Nicole Saunders is our guest in this episode, she is the Manager of Community Engagement at Zendesk. She oversees all of its community programs to help set strategy, define policy and promote their support communities to their users. Today, we’ll be discussing how to get support internally for your community, how she looks at growth and how she’s adjusting her strategy during COVID-19.
Nicole Saunders is our guest in this episode, she is the Manager of Community Engagement at Zendesk. She oversees all of its community programs to help set strategy, define policy and promote their support communities to their users. Today, we’ll be discussing how to get support internally for your community, how she looks at growth and how she’s adjusting her strategy during COVID-19.
Who is this podcast for?
B2B, Scaling, Online & Offline Communities
Key Takeaway
Coming up with content ideas can become a major challenge for your local group leaders running events. As well as any content and events the HQ community team is creating. To help that and better serve the community, Nicole and the Zendesk community team analyze support tickets to see what customers want to know and the language they are using. They take that data and turn into not only event topics but articles, newsletter and other types of content.
Derek Anderson:
In 2010, I co-founded a company called Startup Grind with one goal, inspiring, educating and connecting every entrepreneur on the planet. Today, Startup Grind is now in 125 countries and has millions of members. Along the way, I found the most powerful marketing tool of all time, customer to customer marketing. C2C marketing empowers your greatest ambassadors, your customers to evangelize your brand and grow your community. This is a podcast we wished we'd had when we started building our community at decade ago. Each episode, we talk to the brightest minds and companies on the planet to learn how they build their community and empower their customers. I'm your host, Derek Anderson and this is the C2C Podcast.
Derek Anderson:
I'm excited to have our next guest, Nicole Saunders, who is the manager of community engagement at Zendesk. Nicole oversees all of their community programs to help set strategy, define policy and promote their support communities to their users. Today, we'll be discussing how to get support internally for your community, how she looks at growth and how she's adjusting her strategy during COVID-19. Take a listen. Nicole describe to us what Zendesk is and what is your role there?
Nicole Saunders:
Zendesk is a service for a CRM company. We build support sales and customer engagement software that's designed to foster better customer relationships. So that includes everything from a ticketing system to sales CRM to chat to knowledge based and community platform. My role, I am the manager of community engagement. So I sit on our self service team within our support organization and I manage the community team and I oversee all aspects of our online community. That includes a lot of strategy and planning as well as working cross functionally with a lot of other teams that have a stake in our online interactions with users.
Nicole Saunders:
Our real focus is on making sure that people that come to our community have a great experience, and whether that is getting a question answered, we create a lot of resources for them and try to help them find the most relevant information, conversations and other users. So that includes answering questions, taking in feedback, creating online events, and then also helping to create a lot of publications to point people in the right direction.
Derek Anderson:
Where does community sit in the organization generally? Is it under marketing? Is it somewhere else? Then how does Zendesk as a company look at community?
Nicole Saunders:
We actually sit in the support organization, which at Zendesk we call customer advocacy. As far as the view of what community is at Zendesk, that's something that's been evolving. For most of its history. it has existed as a public support channel, many to many place where users can come and talk to one another and talk to our support agents and that continues to be true but it has been changing and evolving recently. Back in February we redesigned our homepage and opened up a whole bunch new topics because we were getting a lot of conversations on people asking less about product specific things and more about workflows and best practices and that kind of thing. We also found that users were wanting to find out about events or trainings or usergroups and so we created some spaces for those as well.
Nicole Saunders:
All of this evolution has really accelerated in the current situation with the coronavirus pandemic and so we're really starting to view community as a place that can be a central hub where users can connect with each other, find the resources they need and still of course get support as well.
Derek Anderson:
I know you're a CEO and co-founder Mikkel has been a big champion of community and is a very community driven person. He's one of the original sort of Startup Grind speakers and spoke at our events literally all around the world. Whenever we open up a new office he would speak, and love to get your perspective on this. But I think we found with a lot of companies that we work with, when the founders are sort of community orientated, it seems to have this really positive effect on community growth early on and then it sort of gives it this staying power that only a leader can really bring to a community group. It sounds like, I mean, the Zendesk community itself is extremely strong, but I'd love to get your perspective on that. Have you seen a difference there, and maybe with being at Zendesk versus other companies that you've been at or you've seen and what effect does the leadership have on its trajectory?
Nicole Saunders:
Having executive support and executive buy-in is so, so important because can communities can't be successful if they're not appropriately resourced. Mikkel was definitely a huge champion. If you go back far enough sort of in the community archives, you can see him responding to user questions and having discussions with people about product feedback. It's really cool to actually see the company's founder with posts in the community. We don't see so much of him anymore. He's got some other more important things to do as we have grown and scaled quite a bit. But even part of this current, as I said, evolution of our community is coming in large part from Mikkel himself where he's really like, "Hey, guys. We got to focus on this. We need to make this more." It's part of why we're being able to grow and expand what we're doing and what we're offering.
Nicole Saunders:
I talked to so many other community managers and getting executive buy-in is something that comes up over and over, how do we share ROI, how do we communicate to people? So I feel really lucky to be at an organization where what we do is already valued and it's continuing to be supported.
Derek Anderson:
You have a goal of increasing self-service within your community efforts. Can you talk about how you're able to do that and any metrics around it that you can share?
Nicole Saunders:
I was thinking about this earlier today, and looking back in time, we've kind of gone through a couple of different phases. So when I first joined the company about three years ago, I would say we were in phase one, which just started with improving the customer's experience. So making sure that we were getting answers to questions a little bit quicker, making the navigation a little bit easier, marking which questions had been answered, working on our SEO a little bit. Phase two of that for us has been working with the self service team, which has assembled over the last couple of years. So when I started, I was just sort of a lone island with one other community manager running the community. Now we have a full team that works on all of our self service offerings.
Nicole Saunders:
So within that we've been really focused on producing some targeted online events and content, doing what we're calling proactive support. So actually trying to get information out to users before they realize that they have the question. So part of what we're leveraging there is in-product messaging. So if we see that you visited one page in your admin interface three times, we might pop up a message that says, "Sounds like you're trying to work on views. Here's some great resources for you," or something like that. I would say that now we've got a lot of that dialed in and we're moving into what I'm thinking of is phase three, which is this broader collaboration I'm talking about.
Nicole Saunders:
So bringing in more audiences, really making sure that we're appropriately communicating about the community, both internally and externally. One creative idea that my team came up with earlier this week was to create some explainer videos that we could just use internally just to tell people like, "Hey, here's what the community's for and here's how you can use it and here's how you can access it." Or maybe make some of those that they can send out to their customers as well so that everybody can really understand what this space is all about and when is the right time to use it. So that has been effective in what we've done so far and we're looking forward to continuing to grow it.
Nicole Saunders:
I don't have any specific numbers I can share here, but some of the things that we're really looking at is how much traffic is coming through our help center and comparing things like page views to the numbers of support tickets that people are submitting to see if we're getting more people self-serving than submitting tickets and how much that's increasing proportionately. We're also looking at the number of contributions from users. Another thing that we've done is we've really grown our community moderator program. So those are end users who volunteer to help other users out in the community.
Nicole Saunders:
One of the really exciting metrics that I can share there is that we've tripled their contributions over the last year. So they're really having a much greater impact and we've got a lot more users connecting with one another in our community and that's one of the things that makes it really effective.
Derek Anderson:
I love that idea about the videos that you created internally. I haven't worked at a big company for many, many years, but I remember when I started my career at Electronic Arts and we used to have like internal marketing strategies around just to get support and to build what you need to build in order to get visibility and to generate excitement for what you're doing so that you could fund the programs that you're trying to do. I've never heard of anyone doing that, so I love that idea that you did. I know you just recently started usergroups. Could you share how you put that together and what adjustments you've now made? Sort of just kicking something like that off in the midst of COVID-19?
Nicole Saunders:
So we've had usergroups in various forums for a long time, but that's another program that had gone a little quiet for awhile and then has really picked back up. So we actually recently hired a new person to come on and coordinate all of our usergroups in all of our different areas. So our focus prior to the pandemic situation was very much on regional groups. So we've got regional folks that do field marketing all over the globe and they were really responsible for running in person meetups. With COVID-19 coming up, of course, we, like everybody else, has had to figure out how we can bring these groups online and make them virtual.
Nicole Saunders:
So one of the first things that we did is created a space for them in the community so that there was some place that they could actually connect with each other that wasn't just trying to jump on Twitter or something, that's a little bit broader, but giving them a real home within our community space. We're continuing to run a lot of those by region. But of course when you're connecting online, it doesn't really matter where you are and most of the support topics are not specific to the region. The way that you use the products and tools and learning about other people's tricks and best practices and things like that are not region specific.
Nicole Saunders:
So we're also starting to experiment with how we can connect users more by interest. So whether that is pulling people together within an industry or pulling people together, saying, "Hey, if you've just started using our stuff within the last couple of weeks, this group is for you. This is the beginner's group," which has created a thread where people could come on and introduce themselves and offer up and say, "Hey, I would like to connect with other people about this." So we're even trying to create some new really targeted meetups sometimes that are really small groups.
Nicole Saunders:
We also launched a couple of spaces where people could connect by industry. So the first few we did that we started one called the gaming guild for anyone that works in the gaming space to talk about some of the issues that are unique to that space. We also have one for startups. So if you're a startup that's using Zendesk or interested in using Zendesk, we've got a spot for you to come and connect with other people in that, in the startup world as well.
Derek Anderson:
You have a really smart way of getting ideas for content and themes. Could you share that with the audience?
Nicole Saunders:
So I mentioned a little bit earlier that we are really trying to emphasize being proactive in the way that we support customers. So one of the things that we've done is a lot of analysis of the support tickets that users open with us. We, of course, tag and classify a lot of those and so we've been able to look at some reports as well as just literally spending some time where we're manually going through and reading through tickets to really understand what it is that users are asking us about the most. We also have a tool within Zendesk guide called content cues that helps us identify common threads and areas that people ask questions. One of the great things about that is it focuses less on... Within tickets, we classify things the way that we would talk about them internally, but the content cues helps us understand how our customers talk about things.
Nicole Saunders:
Then using those two sources, we figure out what users are asking about the most and where they really have a lot of questions, and that's how we target our events. So for example, every month we host an AMA style conversation in the community. The topic for that AMA is based on that research and what we identify is a top area of questions. We also do weekly digest and monthly newsletters. So we pull together content that fits that theme. Then the team that works with all of our knowledge base publishing and articles really focuses on developing guides, developing recipes and other resources that they publish in the knowledge base around that theme.
Nicole Saunders:
So every four to six weeks, we shift to a different theme based on those support questions. But our goal is really to try to get the most useful information in front of people, like I said, before they even need to file a ticket so that it's just right there at their fingertips when they need it.
Derek Anderson:
As we wrap up, I'd love to hear about a community that you love and why you love it.
Nicole Saunders:
So maybe this is the nerdy kind of meta answer, but my favorite community is the CMX Hub, which is a community for community professionals.
Derek Anderson:
That's a great answer.
Nicole Saunders:
Well, I wanted to come up with something fun and there are a lot of great other communities out there. I use TripAdvisor all the time back in our other life when we could travel. I loved that one. But the reason I love CMX is because it provides such helpful information, right? It's so timely, it's so useful. They've got something there that helps me answer a question or think through a problem almost every day in my career. At the end of the day, the design of a community or what kind of badges you can get or what kinds of features in it, that's not the thing that makes us go back and log in, at least not unless it's like the Candy Crush community because people definitely like the rewards there. It's really the information that they provide, right? So what keeps people coming back and what keeps me going back to the community is that it's useful, it provides what I need on a daily basis and that to me is the most important thing.
Derek Anderson:
Wonderful. Thank you so much.
Nicole Saunders:
You're welcome.
Derek Anderson:
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked the show, please leave a review wherever you listened to this. If you like to see more about how to create your own event community, go to bevylabs.com/pod, that's B-E-V-Y-L-A-B-S.com/pod.