Customer Communities

10Law 6: Everybody Owns the Customer: Community Is a Company-Wide Strategy, Not a Department

By Seth Wylie

Community is a strange initiative. One small team is responsible for it, but the entire company owns it together. It's impossible to picture the makeup of a team who can represent all the interests of your customers, prospects, and partners. So how do you construct these partnerships between the community team and so many others? And which department should hold the community team so that it can make the biggest impact?

Community Starts at the Top, with a Purpose

Gainsight became an example of a company-wide commitment to the community when we hosted our first Pulse conference in 2013. Each year, our CEO, Nick Mehta, reminisces from the keynote stage about that small gathering and about how Pulse has grown. He radiates pride, enthusiasm, and earnest goodwill for the customer success community. His calendar backs that up with uncountable customer calls, networking and career coaching conversations, community events, and more. His support even came full circle, fueling our first-ever deep integration between the in-person Pulse experience and Gainsight's virtual community platform.

Dean Stoecker, now executive chairman, was CEO of the analytics automation company Alteryx in 2015. He said, “No one's ever going to learn our product if we don't allow customers some frictionless environment to share and communicate with each other. … Customers don't want to call up tech support ...