Customer Experience Musings

Community Is Incredibly Well-Positioned for the AI Era

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 01:30:06 GMT

A few weeks ago I spent half the week at an on-site with my team and our partners at Hivebrite, and half the week at CMX Summit. 5 nearly non-stop days of talking about Community from every possible angle.

I came out feeling even more optimistic about the future of the Community industry.

Here’s why.

Humans Need Perspective More Than Ever

Learning how to use a tool isn’t just about what the buttons do. It’s about inspiration: what can this tool do? It’s about relevance: what is the best use of this tool for me specifically? It’s about best practices: how can I make it easier to use this tool? It’s about scaffolding: where should I start?

All of that is actually exacerbated by the current era, where one of the most common interfaces is a chat box. Sure, that chat box can do amazing things…but how do you know what it can do? Where you should start? How to apply it to your industry, role, or task?

You learn these things from humans who have learned to use these tools and been generous enough to share their perspectives.

There’s a reason companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and Glean are putting major dollars behind Community, events, and education. Having a great tool is step one – helping people figure out how to best use it is another, and individual, niche, trustworthy human perspectives are the path.

LLMs Also Need That Perspective

LLMs are trained on content. If there’s no content about how to use your product, an LLM can’t magically figure it out. LLMs are not trying these products and using them within businesses and developing best practices – they’re reading, summarizing, consolidating, and serving up content written by humans.

For LLMs to thrive, new human content must continue to be created.

Humans Need Human Connection More Than Ever

AI is a powerful tool for humans…but it also makes us lonelier and more anxious. People using AI at work crave human connection. Community delivers connection, meaning, and camaraderie.

AI Will Allow Community Teams to Do Things They Always Dreamed Of

This is where the need for Community meets the abilities we suddenly have.

Community teams are known for being incredibly efficient. Read another way, we’re often resource strapped. Community teams sit on a gold mine of data. Read another way, it’s very hard to pull useful data and insights from the noise. Community is deeply personal. Read another way, it’s hard to pitch people “Community” as a concept or point people to the piece of community content best for them.

AI changes all of this.

Don’t have a tool you need? Vibe code it.

Trying to analyze something? Ask your MCP.

Spending all your time on rote tasks? Automate it with AI so you can do the important work of contracting with and understanding humans.

Want to promote your community? Use AI to personalize the recommendations so you send people right to the most relevant content for them.

Over the years we’ve gotten better and better at building connection and tying Community work back to business goals, but the tooling and resources have been pretty stagnant. This is a LEAP forward. People are going to do spectacular, previously unimaginable or unrealistic things with these tools. And I can’t wait to see it.

What I heard on stage at CMX Summit and in a conference room in San Francisco was maturity. The Community gold rush has come and gone. The looky-loos have left. The snake oil salesmen have moved on. The people still building Community aren’t amateurs – they’re pros who were already delivering immense value but now are buzzing with the potential of using AI to do more of it, to measure it better, and to help more people discover it.

I don’t expect, nor want, another Community gold rush anytime soon. What I want and expect to see is steady, sustainable growth; Community teams with immense depth and breadth of impact within their organizations, receiving the well-deserved recognition that Community is an efficient, effective, and essential motion. It’s not a rocket ship, it’s a trail. It won’t result in great riches on a short timeframe, but I believe those that keep hiking up that trail will find a glorious summit.

Relearning Community Fundamentals on a Cattle Ranch

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 16:55:34 GMT

Last week I participated in one of my favorite annual experiences: getting together with a handful of close friends from college for a weekend away. We take a long weekend at a rental house and hike, play music, make food, and hang out. It’s an opportunity to reaffirm our friendships, give each other some moral support, and have fun.

This is our third year doing this event and it’s reinforced a few key community lessons for me.

The Act of Gathering People Has Value

It’s easy to forget that merely gathering like-minded people is powerful. It probably won’t surprise you that I’m the organizer of this event. What might surprise you is how little I do: I harass my friends until they fill out a survey about when they’re available, find an airbnb, and book it. Yet they shower me with praise for doing it…because in our busy world, actually pushing past “we should get together” has value.

Many Hands Make Light Work

Remember how I said I just handle the booking part? The best chefs in the group handle the food. We collectively research places to visit and hike. Everyone pitches in on washing dishes. One of the core powers of community is that you can do more together than you could do alone.

The Space You Gather in Isn’t the Most Important Factor, but It Is Significant

The first and third years we met up were magical. Year two was…nice. What made the biggest difference was the venue. Year one was an airy, luxurious house on a plain overlooking the mountains. Year three was a sprawling ranch house on a cattle ranch with endless rolling hills around it.

Year two was in a cramped house with crummy furniture in the middle of a suburb.

Did we still love connecting with each other? Of course. But part of putting people in the mindset for a magical weekend is putting them in a magical place. Setting the stage affects the way people approach the experience. Taking the time to build the right space with the right vibes is crucial.

Benevolent Dictatorship and Event Structure

An irony about humans is that we value our free will so much that we sometimes avoid directions that could actually help us. (Anyone with a child knows the pain of trying to get your kid to put on a jacket.)

What we discovered is that the warmest part of the weekend happened after we had caught up on each other’s lives and opened up about our challenges…but these happened in small silos scattered across the weekend. We weren’t all fully connected and opened up until the end of the weekend.

So this year we kicked off the first night with life updates. There was joy, tears, hugs, and high fives. And suddenly, we were past the biggest hurdle to connecting and everything felt easier and more joyful.

Similarly, some of the songwriters in the group (myself included) wanted to share some of our songs but didn’t want to be the attention hog that says “HEY CHECK OUT MY NEW SONG”. So we explicitly built song-sharing into the weekend…and suddenly instead of it being awkward, it encouraged others to share and resulted in a beautiful night of music and sharing.

Priya Parker calls this being a “benevolent dictator” of your events. If you’re truly acting in the interest of everyone involved, they’ll thank you.

Connecting with Others Is Essential

If you’re reading this I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of this…but even though I live community all day at work, I sometimes forget how much my cup is filled by connecting with friends.

And this is only going to become more true: Harvard Business Review found that employees who worked with AI were more lonely and had a greater desire for connection.

We are soon going to be having more conversations with computers than ever, and the cup-filling power of community is going to be even more important than ever. Our work will only grow in value to companies but also to individuals who are suffering in silence.

When Leaders Should Get in the Weeds

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 16:25:16 GMT

I've been thinking a lot about when, as a leader, you should be in the weeds versus when you should be focusing on the strategic, high-level work.

The role of a leader is to provide strategic direction, drive internal support, remove roadblocks, and grow their teams. But does that mean they should never get in the weeds?

I believe there are a few key scenarios where you should - and a lot of situations in which you shouldn't, but will be tempted to. Here's my non-exhaustive list.

When to Get in the Weeds

1. Your team is suffering.

If your team is incredibly overloaded or stressed and you can ACTUALLY help out (instead of just performatively helping), hopping in can help dig them out and raise morale. When I first joined Reddit there was a HUGE ticket backlog, so I spent two weeks in a conference room with the team crushing tickets. (And let them hit me in the face with a pie after.)

2. You have a wild idea and you don't want to distract your team.

Sometimes you're chasing down a really fringe idea and it doesn't make sense to distract your team. Go pound the pavement on your own to see if there's something there.

3. You've been asked to do something annoying.

Sometimes a request comes down from the top that can be a little irksome. You still need to do it, but it can be nice to shield your team from these from time to time.

4. You need to understand the reality of something.

Especially if you're planning on making changes to how your team operates, spending some time IN their workday understanding how it really works is crucial. Whether doing the work or shadowing, this helps you pressure test your ideas against the real world.

When NOT to Be in the Weeds

A) You feel guilty.

Your job is to be strategic, and that IS real work. Sometimes you can feel guilty as a leader for not doing the day-to-day work, but don't let that pull you away from making sure you're steering the ship.

B) You want to feel productive.

Similarly, it can often feel far more productive to go do a thing rather than think, research, and have conversations. Both things are important and productive, but again, your job IS to do the strategic work.

C) You're micromanaging your team's work.

If you're getting in the weeds because you feel you need to fix your team's work, hit the breaks. There are two likely scenarios here: either you're being overly critical and you need to chill out or there really IS a problem with the team's work. If it's the latter, fixing it yourself isn't sustainable; you should be spending this time thinking through what structural changes you need to make to support them.

Solo image by MART PRODUCTION

Duo image by Yan Krukau

Building a Strong Community Culture

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Sun, 21 May 2023 04:50:40 GMT

Building a strong community culture is incredibly important for the long-term success of any community. Without a great culture, a community can start to scare off new members, harm existing members, and damage your brand. But “culture” is one of those things that seems so touchy-feely that it’s easy to wonder if you have any control over it.

Thankfully, over my 15+ years working with communities at companies like HubSpot and Reddit, I’ve uncovered some of the core building blocks of a strong community culture.

A Strong Cultural Vision

You can’t have a strong culture if you don’t know what you want it to be! Taking the time to think about what vibe you want for your community - and what vibe will allow you to please both members and business - is worthwhile. Are you creating a raucous nightclub or a quiet library? A messy fun run or a professional race? Writing this out will give you a north star to execute against.

Clear Guidelines

Correspondingly, it’s hard to enforce a culture if members don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Capturing the dos and don’ts of your community in a formal document will help guide your members and give you something to point to when you have to hand out punishments. The Coral Project has a great guide to building a code of conduct.

I recommend making your rules specific enough that they’re clear without having them be so targeted (“you can’t say words x, y, and z”) that you have to constantly amend them to factor in new, creative trolls. (And let me tell you, from 5 years at Reddit: they will always come up with new ways to be nasty.) And don’t forget to list them prominently - research has shown that this can decrease problematic posts.

What punishments you assign to transgressions will depend on your community and the level of transgression. In some cases you may want to consider a 3-strikes rule; in others, you may have zero tolerance.

Great Founding Members

The founding members of your community are going to set the vibe. Whatever content they post will be what the larger member base sees when they join. These are the village elders that newbies will look up to. So you absolutely must carefully screen your founding members to ensure that they both embody your cultural vision and that they’re committed to helping you deliver on it.

Staff That Model Behavior

Just as your members will look up to your founding members, they’ll look up to you and your staff. The moment that you break cultural norms, everyone will think it’s ok. Ensure that your team knows the rules and vibe and diligently stick to them.

Positive Reinforcement

Studies show that positive reinforcement tends to be more effective than negative reinforcement. Shout-out the members you see doing an amazing job living up to your values. Consider awards or surprise-and-delight budgets for these folks. But also consider positive reinforcement for problem children - if you rain praise down on someone when they make the right choice, they may lean away from all the wrong choices they had been making prior.

Consistency of Punishment

Even if it’s not as effective as positive reinforcement, we do need to enforce our rules. Importantly, consistency of punishment is shown to be more effective than severity of punishment; it’s hard to prove any decrease in crime from the death penalty, whereas studies have shown that hard-to-avoid DUI checkpoints are quite effective.

This means making it easy for members to report transgressions, setting up automation to catch troublemakers, and enforcing the same way every time. Even if someone has traditionally been a good member of the community, you have to treat them the same as everyone else.

Evolution of Culture as Necessary - WITH Your Community

Communities are living, breathing, evolving entities, and it’s rare that their culture will remain stagnant or a ruleset will cover all situations until the end of time. You will likely need to evolve your guidelines over time. To do this successfully, consider involving your community in the discussion and be default transparent about the changes.

The Secret Weapon

What makes a strong community culture can’t truly fit into a blog post; it’s the day-to-day work of community professionals nurturing, supporting, and enforcing in their communities. If your business hasn’t hired a community professional, that’s my cheat code for you: hire someone who is great at this.

_{"Rules" photo by Joshua Miranda}

_{Cars photo by Michael Pointner}

Why Every Company Attempting Category Creation Should Invest in Community

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Thu, 09 Mar 2023 00:49:11 GMT

Category creation is one of the highest risk/reward plays in business. It can help your business stand out in the crowded software market by avoiding the crowded paths, it can help you create rabid evangelists for whom you’re the first company to truly see them, and it can help you access new budget instead of fighting to get a company to switch software providers.

The challenge, then, is that category creation involves creation. You’re inventing a category from, essentially, nothing. With this comes the risk that nobody buys in and that there’s not enough activity to sustain your business and the category.

This is why community is an essential ingredient for category creators.

The three strengths of community are scale, passion, and perspective. These strengths neatly address two needs for getting traction for your new category:

1) Creating and Building Excitement

It’s much easier to get excited in a group than alone. Putting like-minded people in a room together to discuss their category is a surefire way to get them hyped up and excited to contribute to the ecosystem.

Community can also be a great way to get these early category adopters to collaborate to create content, events, best practices, etc that help promote and legitimize your category. You writing on your blog about a category feels far less legitimate than dozens of community members doing the same.

And empowering your community to go represent the category far and wide gives you scale you cannot normally reach as a small category creator. Only a community-driven meetup program, for example, can regularly reach 15 cities with only one community program manager.

2) Preventing Category Despair

As exciting as a new category can be, it can also be lonely. You’re often the only person at your company with the title or responsibilities. There are few jobs out there. There’s not much content to tell you how to do your job or if you’re doing it right. And all of this can drive loneliness and despair in your early category adopters. Take it from me: I’ve been in the community industry since it was maybe 50 people worldwide, and seen the majority of my original cohort move into other roles. There are many times I questioned if I was on a dead-end path.

Community is the most effective way to create a support network for these members of your newfound category. Meetups help people not feel alone. Forums and chat channels allow them to get instant feedback on their work. And job boards give them a centralized place to see their options and feel optimistic about the industry.

Case Studies

Gainsight

Today, Gainsight serves 20,000+ customer success professionals out of a market of 300,000. But back in 2013, “there were literally a whopping 1000 people in the profession worldwide”, according to CEO Nick Mehta. This presented a problem. “Our business was building software for those people. So we could never build a big company if the job itself didn't grow.” So they began building community. They started with a meetup series and grew into a conference that now hosts many thousands of this market, which all started with a little human connection. “We would host these like these little happy hours and they would leave these events and say ‘Gosh, like I feel a little less alone. I guess I'm not the only one going through this. I feel more validated.’”

Gainsight Pulse

Product Hunt

Product Hunt feels obvious today, but 15 years ago the idea that people would hang out on a site upvoting and discussing new startup products and inventions probably seemed…nerdy. Not something that would eventually drive millions of visitors a month. And it all started with community. Founder Ryan Hoover couldn’t do it alone would personally email founders with advice and connect them with other founders, creating a tight-knit group. He would ask founders featured on Product Hunt to create content about their experience, lending the site legitimacy and buzz. And eventually, they gave members ownership over hosting events. The effect? Product Hunt was able to scale and become the centerpiece of the intellectual builder category. “When people ask ‘How did you guys meet?,’ for the rest of their lives, our community members who meet at our events will say ‘Through Product Hunt,’” said member of the founding team Erik Torenberg. “People may forget an email exchange, but they are unlikely to forget meeting like-minded community members in person.”

Product Hunt Meetup

Culture Amp

“Culture” is a word that, until a decade ago, tended to be primarily used in academic circles and by TV pundits complaining about the state of our society. But in recent years, the word has come to be closely associated with how a company operates. And that was in no small part due to Culture Amp helping create the culture category. Head of Community Damon Klotz leaned into the fact that culture fanatics were a niche and geeky minority, choosing to name their community “People Geeks” with the goal of “building something that makes Culture Amp part of the conversation on the changing nature of the HR profession and world of work.”. Today their community has over 20,000 active members and they have 95 chapters around the world run by community members. And notably, activity around the phrase “company culture” has grown 150% according to Google Trends.

PePeople Geek Meetup

How Category Creators Should Tackle Community

Hire an Expert Community Strategist

It can be very tempting to try to go cheap and hire an enthusiastic community member to build a community. But enthusiasm does not a community make. There are many highly experienced community builders in the market who know how to quickly and effectively build and scale a community. Spend the money; it’ll be worth it.

Hire Community Members onto the Community Team

That’s not to knock hiring community members! Their passion and connection to the community can be highly valuable in a community engagement specialist role, and they will go faster and farther than someone who is not invested in the category.

Let Go, and Empower Your Community

The more freedom you give your community, the more they’ll do. An empowered community can host events, create content, do interviews, organize projects, write code, and more. A highly-controlled community will have more consistent results, but a whole lot less passion. It’s a spectrum (you certainly don’t want your community members out spraypainting cop cars with your category slogan), but you should err on the side of empowering them and getting out of their way.

Measure Business Outcomes, But Also Enthusiasm and Adoption

I am the first community builder in the room to say “what is the business outcome?”, and that certainly applies here as well. Just because communities are about feelings doesn’t mean you can’t measure the leads they bring in the door, the retention they drive, and the costs they defray. But with category creation, you’re trying to build and grow a vibe, so I also recommend measuring softer indicators, like enthusiasm within the category and adoption of category terms in resumes, job descriptions, conferences, etc.

Category creation is a bold endeavor to take on, but with a community hyping it up, you’ll give yourself a distinct advantage.

What Community Professionals Need to Do to Weather These Hard Times

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Tue, 21 Feb 2023 06:03:48 GMT

There's no denying it: Community teams are being hit very hard right now by layoffs. The tech industry is seeing revenue dry up and taking massive action to reassure stakeholders, largely by letting people go.

We could debate the intelligence of these decisions, the morality of the choice, the side effects they'll have to deal with. But that's neither here nor there for Community professionals who worry they are next.

The fact of the matter is: companies are cutting heads and functions that they don't think will help drive or retain revenue over the next 12-24 months. And if they're cutting Community teams, that means we didn't do a sufficient enough job generating and retaining revenue and/or we didn't do a sufficient job promoting our success.

With that in mind, here's what I see as the name of the game for the next year or two...

Get Focused - no superfluous activities.

Community teams need to figure out where they can be most valuable and laser-focus on that. No unnecessary campaigns. No flights of fancy. No expansion of scope because some other Community team is doing it and it looks cool. Do 1-2 things, and do them well.

Experiment & Iterate - don't launch & hope.

There is too much at stake to do a big launch and hope it works. New community ideas should go through testing & iteration, much like new product ideas. Start small, measure results, expand and pivot as needed from there. Don't stake your whole reputation on a big launch.

Measure Results - get as specific and close to dollar value as possible.

Fairly straightforward. We need to be measuring the value we're providing, and tying it as closely as possible to driving or retaining revenue. Satisfaction scores and social reach are not going to do the job.

Build Connections - make community an invaluable partner for other teams.

Along these lines, the most defensible teams are the ones other teams want to defend! Don't build off in a corner - find other teams that have challenges you can assist with. Become their hero, and they'll become yours.

Promote The Work - make sure nobody is unaware.

Community builders are givers, which often means they're bad at self-promotion. You need to stuff that humble instinct in a trunk and lock it during this time. Every win you land should go to your boss, and possibly your boss's boss, and possibly many other people in the company. You should be on the tip of everyone's tongue. Reorgs and layoffs often, sadly, happen through gut executive understanding of what's working. Don't wait for them to ask if things are working - make it impossible for them not to know.

‍ Share Stories - make sure people FEEL what the community has done.

"Evan, didn't you just say metrics and dollars are the most important? What is this storytelling nonsense?" Yes, the numbers are the crucial thing. But storytelling is very powerful, and community generates amazing stories. Let the impact of your work be seen in the metrics and felt in the human stories you tell.

None of this is any guarantee you or your team won't face cuts, of course. But these are the table stakes. Any Community teams not taking the above actions are at high risk until we get out of these dark waters. Stay vigilant, stay true to yourself, and hang in there - we will get out the other side, but it's going to be rocky for a bit.

The Top 10 Links from Community Manager Breakfast 2022

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 22:37:38 GMT

Nearly every week, I curate three of the best links about community building for my newsletter, Community Manager Breakfast. I scour the web, reading sometimes dozens of articles a week to find the cream of the crop. For the end of the year, I thought I'd take that curation even further and take a look at which of the roughly 140 links I've shared this year got the most clicks. Here are your favorites for the year!

10: What are the Indicators of a Successful Online Community?

In this piece, my amazing friend Carrie Melissa Jones walks us through the five key elements for a community to succeed.

9: Offensive and Defensive Community Onboarding

Ian Vanagas, one of my favorite new community writers of the last few years, provides a great framing for two approaches to consider for onboarding your community members.

8: Community Discovery Framework

This framework from the folks at Burb falls into the "I wish I had written it" category for me. They provide a clear way of thinking about how to explore and discover the right community for your organization. It maps extremely well to how I think about the topic!

7: Community Strategy Planning for 2023

Jenny Weigle, one of Community Manager Breakfast's biggest cheerleaders, blessed us all with a five-part series on yearly strategy planning. (Scroll down to the bottom to find the other entries.) In-depth, thoughtful, and immediately actionable.

6: A Big List of Community Advocacy Program Incentives

Sometimes you just need a list. Jenny Weigle lands two spots in a row here, this time with her inspiration-provoking list of methods to reward advocates.

5: What it takes to scale

Many of the links above focus on how to launch a community and achieve success...but how do you achieve scale, and what challenges do you face once you hit it? Gareth Wilson has some answers.

4: The Community-Led Growth Report

Common Room took advantage of their massive dataset to give us all an early holiday present, covering a plethora of topics including: does the initial surge of chat community activity drop off? Do communities contribute to lead generation and conversion? How responsive are community members? Great stuff.

3: Building Campfires and Community

Carrie Melissa Jones returns to the list, this time using a campfire analogy to help us think about how we create crucial intimacy in community experiences, even at scale.

2: How To Improve The Community Member Experience

Georgi Todorov, who also frequently showed up in the runner-up links, takes member experience back to fundamentals by reminding us to think through who we're serving and why they're present, then building from there.

1: How to Deal with Low Engagement in a Community

And coming in at #1 is Martha Essien not with a cheat sheet of engagement tactics, but with sage advice to take a breath, assess the situation, and get to work. Good advice for all of us.

If you found any of these links useful, why not get them in your inbox every Monday? Subscribe to Community Manager Breakfast below to get 3 curated links and a dose of inspiration from me delivered directly to you every week.

Measuring Community Value for Members: NetPromoter Score or Product Market Fit?

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 23:05:20 GMT

Measuring the value your community is providing to members is incredibly important. Without value, people won’t stick around, contribute, or spread the word.

So how do you measure this?

No One Metric to Rule Them All

First, a caveat: you should never rely on a single metric for anything. Single metrics give you one angle of a situation that is complex. You should always compliment your primary metric with other viewpoints.

For example, if someone says that the community provides them value but you see incredibly low contributor rates, that could mean your community is riskily balanced on the backs of a very small number of contributors. Or you see great contributor rates, but when you review the quality, 90% are spam.

Choose the most useful primary metric, then supplement with other viewpoints.

The Case Against NetPromoter Score

NetPromoter Score (or NPS) asks what seems like a simple question:

“How likely is it that you would recommend [Organization/Product/Service/Community] to a friend or colleague?”

Members then answer by choosing a number between 0 (not at all likely) and 10 (extremely likely).

You then break members into different groups based on their score:

0-6: Detractors
7-8: Passives
9-10: Promoters

You then subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters to get your score.

This is a good overview.

NPS is rampant across the business world. It’s ubiquity suggests that it simply must be a high quality, useful metric. And although I’ve used it before, I have come to the conclusion that it’s generally problematic, and specifically a bad fit for communities.

0-10 Scales Are Confusing

Quick, tell me what a 6 out of 10 likelihood to recommend to a friend means!

Hard, right? The 0-10 scale for NPS is overwhelming for both customer and analyst. Research validates this: one study showed that a 5- or 7-point scale was better.

(They also found that there wasn’t a single best predictor, and that different question response combos resulted in different results - see my point above about looking at more than one metric.)

It’s Not Entirely Clear There Is Sound Logic Behind the Calculation

This piece nicely illustrates exactly how wacky this calculation can be:

“Let’s say we’re having a bad day and 10 respondents give us all zeroes: 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, and 0.
The average of these ten numbers is a 0. (Makes sense.)
NPS is -100. That’s the worst it can get.

Now, let’s say the team works really hard. They make the product so much better.
After all this hard work, we get all sixes: 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, 6, and 6.
The average of these ten numbers is 6.
But NPS is still -100.”

This is not only depressing, not only confusing, but also doesn’t give you good directional feedback. You just increased likelihood to recommend by a massive amount…yet your score says you made no progress. This could lead your team to abandon the work that got you those 6’s and go back to the drawing board, even though you were on the right track.

There Are Reasons Someone Might Not Recommend A Community They Love

This last point comes from personal experience. I’ve used NPS many times in my career. And every time I dig into the details of the responses, I see oddities based on the exact phrasing of the question. Common ones:

“I wouldn’t recommend this to my friends because I have no friends.”
“I wouldn’t recommend this I don’t ever recommend products.”
“My friends don’t want me to bug them with product recommendations.”

With communities, it becomes even more interesting:

“I wouldn’t recommend this community to my friends because I don’t want them to know what I’m posting here.”
“I wouldn’t recommend this community because my friends aren’t into this topic.”

So your member could be experiencing your community as the brightest point in their life, the reason they get out of bed in the morning, and yet they’d give you a bad NPS. Again - this is not helpful directionally.

The Case for Product-Market Fit

The Product-Market Fit (PMF) survey asks:

“How would you feel if you could no longer use [Organization/Product/Service/Community]? A) Very disappointed B) Somewhat disappointed C) Not disappointed”

Then you simply report on the % of members that fall into each category.

There’s a nice overview here.

Now, to be clear, I’m not 100% sure PMF is the right solution, and I have limited personal data points. But on the surface, it feels like a better fit.

It’s Simpler

Three options. Worded in a human way. Far easier for the member to determine, and far easier for you to interpret; “Hey, most folks would not be disappointed if we shut this community down” is a pretty definitive statement.

It Focuses on the Member

Rather than focusing on recommendations, which I’ve already demonstrated are highly complex things, this question focuses purely on the member’s experience with your community.

It’s Encompasses Value and Emotion

Especially with communities, you want to provide value but ALSO be eliciting a strong emotion. Someone might find a community useful but not be passionate enough about it to contribute. This question nicely straddles the usefulness of the community and how strongly the member feels about it.

It’s a Familiar Term for Most Startup Leaders

The hardest thing about moving away from NPS is that everyone seems to use it, so you’ll get skepticism when you say you want to try something new.

Thankfully, entrepreneurs talk about product-market fit constantly - so you’ll still be speaking their language.

The Magic is in the Responses

Regardless of which survey you use, be sure to include a “Why did you give that score?” write-in question after the numerical rating. Yes, having a score and being able to look at which way you’re trending is valuable. But more valuable is knowing WHY people feel this way. This is what you can spin into gold. This is what is really bugging or delighting people.

So even if you’re stuck with NPS, make sure you get those write-ins. Ultimately, what your members say is more valuable than any number.

Keep Experimenting

My goal here isn’t to get you to adopt PMF, but rather to carefully consider the value of NPS for your community and to explore alternatives.

As mentioned above, no one metric will serve all your needs.

No community is the same, and you may have unique aspects that you should measure. Don’t get bullied into using others’ metrics unless they’re actually valuable for you.

Try different things. Try validating them - do you actually see recommendation actions from high scorers? Increased contributions? Or are people saying one thing and doing another?
And lastly, please share - we’re all traversing these challenges together, so I’d love to hear from you about what worked for you!

Stars photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya

Frustrated man photo by Oladimeji Ajegbile

Apple photo by Andres Ayrton

The Customer Experience Stack

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Mon, 03 Jan 2022 23:00:30 GMT

One of the things that excites me most these days is thinking about Customer Experience departments as holistic endeavors to provide users with an amazing experience and thus, retain them.

Too often businesses fund a specific effort to try to shove customers in or pry them back from the brink. But the businesses that seem to succeed with ease are the ones who have put funds, sweat, and tears into the entirety of the user journey. Instead of selling harder or giving more discounts when customers try to cancel, they create a powerful experience at every point in a customer’s journey, increasing the value you’re providing them and getting them to stick around longer (and spread the word).

Here’s how I think about approaching the whole customer experience.

Core Elements

These are the core tools a Customer Experience team has to drive retention.

Foundational

You can’t build on a weak foundation. These crucial underlying elements might not drive immediate retention effects, but must be included - and cared for - in order for the rest of the org to thrive.

Customer Support

Customer support isn’t sexy. But it’s also something that many customers will have to seek out, usually when they’re already feeling stressed out. If you can’t deliver a high-quality support experience, it doesn’t matter what sort of fancy events you host or quarterly business reviews you conduct.

Key metrics to consider:

First reply time
Customer satisfaction
Customer effort score

Customer Feedback

You can’t serve your customers without understanding what they need. Customer feedback helps inform your initiatives, prioritize your work, and - when done well - show your customers that you are listening.

Key metrics to consider:

Customer segment representation
Customer satisfaction

Targeted

These are tools you can deploy at specific points to actively change outcomes. They’re your scalpels - and must be used with care.

Onboarding

Ensuring your customer knows how to use your product is crucial, and onboarding is your best opportunity to do this. However, onboarding is a double-edged sword; if you get in your customers’ way or overwhelm them, you may create the opposite effect you had hoped for.

Key metrics to consider:

Completion rate
Ratings
Correct quiz answers

Customer Success

Customer success teams, in my opinion, are your SEAL Team 6. These are the people you deploy at the highest-leverage moments - when a customer is just starting with the product, or when you’re seeing warning signs - to provide expert, hands-on support and advice. The best Customer Success teams rely heavily on data and on conversations with customers, and are able to use the two to provide powerful intervention.

Key metrics to consider:

Customer health score
Churn rate

Offboarding

Offboarding might seem like the end of the relationship, but a former customer is still someone who will provide word of mouth about your product. Make it hard to cancel and they’ll complain. Offer discounts you don’t offer your happy customers and they’ll gossip. Instead, this should be seen as an opportunity to a) get feedback so you can make your product and services better and b) leave them feeling great about your company (even if the product is no longer right for them).

Key metrics to consider:

Resurrection rate
LTV of resurrected users (if they are resurrected and then church a month later, it was pointless)
Qualitative feedback

Value-Add

These tools create additional value for your customers, hopefully improving their appreciation of and commitment to your company. They shouldn’t be attempted without a strong foundation and some key targeted tools…but when combined with the above, they can really take a company over the top.

Education

Not to be confused with onboarding or help centers, education helps your customers advance in using your product and/or in their craft. This is the difference between someone using your product at 10% vs 90%, or the difference between retaining a manager as your point of contact vs having your point of contact promoted to Director. A word of warning, though: education can be an endless project, and you must make sure you’re creating the most valuable content and driving people to it at the right moment.

Metrics to consider:

Education promotion clickthrough rate
Completion rate
Ratings

Community

Obviously one of my favorite subjects. Beyond your actual product, there’s only so much domain expertise your company can have and credibly deliver. Connecting customers (and/or prospects) to each other can unlock a wealth of information and value for your customers.

Metrics to consider:

Community retention
Percentage posts answered
Customer satisfaction

Partner Touchpoints

As Brian Oblinger has rightly pointed out, a Customer Experience team working in a silo will not succeed. Customers’ experiences are affected by every touchpoint they have with a company, and it doesn’t make sense to fold all those touchpoints into the Customer Experience team proper.

Here are some of the crucial partnerships & touchpoints the Customer Experience team must influence.

Marketing & Expectations

Marketing teams want to get people in the door, but if they do so by setting too-high expectations, it can be for naught. A great Experience and Marketing partnership finds the balance between getting customers excited and ensuring accuracy. And, ideally, Experience can also provide a pipeline of potential references and satisfied customer quotes to market!

Sales & Fit

Sales teams are often rewarded for closing - and left unscathed if a customer is a bad fit or finds that your offering doesn’t live up to what they were told. A great partnership between a Customer Experience team and a Sales team ensures customers are great fits - and shares that success.

Billing & Experience

Billing is often seen as an operational function unrelated to customer experience. But it is an experience. And, if it’s a bad one, it can sour the other experiences a customer have. A great Experience and Finance partnership ensures that bills are paid without customers feeling stressed out.

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Customer Experience is a holistic effort. A customer doesn’t exist at just one point in time. They exist before they start talking to the company, while they’re sold to, while they’re setting up and using the product, and - yes - even after they stop using the product. A proper customer experience strategy should utilize all the tools above to ensure the customer has more than just a smooth experience, but a successful and delightful one.

How to Build a Successful Customer Advisory Council

evanhamiltonld@gmail.com (Evan Hamilton) — Fri, 17 Sep 2021 17:09:44 GMT

Building trust - with customers, with communities, with employees - is one of the most important things you can do as a business. It’s not just a touchy-feely issue; consumers with greater trust will spend more while consumers with lower trust will spend less.

One of the most fundamental ways companies can build trust is to listen to their customers (and act on what they hear). But this can often be easier said than done. There’s SO much feedback out there, there can be a lot of aggressive negativity, sharing roadmaps feels like handing intel to your competitors, etc.

One of the best tools for building this trust while avoiding many of the concerns above is an advisory council: a private, limited group of customers who give you insight and feedback. A successful advisory council becomes the bridge between company and audience and drives true co-creation.

Advisory councils have been one of our most crucial tools for rebuilding trust at Reddit. And many of the harder decisions we’ve made have been informed by our Moderator Council. You can see that in action in the public notes we shared from our Council discussion on implementing a hate speech policy.

Today I want to outline the crucial ingredients for a successful advisory council.

A Clear Mission

If you’re not explicit about what your goals are, your audience may see the council as simply lip service - or use it in ways you didn’t expect. Craft your mission statement before you do outreach and be sure to feature it prominently both during that phase and within the council itself.

You’ll also want to explicitly define what the council is not. For us, we had to clarify a few months in that this was not a channel to escalate support issues. We didn’t want to give unfair advantage to our council members and these escalations tended to distract from the core topics. Make sure when identifying these non-topics that you carefully explain why (and what their alternative channels are) so the council doesn’t feel silenced.

Constructive Criticism

A successful council will give you the feedback you need to hear, but not feel antagonistic. If it’s too antagonistic your staff won’t want to attend, but if you just fill the council with yes-people you won’t actually get what you need.

The right people

Choosing the right people for your council is one of the most crucial steps. As with any community, your core members will define the culture and vibe of your council. We specifically looked for people who had criticized us before but tended to be civil and open to discussion. This was relatively easy for us because we do public feature announcements on our platform and get lots of feedback in the comments. If you don’t have that to pull from, you can do some introductory calls before extending a formal invite.

Sales staff, community staff, customer support staff, and your audience itself will also have great suggestions for additions. Just be careful that nobody is getting added as a way to help close a sale - you should have final say on whether you accept a nominated member.

Rules and norms

Like any community, you want to establish rules and norms within your council space. This may be fairly personal based on your company, the area your business is in, the stomach your staff have for conflict, etc. For us, a few things were important: council members needed to actually try to attend calls and get context if they were going to give criticism, to treat others like humans and avoid ad hominem attacks, and to ensure they’re not dominating the conversation.

Confidentiality

It’s very important that you’re clear with invitees up front what level of confidentiality you expect. Some members may not be comfortable keeping things private, and you don’t want to put them in a tough position. Nobody should have to guess what they can share - make it explicitly clear when something is early and confidential (i.e. don’t freak out the larger community with this half-baked idea) vs something you’d love for them to evangelize.

On the other hand, make it clear whether their participation in and/or contributions to the council will be publicly shared.

Enforcement

Rules don’t work without enforcement. It might feel especially painful to punish someone in such an intimate and important community, but if you don’t then nobody will take the rules seriously. Establish a plan for how many strikes someone gets and then apply consistently. We’ve been lucky to have to remove very few folks from the councils, but our warnings and occasional removals have been effective in showing that we’re not messing around.

Positive reinforcement

On the flip side, make sure that every time you see someone with a really great contribution you give them a shout-out. Be sure to emphasize why it’s great so others know how to emulate - call out if it was particularly insightful, or critical without being antagonistic, or whatever other norm you want to entrench.

Diverse Membership

The insights from your council will be ineffective unless it’s successfully representing a diverse group of people.

Diverse recruitment

This is an opportunity to hear from the folks who may not be the loudest voices in the room, but are still affected (sometimes, even more dramatically) by your decisions. Be sure to carefully curate people across a range of attributes, like:

Account size
Account age
Location
Race
Identity
Product usage

Obviously, be sure to follow all relevant laws and be transparent about any data collection or usage.

Term limits

A permanent advisory council is bad for a number of reasons:

You don’t get a diversity of voices
Over time, members may lose their outsider perspective
The larger audience may not feel represented by this “cabal”
You may discover someone isn’t a great fit but you don’t want to “fire” them

I highly recommend creating limited, pre-determined terms for your members. You can consider a one-time extension for especially fantastic members. (We also hired one of our best council members!) This gives you a nice rotating cast of people and an easy out if someone isn’t a great fit.

Internal Participation

The council will only work if you’re actually engaging with it regularly. This means that you have to drive internal participation.

Getting internal buy-in

This can be hard - internal folks may feel too busy, or may be scared of being yelled at. The best long-term solution for this is just to make sure that, per the above, council conversations are constructive. The short-term solution may be less elegant: call in favors, plop council meetings onto people’s calendars without asking, find a friendly (even if they’re not the team leader) to come present, get their bosses to pressure them, etc. Get the wheel turning and, if you’ve truly created a collaborative environment, folks will want to come back and will spread the good word.

Be sure to also be conscious about how you’re pitching the council. When pitching, this isn’t about “listening to our users” or “doing the right thing” - those aren’t the primary motivators for everyone (unfortunately). Instead, frame it in a way that aligns with the parties’ goals. For product managers it might be about making their launches more successful, for policy folks it might be about avoiding potential blowback, etc.

Hearing All Voices

If the point of a council is to hear viewpoints you might normally miss, that means being intentional about hearing those voices.

Limit call size

After about 10 council participants, a call tends to gets too messy to handle and people can’t speak up. Make sure to limit - you can always release notes from the call and have a larger asynchronous discussion after.

Wait before you try to solve

It can be easy to hear someone explain a problem or make a suggestion and immediately leap on it because you have thoughts or want to try to fix it. But that one person might not represent the group. Make time for other voices; ideally, a gap long enough it feels awkward and the most timid people can work up the courage. Actively ask “Is this how everyone feels? Are there any other perspectives?”

Raise people’s voices

If someone’s quiet that doesn’t mean they don’t have an opinion. Make sure to call on people you haven’t heard from.

Follow up after

Some people aren’t great live, and sometimes people think of new angles or better articulate their thoughts after a call. Create an asynchronous written space for his conversation.

Respect time limits

Hearing all voices does not mean going over time. Some people have hard stops and can’t attend past the end time - continuing is putting them in a tough spot and potentially excluding them. Plus, having more to talk about probably means you’ve just found some juicy topics, which is great! You can always schedule a more focused follow-up call (frankly, that may be more productive than trying to solve something in the last 10 minutes of a call) or, again, take it to an asynchronous conversation.

Theme your calls

There will always be topics that are more urgent, but not always more important (see the Eisenhower Matrix). For this reason, it’s good to have different themed calls to ensure that you touch on everything important at some point. For some constant topics you’ll want to have a recurring call; others can be ad hoc.

Act on feedback

Listening without taking action can sometimes be worse than asking in the first place. It gives the sense that a council is merely for show.

Bring things to your council early

The biggest issue we ran into is that teams would be so heads-down on work that they wouldn’t bring products to our council until they were nearly finished. This doesn’t work; even if you get some truly great and valid feedback, you don’t have time to implement it.

Set an internal goal for how early teams are to bring items to councils, measure it, and address problem teams. Be sure to remind them why this is in their best interest!

Either do it or say why not

Some feedback will be worth acting on, some won’t. Some will align with business interests, some won’t. But even if you don’t plan to act on feedback, you should acknowledge it. Explain why and set clear expectations as to whether you’ll revisit the decision. (Try to avoid platitudes like “thanks for the feedback, we’ll consider it” - people can see right through this.) Often, this is the difference between a community member feeling you’re ignoring them and them grudgingly accepting your decision.

Reply

Even if you don’t have anything actionable to say in response to feedback, you should appreciate that person for going out of their way to give you something valuable. Try to reply to or at least socially respond to (like, award, etc) every contribution.

Appreciation

Hopefully it goes without saying, but people like appreciation and you should appreciate your council. A few ways to do so:

Thank them every chance you get (publicly and in the private council space)
Point out where their work had an impact - the more specific you can be, the more they’ll feel it
Give them unique swag that emphasizes their unique effort
Give them access to high levels of the company
Give them digital badges or trophies to display
Loop them in early when something big is happening

On that last point, we specifically found that during crises (when we tended to be heads down) our council felt painfully ignored. When we started to loop them in - even with a “hey, we ARE working on this but we don’t have any details yet” - they were happier, gave us more constructive feedback, and tended to publicly support us more.

Amplifying to the Larger Audience

Simply running a council doesn’t mean all your users feel connected to what you’re doing. An advisory council shouldn’t exist in a vacuum - it should be combined with other methods of gathering feedback, conversing with your audience, and building trust.

It’s important to amplify the work you’re doing with your council. This can look like:

Noting in launch announcements that the council weighed in on a feature
Calling out improvements that were specifically identified by the council
Sharing (usually anonymized) council notes publicly (again, see what we did around our 2020 policy launch)
Creating ways for the broader community to apply to join or nominate others

Evolve

Our first councils were vertically focused (sports, gaming, beauty, etc). We then combined them into one mega council because we didn’t have the bandwidth to run so many individual calls. We’re now looking at some potential ideas around splitting them out again. That’s ok: plans, situations, and capabilities change.

Every council is going to be different, and it’s going to evolve with your capacity, company goals, etc. Don’t lock yourself into one format. But, crucially: be sure to get feedback from your council before you change said council!

Advisory councils are not a small amount of work, but they can be one of the biggest bangs for your buck in building customer insight and trust. If you choose to create an advisory council, be sure to sufficiently invest in it. And lastly - have fun! Getting to connect intimately with your audience can be incredibly rewarding.

Photos provided by Pexels.

Credits:

Man thinking photo by Thirdman

Envelope photo by Karolina Grabowska

Handshake photo by fauxels

Corkboard photo by Polina Zimmerman