Developing Community Programs that Improve Customer Retention with Gong
An event summary from our February 2023 event with Nisha Baxi
In yesterday's event we learned from Nisha Baxi, Director of Community at Gong, a multi-billion-dollar software company that helps over 2,000 large companies to better understand their customers, improve their data-driven decision-making and increase their revenue.
During the event, Nisha taught us all about about how to develop community programs that improve customer retention. See a short summary of what we covered below 🌟
To ensure their work is critical, customer community managers should work closely with product, sales and marketing teams and focus on the A ('Acquisition') and P ('Product') aspects of the SPACES model
Nisha works as part of the Customer Success function at Gong, where the north star metric is net dollar retention (NDR), which is a measure of how much your annual recurring revenue or monthly recurring revenue (MRR) has grown or shrunk over time by factoring in customer expansion as well as negative churn and downgrades
'Retention' is actually a lagging indicator, influenced by leading indicators, with product adoption being the universally agreed-upon leading indicator
To identify effective community programs for customer retention, focus on how they help with product adoption and encourage more usage of the product
Building a culture of experimentation is critical when trying to identify the best community programs
When experimenting with different programs, avoid big bets and focus on the fastest path to success by being open to collaboration and being outcome-driven
Engage with customers in your community and understand their pain points, then use deductive reasoning to create and modify experiments
It is crucial to start with a hypothesis based on data, then track experiments, gather data points and measure the success of different methods
The responsibility of prioritizing which product features to build/improve lies with the product team and they gather feedback from various sources including the community
Don't just extract information from your community, create a place for them to organically share ideas and insights and review and share those internally
To gather valuable feedback, focus on depth and test hypotheses through experimental approaches
Build trust with the community by thanking and tagging members when their feedback is turned into a feature and inform Customer Success Managers (CSMs)
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Community @ Unreasonable Group
Purpose of your community: Unreasonable Collective exists because solving the world’s most pressing challenges is not only a moral imperative but also a unique financial opportunity. We pool both capital and knowledge from our values-aligned community to co-invest in world-class global technology ventures that are uniquely positioned to successfully change the world for the better.
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