Ep. 53: Proactive customer support through community building at Drift [Feat. Ben Gardner, VP of Customer Support at Drift]

Speaker A: Welcome to today's episode of the Support Insights podcast. I'm your host, Briohnie Mulcahn, community manager at Sentisun. Today my guest is Ben Gardner, VP of Customer Support at Drift. We're going to be talking about Drift's customer community and how they're using it as a way to offer proactive support and encourage product adoption and retention. We're going to talk about what exactly makes up a customer community and how it's been getting every department involved in customer centricity at Drift. Hello, Ben. Thank you very much for joining me on today's podcast. It's lovely to have you.

Speaker B: Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.

Speaker A: Would you mind giving me and the audience a little bit of an introduction on yourself and what it is you do at Drift?

Speaker B: Yeah, I am the VP of Customer Support here at Drift. I've been here for a little over three and a half years running the support team, and I also have responsibility for our customer documentation and our newly launched customer community. I've been doing this, you know, from a running a support team perspective and working in support for close to nine years now total. So I've got experience across different companies and building and scaling teams.

Speaker A: Would you like to give a little overview of what it is that you guys do at Drift?

Speaker B: Yeah. So Drift is a conversational sales and marketing platform, and we've expanded also into service. The easy way to describe it is if you go to a website and you see a chat icon that is going to be one of the services that we offer and use from a solution perspective. But the idea being it helps sellers and buyers connect very quickly and seamlessly at the right time, at the right place. The biggest example I give you in a real concrete world is if you walk into a store and somebody greets you, they ask you a question, you know, what brings you in today? That that is kind of that chat influence on the website. But, you know, if you show intent and you're on a specific page, such as pricing, then it'll kind of guide you there and say, hey, it looks like you're interested in pricing the same way that you would at a store if you picked up an item. So it just helps you when people show intent, that you can latch onto them and kind of make sure that you're able to support them and connect with them as quickly as possible.

Speaker A: So the topic of this podcast is primarily on the community that you have recently created at Drift. Could you tell me a little bit about how that came about? And the role that that play, customer engagement and support generally.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we had a community before, and when we looked at it, what we were looking to do with it, we weren't quite meeting the goals that we had set in terms of driving adoption, building customer engagement in it, as well as creating educational content. And so when we looked at this from a new community perspective, we wanted to focus on a couple of different things. First and foremost is getting the customer the information and how they can achieve value with drift. And so not just being product focused in terms of here's what the different features are and what they do, but also we know that they bought drift for a reason. If they want to reduce the cost of service or generate more revenue pipeline, it's this idea of like, they bought it and we want to give them information that fits that category. Because when we looked at it, you could go to a community and you could say, like, you know, let me learn about the product and the different features. People don't buy features, they buy the benefits from those features. And so that's what we had kind of geared our setup for. And so what we ended up doing was starting with, instead of building a visual layout and looking at what kind of the experience looks like, it was, what value do we want to provide? And also, how could we use this for our customers that are brand new to share insights so that they can find a place that they can get all this information from? Or as we launch something new, how can we share that information again so that people can see what are the different use cases. So when we did that, we set out that structure of here's going to be, where you have general discussions about the product and the values that you get out of it. From a support perspective as well, here's going to be how you answer specific questions that have come up from other customers too. And then also building out an entire section on events and webinars. Essentially, because we understand that reading is one thing, watching a video is another. But if you can interact with somebody, live presenting something and ask questions like, you're going to get a little bit more value. And as a former teacher, I understand that you have to provide a lot of different avenues for learning and not just say, here's the one way and the one way it's going to work. So we designed it in a way that it's going to build that idea for just people who want to read, people who want to interact, and people who want to watch.

Speaker A: That, uh, is fantastic. And you're using that as A sort of platform to provide proactive support. Right. So you're not just waiting for people to contact you. You're giving them a whole community where they can learn this stuff without having to reach out.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, I mean, a couple different things that we did with that that really focus on that proactive area of support and engagement from a direct support perspective is every customer case or question that we get, we capture that information, track it, catalog it, and each month we have a series of, here are the common questions that we've gotten the previous month. And so that our customers can see it and go, okay, well, this is something that someone else has seen. And so, uh, instead of having to wait and ask support, they can subscribe to that and get that information so that they understand here are some common pitfalls or different things that other people are running into. The other side of it is from a product release perspective, you know, as we send out release notes, which I know a lot of companies do, and I've been a part of other companies that do it, where you say, here's what's new and what's coming down the pipeline, we expanded on that a little bit further and for a little bit more, being proactive is the idea of, well, here's the actual use cases that we've already heard and uncovered. Here's what some of our other customers and possibly beta are doing with it, that you can be prepared when it launches to everyone else. So that we're not just saying like, something new is great, but then how do I use it? It's trying to give them a little bit of a Runway there so they can go to understand, like, here's what you could do with it out of the gates, and then some other aspects of it from a question m starting perspective is, you know, we've got different people on different teams starting those discussions, asking questions, how are you doing this? Or how are you doing that? So other customers can chime in. So again, you're not waiting for someone else to come in and ask that question. If we know this is a question that could benefit everyone, we'll go ahead and throw it out there and start a discussion.

Speaker A: What are the different sort of facets that make up this community?

Speaker B: Yeah, so there are a couple of different, I'd say, key areas in the community. And so the first one is our forum, which is based on our product as well as the value that you're going to get. And so this is going to be the area where we pose questions or customers ask questions, and you Kind of get that discussion started amongst them or with us. The next aspect and area of that is a knowledge center. And so with this it is really focused. So we have a help documentation center. But the knowledge area in the community is more geared toward and support what's called KCS and Knowledge Centered Service. And the idea of a question comes in and you're going to give a specific answer. And so we've got what we call a knowledge base there where it's going to be very specific questions that have come up before that'll guide a customer through that information. And then we've also got our product information and that's going to be our releases. So as we do release notes that send out to customers so that they can get answers on those different areas and then our events and webinars. And so that's going to be where we host everything from um, our deep dive with Drift series to where people can understand more about the product. A day in the life where you're trying to understand from an SDR like what their day looks like using Drift and different things like that. And in the future looking at, you know, doing ask me anythings with product managers and different people like that. And then I think one of the most exciting things that we did with our community was we integrated it with our help documentation as well as our it's insider plus, but our academy essentially where customers can take courses or learn different things. And so if I am a customer and I land in the community and I search a term, it's going to bring up information across the entire community. So if there was a webinar on it, if there was documentation on it, it's going to pull from the help center though. And if there's training on it, it's also going to include that information. So it's like a one stop shop where they can get all the information they need.

Speaker A: I love an academy. I think that's a uh, really underutilized tool about that people could really use more because it just helps customers become experts in the tool and then if they know it, they're going to be more inclined to use it a bit more. So that's fantastic. I wanted to get the specifics on that just because when you're describing a community and customer support, it's something that I personally don't hear about that much. So people who are listening might think oh God, like why is that? Where would I even start? But then when you break it down, most people have a knowledge center, uh, most people run webinars and things like that. It's just really honing those, making them really customer centric and bringing them all together with this unified purpose and making that the customer community. And you've done such a fantastic job with it by the sounds of it. Have you started monitoring any of the results or any impact that it's had on your customers yet?

Speaker B: So right now what we've seen is a lot more engagement than when we first launched. Like we're seeing more customers added to the community we have not yet measured, but what we are looking to measure soon is going to be what is the health score to that customer in comparison to their engagement in the community? So are we seeing more product adoption? Are they utilizing more features, more their seats and different things like that? And can we tie that to are they also in the community? Are they interacting there? Are they looking at different pages? We're not quite there yet because we want a larger sample size. We have seen some customers that are in there though, honestly that are seeing the most value out of drift are some of the biggest spokespeople or cheerleaders for it and just really love the product. They're also the same people that are in the community sharing information, asking each other questions. So I think from a benefit perspective, we're already saying that if they're champions internally across their organization, chances are they're going to be champions just of the product itself and they want to interact with other people like that. And so it's going to give us more information from a success side to say if your customer is not in the community, take a look at these customers, then what value they're getting out of it and notice how they speak about it. And so this is something that you should really encourage them to do. Start getting them to be engaged in there, tagging them with different questions. Because if this customer is seeing a good roi, then you should make sure your customers are also doing those same things.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And it's probably a bit too early to say, but have you seen any sort of reduction in ticket volumes or anything as a result of this?

Speaker B: So not quite yet, but I will say we have seen more page views in the community on different areas than we used to see in our help documentation. And I think it expands upon it. And the reason why, if I'm just going to get a little too ahead of myself in terms of assuming this is when we share the content in the community of Here are the top articles that we sent out to customers. We're telling them why the article was used how it was helpful and the benefit to it. And I think that adds a little bit of a extra layer of value to it because if I land on a help center and I read an article that tells me about what this feature does, it is helpful if I know what I'm doing, but if I don't, then I'm not going to see as much value. But if I read that community post that says, well, here's what we send and why we send it and the common questions that come up, it's just adding more benefits. So I think that's why we're seeing an increase in some of the views our community versus the help docs.

Speaker A: That's great. I don't know about you, but if I look at if I search a query on like HubSpot, for example, I use their help thing a lot. I won't often read the whole document. If I'm in the help center, it will highlight a little paragraph for me and I'll read that. And if I don't get from that what I'm trying to get, then I'll usually then contact support. But it sounds like because you're able to pull answers from real life tickets that you've had and real life customer situations that you've had, you're able to build up the information within that knowledge center based on the customer's resolution and what has worked for them.

Speaker B: Exactly. And I think it's that little bit of someone else has gone through this and so if they see that it's a little bit more trustworthy, I think everyone is like that where you go, I'm not sure if I should believe this, but as soon as you go, oh, this helped someone else, then you're more likely to understand and believe it.

Speaker A: Oh yeah, you're so right. It's like when you Google something and it comes up with a Reddit forum where someone's had the same issue, you'll normally get a better, better response from that.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: So what sort of trends have you seen coming up since you've launched the community internally or with the customers who are getting involved?

Speaker B: From m an external perspective right now, the biggest questions we get from customers are going to be around reporting and value. And so I think what they're asking each other, which is the interesting trend that I really like, is they want to know how are other people doing it? Because I think it's one thing when you hear directly from support, success or services like here's how to use the product, it just adds another layer of Value to ask each other questions. And so seeing engagement from customers is really important and that's something that we've noticed. And the biggest thing is more around, um, how do you show what the impact is of using Drift? Not specifically how do I use a certain feature, but more so like how do I show that impact across my company and my organization? From an internal perspective, I think the biggest trend that I've seen is that there's a lot of excitement from the entire customer success and services team about what customers are saying and what insights they can get from the questions that they're asking there. And then from a product perspective, I've had several people from that team asking how do we get involved? How do we get into the community to understand what questions are coming up? And so I think people internally are starting to see the value. We got a lot of buy in at the very beginning, but as people have started using it, they're starting to see more value from the platform.

Speaker A: That's great. So it's not only a tool for the customers, it's a tool that you're actually harnessing yourselves as well to gather insights on what the customers are asking 100%.

Speaker B: So I think that comes from, um, a couple different things. You've got page views, so seeing what they're interested in, how many people are interacting with different things, whether or not they're showing reactions, they like something or found value. But also the different categories that we're getting questions posted in. That's where I said, you know, from a product perspective, like they leaned heavily into the fact that we've gotten several questions on reporting so that it can help us understand, you know, how are customers doing this today with the product and platform and how can we change this so that it's an easier experience on them. And I think that's one of the added benefits that wasn't initially, you know, I'd say scoped out for the community where it's taking feedback from them and using it to make their experience better just organically, not even having to ask questions, but going, here's what they're talking about and what can we learn from them.

Speaker A: So what is it that you're hoping to achieve with this community?

Speaker B: The biggest thing is we want our customers to see value from Drift. And so that's going to come from a couple different areas that we're hoping to look to get is product adoption. So just in general we should see hopefully an increase in the number of users in the platform, the different features that they're Using just making sure that from a product perspective that they're getting the full value out of everything that they purchased. But we're also going to start to see engagement and an increase in their roi. So we want our customers to be successful. The more successful they are, the more successful we are. And so the insights that we get from other people, from other customers, from other success stories, we want to share that across and so that we can start to see our other customers reading this and going, okay, well I'm not doing that today and maybe I should. This is what someone else is doing and the value they're getting. So we want them to not only use the product but also get more out of it.

Speaker A: Yeah, that makes complete sense. So if I were a customer of drift, if I were involved in the community, what would that look like for me? Do you sort of send out invitations to events? Is it something they generally self serve on?

Speaker B: So it initially starts from a brand new customer perspective. We walk them through what the community is during onboarding, what the value is that they're going to get out of it, and then create different user groups that they can join based on their experience level. And you know, from a self service perspective they are going to have access to this so that they can go and ask different questions. Questions. But we've also expanded upon that. So for a couple different areas, from product release information, you, you can subscribe and get updates every month when we send out the monthly release notes so they don't have to go in and get it, they'll get that via email, but also from our digital team. What we've done is for customers who are at certain points in the journey, we're going to send them information that links to the community. So in the product itself they might get a little tool tip that pops up and says, you know, it looks like you haven't connected Salesforce yet. You know, would you like to learn more? And then it'll guide them over there. And then in conjunction with some of those different things it would be sending them, I'd say, I don't know, we call them goodie bags. But the idea of as you hit a certain point in your journey, let's say you're a sales user, here's a landing page that you can go to that has all of the different tips, tricks, best practices and things like that so that you know, it's not something that you have to go find on your own. And then the last piece I would say is from a customer success and professional services perspective. If there is something of value to that customer that they're not sure of, or that a question pops up again, that that CSM or consultant is going to send them that link, they'll tag them in a post so they can say, hey, you know, Mary, you were interested in this, or hey, John, this is something that we talked about the other day. And, and you can make sure that you're tagging them in that so that they can just drive them there organically too.

Speaker A: Great. So this is actually quite an enormous sort of company wide thing that everyone is involved in in some way. So every department essentially is involved in the community in one way or another, which is fantastic for customer centricity. Could you tell me a little bit about the specific partnership that support and product have and how you work together to analyze those areas of improvement?

Speaker B: Yeah. So for the support and product relationship there it is heavily focused on pulling the insights that we get from what customers are saying and doing. And the way we did that was we categorized our community into what's important to our product teams, which is the product area. And so they can go in and figure out exactly what someone is saying or where that category is taking place and so that they can end up going. We're getting a lot of questions on Playbooks or we're getting questions on routing, two different areas of our product. So from a product perspective, like we look at the data that we get from where the questions are coming in. So the category that it took place in and we combine that again with all the other information that we get. So our case data and questions, our chat information, and then the product also looks at it compared to usage, like where in the platform do people, you know, spend the most of their time? And so looking at that, that's where we gather that insight. And then on top of that, I'd say the biggest thing that we started noticing is we did not send out proactive release notes until we launched this community. It was something where a customer could go find it on our health docs. But when we went with the community, we send these emails out and the product team is looking to see how many people are reading this, what kind of engagement we get. And since we're sending this out a, uh, week early at this point we're starting to see customers who chime in and say, I'm so excited about this feature that's coming out, I can't wait to use this. Or asking more questions on, well, how am I going to use this right here? That gives another layer of Information for product on here's what customers are really hyped about, but also here's where we could send more details in our notes to say, here's what you could be doing with it so that they can understand like how to use it from day one.

Speaker A: That uh, is so great on so many levels because you've got the product adoption part of it there where they're going to be getting excited about what's coming up and getting invested in the product. And that's also great for the product team because they're getting real time responses and seeing how your customers are engaging and reacting to the things that they're bringing out, that must be really motivating for them.

Speaker B: It is, because it was one of those things where we always took it word of mouth from support and success and services, but now we get to get it directly from the customers instead of just that small group who tested it early. It's now the broad audience and we're seeing how many people are reacting to that. So it does give a lot of hope and idea of like we're doing the right things and people are excited about the things that we're doing. I think one of the big benefits of like being able to partner across the company specifically with success and services is that they're not just there to share insights, they're also there to answer questions. And, and if you gamify it so for example, we capture how many posts people create, how many questions they respond to. Now you're just building out a bigger base of people who can answer customer questions in the community. So you just start to go with, it's not a support responsibility. Especially if your support team maybe isn't so large, it's now like a group effort. And so you might have a success manager who's really keen on winning points and getting awards and so they really want to be active in there and answering questions. So now basically what you're doing is turning a team of, you know, 40 people in my support team to a team of um, 150 across the entire customer team who can answer any question at any time. And then you add into that every one of your customers who also like answering questions for one another. And that just becomes larger because I think the benefit that if anyone has ever been on Reddit is everybody likes to have the right answer. Everyone likes to chime in. And so if you have people who are strong users of your product, when someone else asks a question, they really want to be the person to say, I know the answer. To that, let me tell you how it works.

Speaker A: Yeah, this seems like an absolutely fantastic idea and I think that so many people can learn from this topic. So we've talked quite a lot about how you've built up this community and all the amazing things that you are using it for and how useful that is hopefully going to be in your retention and product adoption. What advice would you give to anyone listening who might be interested in developing a community within their customer base?

Speaker B: I would say the number one thing is get buy in across your entire organization because a community the same way they talk about it takes, you know, a family to raise or what is that quote? I don't remember what it is. It takes a village. There we go. It's you need everyone's involvement and their buy in because it's going to be really hard to stand up if it's just support owning it or marketing owning it or success. Like anyone, if it's just your individual function, it's going to be really difficult. And I think most people, when you stand this up, you have to understand that a community has value. That's going to go every team. And so whoever's spearheading this, in this case, if it was support like it was with me, I had a direct partnership with my VP of services and VP of success and I explained, here's what I'm going to give you, you know, here's the benefit to you and your customers and your team, but here's what I need from you to make it successful. And because it's a partnership and a give and take, I got a lot more buy in from that. And then uh, again showing that insight and information to the product team, it's getting their buy in there and you know, they were all sold on that. And then from a marketing perspective, if it's not owned by marketing, marketing is out there trying to get customers to use the product and drive adoption as well. So you've got very similar goals or if not the same goals and so making sure that you're aligned with them. And I think when you bring everyone along on the journey, it just makes it more successful. I'd say the other piece of it is going to be defining what you want to get out of it. Before you start creating everything from categories, job descriptions and things like that. I think it's really easy to get ahead of yourself and go, this is a beautiful tool. I can, you know, create a landing page. We can do. All this stuff is, well, that's great, but what are they gonna get out of it. And so starting with who, what is the value to your customer? What is the value to all of your internal stakeholders? When you have that information, then you can start creating. So don't get too far ahead of yourself because you might build something that it looks really nice from the outside, but it's one of those things where it's like a wall and then you go through the door and there is no house on the inside.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. As a marketeer, I completely relate to that because that's what we do. Make it look all pretty and then if we're not ready for it on the inside. So do you manage the community then? Or is it a group thing?

Speaker B: So the person who runs my help documentation also runs the community today.

Speaker A: Oh, okay, awesome. So why is it that you set the community up in the way that you did and haven't, say, hired a dedicated person to run the community as a whole?

Speaker B: That's a very good question. Out of the gates, it's a lot to say. I'm going to buy a platform, stand this up, hire someone who's going to do it, and they're going to take over and build the whole thing. And so for us, what we wanted to do was get the content out there. We understand how to use the product and platform, uh, across support, success and services. And so we're going to be the ones who facilitate a lot of the content. But also down the road is it gives us the avenue to make this into a career position. If we open this up and say, we want someone who's dedicated to this, instead of hiring someone externally out of the gate saying, this is what you're going to do, it's let's get everything stood up and then figure out, is there someone internally who wants to own this and we have justification for it because it just creates another career opportunity for someone maybe that you didn't have before. Because if you're saying, I want to build this from scratch, usually that comes with, let me hire someone outside who's got experience. And I feel like it's a miss of an opportunity to give someone that chance to say, I want to do something with my career that is not specifically in support or success, and I want to do something where I run a whole program and this is going to give us that opportunity if we want to do that. If we find out later though, that we need someone who knows everything and has experience, we still have that opportunity. But you just can't take that step back of, uh, I hired someone to do it and Now I'm going to replace them with someone internally. It just doesn't feel right.

Speaker A: Yeah, I actually really like that approach of how you've done this, that you've set it up first between yourselves because that means that you've been able to get buy in from so many people and get their input rather than either bringing someone in who no one knows and them having to go around and ask people for help or having someone try and step up to something that they. They maybe aren't really that confident in.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think that the thing that you just said there that I didn't say specifically, but I think it is a key thing there is it lives under support today. And I've built relationships with the entire company through interactions because support touches everything. I have to work directly with product because we're supporting the product. I work with success because again, we're answering the questions for that team and those customers. Same thing with services. And if I already have those relationships, it just made it easier to get that buy in like you said, rather than saying someone from scratch. So I think without thinking about it, that was one of the big benefits to having it fall under support for the time being.

Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And well, for me, support is at the heart of any organization, or it should be. So it's really nice to see that that's how it is actually working out for you guys. And I can't wait to see the results that you get.

Speaker B: You are my favorite person for saying that.

Speaker A: Thanks, Ben. Um, so what is next for you then and for your community at Drift?

Speaker B: So a couple of the big things that we're looking forward to doing that we haven't launched specifically yet. I touched a little bit on it, but they ask me anythings. So the chance and opportunity to engage with different people and different leaders and you know, for us, that is not just a product team, which I've seen before, where maybe a product manager is going to answer questions about the roadmap or what features we're doing or how that benefits the customer. But also we use Drift at Drift. And so this idea of someone who's in a similar position. If I'm a sales operation leader and I want to talk to our VP of sales ops here and say, how are you using this? How do you show the value of it? That's a great person to connect with for the support use case, putting myself out there and saying, what questions do you have for me on how can you use this? How can you maximize this for your teams? How can you show the value and benefit. So not just thinking about, let's talk about the product, but let's also talk to peers and leaders who can also talk about those different areas. So that's something that's going to be coming down the road with that. The other different things that we're looking at doing are going to be a little bit more tied to those values that I talked about. So the value that you're getting out of the product and platform, but being very specific about the statistics and the different insights that we're getting from customers who are successful and giving them a chance to kind of showcase and talk about what they're doing and how they're seeing value in it. I did a little bit of it recently where I spotlighted a customer who was very active and engaged in the community. And so the first spotlight on a customer was sharing their story of what they get out of Drift, what they're hoping to get out of the community and down the road. What we want to do is spotlight customers who are also seeing the most value out of the product and platform and what insights can they share with other people?

Speaker A: I love that. I think that's a really good idea. So I want to keep an eye on everything here. I'm really. You piqued my interest. I'm invested.

Speaker B: I will get you a personal invite and badge to the community.

Speaker A: Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast with me today, Ben. It's been really lovely chatting to you and learning all about this new community initiative. I can't wait to see where it goes.

Speaker B: Well, thanks for inviting me and having me. And hopefully if anyone has any questions on this, they can find me on LinkedIn. And I'm more than happy to answer questions about launching a community and organizing it from, uh, a support perspective.