3 Pillars for Strong Communities with Nicole Saunders, Manager of Community Engagement at Zendesk

Speaker A: Welcome to the Brand Community Podcast.

Speaker B: Brand communities are the foundation of business growth. They build a human connection between brands and their customers, turn those customers into lifelong advocates, and ultimately grow your business.

Speaker A: I'm Sam Heisel, a co founder and managing partner at Knox, a digital agency that helps brands, artists and entrepreneurs grow and convert communities online.

Speaker B: And I'm Chris Whitman, co founder of Crony, a creative agency that connects brands and consumers through powerful brand experiences.

Speaker A: Every Tuesday, we'll be interviewing marketing leaders and community builders so you can walk, walk away with actionable strategies to help your brand grow and prosper. Welcome to the show, Chris. What's happening, man? How you feeling?

Speaker B: Feeling great today. Um, ready for another great episode of the Brand Community Podcast. How about yourself?

Speaker A: I'm good. Who we got lined up today?

Speaker B: We've got Nicole Saunders from Zendesk. Um, and if you're not familiar, Zendesk is a company that makes support sales and engagement software, uh, for various companies. Uh, as part of the community team, she sets strategies, defines policy, and promotes Zendesk family of support communities to users. Uh, this also involves collaborating with several internal teams. It's like a laundry list, um, across training, customer education, content marketing, social media, data and analytics. The list goes on. It sounds like she's got a heavy lift. Um, but anyway, the episode's really interesting. She mentioned something that we hear a lot, which is engagement does, doesn't necessarily drive business growth. Um, you gotta be really pointed with who you're engaging with. Um, she also leans heavily on how a successful community means helpful content, helpful people, and helpful leadership. Uh, Sam, what'd you think?

Speaker A: Yeah, no, I loved it, especially those three pillars you just mentioned. I think she also dives into some innovative programming formats for virtual events. I think as a lot of people, uh, have kind of pivoted towards virtual events, there's been a lot of saturation, um, and a lot of fatigue. So being able to kind of break through the noise and come up with, uh, progressive formatting is really important. I think she also has a lot of background and experience in content marketing. So I think her being able to really make a very clear connection and dive into her process for really balancing that, uh, act of identifying what content to create and using community engagement with the community is saying in order to inform and prioritize accordingly. So lots of awesome tactics and takeaways coming out of this episode. So, uh, without any further ado, Nicole Saunders.

Speaker B: Hey, Nicole. Welcome to the Brand Community Podcast.

Speaker C: Hey, Chris, thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Thanks for joining us. We're super excited to hear more about Zendesk today and uh, everything you guys have going on over there. Um, you know, just to kick things off, uh, you know, often we talk about the difference between marketing and community. Um, so off the bat I know that you're more specifically in a community and um, supporting role, um, you know, at Zendesk, but we'd love to just kind of hear how you guys differentiate between the two channels and um, how you convey that to your user base.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Um, I think one of the biggest differences between marketing and community is that marketing is often a one way conversation. It's often a broadcasting, sharing your message out. Sometimes there's a little engagement back and forth. But the community is really focused on the two way conversation. Um, what the customers say and their feedback into the organization is actually more important even than what we're saying and what we're broadcasting out to them. Um, as you called out, our community at Zendesk is uh, within our support organization. So we do work very heavily with our marketing team. There are some marketing things that go into our community space. Um, but we're focused first and foremost on what is going to help our customers be better at their jobs, you know, use our tools better, have a better understanding of it, um, and help them really develop in their roles.

Speaker A: That's awesome. So when it comes to uh, can you kind of dive into what your day to day approach is and how you kind of the team you work with is structured as far as where they're kind of focusing a lot of their time?

Speaker C: Yeah. Um, so we have three full time community managers at Zendesk and then we're augmented by about 40 other people across the company on different teams that help us out with our community engagement. Um, so the first thing that we're looking at every day is trying to take the pulse of the community. What's going on? What are the hot conversations? Has something surfaced? Is there any kind of an issue going on that we need to bring other teams into or alert them to and then from there really working on facilitating the conversations that users are having. So um, we try to take a look and start bucketing groups of questions that people have asked, um, connecting them to other resources. We do a lot of interaction with our virtual events as well. So we have everything from live Q&As where we bring support experts into the community and let users ask them questions, they answer them on the fly. Um, we're now doing it in a virtual environment. So like via a zoom webinar. Um, so a lot of the time we're looking for ways that we can connect users to the right events and resources that are going to help them out, um, or where we can get the right people into conversations to make sure that users are getting answers to their questions. Whether it's something as basic as how do I reset my password? Or something as involved as, hey, I've got this really complicated workflow, and I want to hear from other customers how they use these tools to accomplish something similar.

Speaker B: Yeah, you brought up a really good point. And it's kind of like Word of the Year, which is virtual. Um, it seems like it's something that all community managers are, um, wrestling with, but also we're hearing a lot of success, uh, with the format. Um, curious to hear what some of the learnings have been from your end in terms of. I would imagine that you guys were doing some virtual events previously, but now it's like, all in. Um, what are things that have worked, um, excited you guys? Uh, potential pitfalls. But then more importantly, as we kind of like, look at post Covid world, with all the vaccination news and everything like that, how do you guys see that evolving from an event perspective?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we definitely had some virtual events, uh, pre Covid, but we were doing a lot on the ground, um, and within the community. We were really largely just focused on our online forum. Um, of course, once we all moved into the matrix here and started living in zoom rooms, um, there was this big push for everybody to go virtual. And we just had dozens and dozens of, like, webinars and meetings and meetups, and the feedback we got from customers was like, this is way too much. I can't go to this many zooms. My day's already full with work, and now I've got these other things as well. So we really spent the summer thinking strategically about what events were going to be most relevant and most important to which audiences, and figuring out which things should we keep, which things should we scrap, which things should we combine? So, for example, we used to have regional user groups all across the country and really all across the world. And having individual virtual user group meetups for different cities or different time zones, um, was too many. So now we have one national user group meetup that we do quarterly, and then we break people out into breakout rooms depending on industry and things like that. Um, one of the biggest things that we saw is that people wanted to connect more by, like, industry or sector instead of what city they were in. Because now the city didn't really matter, and they suddenly had access to people in other parts of the country that they could connect with over that interest. Um, so that was one piece of it. In the community space we really launched into taking some of our events that were just happening like we were doing written style ama's kind of like they do on Reddit where people would come and ask questions. We moved that to a video format and that was hugely popular. Um, so now our strategy is having some of those events and then try to facilitate a lot of smaller um, ones that really connect users to one another. So we've launched an event series called Knowledge Shares where we let members of our community come in and share their best practices and tips and answer questions for each other. So it's not always just our own teams doing that, um, but really giving uh, community members that leadership opportunity. As far as what that looks like in the post Covid world, I think some of these events we've seen such success. That ability to connect people across industry instead of just the local other users. The ability to give community members leadership opportunities. And so I think that we'll continue doing more virtual events than we did pre Covid. Um, but we certainly look forward to the opportunity to be on the ground and eventually get to shake customers hands again and that sort of thing. Um, the other thing that I expect is that you're going to start seeing especially with larger conference types events, a lot more hybridized events where some people are attending in person, some people aren't because I think it has given access to so many more people to participate in these events and everybody has found that really valuable, you know, getting to have 1,000 of your community members instead of just 50 of them together in a space really has some power and some magic to it. So I think we're going to continue to see that kind of thing happening.

Speaker A: That's amazing. So when it comes to events like that, I mean I know you kind of mentioned how you even iterating and testing different formats and always trying to just be progressive and create what's going to be the most valuable experience for um, customers. From a kind of success tracking side, what are you using to, I mean how are you monitoring and measuring success and what sort of kind of KPIs do you use to really dictate what's success not only with regards to these virtual events, but some of the other general community initiatives you're helping spearhead?

Speaker C: Yeah. So you know, one of the things we're always looking at is what percentage of our customers use these resources and participate in these Events, you know, is it 10% of customers use the community or 40%? And of course I was trying to increase that share of our customer base that's participating in these places. Um, the other thing that we look at is um, really you know, how much our users answering each other and engaging in conversation with each other versus just waiting for the organization to jump into a conversation. There's always going to be a certain set of um, questions and kinds of activities that the company has to be the voice, um, and give the official response on. But really the more that we can encourage that user to user engagement, that's one of the biggest things that we look at. Um, I think the biggest key for any community is to make sure that you're tying your KPIs to your business goals. I hear a lot of organizations and a lot of teams that just want more engagement and engagement for engagement's sake doesn't necessarily drive anything in particular, doesn't necessarily bring value to your board of directors or your shareholders or your C level executives. And so I think the most important thing is always being clear on what your business goals are and making sure you're driving to those. Since um, our community is largely focused on support, you know, we definitely look at the number of answers that we're getting out there for people so that those are public responses that users have and can access as opposed to things that are just happening privately in a ticket with an agent or something like that. So we look at a number of different things. But yeah, I think overall just getting people um, really answering each other is a really big key for us for sure.

Speaker A: And in that same vein, now that we understand the success of carious, how you drive that success, I mean both on the side of being able to help facilitate and trigger engagement and kind of peer to peer, uh, conversation. But as well as the objective you laid out as far as getting the general participation from the user base as a whole. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most successful things that you've seen work well in driving that?

Speaker C: You know the biggest thing that we've seen success with is um, giving our users opportunities to take leadership roles in the community. So empowering them. Uh, and this happens in a number of different ways. You know, one is the good old user badges in the community. Something that gives them that visual recognition to other people. But it goes beyond Internet cookie points, right? It's, it's giving other people the context of hey, this is someone that's got expertise, this is somebody that has obtained a Certification, this is somebody that Zendesk is recognizing, has a lot of knowledge that they're sharing with me. Um, so we have like our community moderator team and they spend a lot of time developing subject matter expertise and facilitating events for other users and they are some of the people that we like to feature in those events. The other thing that we're really doing is working super cross functionally with other teams. Um, organizations and communities in particular, I think, really struggle with being very siloed. And so we're really looking at the ways that we can make the community sort of the fabric of the customer experience. It's the thing that is constantly, always there in between your meeting with your account exec or a live event or something like that. So to that end, when we take those things like user recognitions and rewards, we're trying to do things like if you pass the certification exam, certification exam that the training, uh, team runs, those credentials carry over. So when you show up in the community, you've got a badge that says that you're certified. And then we're working towards an idea where when you show up at an event, somehow those credentials show up there so that you get that recognition across all these things and they're not so siloed. And the great thing that that collaboration does is it gives all of the different teams a reason to help share about the community and encourage people to participate. So it's not just us trying to toot our own horn, but now we've got the education team helping us out and the success team helping us out and the marketing team helping us out. Everybody's wanting to drive to the community because there's something for everybody there.

Speaker B: You brought up a really interesting point earlier about, especially with the virtual events, how it's no longer community isn't no longer necessarily tied to location, it's now tied to industry. And that makes me think a lot about how community can inform marketing decisions and even content marketing decisions to a certain extent. Are you seeing that occur, um, a lot on your end? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you have a pretty heavy content marketing background. So I feel like you're uniquely positioned to answer this, but would love to hear how content marketing and um, community kind of intermix, uh, from an intel perspective.

Speaker C: Yeah. Well, community can be a great place to, um, really test things. Right. Especially when you've got these smaller groups like the moderators that I was mentioning kind of serve as a council for us. It's a lot of the time when we're working on something new, we'll run it by them first and get their feedback. Um, and so you know, if we've got a new campaign we're sending out, we might stick some, uh, send it over to them and get some feelers, right? And say, hey, does this, does this sit well with you guys? Does this make sense? Does this click. Is this something that you would use? Um, so we'll run things by then that way. But the other key is that um, content is a really important part of community. A community is going to be successful when you have three things in place. You have helpful content, you have helpful people and you have helpful leadership. All of those are really, really responsive to the users themselves. Um, I think it's really key that those things are coordinated. It's also really important that the messaging is coordinated because if the content marketing team sends out a campaign and we're not aware of it and doing activities related to it in the community can be really awkward. If a user comes in and says, hey, I got this email about this thing, can you guys tell me more about it? And we're like uh, what, what is this? Uh, somebody ping someone on Slack and find out. Um, so really having those things be integrated so that whether the user is getting an email message or seeing a banner somewhere online or interacting with their social channels or in the forum, that should all feel like it's coming from the same organization. That should feel like it's all coordinated and all of those pieces should feed one another. So no matter which touchpoint users are hitting, they're getting the same messaging, they're getting the same experience and it's one that resonates with them.

Speaker A: Yeah, I like that a lot. Especially that kind of the three part uh, framework or the three kind of pillars of successful communities. When it does come to uh, content, I mean I definitely think diving deeper into that one specific pillar, can you talk about how you are really leveraging a lot of the uh, I mean when it comes to creating content and prioritizing what sort of content you want to create, there's undoubtedly a very probably like clear connection between what you're seeing people talk about and what's kind of unanswered and where you want to double down there, um, can you dive deeper into the process of identifying what sort of content you do want to create and prioritize?

Speaker C: Yeah, so we um, use a lot of a uh, knowledge capture model where we actually really try to pull in our users knowledge. So uh, one example I'll give you is like when we're putting together events or content, we'll look at support cases and we'll see what we're getting the most questions about and make sure we're targeting our content to those questions. But beyond just like covering the topic, we try to use the same language that our users are, uh, using in those tickets. And so maybe like one example is we have a function in our tool set that's called triggers, and it's a way to trigger different activities, most commonly email notifications to go out to users. So we talk about everything in terms of these triggers, but, but users talk about it in terms of how do I send email to my customers, how do I make these automatic emails happen? And so we've really started focusing on using their language to make sure that one, when they're searching for stuff, the right things are showing up, and two, that they're understanding it. The other thing that we're really trying to do is capture their knowledge. Um, users have the experience of doing something on the ground. And so somebody can call our support teams or their success person or their account executive and say, hey, how do I do this with Zendesk? And we can make all the recommendations in the world, but chances are we've never done that thing, right? We've maybe never run a travel agency using it or done something specific. Whereas if they can hear from another user that has done that exact thing, that is the most valuable information they can get. And so the more that we can capture user knowledge, bring it into our knowledge base, bring it into our content, bring it even into blog posts and that kind of thing, the more we're really catering exactly to their needs and the things that are going to be most relevant to them. Yeah.

Speaker B: Ah, that's great. I think it makes me think about, I mean, just as it's conversation in general, it makes me think about how do you keep community members engaged and perhaps they've gotten distracted and how do you pull them back in and get them re engaged? Um, one of the ways that we've kind of heard a lot of brands addressing that is. And, um, this even goes for new community member acquisition, but partnering with other brands and trying to figure out ways to kind of like, you know, collate audiences and create a shared experience. So is that something that you guys are doing over at Zendesk? And, um, if so, has that been a successful tactic for you?

Speaker C: You know, we haven't done it in a formal way yet. Um, I could definitely see room for it in the future. Uh, one of the things that has come up. There's an organization called Support Driven, that's sort of a professional group for people that work in customer support, which of course is our industry. And they have this huge Slack community and they've added Zendesk channel within their Slack community. It's got like a thousand people in it that are all there interacting all day, having exact kinds of conversations that we have in our own community forum. Um, and so we've gotten to where there are a couple of Zendesk folks that will go over and spend time there. And a lot of users we're starting to see use both communities, they'll move between them. Um, and when we've got opportunities or new things launching in our, you know, our branded community will cross pollinate with Support Driven. And so that's a good example of like, I think we could be doing a lot more of that, especially in the CS and CX spaces. And so I think that you know, cross pollination can be really valuable. The key is making sure that you're really centered on your unique proposition, your brand, you uh, kind of know where your boundaries are and then you can start to really share with other teams.

Speaker A: I like that a lot. Well, as we start to come towards a close, uh, we have one question we ask all of our guests and this will put you on the hot seat a little bit. But if you were starting uh, a new product company, whether it's a physical product, software product, uh, from scratch, what would the company be? And then how would you go about deploying a one, uh, hundred K budget to kind of jumpstart growth and engagement?

Speaker C: Oh man. What would the company be? You know, it's so funny you asked that. I think I would really be looking at an opportunity. Obviously I'm thinking a lot about software, I'm thinking a lot about communities and thinking a lot about the virtual space. Putting together something that really uh, pulls together all of those pieces, right? You've got a lot of great community products out there right now. You've got a lot of great video products out there right now. But most organizations have to have this tech stack that's like three or four or more tools to bring it all together. So if I could launch any kind of company, I would uh, I would definitely pull together something that was like community and virtual events and CRM and all of those pieces all in one. Um, so that you're not having to thread these different pieces together as far as marketing budget. That's a big question. Um, you know, I think that there are definitely A lot of tried and true channels. You know, it's never going to hurt you to make sure your brand is really polished. It's never going to hurt you to make sure your SEO is really good to be doing some of those ad buys and placements and that kind of thing. Um, I'm pretty neutral on social media these days. I think it's important to have a presence there. I think it's hard to punch through the noise. There's so much promotion, so much activity. So I think it's a good channel, but it's not one I would over invest in. M. Really where I would probably go is investing in those brand ambassadors and those evangelists that can help spread the word. Um, I would start a beta community six months ahead of a launch and get some people in there interacting and populating it. So there's a party to invite people to from day one. Instead of trying to launch a brand and then get people talking about it after the fact, um, that's where my big money would go, would be towards developing those evangelists and those ambassador relationships with people.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that awesome product and great, uh, strategy. I think, uh, if we ever need the early adopters for that beta program, we can definitely just, uh, get some of our listeners signed up. I think we got the perfect community brand partnership right there.

Speaker C: Sounds good.

Speaker A: Making deals on the podcast developers and

Speaker C: we're good to go.

Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Uh, well, Nicole, we really appreciate you coming on. I think, uh, a lot of the work you're doing is really incredible and impactful. So really grateful you're able to share some of the tactics with, uh, us today.

Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here, definitely.

Speaker B: Thanks,

Speaker A: Man. Well, that was a great episode. I really enjoy what Nicole had to say. I think, uh, Zendesk, incredible company, powers community and support functions for tons of businesses, let alone their very own community and support function. Uh, I think she does a great job. I really love kind of how she goes about tracking performance and those core pillars and areas of focus with regards to creating and, uh, driving strong community engagement that really translates to business growth. What'd you think, Chris?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I really loved how she kind of walked us through the process of, you know, the heavy drive towards virtual events. Um, you know, once COVID 19 hit sound, you know, honestly, like, this is true for everybody, but everyone's kind of like rushing into virtual events, overloading everybody. You know, zoom fatigue was very much a real thing. And then they took the summer to really take a step back, think thoughtfully about, uh, you know, the approach there. And it's actually helped inform a lot of business decisions that they're making moving forward, whether that's content marketing, um, or, you know, looking at hybrid events in the future. So, you know, I just thought that was really. Ah, poignant insights.

Speaker A: Totally. Well, as always, really appreciate you all tuning in. Super grateful for your support, for being a part of our community. We'll be back next week. Thank you very much.