When your Customer Success team starts feeling like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day—reliving the same onboarding questions, delivering the same training sessions, and answering the same support tickets day after day, it’s not an extreme case of déjà vu. It’s a flashing neon sign that something needs to change.
Whether it’s customers asking for the same guidance or CSMs stuck in an infinite loop of rinse-and-repeat workflows, you’re not imagining it. No need to wait for Punxsutawney Phil to tell you it’s a pattern.
This topic came up recently at Pulse Unplugged during an incredible conversation I had with Aaron White, Senior Community Manager from Akamai, and Kevin Dunn, Senior Manager of Customer Education and Community from Airtable. We talked about what it really takes to scale CS without losing the human touch and why community is the lever that makes it possible.
Here’s what we unpacked.
Signals You’re Ready to Scale
Are your customer webinars at capacity within minutes? Is your help center traffic doubling? Are new users showing up with advanced questions before they’ve finished onboarding? These aren’t isolated issues – they’re signs that your customer base is hungry to learn, share, and connect at scale.
The best teams recognize those signals early and invest in community and education as force-multipliers. They know that when customers learn from each other, it drives product mastery, reduces support load, and builds long-term loyalty.
At Airtable, community and education are core levers in their scale motion—automating onboarding through cohort-based programs and reducing support volume with self-serve content sourced from power users. At Akamai, the community centralizes product enablement, funnels customer insights to internal teams, and drives consistent engagement across segments.
Both are proof points: scale doesn’t mean more headcount. It means more humans helping each other.
Great Communities Are Built on Great Systems
If it feels like your team is drowning in repeatable tasks, it’s probably not a people problem—it’s a systems problem. And no amount of hustle can fix bad plumbing.
At Akamai, community operations are scaled with smart Slack automations. Questions that go unanswered get flagged automatically. Offboarding triggers fire with a click. It frees up the team to focus on strategy, not cleanup.
Airtable’s internal setup is equally impressive—Kevin shared how learner and community engagement data syncs in real time, giving Product and Support visibility into what’s resonating and what’s missing. No need for swivel-chair workflows between tools.
What I love about both of these examples is how seamlessly they integrate into the day-to-day flow. They’re not asking teams to adopt a whole new system or workflow—they’re embedding community workflows into key places they already rely on. That’s what makes them sustainable.
Scale Without Losing the Personal Touch
Just because something’s digital doesn’t mean it should feel generic. The best scale programs flex by persona, segment, or lifecycle moment—and feel like they were built just for that user.
During Pulse Unplugged, we talked about formats like onboarding cohorts, roadmap previews, and industry-specific workshops. Aaron shared that his team is experimenting with a community-driven newsletter that brings product content, community threads, upcoming events, and training resources together in one place. It’s a simple but powerful way to help customers discover what’s available—and remind internal teams that community isn’t a silo; it’s a connector.
My takeaway: When your customers feel like they’re part of something bigger, they show up. They stay longer. They contribute back. That’s the power of community.
Getting the Right Programs to the Right People
Even the most thoughtfully designed community program won’t land if it doesn’t reach the right people at the right time.
That’s why I always push for internal alignment across CS, Product, Support, and Marketing to coordinate how community and education programs get delivered. Think: surfacing the right themes for onboarding cohorts, live Q&As, resource hubs, and customer showcases.
Don’t let your best community content sit untouched in a dusty help center folder. Instead:
- Enable CSMs with talk tracks that plug your programs.
- Embed community highlights into product release notes.
- Surface education modules in onboarding sequences.
- Spotlight top threads in your newsletters.
And don’t forget to measure what matters.
Ask yourself:
- Are customers who join onboarding cohorts ramping faster?
- Are attendees of Q&As submitting fewer tickets?
- Are contributors to the community more likely to renew?
I always recommend combining hard metrics (CSAT, ticket deflection, product adoption) with narrative insights from the field. That combo is what helps you make a compelling case to leadership – and improve your programs in real time. I wrote more about that balance in this blog on the new ROI of community.
One Final Note
You don’t have to wake up every day to the same customer questions on repeat. You don’t have to be stuck in the same loop of one-off training, manual workflows, and overextended teams.
When every day starts to feel like Groundhog Day, it’s not a sign to work harder, it’s your cue to scale smarter.
And the best ways to do that? Community and Education.
When community and education are baked into your scale strategy from the start, customers can find answers faster, onboard smarter, and stay connected through every stage of their journey. That’s what turns scale from a challenge into an advantage.
Follow Erica Kuhl for bold ideas on how to help your customers learn what matters, adopt what drives real value, connect with peers, and succeed by orchestrating the entire customer journey.
