Getting involved in the best customer success communities can give you access to the resources you need to take your CS team to new levels of performance. Here’s our guide to the top customer success communities in 2022 and what they have to offer.
First, we’ll take a look at just what a customer success community is and what the benefits of being involved in one are. Then, we’ll walk you through a list of some of the best customer success communities you can join in 2022 and what each of them has to offer. Use our list to help you find the right CS communities to suit your professional lifestyle!
What Is a Customer Success Community?
A customer success community is a group of professionals who wish to grow in their customer success careers and share a common interest in helping clients achieve desired outcomes. Customer success communities usually operate through digital channels such as social media, apps, chat rooms, online forums, and email lists. In more tight-knit communities, members may take conversations offline, and talk through phone calls and face-to-face conversations.
Customer success communities allow members to network, carry on conversations, and share resources. This can serve a variety of functions, including:
- Enabling participants to ask questions seeking professional advice on CS problems, solutions, and suggestions
- Providing a forum to share CS strategies, tips, and best practices
- Promoting CS thought leaders
- Soliciting CS opinion polls
- Supporting CS research
- Showcasing and reviewing CS software
- Offering career advancement tips for CS professionals
- Providing CS training opportunities
- Posting job opportunities
- Hosting CS webinars, teleconferences, and seminars
- Offering tips on how to run customer success communities
Different customer success communities have different areas of focus, along with differing policies on what topics may be discussed and what types of materials may be shared. Before participating in a community, be sure to read through the community’s guidelines and understand the rules. In particular, be aware of any community guidelines regarding product promotion. Some communities may allow direct product promotion under certain conditions, while others may only allow indirect promotions, such as linking to your site in a profile.
Joining a customer success community usually is a simple matter of registering, but some communities may require administrator approval to join.
Any individual or company can start a customer success community. Some brands set up their customer success communities to enhance their customer support or to support their marketing efforts.
Why Should You Participate in Customer Success Communities?
Engaging with a customer success community offers many benefits to CS professionals, including:
- Allowing CS professionals to network with other professionals
- Providing a resource for CS team members to find answers to business challenges and technical problems
- Helping CS professionals sharpen their skill sets, advance in their careers and hunt for jobs
- Support CS managers with information and advice from the community
- Giving CS companies promotional opportunities to position their brands as thought leaders, generate leads, and plug software products (within the limits of the community’s policies on promotions)
These and other potential benefits make joining a customer success community a winning proposition for CS team members, managers and marketing leaders.
Best Customer Success Communities in 2022
As customer success management has grown in importance for building SaaS customer loyalty, the number of customer success communities has grown. Check out this list of awesome customer success communities to consider joining.
1. CS Insider
CS Insider is a CS community that highlights inspiring stories and resources focused on helping people break into customer success and level up in their careers. The resources CS Insider offers include a newsletter, a blog, a podcast, community spotlights and events catered specifically to CS professionals.
2. Gain Grow Retain
Gain Grow Retain is a free, open community for CS leaders from B2B SaaS companies. The community aims to provide CS leaders with practical peer support. It also seeks to stimulate discussion of best practices. Content is delivered through an online community platform, podcasts and weekly calls. Participants can ask questions of the community, connect with peers or submit events for possible promotion. The community includes areas devoted to leadership discussion and job boards.
3. CSM Practice
CSM Practice is a CS consulting firm that serves technology and services organizations. They host a CSM Practice community on Facebook. The community posts content, videos, CSM templates, reviews, and announcements of events and fundraisers.
4. Leveraging Customer Success
Leveraging Customer Success is a LinkedIn group for professionals who want to share tips on how to share customer success journeys through social media and other traditional marketing methods.
5. The Customer Success Roundtable
The Customer Success Roundtable covers all of the facets of Customer Success from onboarding to long-term retention. This group focuses on identifying the core issues and challenges related to each stage of the customer journey.
6. Customer Success Executives
Customer Success Executives is another LinkedIn community and is tailored towards customer success managers and executives in the software and internet space. Professionals can share industry tips and best practices here.
7. Customer Success Managers in Action
Customer Success Managers in Action is a global community focused on strategies to elevate the customer success profession.
8. The Customer Success Forum
The Customer Success Forum is a CS community hosted on LinkedIn. They are affiliated with the Customer Success Association, a membership organization dedicated to providing information about the CS profession and helping CS professionals connect.
Their forum is geared toward both customer success and customer experience professionals. Participants come from companies of all sizes and range from CS managers to CEOs.
9. Success Hub
Practical CSM’s Success Hub is a community dedicated to all things related to customer success management training, development, research, discussion, software, process and best practices. They offer great events like webinars, live training and live interviews, as well as other resources including thought leadership articles, discussion forums and job postings to help propel you forward in your CS career.
10. Customer Success Leadership Network
The Customer Success Network (CSN) is a forum for CS professionals worldwide to collaborate with their peers, sharing best practices, implementation tips, key metrics and CS transformation trends. The CSN also has LinkedIn and Slack communities where members from around the world chat and collaborate about the issues they are facing every day.
11. CS Ladies
CS Ladies is a service organization open to women in the customer success industry and beyond who are interested in self-improvement, mentorship, learning and supporting other women. It is focused on empowering women through a “learn with and from” approach to personal success, and provides a safe environment for women to share, grow and cultivate meaningful relationships.
Join the Best Customer Success Communities to Multiply Your CS Performance
Customer success communities are groups of passionate professionals who share a common interest in being the best in their customer success careers and helping clients achieve desired outcomes. They can serve several functions, including providing networking opportunities, peer support, information, career development advice, training, and job-hunting resources.
Interacting with a customer success community can benefit CS professionals by helping you network, get peer input on business and technical issues, and stay updated on your industry knowledge and skill set. Brands also can receive marketing benefits from using CS communities for thought leadership positioning, lead generation and promotion of product awareness.
The Totango online community includes our blog and other resources such as white papers, reports, on-demand webinars, and a learning hub to help you get the most out of our CS platform. You also can learn by doing by trying the Totango platform free to see for yourself how it works.
