Community managers usually wear a lot of hats, and if you’d be able to clone yourself, you may build a marketing strategy, run ads, do an SEO for the website, record podcasts, drive traffic, make sales, and maybe even create a product. And all that just in your free from building community time!
However, let’s be honest, to do all that, we’d better live on a Mercury because one full day there is equal to 58 days, 15 hours, and 30 minutes compared to the tiny 24 hours on Earth 😅
And, yes, sometimes, there are better marketers, salespeople, SEO experts, etc. than we are, but if we collaborate and work together, instead of fighting for tasks and CEO’s favor, we can achieve really great results!
Usually, the product team is the center of the company, and while they develop and focus on making products better for customers, the community team collects all the feedback and customers’ needs, analyzes it, and brings it to the product team to build exactly what people want.
A community team is like a relationship manager, who communicates with clients, makes them feel seen and heard, calms down sometimes, and transforms all those “I wish to scratch my left ear with the right hand” into language understandable to a product team.
If the product team is a spaceship, the community team is its navigation system!
If people face any challenges with a product, they need other like-minded people to talk about those challenges. Such conversations make you reassured that it's a solvable problem or that enough people are facing it so someone (a person or the company) will find a solution.
That’s why people go to the community with every question they have about the product, and while communicating with other customers they are solving their problems, building meaningful connections with each other, and feeling not alone!
Also, a community helps gather valuable insights that can help support better solving tickets.
“A headache we used to face in Alibaba was getting a lot of tickets that would complain about an issue without giving enough context for our teams to understand the root cause. Users think the issue is A, so they complain about A, while forgetting to say that A only happened after B. We use the community to deep dive and understand root causes.
Community is also great to identify issues before it becomes something big, we have found tech glitches that users didn't even realize just by seeing screenshots or conversations about a completely different issue.” Pixie Cigar
Here are more amazing ideas from Pixie:
“*When transiting away from having a customer service hotline (phones) community plays a super important role to build user habits to know how to properly report issues/raise tickets. + When there are system crashes impacting the ability to report issues, we can find that out in the group.
The last one is: A community can help calm people down while support is working on fixing an issue (to reduce the unnecessary flood of tickets for a known issue). Whenever there is a tech issue where we are getting an influx of tickets, we will post in the community telling people we are working on solving it. This helps a lot and reduces anxiety/anger from users, gives them trust since they know we are working on it.”*