The Essential Guide to
Customer Communities
Build thriving customer communities that drive engagement, boost loyalty, and deliver ongoing value.
Traditional support channels can’t keep up with rising customer expectations. Customers want quick answers, real connections, and a voice in your product roadmap. These are needs that transactional support alone can’t meet.
Online customer communities bridge this gap by providing a branded, self-service space where customers get answers, connect with peers, and shape the product experience.
This guide delivers actionable strategies, proven best practices, and real-world examples to help you launch or scale a customer community that drives results.
Whether you’re starting from scratch or improving an existing community, you’ll learn how to increase peer-to-peer support, streamline resources, and engage customers at every stage of their journey.
Main Takeaways:
- Customer communities fuel growth, loyalty, and innovation. They deliver scalable peer-to-peer support, unlock deeper product adoption, and turn customers into advocates.
- Strategic community-building requires clear business alignment. Success starts by tying your community’s purpose to measurable business outcomes, from support deflection to increased retention.
- Design matters. Treat your community like a product. Intuitive navigation, purposeful content, and strong onboarding drive engagement at every stage of the customer journey.
- Value is created through ongoing engagement and member leadership. Consistent programming, recognition systems, and member-driven initiatives keep participation high and relationships strong.
- Communities power real business impact—from cost savings to new revenue. Measurable results include reduced support volume, higher adoption rates, actionable product feedback, and increased upsell and expansion.
- The right technology is essential for scale and success. Choose a platform that integrates with your tech stack, empowers self-service, and provides actionable analytics.
- Top brands treat community as a core business asset. Forward-thinking companies like Gong, Sonos, and Zapier use customer communities to differentiate their experience and future-proof growth.
Chapter 1
What Is a Customer Community?
A customer community is a dedicated online space where customers, users, partners, and team members come together to connect, collaborate, and share experiences related to your company’s products or services.
Unlike generic forums or social media groups, customer communities are designed to foster meaningful conversations, enable self-service support, and provide a direct channel for feedback—all within a secure, branded environment.
For B2B organizations, these communities have evolved from simple support portals into strategic hubs that power engagement, drive product adoption, and deepen customer relationships throughout every stage of the journey.
Traditional Customer Engagement vs. Community-Based Approach
The shift from traditional engagement to community-based models transforms how you interact with customers.
Table: Traditional vs Community-Based Customer Engagement
| Traditional Approach | Community Approach |
| One-way communication | Multi-directional dialogue |
| Support ticket volume | Self-service resolution |
| Limited customer insights | Continuous feedback loop |
| Transactional relationships | Emotional connections |
When you implement customer communities, you create spaces where customers help each other, reducing support burden while strengthening relationships. Community-based approaches scale more efficiently than traditional one-to-one support models.
Chapter 2
Why Do Customer Communities Matter?
A growing number of companies are investing in large-scale, branded communities as strategic growth channels. Forbes reports that 33% of organizations now have online communities with over 10,000 members, demonstrating just how central peer-to-peer networks have become to modern engagement strategies.
Here’s why customer communities drive such powerful business impact:
- Accelerate growth and reduce costs: By shifting support to peer-to-peer and self-service channels, communities help organizations scale more efficiently, freeing up resources and lowering operational expenses.
- Fuel product innovation and adoption: Direct feedback and real-world use cases from your community let you prioritize product enhancements that matter, while also increasing adoption and engagement across your customer base.
- Deepen engagement and retention: Ongoing, multi-directional dialogue transforms transactional touchpoints into long-lasting relationships, boosting retention and customer loyalty.
- Surface actionable insights: Communities generate valuable data and perspectives that inform your business strategy and customer experience initiatives.
Drive brand advocacy and expansion: Engaged communities cultivate loyal advocates and open up new expansion opportunities, upsell, and word-of-mouth growth, future-proofing your business and strengthening brand equity.
Chapter 3
Types of Customer Communities
Different business goals require different community approaches. Understanding the main types helps you choose the right model for your needs.
B2B Communities
B2B communities connect professional users who want to maximize their investment in your product or service. These spaces emphasize skill development, networking, and best practice sharing.
B2C Communities
B2C communities bring together individual consumers around shared interests, lifestyle elements, or product usage. These communities often focus on inspiration, troubleshooting, and user-generated content.
Product-Focused Communities
Product communities center discussions around specific features, use cases, and technical support. Members troubleshoot issues together and share creative implementations.
Industry-Focused Communities
Industry communities unite people based on professional interests rather than specific products. These spaces facilitate broader discussions about trends, challenges, and innovations in your field.
Chapter 4
What Do Customers Actually Do in a Community?
Customer communities create value when members engage in ways that drive support, connection, and growth. Below are the most impactful actions customers take—and how they contribute to stronger business outcomes.
Answer Peer Questions and Troubleshoot Together
Members step in to support each other with timely, relevant answers:
- They solve problems before a ticket is created
- They share workarounds or fixes from experience
- Popular replies create a growing, searchable knowledge base
Why it matters: Peer-to-peer support reduces case volume and improves resolution speed.
Share Tips, Tutorials, and Creative Use Cases
Customers love exchanging practical insights:
- They post step-by-step workflows or unique product hacks
- They suggest role- or industry-specific solutions
- They build a library of insights beyond what’s in your docs
Why it matters: Expert-level sharing drives deeper adoption and long-term value.
Submit Ideas and Influence the Product Roadmap
Engaged users want a say in what gets built next:
- They suggest new features and vote on ideas
- They flag usability friction early
- They join betas and provide actionable feedback
Why it matters: Listening to community input builds trust and informs smarter product decisions.
Tune Into Updates and Access Exclusive Content
Your most invested customers often check the community first:
- They read announcements and roll out updates
- They replay webinars or event recordings
- They engage with gated content, early access, and rewards
Why it matters: Community becomes the go-to source for product news and engagement.
Connect With Peers and Build Relationships
Communities thrive when members form meaningful connections:
- They join role- or region-based user groups
- They build relationships through shared challenges
- They gain recognition through gamification or shoutouts
Why it matters: Relationships strengthen loyalty and increase customer lifetime value.
Chapter 5
What Are the Benefits of Customer Communities?
Customer communities drive measurable business impact by reducing costs, deepening engagement, and accelerating product innovation—empowering you to scale customer success at every stage. Each benefit builds on the others, making community a powerful engine for growth and retention.
Reduce Costs With Peer-to-Peer Support
Customer communities lower your overall support costs by enabling users to resolve questions and share expertise directly with each other, reducing reliance on one-to-one support channels. By hosting shared troubleshooting, Q and A, and best practices, you cut ticket volume and lighten the load for Customer Support and Success teams.
Centralize Customer Education and Resources
Communities streamline customer enablement by consolidating education, onboarding, and product resources in a single, organized hub. Instead of sending users to scattered sources, you empower them to access how-to guides, updates, and best practices —helping users self-serve, learn at their own pace, and personalize their product experience.
Engage Customers Across the Full Journey
Communities foster higher engagement by supporting customers at every stage—from onboarding through advocacy. By creating spaces for newcomers, power users, and champions, you deliver relevant resources and opportunities to share ideas, collaborate, and connect, driving adoption, satisfaction, and long-term loyalty.
“Community is everyone. It touches prospects and customers. Everyone is part of the customer experience.”
— Nisha Bax, Head of Community, Gong
Strengthen Customer Relationships and Trust
Customer communities deepen relationships and build trust by enabling authentic, transparent conversations between your brand and users. When customers feel heard, valued, and connected to others with shared experiences, they’re more likely to stay engaged over time.
In fact, Forbes reports that 27% of customers say that a sense of belonging to a brand directly influences their decision to do business with it, proving that emotional connection isn’t just a soft metric; it’s a revenue driver.
Consistent dialogue, recognition, and community-led support create the kind of loyalty that can’t be replicated through one-off transactions.
Improve Product Development With Real-Time Feedback
Communities accelerate product innovation by capturing real-time feedback, feature requests, and candid insights directly from customers. Because users feel comfortable sharing in a trusted space, you gain actionable data to prioritize enhancements, address issues, and build a truly customer-driven product roadmap.
“If there’s a bug in the product, we can be nearly guaranteed one of our users will find it quickly—and then we can fix it.”
— Ditte Solsø Korsgård, Community Program Manager, Sonos
Convert Prospects With Helpful Community Content
Communities accelerate conversion by showcasing real customer experiences, success stories, and peer-driven insights to prospects researching your product. When high-quality community content ranks in search, potential buyers discover authentic engagement, driving trust and influencing purchase decisions.
McKinsey reports that Consumers overwhelmingly trust peers over brands when making buying decisions, highlighting how customer communities act as high-trust environments that influence purchase intent far more than traditional campaigns.
Fuel Upsell, Cross-Sell, and Expansion
Customer communities unlock new revenue opportunities by surfacing expansion signals and connecting engagement data to your CRM. By tracking product interest, adoption trends, and advocate activity, Revenue and Customer Success teams can identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, driving growth through real-time, community-driven insights.
Explore What Makes a Community Drive Real Results
Learn how leading brands like Gong, Sonos, and Zapier use Gainsight to boost retention, accelerate growth, and build stronger customer connections at scale.
Chapter 6
How to Build a Customer Community
Building a thriving community of customers isn’t just about launching a forum—it requires thoughtful planning, clear goals, and consistent engagement. Here’s a step-by-step approach to doing it right.
Connect the Community to Your Business Strategy
Start by defining clear business objectives for your community. Are you trying to reduce support costs, increase product adoption, or drive customer advocacy?
- Strategic alignment: Identify how the community supports broader business goals
- Journey mapping: Determine where community interactions fit in your customer lifecycle
- Cross-functional buy-in: Ensure support from leadership and adjacent teams
Map specific community activities to key moments in your customer journey, from onboarding to advocacy.
Define Who the Community Is For
Successful communities serve specific audience needs rather than trying to be everything to everyone.
- Target audience: Identify your primary users (power users, admins, decision-makers)
- Value proposition: Clarify what members will gain from participating
- Success metrics: Define how you’ll measure both member satisfaction and business impact
Create detailed member personas to guide your community structure, content, and programming decisions.
Choose the Right Platform
Your community platform should integrate with your existing tech stack while providing the features your members need.
Key considerations include:
- Hosted vs. self-hosted solutions
- Integration capabilities (CRM, support tools, analytics)
- Mobile accessibility and user experience
- Moderation and management tools
The right platform makes engagement easy while providing the data you need to demonstrate ROI.
Design the Experience Like a Product
Approach community design with the same care you’d give to a product launch. Create intuitive navigation, clear onboarding flows, and engaging content formats.
- Structured onboarding: Welcome new members with orientation resources
- Content organization: Use categories, tags, and search to make information findable
- Engagement paths: Design clear routes for different member goals and interests
The best customer communities feel purposeful and organized, not chaotic or overwhelming.
Seed the Community Before Launch
Don’t open the doors to an empty room. Identify and recruit core members who can help populate your community with valuable content before full launch.
- Early adopters: Invite engaged customers to join as founding members
- Content calendar: Prepare initial discussions, resources, and activities
- Recognition program: Acknowledge and reward early contributors
This approach creates momentum and demonstrates value to new members from day one.
Deliver Ongoing Value
Communities thrive on consistent value delivery and fresh engagement opportunities.
- Regular programming: Schedule AMAs, webinars, challenges, or discussion series
- Exclusive content: Provide resources or access not available elsewhere
- Recognition systems: Highlight member contributions and expertise
Successful communities balance structure with space for organic interaction and member-led initiatives.
Turn Your Community Into a Growth Engine
Discover how Gainsight helps scale peer-to-peer support, drive ideation, and deliver self-service experiences that cut costs and drive loyalty.
Chapter 7
Overcoming Common Community Challenges
Even the most well-designed communities face growing pains. These common challenges—and how to overcome them—will help your team stay focused and resilient through each stage of growth.
How to Handle Low Initial Adoption
Low early engagement is normal, not a failure. Focus on quality interactions rather than member count.
- Direct outreach: Personally invite power users and advocates
- Value demonstration: Showcase early wins and member benefits
- Patience: Recognize that communities typically take 6-12 months to reach critical mass
How to Prevent Spam and Toxic Interactions
Clear guidelines and active moderation protect your community’s culture and values.
- Community guidelines: Establish and enforce clear behavioral expectations
- Moderation team: Train staff and volunteer moderators on intervention strategies
- Positive reinforcement: Highlight exemplary contributions and interactions
How to Scale As Membership Grows
As your community expands, your management approach must evolve to maintain quality and value.
- Automation: Implement tools for routine tasks and member onboarding
- Member leadership: Develop programs for members to take on community roles
- Data-driven decisions: Use analytics to identify successful patterns and improvement areas
Chapter 8
Future Outlook on Customer Communities
Customer communities are becoming central to modern customer experience strategies. Future communities will feature:
- Deeper integration with product experiences
- AI-enhanced content discovery and moderation
- Expanded self-service capabilities
- More sophisticated advocacy and influence programs
Forward-thinking companies are already treating communities as strategic assets rather than nice-to-have forums.
Chapter 9
What Makes a Community Successful?
Successful communities share three traits: self-service support, scalable content creation, and two-way engagement that builds lasting relationships.
Enable Customers to Self-Serve
Communities are based on the idea of empowering your customers to self-serve, which is a huge win-win for you and your customers.
- Customers win because they prefer self-service by a wide margin versus relying on contacting Customer Service or Customer Success directly. Communities allow them to access content at their own pace and receive information faster, in most cases.
- Your company wins because it drastically reduces the amount of resources required to support and serve customers while allowing you to scale far beyond what you could accomplish when limited by communications driven by internal teams.
Create and Surface Helpful Content
One of the primary functions of a Community is to generate robust, high-quality content. Whether that content is user- or company-generated, it all drives engagement, facilitates self-service, and helps users and customers achieve value with your product.
And the content that lives in your community doesn’t have to stay there—you can use your platform’s API or embedding tools to inject posts, knowledge articles, and support documents into your apps, websites, or software products.
Content will also have a second life, driving organic search, driving millions of relevant impressions each month, with up to four times higher click-through rates than paid search.
Promote Ongoing, Two-Way Engagement
Communities are built to harness the power of multiway communication. Communications sent to the user base via community reach a large number of people in an effective, efficient manner, becoming a truly one-to-many channel that is arguably more impactful than what a single Customer Success Manager, Account Manager, or email campaign could achieve.
On the flip side, P2P communications in Communities quickly grow into a vast web of conversations with a breadth and depth unmatched by any other channel. And because community conversations are happening on a trusted and transparent venue among your most dedicated, loyal users, the impact they have will be deeper and more lasting.
Chapter 10
How Are Top Brands Using Gainsight Communities?
We wanted to share some real-world examples of companies that used Gainsight to build successful online customer communities.
Zapier
Workflow automation company Zapier needed a community that could connect their vast pool of users to the information they needed without disrupting their workflows. They designed a personalized community experience that could accommodate any user journey, while empowering their Community team with automation.
- 100% of user questions answered in 4-6 hours
- Customer support for 2.2 million customers
- 240,000 monthly page views
Read more about Zapier.
Gong
Revenue intelligence platform Gong wanted to create a space where their customers could interact with one another beyond in-person events. Gong’s active community now enables knowledge sharing at scale, with improved customer retention, product stickiness, and ARR.
- Active community members upsell at 3X the rate of other users
- 36% of accounts are in the community
- 12,000 unique visitors in one year
Read more about Gong.
Sonos
Sonos is the world’s leading sound experience company, delivering an unparalleled experience through thoughtful design, simplicity of use, and an open platform. The Sonos community provides an all-in-one destination for self-service and user engagement, delivering a superior customer experience.
- Serves more than 1 million users per year
- Handles 40% of Sonos’ support interactions, saving millions of dollars annually
- Their beta community’s 13,000 members have created more than 300 ideas for Sonos
Read more about Sonos.
Meltwater
Meltwater created a modern, scalable community with Gainsight to empower 27,000+ global customers through self-service, education, and a strong product feedback loop. Their small team launched in just three months and quickly saw:
- 147% higher product usage among community members
- 20,000 members reached— three months ahead of schedule
- 30+ multilingual workshops monthly with 1,000+ registrants per session
Now, Meltwater’s community is a central hub for onboarding, product adoption, and advocacy, driving higher engagement and accelerated customer success.
Read more about Meltwater.
Consensus
Consensus, a leading Product Experience Platform, needed a scalable, centralized hub to support thousands of users as their customer base rapidly expanded. By launching the Consensus Customer Hub on Gainsight, they empowered users to independently access knowledge base articles, product walk-throughs, and best practices, doubling content views in the first month.
- 1 month to launch their Gainsight community
- 2x increase in content views in the first month
- Scalable self-service support for thousands of users
With Gainsight, Consensus brought onboarding resources, product tours, and community discussions together in one place, enabling users to quickly find answers and support. The Consensus team continues to leverage community engagement to drive customer success, renewal, and expansion.
Read more about Consensus.
See What Your Community Could Look Like
Ready to launch or scale your customer community? Book a live demo to see how Gainsight can help you build lasting engagement at scale.
Chapter 11
Why Choose Gainsight for Your Community Platform?
We’ve shown how top brands use Gainsight Customer Communities to boost engagement, drive ideation, and deliver self-service at scale. Now, let’s take a closer look at how Gainsight empowers you to build and grow a branded online community—no matter your team size or stage of maturity.
Deliver a Connected Experience
Gainsight makes it simple to organize both company- and user-generated content, so customers can find what they need quickly and escalate more complex issues when necessary.
- Federated search allows users to search across all your resources (forums, docs, help centers, etc.) in one unified experience.
- Flexible APIs and a robust set of publishing and moderation tools put you in full control of the content experience.
- Generative AI tools help you draft and publish knowledge base articles, create email outreach, and keep engagement active across your community.
Customize Without Developer Resources
You don’t need a dev team to build a standout community with Gainsight.
- Easily adjust branding with custom HTML, CSS, and visual styling.
- Launch features like user groups, gamification, and event promotion with just a few clicks.
- Tap into rich user data and analytics to better understand engagement and integrate it directly into systems like Salesforce and Gainsight CS for a full 360° view of customer behavior.
Turn Insights Into Business Impact
Use your community to collect meaningful product feedback and act on it.
- Capture customer ideas in a centralized ideation loop, then filter by popularity, ROI, or account tier.
- Share updates and feature releases instantly to close the loop with customers.
- Use Gainsight’s product feedback dashboard to track how well you’re delivering on what customers want.
Power a Unified Customer Hub
- Gainsight’s full platform connects Customer Communities, Customer Success, Customer Education, and Product Experience in a single, integrated suite. That means you can deliver value, scale support, and deepen relationships—all in one place.
See how Gainsight can help you scale your community with ease. Schedule a demo.