UserTesting is a truly customer-obsessed organization. If their software didn’t give that away, a tool used to modernize customer feedback, then their Influitive-powered advocacy program certainly would!
CommUnity is the name of UserTesting’s award-winning advocacy program and its success has been spearheaded by Lauren Turner, their Senior Customer Marketing Manager. The program’s purpose is simple: enable UserTesting customers to take actions that mutually benefit themselves and the UserTesting brand that they love. Customers are given the opportunity to share their knowledge, network, and help each other grow—all while providing stellar levels of advocacy.
In this Influitive Customer Spotlight recap, read on to learn about the ingredients that helped Lauren and UserTesting win the 2020 BAMMIE award for Program of the Year – Mid Market.
How do you explain CommUnity to potential new members and how do you help them understand the benefits of joining and participating?
My ideal onboarding method is to do a live walkthrough of CommUnity with new customers. This involves me working in tandem with a CSM, sales rep (when the customer is about to close) or someone from our onboarding team. We’ll aim to have everyone from that account attend and I’ll show them how it works, why it benefits them and answer all their questions. If a live walkthrough isn’t feasible, I’ve created a quick and in-depth recorded walkthrough that they can watch at any time. My next touchpoint is 1-2 weeks after they join CommUnity, where I send a push notification challenge with a quick video tutorial and link to my Calendly should they want to book a live session with me.
How long did it take you to launch your community and what has changed over time?
In order to get that real baseline of about 50 challenges built—so there was enough content to encourage people to join and keep coming back—it took us about three months. Then, the rest has been truly iterative with some trial and error. Some of our challenges last a few days and others will be active for several months. We do have a monthly channel of content that is refreshed and rotated out each month and it is important to always have some kind of new activity happening. Keep running reports and look at your dashboard to see what is and isn’t working. The last thing on this, don’t be afraid to just ask your customers through a challenge.
What does a “day in the life” look like for you?
What I’m doing for most of my day is evangelizing the community. This means I’m attending meetings with product managers, working with our marketing communications team and customer success managers to really figure out what it is they’re working on, how they’re involved, and how we can bring the community into that. I work hard to keep CommUnity top of mind for other departments as it’s mutually beneficial for them and our customers.
The rest of my time is day-to-day account maintenance, which includes welcoming new people who have joined CommUnity and sending them a quick email to offer the live walkthrough. It also means ensuring that everything is working smoothly but also coming up with new ideas for up-leveling the community.
Content is really only about 10% of what I do in my job. I know an early concern when starting a new community is the need to create from scratch. A lot of my early content creation was centered around repackaging existing resources and now I’m always on the lookout for new content. Fortunately, we have some fantastic content coming from all across UserTesting that makes it fairly easy to put together.
What advice do you have for smaller marketing organizations that don’t have a steady stream of content coming from other departments?
If you belong to user groups or newsletters for your industry, you can pull content from those newsletters to repackage as challenges. You can also set up Google Alerts for the topics that you know are most important to your customers and pull from the articles that come up from that daily feed. It’s also key to stay well-read and keep up with your industry and the interesting snippets you come across. I find LinkedIn to be fantastic for that actually; people in your network who are sharing articles that they’ve written, or are pointing to other articles. I spend a few minutes every day scanning through my LinkedIn feed to see what people in my network are posting.
Walk us through your content mix in the CommUnity.
I’ve organized all of our content into 12 channels:
- Getting Started: Our onboarding channel walks them through how CommUnity works, key benefits and what actions they can take
- Education: Links to webinar recordings, on-demand videos from live events, research reports and white paper content
- Test Your Knowledge: A series of quick multiple choice quizzes created by our product teams to test product knowledge
- What’s New: Includes all scheduled events for the current month and links to register
- Read & Share: UserTesting blog posts and podcasts can be read and then shared across their social channels
- Highest Value Challenges: This includes larger asks for advocacy like participating in a webinar, guest writing a blog post, reference calls and completing a case study with us
- Monthly Themed Content: A fun campaign that keeps content fresh, where we often leverage Influitive’s prebuilt campaigns
- COVID-19: Includes internal research, health and wellness content, and advice for working remotely
- Future Features & Product Roadmap: Members can sign up for beta testing groups and attend product feature demos and a perk of joining CommUnity is seeing new features 2-3 weeks before launch
- Fun Stuff: Content unrelated to UserTesting that connects customers on a personal level
- Writer’s Room: Includes opportunities for members to write testimonials, reviews and blog content
- Grab Bag: Miscellaneous content like one-off surveys, time-sensitive content and our monthly kudos to all members who have recently up-levelled in the CommUnity
What is the value of fun challenges and campaigns?
We recognize that newer members may have not formed an opinion about UserTesting yet or feel comfortable sharing knowledge or asking a question yet. That said, we still want them to be able to engage and this kind of content is a simple way for them to participate. Answering questions about pop culture or their favorite flavor of ice cream lets them connect with other CommUnity members as human beings and ultimately that ties back to our overall theme of customer empathy and being able to put ourselves in their shoes.
Is there another channel that stands out and gets a lot of traffic?
Our education channel is always very popular. When we have our product launches, thanks to the engagement in this channel, we end up seeing increased feature adoption because members are educated before launch. Our UserTesting University recently rolled out its first certification program and I’m expecting to see a big uptick in participation in the certification tests.
What are some of the KPIs you use to measure success?
We measure the number of case studies, reviews, testimonials, webinar participants, and blog articles written by members.
We’re still working on a way to best track those advocacy activities to an actual dollar amount. We do use Influitive’s ROI calculator to help us determine the value of things. We’re bringing in all of our different departments to help us find what a holistic score might look like.
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Listen to the full webinar recording to hear more of Lauren’s insights and to get a closer look at the UserTesting CommUnity. Be sure to check out our events page for upcoming customer spotlights and more.
