Community touchpoints touch every channel // Bad automations // Complicated customer journeys
An example was shared by , where he had responded to an automated community email of “please tell us what you think,” only to receive another automated reply of “we’re currently very busy and can’t respond.” That’s a bad vibe.
It’s also a stark reminder that the customer journey of community has a ton of touchpoints, ranging from social media and email through to the community tool itself.
If a community is its people moreso than its tools, then anywhere you and those people can interact is technically part of it, no matter how far outside the “official” software it happens to be. This is all doubly important at emotionally critical moments, whether positive or negative, excited or frustrated. (Which is exactly when folks are most likely to email!!!)
Emails are such a delicate thing and so many companies/products seem to treat them with such casual disregard… I think one of the reasons I hold community tools to such an unreasonably high standard is that they are always attempting to send emails on my behalf but without my explicit permission, as if there’s no downside for getting it wrong. Sending emails to a customer’s customers feel similar in importance to handling financial information, deserving of its own set of checks and balances, reassurances and transparency. For example, there’s no way for me to know what Circle is even sending! It’s literally impossible for me to audit, much less to improve.
There’s also some sort of parallel to the overly rational/reductionist worldview where someone says, “oh, only X% of members are asking a question, so it isn’t super important that we reply.” But once you stop replying, it sends a signal to everyone else that questions don’t get a reply, which destroys the perception that a safety net exists. It’s another case where the data would seem to mislead, and where efficiency isn’t. Automations appear to be super efficient, but in a set of critical situations, they’re fiddly and prone to fail – not in a technical, noticeable way, but in an emotional, “evangelist into detractor” sort of way.
Comments (4)
I just had an experience exactly like this with Circle. There is a technical problem with some custom HTML (embedding a dynamic testimonial wall) that seems to be related to how Circle executes javascript. Anyway, I'd posted in the community to see if anyone had any insights on making it work, knowing that Circle itself doesn't support custom code. Only to have that post removed for violating community guidelines as it's a support issue, before being explicitly told in private message that support would indeed help with this. And then support wrote back saying they don't do anything with custom code and to post in the community.
Definitely a reminder of the impact of communication. I wasn't upset about the custom code not working perfectly, and went to the channel set up for that purpose to see what could be done, if anything. No big deal.
I was upset at the removal of the post (having seen many threads about custom code in the past), and then more irritated at their cross-communication failure.
None of this was automated, but it strikes me that what automation and this have in common is the arbitrariness.
I don't mind automation that feels frictionless and helpful. I don't mind mistakes from real humans. I mind the arbitrariness of automations that don't serve me; I mind the arbitrariness of humans shutting down communication (inconsistently) following some rule.
On my own end, I just screwed up a communication with a client. I'm changing over basically every system in my business, and as part of that had to send out a ton of individual communications with coupon codes and other stuff to make sure everyone could get what they'd paid for / pricing they'd agreed to. I straight up forgot to include this person's code, and it was in the same message that I asked for a testimonial!
She gave me a lovely one, and then followed up a few minutes later (judging by send receipts) with her issue. No problem, really. Because it was a very human interaction.
I could have avoided this problem in the first place with automation of these e-mails... I considered it. It would have been easier, and (assuming I set the logic up correctly), less error-prone. But I would have missed out on this direct, personalized touchpoint -- and my error may highlight just how important that is.
(As an aside, we can sort of audit the communications by making sure there are test/dummy accounts in place for everything that a member will experience (at least by default). But it's a pain, and not 100% certain.)
Circle's own customer community is a sort of anti-pattern of how to do everything wrong, at least IMHO -- it's extremely astro-turfed, censored, etc. Feels like they're positioning their own community as customer success, while actually using it as a PR fluff piece. But sometimes the bad examples are as informative (or even moreso) than the good ones, so maybe it ends up being indirectly helpful ;)
re: this bit:
“She gave me a lovely one, and then followed up a few minutes later (judging by send receipts) with her issue. No problem, really. Because it was a very human interaction. ”
During the last live chitchat event, made the extremely astute observation that the more you've positioned yourself as a real, vulnerable human in your comms and ops, the more forgiving and understanding your customers will tend to be. Whereas the more polished/professional/corporate/anonymous/systematized, the less forgiveness you get for these sort of mistakes. So it's a good reason to leave the personality in it for longer than you might think, even if it seems a little non-scalable...