Meltwater’s Customer Community Hits 20,000 Members—Three Months Ahead of Schedule

Meltwater, a global leader in media, social and consumer intelligence, wanted to create a community space where customers could have a meaningful self-service experience. It needed to provide customer support, education, and a product feedback loop that would boost engagement among their customer base and be a valuable tool for their Customer Success (CS) team. They used Gainsight Customer Communities (CC) to create a scalable community that has delivered significant results in the first two years.

With over 50 offices globally and tens of thousands of users in 13 languages, scalability was a big challenge for Meltwater. To continue delivering best-in-class support, they saw an opportunity to empower Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to have an even greater impact, freeing them from repetitive tasks—like basic product training and media monitoring—so they could focus on more strategic, high-impact customer engagements.

Rather than simply expand the team, Meltwater wanted to invest in a smarter, more centralized way to ensure customers were achieving value. They wanted to create a destination where customers could self-serve and teach themselves Meltwater products through training, events, and peer-to-peer interactions. That’s what inspired them to build a customer community using Gainsight CC.

“Gainsight Customer Communities was incredibly easy to get up and running,” explained Bebenek, “With just myself and a graphic designer—and only minimal support from other teams—we were able to launch a professional, beautifully designed community without needing a developer. That was a huge win.”

Bebenek added, “Gainsight’s structure—especially the onboarding plan and intuitive backend—made it possible for a small team like ours to launch in just three months.”

The pricing of Gainsight CC also aligned with their budget, which made it a practical decision as well as a strategic one.

Meltwater really appreciated the control Gainsight CC gave them on the back end. The platform made it easy to build and manage content, update pages, and shape the experience without jumping through hoops. The ease of use also gave them the flexibility to make adjustments over time as their needs changed.

Meltwater’s vision was to start with a support-focused space where customers could get answers quickly. They also wanted it to become a true community of practice, where people come to learn from each other, share ideas, and build real connections. To get started, they:

• Curated product resource content and preloaded the community with the top 50 FAQs from their Support team
• Created a content calendar to make sure they added fresh, relevant content at least once a week
• Integrated the community with their Help Center and Academy
• Set up a Slack integration so the Support team could see community questions in real-time

In the second year after launch, they expanded the scope of their community to include education and product feedback loops, including:

• A Customer Experts program that elevates and recognizes knowledgeable users
• Centralized educational and best practice content that makes the community a go-to destination
• Ideation and Product Updates modules which give customers a voice in shaping the product
• Integration of the community into product team workflows for monitoring ideas, responding to feedback, and sharing updates directly with community members

One of the most impactful capabilities they leveraged in Gainsight CC was the ability to create custom landing pages tailored by language. “That was a game-changer for our global audience,” Bebenek says. 

In the first year after launching their community, they focused on foundational growth metrics: total visitors, the conversion rate from visitors to members, overall membership growth, the volume of posts, and engagement. These KPIs helped them track if they were building awareness and gaining traction.

By year two, they shifted to measuring business impact, focusing on product usage among community members vs. non-members, along with monthly active product users and retention rates. 

They found that community members showed 147% higher product usage than non-members. This proved that their strategy to empower customers through education and connection was working.

When they launched product workshops hosted through the community, they initially had 20–30 registrations per workshop. Now, they offer over 30 workshops a month, with more than 1,000 registrants per session—a clear signal that customers are finding value and coming back for more. They have since evolved these workshops to create a digital self-serve onboarding experience for new customers.  

Their biggest planned milestone for 2025 was reaching 20,000 community members by July 1; a number they ended up achieving three months ahead of schedule. 

Meltwater’s community is evolving into a central hub for digital onboarding and product adoption. One ongoing initiative is their customer learning competition, which has been a great way to drive engagement and encourage deeper product usage.

Their community has become the umbrella for all customer-facing resources, including the Academy and Help Center.

Looking ahead, they are excited to further integrate AI to help customers find value faster and empower our team to do more with less. 

“We see the community continuing to grow—not just in size, but in strategic impact across onboarding, adoption, support, and advocacy,” said Bebenek. “Gainsight will play a key role in helping us scale that vision.”