݺ�ߣ

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hi everyone! Thanks so much for joining today. I’m Andrea and I’m the Head of Customer Success at ProdPad. Before getting into it and talk about “how” to build a Slack community, let’s first focus on the most important question: WHY
• #3: Before I set out to start a community I knew there were things I wanted to achieve, among those...
• #4: [read slide.] These are all very common reasons to want to start a product community. We’ve actually got a little poll going on right now so if you guys want to pitch in I’d love to hear some of the reasons why you want to start your own community as well! Now when I first started a community here at ProdPad, I did what everyone else did…
• #5: I created a forum. Forums are great, they’re the standard for many of the larger communities, and I really didn’t think about it twice. It just felt like it was what everyone else was doing it, so I thought why not, right? Unfortunately… it turned into that.
• #6: Now the reason forums didn’t work isn’t because forums aren’t good. They are, they have proven that time and time again. Unfortunately, Forums require a ton of moderation, which as a support/community team of one at the time, it wasn’t something I could do on my own. The most important reason why forums didn’t work out for us though, is because it required the user to make an effort. We were putting the pressure on them to interact with us, as opposed to us being approachable and ready to chat. So it essentially failed, and within 4 months I quietly shut down the community. Luckily no one even noticed, we maybe had 2 people post in the span of 4 months so it was a bit of a quiet fail! But even after it failed, I kept asking myself… what can we do to bring this back. I knew I wanted to create a community, I just hadn’t found the right way to do it. So one day I look over at Janna, our CEO, and I say to her...
• #7: She looked at me suspiciously and said… ok, what about Slack? And I just kind of hummed to myself quietly. Two weeks later, I said it again, and she fired back with all these questions, like how are you going to moderate it, how is this any different than the forum, are people going to engage, how will you manage it. And this went on for at least 3 months, where I constantly came back to the same question. Unfortunately my answer was always...
• #8: I really looked like this every time Janna asked me a question, because no one had created a product community before on Slack. Granted there were a lot of communities based around interests, like Mind the Product for example which is just about the most active community ever. But we were different, we were going to be talking to clients, and clients would be talking to us, and to each other, and all of it in real time. So I really, really had no idea what I was doing, but I knew I had a few things to consider before doing this...
• #10: [read slide] This lasted about 4 months and it involved inviting only key clients. These were clients we already talked to on a daily basis, were engaged through other social channels like Twitter, or people we had met at conferences who we knew already liked us and wouldn’t mind being part of our little experiment. Once we saw this take off ….
• #11: [read slide.] This involved inviting all new admins who subscribed to ProdPad and send them an invite to the community. For a while all of the invites were written manually too! I would do this for every single admin once a week after they signed up. Once it proved to be working, we moved on to...
• #12: [read slide.] Now we invite everyone. The emails are automated and fire out once the subscription activates, so it no longer requires manual moderation from me (this definitely made my life easier!) Through all of this, we had what I like to call ‘happy accidents’ or happy side effects, so let’s go back to all the things I had to consider when I first started out.
• #13: Community moderation was at the forefront of this whole thing, as we know that’s one of the reasons why forums failed for us. Luckily, Slack just took off and it allowed users to help other users - which is fantastic! We have some of our pro users who are more than happy to jump in and help and troubleshoot issues, all simply because they can. I dont think there’s a better testament to customer loyalty and happiness when a customer is willing to take a minute or two off their day to answer a question for someone else. The other great thing is that the entire ProdPad team is available to chat. And I mean everyone - from our CEO to our developers. Everyone is there and happy to help, even when I’m not around.
• #14: Danielle helping a client
• #15: This leads to our happy side effect # 1, which is it made us a customer centric team. Not only does our entire team have visibility and access to speak to our clients, but it adds that little human touch to it all. It has definitely helped us kick off some great conversations internally!
• #16: On to the second point : Engagement. The main reason this worked is because most people use Slack. It wasn’t some rogue app no one had ever heard about, nor did it require an extensive sign up process to get involved. Most of all, we’ve made sure that the community is a friendly and safe atmosphere, and I always say there’s no such thing as a stupid question so everyone is happy to start up a conversation. We’ve even had some friendships get started because of it! Not just between ourselves and our customers, but also between customers too.
• #17: And this of course leads to happy side effect # 2, which is people are actually asking to join. Compared to our previous community where no one even knew where it was and no one ever engaged, people are emailing in to ask to join the community, or ask if I can invite other people in their team that may not have seen the invite.
• #18: Another thing I had to consider was moderation - and we definitely had to set rules and expectations the more the community grew and continues to grow. We have a bot called Winston that welcomes everyone as soon as they join and lets them know how to submit feedback, how to submit a ticket request and get help, how to reach ProdPad team members, and of course just reminds everyone to be kind to one another. I wrote the bot myself and hosted it in Heroku, there’s really not much to it so you guys can definitely achieve the same thing!
• #19: In terms of submitting product feedback, we have our own bot, called Proddy. All users can interact with Proddy by typing #feedback, and the bot adds the feedback to our own ProdPad account, submits a copy of the notification to our entire team (in case they’re not looking at the community) and then also lets the user know they’re feedback has been successfully added. We recently launched Proddy on ProductHunt, so if you’re interested Fleur will be posting the link to it directly in the chat so you can check it out.
• #20: In terms of support, we also have another bot for that. This bot allows anyone to type /support along with their request, and that in turn creates a ticket in Zendesk. Any one of us can answer the ticket on Zendesk and the user will receive a reply directly as a DM in Slack, which means they never have to leave to submit a request. What’s really cool is it even allows them to upload images and keep track of their ticket, all within the comfort of Slack.
• #21: This of course then led to happy side effect number 3, which is it is easy for our users, and even better it is easy on us. We don’t need any extensive management going, everything just syncs together and it works.
• #22: Scale and growth is definitely something that worried me a little bit the more popular the community became. Initially I was sending emails manually one by one to every single person, but that became a bit tedious to do, so now all of our invites are automated. Cancellations are managed via Zapier, so it’s easy to keep track of users as they leave. A really important thing to consider is to have relevant channels, the more people there are, the more likely it is different topics and channels will be required. We started out with the three basic channels and we now have 6 plus an additional 2 private channels for enterprise support. This has scaled really nicely from 10 users to over 500 that we have now and growing every day.
• #23: But let’s talk about the important stuff now - what all of this actually got us. We have reduced churn immensely, with 90% of our customers in the community sticking around simply because they have access to talk to us directly. 15% of those users who are part of the community and cancel are actually saved. We of course have access to customer insights and feedback, as well as user testing and beta testing programs. We also post release updates directly in Slack, so everyone is aware and can discuss updates as we post them. And most importantly, our customers are happy!
• #24: I do actually have a bit of a personal happy side effect, which is thanks to the success of our own community, I’ve helped some really cool companies launch their own as well.
• #25: If you guys have any questions or would like to launch your own community, I’m happy to start taking questions now!