How Community Increases Retention 4x ft. Erica Kuhl (Gainsight)

And community is just like a dreamy customer retention tool.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You're listening to Unchurned, brought to you by the Gainsight podcast network. When Erica Kuhl joined Salesforce as employee number 176, her boss laughed at her idea. She wanted to build a place where Salesforce admins scattered across the world struggling alone could help each other. He gave her a broken website and called her a web producer. So she duct taped together different technologies and built it anyway. That scrappy community would grow to 17 million members and become the blueprint for an entirely new category. Today on Unchurned. Erica Kuhl on pioneering digital community and digital customer success.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's episode of Unchurned. I'm Josh Schachter, and I'm very excited to be here today with Erica Kuhl. Erica is the executive vice president and general manager at Gainsight. She's overseeing all of our emerging products. Erica, welcome to the program.

Erica Kuhl:
Thanks for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Likewise. We're going to learn together about each other. You and I are both fairly new here. I joined four months ago, Gainsight. You joined maybe seven, eight, nine, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And we've just gotten to know each other. I've been focusing, you know, kind of the first few months on the CSI and a jet, and you're running a really exciting part of our overall business and growth strategy. Tell us a little bit about that.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, so what I get the opportunity to do is wake up every day and eat and sleep and dream about community and education and in app experiences and how they work best in class individually and then how they work together. So that's what I get to do.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Great. So I had heard all about you before I joined. And then when I joined, you know, you have to meet Erica. First of all, she's just a badass and she's like, super cool. And. And when you and I spoke the other day, you showed us, like, your Halloween hat you were wearing, which was like the poop emojis. I was like, all right. Like, she's.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
She's cool. I've also respected, by the way that you've had, like, this is like a complete separate aside, but I've really respected. I Can see that you, you work very hard, but you also draw really nice personal work life boundaries, which is like completely unseen these days. And I really respect that. I can tell that you're a big family person as well. And obviously like that's, that goes with the ethos of, of being a community builder and in the world of post sales, customer success. I had also. So besides being just an awesome person, super cool.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I had also heard that you're like, I don't know if it's the pioneer, the trailblaze blazer. No pun intended. Well, pun intended.

Erica Kuhl:
Beyonce, Michael Jackson, you know, you can name it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah, yeah. I called you the Muhammad. I called you the Muhammad Ali in our prep conversation. Yeah. Of the community building community, if I got that right. So tell us a little bit about like I want to get into Erica's origin story, who you are. Why am I so excited to speak with you? You know, you really did like pioneer this, this industry. So tell us a little bit about your roots in that.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, well, thank you for all those kind words too. That's, that's kind. The, the, the boundaries thing is key. The balance thing, you know, on that, just real quick, like, I, I finally decided that balance was not going to be what I strive for because you'll fail every single time. So I adopted the new, the new fluidity, you know, the model of sometimes it works really well and sometimes there's harder times and that seems to be a better, a better thing to achieve. But yeah, I do, I do love and want to keep the family balance. Even here at Gainsight, I have kiddos that are in the thick of everything. So it's.

Erica Kuhl:
And as I'm sure many people are, so thank you for that. But yeah, my history is wild and twisty and it doesn't make any sense. But I think what's cool is that Gainsight clicked a lot of it into place and. But origin story is, you know, I, I started at this, this company that nobody had ever heard of. I took a big gamble on it myself. And because it was in the dot com era and it was this, this tiny little company called Salesforce. Salesforce.com back in those days of which of course everyone that's listening is like, oh my God, that's not a little company. But when I joined, I was employee 176 and I didn't know what was going on, but I'd heard this was a good company and that there was a great leadership and I like their philosophy.

Erica Kuhl:
I come actually from a previous dot com that had A hosted, like model. And so I liked this idea. I thought this was a cool idea. And I knew how to take complex technical things and boil them down for, you know, easy ways to consume. So I was actually hired as one of their first education members of their education team, which was me and one other person. And I was hired to write and deliver the admin workshop program for a part of the business of Salesforce that wasn't even a part of the business yet. It was like there was no such sub Salesforce Admin. There was no such Salesforce developer.

Erica Kuhl:
It was just people that basically were tapped on the shoulder to go out to San Francisco and take this class and learn to see about this new way of, of working. And, and it was, it was me they were meeting and I was, I called it my Broadway show because I wrote it and I delivered it and eventually I toured it. So that was, it used to just be out of San Francisco. And you know, you have to like, remember back and I'm old. I'm like a dinosaur. So this is like pre social. This is pre digital transformation. This is pre cloud computing.

Erica Kuhl:
Like, this is, this is early day stuff.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And this is like right after the bubble, right? This is like, like 2002, three, four, five.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, I should have framed that. It was exactly 2002. So, yeah, we're having like a, you know, a coming of age, you know, and, and, and I knew that what people were coming to the class and really quickly, like, I realized that we were learning more than technology. They were of course being told to go learn this thing called Salesforce and they're paying a pretty good fee. But when they arrived, we weren't learning regular tech. It was like a whole new thing. So yeah, we had to learn how to use Salesforce, but what I was having to teach them was more of a movement, like describing things to them. Like, okay, when you go over to your light switch and you flip on your light switch, you expect the lights to come on.

Erica Kuhl:
Like you don't have a power plant in your backyard. And so these are the ways that we had to teach technology because it was new. This, this concept is so basic now, it's like hard to even remember a time when, when this didn't exist. So these people were change makers. And I knew that the people in these classes that were tasked to do this were, were part of this movement and they was either going to work or it wasn't like, it was either. Like I was going to tap into the minds and hearts to be able to get These people to bring these new concepts back to their business and get them to adopt this huge potential security problems that they have to overcome lots of things. And so it just felt different. And so the reason why this is important to them.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It sounds like we come back to this a lot on the show, probably because I'm a very big fan of his, but Jeffrey Moore is crossing the chasm. This sounds like. Like this is right in that this is your early adopters and you're trying to figure out how to grow from there.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, that's exactly right. And. And they're not necessarily your typical people that you think were going to be your early adopters because they were. They were not really very high in the organizations. They were more like sales ops people that were just like, this is a part of their job. So they were a little geekier, you know, not even. Not even yet. It became geeky over time, for sure.

Erica Kuhl:
But, like, that's why it was important. And I was. I guess I was the right person that they hired because I knew how to take some of these complex discussions and bring them down into people that weren't yet geeky. They were. They became, like I said, super geeky. But they. They evolved into their geekiness and they were. There were lots of different kinds of roles and things, and I loved watching it happen in the classroom because usually classrooms have like the exact same title and you're taking this exact same course and.

Erica Kuhl:
But these were like random titles, random levels, random parts of the world and country. And they were just the discussions they were having. And quite frankly, I was learning as much because, sure, you're early days. So they were giving me great feedback and I was learning and I was bringing it back to the product organization. In fact, we didn't even have employee training, so the employees would sit in the back of my class too, with the customers, and they were asking all these questions. I'm like, zip it, guys. Like, this is for the customers. Like, we need them excited.

Erica Kuhl:
Like, don't be poking holes. So this is like crazy bootstrappy early days. Pre ipo. Like really early. And anyway, you know, did that for quite some time.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And it was all. It was all. This was. Like you said, this was all in person, this. Like, there was no way to really scale this. It was just like after workshop. Yeah.

Erica Kuhl:
Nope. But interestingly enough, Mark Benioff is, you know, he's way above, ahead of his time in. In so many ways, in so many things. Always, even when I was there, I was always like, this will never work. And it always worked. He always made it work. But he was doing, we were doing recorded trainings. Now this sounds so old school, but like literally we had no video like this.

Erica Kuhl:
And I would be on like, I think it was called go to meeting or something. And I would deliver the class in person. And then I would run upstairs, sit in a room, I called it the bubble room. And I would deliver sales 101 training, like how to, you know, set up sales stages and, and I live in it. And salespeople, literally sales reps would, would log into my class, hundreds of them, and listen to me on recording. But a live recording, he wouldn't let me do a recording. I was literally saying the same thing. Like I could put, I leaned my head back, put my feet up on the table and like delivered the class with my eyes closed.

Erica Kuhl:
Cause it was like the same thing. So I was like, can we please like record this? And he's like, no, live. Live is live.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What was so important? I mean he seemed, I guess he's a live guy. He's got Dreamforce and everything. Yeah. What's so important about that to him?

Erica Kuhl:
I guess it was like Q A and like personality, like knowing that there's someone on the other side that cares about the customer. He's crazy. Ruthlessly customer focused and obsessed. And he wanted the feedback. He loved feedback. So it was really the Q A that he wanted to hear. And so finally I got him to agree that I could run up, click play. So it would play and then I could just like zoom in for the, the Q and A.

Erica Kuhl:
I mean, this is taking me back. I haven't even thought about this for so long where I'd be like doing live Q and A. But there was nothing. So you know, we were just, we were evolving. So we had about a catalog of probably 14 of those like live trainings with Q and A. And then I was the one running downstairs and doing the, the actual in person instructor led training. So it was crazy days.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And what was this? I don't know if you would call it a community at that point or not, but to some extent it was. Right. So what was the size of that group, that community? And like when you were starting this and then where, when you, when you left where, where did you leave it?

Erica Kuhl:
I mean really at this time we didn't, I wouldn't say that that was a community, but actually now that I think about the way of community different, we definitely were, we were listening to feedback, we were engaging with this community. But my idea, I'LL fast forward a little bit. My idea came from the classroom of, like, off they would go into the world trying to. To battle this amazing change and transformation on their own. But they had nothing. They had nowhere to go. Once they left the classroom, they were like, poof, gone. And I.

Erica Kuhl:
And I missed them because I was getting so much from them. So was the product organization, and there was no way to bring that together. And again, this concept sounds so basic now, but I pitched the idea, which I was in. I had moved into the marketing organization at that point, and I pitched this idea of community to our cmo and he literally laughed at me. No joke. I swear to God. He was like, that sounds like a dumb idea. I was like, wait, I know the customer better than anyone at this company.

Erica Kuhl:
I know more about this product than anyone in this company.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What was the idea that you pitched? What was the construct of it?

Erica Kuhl:
I said, I want to create a place like a portal or I don't even know what word I use. I wanted to create a place where the conversations that were happening in the classroom could continue. That they were having this incredible conversations and then they were forging alone. This was a solo operation. When they went back to their companies to try to bring Salesforce to life, I was like, can we continue the conversations, Continue asking and answering each other's questions? They're in the weeds. They're living it. I want to do that. And can't we bring some of this product feedback, a little more structured to the product organization? Those are my two value props that I.

Erica Kuhl:
And I don't know. He thought it was crazy, but I've been there quite a while. So he's like, hey, listen, Erica, you're a good performer. You know, you're a good person. How about I just, like, let you give it a go?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
I'll throw you a bone.

Erica Kuhl:
So he was like, well, what do I call you? Because what is this? I'm like, it's community. I'm going to be engaging. He's like, well, like where? I'm like, well, on a web, you know, like on a portal. On a what? He's like, a website. Like, well, it's not a website. He's like, fine, I'm going to give you a website. We have a website that like, hosts documents and stuff from Dreamforce best practices. I'm going to give it to you.

Erica Kuhl:
It's called success.salesforce.com. i'm like, fine, sounds good. So he did. He made me a web producer. No joke. I don't know Anything about web producer. I don't know anything about this job, but I'm like, whatever. He's going to say, yes, I'm doing it.

Erica Kuhl:
So I started duct taping and hacking together the first community, literally learning HTML and, you know, looking up forums and taking listservs and like, literally blogs. I knitted together like four technologies and hacked it together. So that was it. So I'd say like, we're talking in the hundreds, maybe low thousands people in it at the first, the first days. I love Salesforce about six and a half years ago and we were at like, you know, 15, 17 million learners and community members. So massive. And the company went from 176 to 58,000 in that time too. So it's a massive story, nuanced like crazy that we can get into.

Erica Kuhl:
But like, that's kind of the origin of how it started that a lot of people don't know because I think they just assume that Salesforce has community because it's just such like a part of the DNA of the company. But it is. It was a struggle, and weirdly more of a struggle for Salesforce to understand the benefit of community than the community to actually understand it. They were like, cool, you did it. You gave us a plate. Took a little bit longer for Salesforce to like, what is this doing for us? You know, at the end of the.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Day, it sounds like that community, that initial 1.0 forum plus website of resources took off. It sounds like it found its product market fit, so to speak, pretty immediately. Is that.

Erica Kuhl:
Was that the case for the community members? Yes. I mean, they, they loved it. You know, I grew the community up in marketing, so as a result, I didn't have the support of support. So if you, if you know what that means, like, I. It wasn't a support community. It was a community of people helping people from day one, because that was just what it was. I didn't have the luxury of having anyone to help answer questions. So it became peer driven, engaged immediately.

Erica Kuhl:
And because this movement was happening and it was starting already to, to make impact on their lives, it had this initial immediate emotional connection for the members and they were finding their tribe like they were. This was a, a very unique thing that they were on a, a rocket ship of growth. And so, yeah, they were. It was like lickety split for the community members and it grew fast, really fast.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And did you have to do anything to, to help amplify that growth or was it completely on its own? Okay.

Erica Kuhl:
Oh, God, no. I never want anyone to think that, because that is something I also hear is, you know, I talk about, I want, people want to talk about the community a lot about at Salesforce and they're like, oh, well, you're just lucky. You're just lucky that like everyone's just so rabid when it comes to Salesforce. I'm like, hell no, not 20 years ago. CRM, like enterprise, you know, CRM. No, it's boring as hell. That is not true. Like, this was a deliberate strategy.

Erica Kuhl:
Maybe I didn't know I was doing it as a strategy, but no, it was hands on, one to one. I knew everything about these guys. I knew what motivated them, I knew why they were engaging. I knew what they wanted from me and from the company. And I knew that if I was going to survive, I had to get them doing it on behalf and with me. So I knew that it was building with them for them, not for them, like with them along the way. So I listened hard, I championed on their behalf. It was, it was, it wasn't on me, but like it was definitely a deliberate strategy.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Well, it was a small team. So it was largely you. I mean, tactically speaking, what was your role as the community manager?

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, everything, it was just me. So honestly, it was, it was, I was a one man show again. Just like I was teaching, you know, writing, delivering all that. Um, so for me at the beginning it, you know, what I knew that I needed to do was scale. Obviously that was what it was. And I also knew I needed to align on some kind of metric because community can be squishy and I hate that word. Weird. Weirdly enough, like community is not even a word I love because it just means a lot of things.

Erica Kuhl:
It might jump to your mind as a forum, might jump to somebody else's mind as social media. And so I knew that if I didn't start speaking the language of business and start putting some metrics around, like what I was doing for the business, it wasn't going to survive. So I started thinking about things like, okay, if all these people are asking and answering questions, surely it's, it's having an impact on the support organization or self service skill or time to time to value, you know, So I started putting a little more work into that so that I could grow my programs and also grow my team so we could start showing some value. Because a one man show is not fun. That's, it's, it's so hard. But I needed to sell value just like anything else, you know, and this was so new that nobody of Course like I knew what was going on. I saw it and lived it and breathed it. But other, other parts of business didn't get it.

Erica Kuhl:
And it, it's new so I needed to figure that out.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Let's, let's remember to come back to those measurements. Cause I think that's a really important piece for us to talk through.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Again, going back to tactically, like what was your, like, were you seeding posts? Were you replying on your own to make sure that like the conversation got going? How were you doing those types of things?

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, yeah, I, I wasn't doing a lot of seating because they, they really were doing a lot of it on their own. But what I did know is that I needed things to get answered and I needed them to get answered fast. So I was doing a lot of behind the scenes puppeteer work. So either I was I. Because what I had going for me is I knew everything. I knew what was going on. And so if I knew a question was being asked about a certain kind of best practice, I happened to know someone knew something. I tap them in and make the connection literally.

Erica Kuhl:
And then, or if it wasn't able to get done by then, I tap someone internally, a subject matter expert internally and say, hey, I know this is not your job but like this is a great question. This, if you answer this one time, you're going to be able to reuse this asset multiple times when. Because if one person is asking it, I bet a lot of people are asking it. So I would just kind of like this master puppeteer in the background. I wasn't actually creating much net new content myself because that was not the goal. The goal was to make certain that I was getting the, the differentiation was the engagement. There was enough going on in a content perspective that I didn't need to be curating content that was being done by other parts of the business. But I bring the content to them, I make certain it's accessible, start connecting some of those dots.

Erica Kuhl:
So it's really like a master, you know, wizard of Oz. Like I was literally like the wizard of Oz.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
You know, you were the bridge builder, connective tissue node networker, community builder, you know, like that. Yeah.

Erica Kuhl:
And the protector too. I was the protector. I, I fiercely protected their security. Security. You know, when things, making certain that things did not go awry, that, you know, there were some guidelines in place that they felt that this was their environment. I, I very passionately felt that this was their home. I built them their home, but then I sold it to them. You Know, I gave it to them and said, you invite sin when you want, but this is your home.

Erica Kuhl:
You. You set it up how you want. Because I just felt like if we overrun their home, you know, they won't be able to have their own trusted conversation. So I protected that very fiercely from like outside spam or negative negativity. I didn't mind critical. I love critical, but it's the negative, like just straight up bitching and moaning. That wasn't what we were there for. We were there to help and collaborate and grow and same thing for the company.

Erica Kuhl:
I. I didn't want them coming in there and bombarding them with garbage. It was not a megaphone of marketing garbage. It was like if you've got something to actually share and engage with. So it's teaching a whole new muscle to the organization. Like, how do you engage with community different than just a marketing channel.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So a lot of internal curation. It sounds like that was the most of your focus. Was there anything as far as distribution or that really just kind of sculpt on its own?

Erica Kuhl:
What do you mean by distribution?

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Like grow. Growing the community. Growing the community people, you know, growing the numbers.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, I mean, that's, that's. That didn't come strategically until later. It was pretty organic because I think it was just. But what I learned is that there were some really, really important things that happened. And by focusing on the salesforce employee ecosystem, it actually drove my numbers. Because once they started to understand the ways that they can engage with their customers in a new way, all of a sudden there were new. New ways.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Referred people.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, through people, through programs like getting things on the community, like release information. I mean, it's exhausting to keep up with releases. So saying, hey, put all your release information here, have your webinars here, have your Q and A, answer questions about new feature releases. All of a sudden, four times a year at minimum, people are coming to the community to consume that content and engage. So finding these new ways for acquisition that's. That's across the entire customer journey was so key. So it's not just me on my own, like driving traffic. Like, that's.

Erica Kuhl:
That's never going to work. It's never going to work. Yeah.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
This podcast is all about strategies and tactics in retention, because Gainsight is all about strategies and tactics in retention and in our product suite. So. So why does community matter so much for that? Like, for today, you know, why does it matter? And for folks that are in 2025, going into 2026, that are at a spot where you were 20 years ago. Yeah, let's talk about how they can jumpstart.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah. I mean, the good thing is that they're just so much. There's so much more. So. And you know, I didn't have an Erica helping me along the way. So now I love that there's me and other people that have done this along the way to fast forward a lot of these. These strategies and get them away from the roadblocks that I had. But I would say that at the end of the day, it was retention.

Erica Kuhl:
You know, I sat in a lot of different organizations throughout my tenure at Salesforce building community. But at the end of the day, it all boiled down to product adoption and retention and expansion. You know, those were like the biggest things and those are like the biggest problems that people have. And at the end of the day, I wanted to show that people that engaged in the community in a certain specific way, that they stayed longer versus community. People that didn't engage in the community. Ultimately, that was my goal. So even back then I was like ruthlessly focused on retention. Now, of course, I wasn't the only way, but I could strongly correlate by understanding, you know, by looking at the data and seeing how they engage in different ways and then looking at their time to value and looking at their length of service.

Erica Kuhl:
And then we would. We saw an enormous uplift by running the data, seeing that, sure enough, you would think, you would think. You create this nurturing environment where people are there to help each other and experts in the company are providing content and you're listening and bringing feedback into the product like, you'd think they'd stay longer. But Salesforce didn't care unless they could actually prove it, if they could actually draw strong correlations. So. And that's the same for other people. Now I say the same thing when I'm helping people build strategies. I'm like, you better tie this to retention.

Erica Kuhl:
You better tie this to product adoption. You won't survive. You won't. Your community will not survive. If it's all just soft, you know, soft metrics, it must ladder to retention.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
And it sounds like it's running cohort analysis to prove that out of. This is the group that's in the community. This is the same group, similar group that's not in the community. And here's the difference in the metrics.

Erica Kuhl:
Right? You get it. It's not hard. I mean, you know, it can be more sophisticated. You can. You can, you know, dial it up or down in different ways. Ideally, it's, it's integrated into your CRM, your community, so that you can very seamlessly see the engagement and how it ties to these things. But, but don't let that stop you. Like, just do it.

Erica Kuhl:
You. It, it is exactly what you're saying. You just define what engagement means and then tie it to that cohort and say, how does that cohort do over a right amount of time? Not maybe all time, but like get it tight and take a look and then, then change your strategies each year to figure out if you can make market improvements which make a huge difference.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
So who are you speaking to these days that would be interested in learning this backstory and applying it to their own organization? Yeah, like, who's the role? Who's that Persona?

Erica Kuhl:
Well, what, you know, I'd say who's. I'm. Who I'm seeing cares about this most these days, interestingly, is like cmos I was talking to a lot. And so my previous days, right before Gainsight, I was a consultant building these strategies for big name brands. B2B, some B2C, actually medium all the way up to large. And, and CMOs were caring a lot about this. In the realm of like customer marketing, I would say, you know, it starts back to like what happened during COVID not to like go back to the COVID days, but what happened is that nothing new was really coming in to the funnel in those days. And so the people that did really well were people that had incredible programs to retain their customers.

Erica Kuhl:
And community is just like a dreamy customer retention tool. And so they were, they were scrambling, they didn't have it. And so they were like, so excited to spin up communities. And so CMOs about all these dollars to run events that couldn't do in person events. They were like, we gotta build a community to like keep engaging. And so sure enough, like, a lot of CMOs started becoming really excited about building communities and they didn't know what they were doing. And what was kind of cool is.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That there's a company like Gainsight that like has to skip Pulse. And so they've got a budget there for like this mega conference that they throw or Dreamforce. And you're like, well, great, what are we gonna do that we've got that budget now, what are we gonna do with it?

Erica Kuhl:
Exactly. And if you weren't doing something before, you didn't know what to do, you literally were like, do I run a webinar? It's like, okay, no, I mean, yeah, go ahead and run a webinar. But, like, that's not gonna continue. The conversations, those beautiful conversations that are going on at Pulse or at Dreamforce, you know, they're. Those conversations should be literally going on 365 days a year, not four days or three days that you have there. So this was the way that I got CMOs to understand. This is your conference, 365 days a year, always on in all the different countries. You know, always on.

Erica Kuhl:
And that's like, oh, I get it, I get it. It's not just the content. It's like the conversations and the sitting down on a beanbag and having a great conversation. You know, that's. That's the way that they were starting. So I talk a lot to CMOs, but now there's an evolution of customer marketing that's starting to bring together advocacy and community and sometimes education as well. So it's starting to converge that it's difficult because the titles are a little all over the place. But what, you know, people that are caring about digital customer success, this is now, like, the real digital customer success.

Erica Kuhl:
You know, we've been talking about it for a while. It's not like digital customer success is something we created or it's new, but it hasn't always been about community and education and these in app nudges. That hasn't always been a tight conversation. It's like community over here, education over here, digital doing their thing. And so this is the convergence of them that we're starting to see happen. And that's what I'm. That's why I'm here. This is why.

Erica Kuhl:
Why I'm excited. You.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It sounds like Chuck brought you in to give you an opportunity to create that subcategory of post sales effectively. So what is digital customer? It is. It is X plus Y plus Z. What exactly is it again?

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah. So. So back to Chuck. Yeah, he. He tapped me when he joined Gainsight, and I was like, I don't know, you know, what's going on over there yet. Let's. Let's look, hang back. But, you know, then he whispered in my ear about Skill Jar, and I thought, oh, boy, this now is real.

Erica Kuhl:
Like, now they've got this great community product that I knew well from my years in consulting, and now they're. They're, you know, they bought Skill Jar, and he was like, listen, come over.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Which is an education customer. Education platform.

Erica Kuhl:
Education platform. Fantastic education platform. And he's like, come over and run this roadmap. Like, run. Run the product. Do it like you always wanted to do. You know this space better than anyone. You know what you didn't have, you know what you dreamed of, you know where the industry is going.

Erica Kuhl:
I'm like, I don't, you know, I don't really know how to run a product organization. Have you, have you seen my background? Engineering? You know, he's like, I don't care. We have fantastic people that do that. But, but you know, you know what you need. Like, that's what we don't, that we don't have. And so he had a lot of, a lot of trust in me and a lot of vision in me that I didn't even maybe have, but he's so right. And you know, we're talking about earlier the clicking together of these disparate parts of my, my career. And so the dream of like being able to start an education, grow a community and now, now be able to drive, you know, drive this future forward.

Erica Kuhl:
And so when I think about what is that? What is digital customer success? It's, it's a world in which you've got learning anywhere, learning everywhere. And it's a seamless experience personalized like this has never happened. It's all very, it's, it's all very disparate. And your org chart starts throwing up all over your customers. And now it's not that it's about meeting them where they are and feeding them the right information at the right time when they want it in different formats. And this is something we can actually do because we actually have those, those products that power this possible, you know, seamless experience.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
What products do you manage that power, this experience? And I'm asking because of the follow up question I want to ask after.

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah, so it's the community, the community platform and skill jar, which is education in, in app customers, in app product experience.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Okay, so, so that's kind of the, the Y plus X plus XYZ whatever.

Erica Kuhl:
Right? One equals three, you know, or something like that.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
It should be the one plus one plus one equals four. Right? Like it's got to be the extra multip. Okay, step one, building digital cs. Which one of those three combination of the three, you know, like, like vibe code versus Buy skill jar. Like where's the starting point for people?

Erica Kuhl:
Oh God, that's really, that's a tough question. You know, I, I think that, you know, it, it, it can start. There is a crawl, walk, run. I mean in the dream state, you're like, I'm all in on this and I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go all the Way across the board with Gainsight and, and start the programs off together. Dreamy. If you can start these programs off together where they're immediately understanding each other, they look the same, they're the same login, the search is federated across them. You're able to serve up personalized experiences, AI threaded throughout. So it's, it's really customized dream state.

Erica Kuhl:
Okay. But reality is, I'm not sure that's everybody's ability to do so. So for me, it goes back to just like, what are you trying to achieve? Like, what is your biggest, strongest, what are you trying to achieve? And so that decides whether are you trying to get a ton of people certified on a, on a new piece of technology or get education out to get that done? Maybe you start with education. If you're really struggling to get product feedback and insights and you want customers to start helping each other to scale your customer support organization. Start with community. You know, so there's, there's different ways that you can start, you know, moving slowly through, but in the dream state, you're, you're at least thinking about the next step. You're thinking, okay, we start with community, but let's think about how this feeds into education right away, because otherwise you start to diverge and that is not good. So whatever you do, start somewhere, but like, always be thinking about the other pieces that you want to layer in right away.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Is there a community building community that you can go to for help with that or any resources you'd recommend for folks?

Erica Kuhl:
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we have a great community. So Gainsight has a great community and there's a lot of great community builders in there, but there are a lot of great people that are doing wonderful things. There's a guy named Brian Oblinger, created an entire community strategy academy filled with courses on how to do this, because this is, this is new stuff. I mean, even though community has been around for decades, for actually since caveman days, they've been building community. Let's be honest. Like, I did not start this, but like, actually structuring this for success at a, at a company is, is newer, you know, and tying it to business value is newer.

Erica Kuhl:
So there's individuals out there independently that are creating great content for people to consume, to learn about how to do this. And then, you know, we have, we have a great community that you can learn from on our community. But it's, it's, it's still early days. You know, we're, I encourage, I always have a podcast myself. Not as great as yours, but very nerdy. Very plug it.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Like it.

Erica Kuhl:
I mean, you know, it's. It's called in before the lock, which I'll tell you why. But It's. It's about 105 episodes of like, super in the trenches community building stuff, you know, that literally, like, as I was struggling with something, we jump on and do a podcast and we run long. Like, we do it, we outline it, and we run it till it's dead. Because this isn't stuff that you can do in five minutes. It's like stuff that takes time. And so we run it through.

Erica Kuhl:
It's like a walk your dog podcast or like fold your laundry podcast, you know, aren't they all. Yeah, right, Right. Well, some are like, build a community in five minutes. Listen to my podcast. It's like, no, we were really, like, not wanting to be those people, so I do that with Brian Oblinger as well. And it's so in before the lock just does another. Super nerdy is like the old days of community building was really in gaming. And in the gaming communities, they get pretty fiery.

Erica Kuhl:
And so there's always like a moderator. And the idea was that you. You kind of are losing your mind with. With a. Another gamer and you're trying to get your last comment in before they lock the thread. So it's in before the lockdown is how we came up with our names. It's super nerdy.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That's all over my head. I feel. I feel old now and out of touch, but I. Yeah, makes sense. Okay.

Erica Kuhl:
Like, nerdy world for me.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Yeah. No, so I want to. I want to end with this. I'm going to put you on the spot here. We didn't prep this. You are. You're in the elevator with Chuck. Let's just say, as before, you've joined Gainsight.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
We don't have a digital CS program at Gainsight. This is all hypothetical. Right. This is however many years ago. What is your elevator pitch to Chuck? That we need this program.

Erica Kuhl:
So what I do is I turn it back to him and I say, what are you struggling with most? What is your. What keeps you up at night as a CEO of Gainsight? Like, what's the biggest problem? And I think what he would answer if I were Chuck is, grr. You know, like retention. You know, this is. And I say, well, yep, you're hitting up all the normal ways for retention. What if I give you a way that you can increase retention by four times? What if I could say that I could give you and I could do it with a small group, and I could do it with our customers along the way. And that. That's sort of like my.

Erica Kuhl:
My, like, introduction to community is of a scalable, easy way to impact retention in like, a modern way. So that's. I don't know that maybe that was a terrible pitch. Maybe he'd be like, get out. You have no idea what you're talking about. But get him interested, to get him by thinking like, an easy, inexpensive way to impact grr. And retention. Yeah, I'm listening.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
That creates a niche. Okay, good. Erica, thank you so much for being on the program. I'd love to have you back. We can. We can go deep with maybe some leaders that are exploring the space them. Get some of your expertise.

Erica Kuhl:
I'd love for you to hear from them. And thanks for letting me geek out on Community. I know that a lot of people were probably like, what is all this stuff? But hopefully I made it relatable and. And exciting and maybe get some people thinking about new ways that they can. They can drive success in their. Their organizations.

Josh Schachter [Host]:
Love it. Thanks a lot.

Erica Kuhl:
Thanks.