Charlotte Kennett

#general - June 26, 2025 at 07:38 AM

There is a whole channel dedicated to community discussions, which may be the best suited place for these types of questions.

From experience working for tech vendors for most of my career: you have to invest in onboarding and adoption. It's less about the platform features and functionalities, and more about the change management side of things. It doesn't have to be hands on professional services, but there has to be SOMETHING.

My previous company built a full framework/operating model that was basically the best practices for organisation to be successful, and every single customer I'd then encounter at the advocacy phase had leveraged elements of it.

Community building is HARD, it takes time, there needs to be a compelling reason for new members to engage and stay.

#general - June 25, 2025 at 03:35 PM

Veering away from traditional case studies was hard for us, as they were always needed, and we had a pretty robust process. BUT what we did was diversify the output and supporting assets, and varied some of the formats.

For example for written case studies, we did video summaries of highlights of the case study contents for social, we did quote cards and supporting visuals, etc. (will try and dig them out).
We also developed user-generated use-cases (more solutions oriented) both in video and written format, but that were told from the customers' PoV
We leveraged reviews from review sites that we packaged up and leveraged in different channels to support our value proposition, etc.
We also had an internal cheat sheet of some of our hard hitting quotes and statements we'd often update, etc.

So in short, we did more with what we already had, to tell a story in different ways and for different mediums.

And sometimes, you don't need a case study, eithern

#general - June 25, 2025 at 02:59 PM

I'm part of a London-based marketing leadership networking group, and someone has shared some initial research they've done analyzing 2.5 million LinkedIn job titles to get a sense of the landscape. A few interesting findings, so thought I would share!

The trends show that there is movement towards specialisation, but at a slower pace than overall market growth (generalists shrunk by 2.8%, but the overall marketing talent pool grew by 11.8% since June 2020)

Most careers plateau at manager level, with the conversion rate to Director and above decreasing by 23% since June 2020, with again generalist titles being favoured for leadership roles.

As someone that's on the job market with a hyper specialized profile and relatively senior background, I can really feel this double-edged sword right now.

Keen to get some thoughts and gut reactions on this?

#10-community - June 24, 2025 at 01:17 PM

Ha, tricky one! It would depend on a lot of factors, including the existing tech stack & architecture, internal resources (development, project management, etc), requirements, audience and overall business case, then take into consideration the product itself (performance, features, roadmap, etc.) and support/experience with the vendor.

IF I am working for an organisation that is committed and has in-house development features, I wouldn't mind a white-labelled platform like Discourse, alternatively, if there is already a strong existing community on 3rd party platforms, I'd also be open to partnering with them, and figuring out a way I can tie potential investment back to the business case.

I'd challenge that you may not always need a forum/type platform/destination, depending on your audience, interactions styles and objectives.

#10-community - June 24, 2025 at 12:58 PM

Gainsight Community (InSided) was built VERY differently, and agree with Christine, the customisations are limited - their latest investments were more in the back-end/analytics + integrations within the wider CS product suite (which has its value).

We had moved off Higher Logic (we were on the OG platform), beyond the product performance, issues with metrics and integrations, we had big account management/support issues with being in EMEA, and I would personally not want to work with them again.

#10-community - June 24, 2025 at 12:19 PM

Yeah, I've been messaging the community team at Spotify this morning, they genuinely can't get hold of a human to figure out what's happening :/

#10-community - June 24, 2025 at 10:36 AM

Yeah - not the biggest fan of him, but he does a good summary. The UK team all received their redundancy notice last week, too. Urgh... so many feels :(

#reviews - June 23, 2025 at 06:40 PM

Ha, well they may have changed since the last MQ I was involved with last year. Thanks for sharing!

#reviews - June 23, 2025 at 11:25 AM

So the badge that you can get from Gartner Reviews is the Voice of Customer: People's Choice badge for a specific category/industry.

If your organisation is entering for a Magic Quadrant, the Gartner Analysts will also be leveraging your Peer Reviews as part of the social proof/references piece instead of asking you to source your own references. The lead analyst for the industry I was in told me they also reviewed reviews from other sites such as G2, as well.

In the back end of your vendor portal in Peer Reviews, you can create multiple personalized tracking links, which can help you monitor campaign performance, and also tailor the incentives you want to attach to them. Note: you are only allowed to use Gartner's own incentives.
These links are mainly for sourcing, rather than showcasing cool stuff

Finally, they have also started doing "review quotes" which they create and you can link back to in campaigns. They are a really great source of social proof quick wins, and also come with a direct link to the review. But Gartner being Gartner, you need to use the visual they created, and follow their guidelines.

Happy to answer any more questions on Peer Insights if helpful!

#10-community - June 18, 2025 at 01:59 PM

Most of the people in EMEA have been made redundant this week. Nothing formal in the UK yet, but they are just waiting at this point :/

#10-community - June 17, 2025 at 07:30 PM

<@U07V02XU2CB> - having AI-assisted CS, 100%. However they've replaced all CS coverage with AI, and are making CS redundant.

#10-community - June 13, 2025 at 10:03 AM

I was at an event yesterday, and there was a fireside chat with 2 celeb UK entrepreneurs, and one of them said "I hate that everything is always all about growth and getting bigger and doing more. Why can't more businesses just be satisfied about just doing a good job and serving a clear purpose?"
And yep, been thinking about all that a lot, both in my career and the businesses I work for, and of course this situation with Khoros.
Anyway, Friday Philosophical Moment /over

#10-community - June 12, 2025 at 02:18 PM

"I wish I could understand"... Literally a convo I had today. I can imagine people in suits looking at numbers... And that's it 🙃

#general - June 11, 2025 at 10:37 PM

I've used Wistia, too, which I loved.

#general - June 11, 2025 at 10:37 PM

What video hosting platform do you use? Both with Vidyard and YouTube you can make it only accessible via link, or password protect, without it being searchable. With Vidyard we had it linked with Marketo so we could still see who watched it.

#reviews - June 11, 2025 at 05:59 PM

Be careful with Gartner, if you offer incentives they aren't formally part of the platform process/vetted incentive and they find out, they can simply remove those reviews and you can get penalised. They are VERY picky about that.

#10-community - June 11, 2025 at 05:56 PM

I don't want to be tacky and fuel some of the Khoros gossip... but it's looking VERY VERY bleak, and I would actively encourage people that have a contract/agreement with them to review the terms and engage conversations with your legal team sooner than later. (I know my former team have)

From friends/former colleagues, they are actively talking about defunding CSM function, Ignite are sending CSM emails using AI already, pushing communities to AI chat (er, how will the communities grow then?), their AI avatar assistant demo on the website is just... Well. Bad.

#10-community - June 11, 2025 at 05:50 PM

Happy to jump on a call to chat if helpful at any point! I've helped launch way more brand communities than I care to admit before moving into customer marketing (and then launching another couple of communities on top of that since) 😅
Brian O. and I were colleagues for a few years, too. So we kinda grew up in the same "school"

#general - June 05, 2025 at 06:49 PM

Which dates are you in London?

#jobs - June 05, 2025 at 04:20 PM

I'd love to know more about this too? I do have the paid access and can't see it?

#general - June 05, 2025 at 04:17 PM

Seconding @Alexie Glover, you want to be where the rest of the team is both for the pipeline (we used Asana, LOVED IT), and the published assets (we used SharePoint and Showpad - was fighting for us to have a more robust DAM to help make them easier to find internally)

#general - June 04, 2025 at 08:20 AM

I'm in London and would love to meet up :)

#general - June 03, 2025 at 10:05 AM

We mainly used it to analyse:
1. Survey contents (open text) to help create clusters/themes as it was more accurate than your regular tagging
2. Identifying potential use-cases, reference candidates, etc. from call recordings. We did a PoC with our CS team of a call recording technology.
So mainly back-end use-cases to help with processes, and spend time on things we wouldn't have otherwise!

#open-share - June 03, 2025 at 09:57 AM

Had a bit of a rant/vent after speaking to a few CS leaders recently about how they never get any support from marketing to run post-sale engagement programs, and I'm just surprised not to see more stories of these teams working more closely together. Thought I would share the result of said rant/vent here 😉

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/charlottekennett_customer-success-professionals-are-no[…]m=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAOk5S4ByCNLG7KocGAlhWkp22jpGAxXhP0

#jobs - June 01, 2025 at 02:45 PM

UK-based Customer Retention/CRM Lead (B2C - Travel/eCommerce)

Hybrid (Bristol) but open to remote as long as it's UK-based and able to go into the office 1x a month
Salary is £80-90K

If interested, please email Luke.watts@heidi.com|Luke.watts@heidi.com directly
(the role was shared with me by the CMO, Sam Knott, as they are struggling to find the right person, non-affiliated)

Job description below: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4227079928

#general - June 01, 2025 at 09:22 AM

So we were able to show that orgs that were actively using/visiting our community had on average a NPS score 10% higher than those that didn't.

In terms of revenue, combining community and customer marketing, we influenced 12M USD in pipeline for 2023, but I no longer have access to the core data to help figure out trends or averages, sadly.

#10-community - May 29, 2025 at 08:21 AM

<@U0806J8HHHR> - not Vanilla for sure, so assuming it was Thrive :)

#general - May 29, 2025 at 08:20 AM

VoC was part of my remit in my former role, and after we completely shook things up in terms of business-wide adoption, and turned it into a strategic tool, we saw a 141% increase in NPS YoY. One area it really helped (beyond the strategic decision making and social proof) was to help with Analyst responses (Gartner MQ, etc.), because we could back with data.
We were actively working on what I called a VoC 360 initiative, that basically fed all forms of customer feedback and surveys into one place (incl. reviews), our early POC was incredibly promising in terms of insight and usability.

Anyway, more than happy to connect to talk more about it if helpful 💕

#general - May 29, 2025 at 07:44 AM

Awards were the highlight of our year, and were an incredible engine for stories and advocacy; I LOVE THEM.
A few things we did:

For the winners:
• Gave them a virtual badge they could add on their LinkedIn (we worked with our education team) - we encouraged including the extended team
• Gave them a digital assets toolkit to help promote their story internally and externally, with a blog template, etc.
• Encouraged the local teams to go and visit to celebrate, we'd help with some little things to make special. That's created some really great relationship moments. If possible we'd get them to deliver the trophy in person too.
With the content
• We included terms around content re-use as part of the entry submissions, and asked them to potentially tailor or opt-out of said content re-use for purposes outside of the awards
• We turned the winning stories into customer stories, that were then turned into an ebook, we then prioritised our pipeline based on our needs and quality of that story
• We made all the entries available internally to be used by sales, solutions, CS and the wider marketing org (while being SUPER CLEAR on how this could be used)

#10-community - May 28, 2025 at 05:25 PM

@Joel Primack I will say that is a reputation that proceeds them (and when I worked there, they did milk their license cost).

However, when we migrated off Higher Logic (last year), our Total Cost of Ownership went down (incl. License costs), with less customisation needs and more OOB integrations, better SEO lift, and generally less time trying to keep it from crashing and battling with the admin, and more time focusing on strategy.

It did take me 18 months to build that business case, and ended up having to present it to the board of our parent company. (And I'm kinda glad I'm not there anymore needing to deal with the aftermath of "this" 😅)

#10-community - May 28, 2025 at 05:04 PM

@Mary Green (Owner CMAweekly), those are my thoughts exactly. So many people build their careers and put their reputation at stake when bringing in these types of platforms in, and develop programs around them.

#10-community - May 28, 2025 at 04:57 PM

I know that 5 years ago, Influitive had a white labelled version of Discourse within the platform, but not sure if they kept it or not?

#open-share - May 28, 2025 at 08:26 AM

Shared some thoughts on AI and Community after attending a roundtable convo with some EMEA Khoros customers a few days ago, which is interesting given the news 🙃
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/charlottekennett_this-morning-i-joined-a-brilliant-roundtable-activity-7329213581219004418-gg5Q

#10-community - May 28, 2025 at 07:21 AM

• I worked at Lithium when the Vista acquisition happened, and that was a rough transition time in itself, but the company did need to grow up after the Klout fail. I will agree that Vista was competent in terms of running a business (they glowed Marketo up before selling to Adobe), although I still don't understand why they acquired InSided for Gainsight.
• I still have a lot of very close friends that work at Khoros, and their morale is in the dumps. They've massively cut resources recently and have increased outsourcing and off shoring, and cut local marketing teams.
• Seeing the IgniteTech website full of AI imagery, and with its generally completely outdated vibes makes me genuinely sad; and just feels wrong in the context of COMMUNITY: https://ignitetech.ai/khoros. My biggest gripe with Khoros for a while has been that their leadership didn't "get" community, and prioritized the wrong things. This is just the embodiment of that.
I left Lithium/Khoros 8 years ago, but my nearly 5 years there were incredibly foundational to my career and life here in the UK; from a strategy consultant working with some incredible brands to leading their local marketing team, and meeting some of my best friends, I can't help but feeling attached to what it was, and what it meant, and just general sadness with what's to come with this.

I had a chat with my former head of Community, who's really concerned with the impact of their overall AI tech stack with compliance (Blue Prism works in highly regulated markets): "First impressions not good though. I raised some concerns yesterday over data and confidentiality (eg - our private spaces have never been exposed to AI. Now with platform level access, they will be, and I'm not sure our govt body user groups will be comfortable). And I got a response from an LLM."

-- Ramble over --

#10-community - May 27, 2025 at 12:34 PM

Khoros (Lithium/Spredfast) got acquired by IgniteTech, who previously acquired Jive internal communities (Khoros had acquired the external communities piece) - moving them away from Vista Equity Partners (who own Gainsight - and have recently done big moves in the Community space after acquiring InSided).
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ignitetech-acquires-khoros-to-transform-customer-connections-in-the-ai-answer-engine-era-302465365.html

Having worked at Lithium for 5 years a while back, and being a former Khoros customer, I have a lot of thoughts on this, but keen to see what the vibes here are ;)

#cabs - May 27, 2025 at 12:27 PM

What I've found works well is
1/ Custom-made
2/ When they have the choice (to also potentially opt-out)
3/ Stuff they'd actually use
4/ Stuff for their teams
5/ Stuff that actually shows that you KNOW them (although that does require doing it 1-by-1, but the impact is... chef's kiss)
6/ Gift cards for Ubers to attend (if in person), or Uber Eats style if virtual/remote to make their lives easier.

PLUS - managing through/via a platform like a Reachdesk helps measure attribution and impact, too.

#general - May 27, 2025 at 10:36 AM

Hey @Liza McGraw - where are you based?
I spent 4 years helping brands launch brand communities whilst I worked at Khoros, and that was a key part of our launch process. I transitioned into customer marketing 10 years ago, but my former team re-launched their community on Khoros last year, and there was a lot of foundational work like that that needed to be done for the relaunch.
Feel free to DM me and we cans setup some time or I can send some links over :)

#general - May 27, 2025 at 10:34 AM

I do not have access to these documents anymore, but what we had was something in the lines of: "You agree for your name and logo to be included within a public facing list of customers, without predominance of your name and without any details on contractual details or use-cases." as a standard.
We had about 80% of our contracts on these - and when we'd engage them in specific programs of work then we'd make sure we'd have the right legalese around it (use cases, etc.)

#jobs - May 27, 2025 at 10:17 AM

Thank you SO MUCH for doing this @Alexie Glover ❤️

#general - May 12, 2025 at 12:21 PM

@Charlotte Weiss - if its any consolation, it took us 5 years of trial and error, refining our processes and systems, and getting people onboard before we were able to operationalise anything consistently. Having someone partner with you in legal to make sure there is a baseline and process is vital, too, as it's often a case of accepting levels of risk. In terms of systems, it really has to be somewhere that doesn't require a lot of jumping through hoops + governance in place to get a source of truth. Happy to connect separately if helpful 🙂 (I think I know a few people in your team ;))

#10-community - May 09, 2025 at 03:30 PM

Gainsight's platform is great, if the rest of your CS org use it, it's a customer marketing goldmine. Good luck with your community project! Community building is one of my favourite things ever (I helped launch over 30 brand communities when working with Gainsight's main competitor ;))

#10-community - May 09, 2025 at 02:45 PM

@Shelly Ryder - the difficulty was to get people aligned and bought in, the actual process design and solutioning is actually relatively straightforward. My goal was to make the community part of as many departments as possible, but for that they needed to get value from it, and for it to be part of their day to day.

Ideas delivered = product management had accountability for including community-sourced ideas in their product lifecycle, as well as maintaining the status and progress of ideas.

NPS = program execution sat in my team, so it was relatively simple to measure the delta between community users vs. non

Cost avoidance = we used relatively industry standard methods for that through sample surveying, where we prompt visitors to tell us the purpose of their visit, which is similar to what you are suggesting

Pipeline influenced = we included our community and programs as touchpoints within our demand gen/lead scoring. Even without the CRM integration; every webinar they attend, program they engage with, etc. we made sure we used the processes and toolings on place from marketing operations and tracked via campaigns.

#general - May 09, 2025 at 02:32 PM

We created custom fields within a legal review section. And no, we had different scenarios: our standard clickwrap would allow us to use a customer logo/names as part of a wider list, without disclosing any commercial/use information.

Clickwrap = limited use

The field would also only be populated IF there has been a form of review, either from the clickwrap, review or reference activity

So in the field Logo Use, we had:
Yes / No / Limited / Unknown

And then in the justification field, we'd either have a link to the terms, the release, or what not (and the update was dated)

Means we could create reports for the sales teams, and our peers in the wider marketing department.

Maintaining this was part of our standard operating procedure, as well as legal.

It took a WHILE to get something going, and getting alignment with legal, but once it was up, what a blessing!

#general - May 09, 2025 at 10:47 AM

Haha - well before we used Gainsight, we built an email flow in our email marketing system, and would manually batch-upload the target emails on a monthly basis. We were still able to make it seem like it came from the CSM 😉 One thing to consider, is that surveys often have a completion rate of between 7.5/10% (based on # of people you send it to), so anything you can do to optimise the way that NPS survey is served will really help you; think like a marketer. I'd also really recommend sticking with JUST the NPS question, and having a free text box; it's great to see what is top of mind for people to understand what influences their scores

#10-community - May 09, 2025 at 09:13 AM

@Shelly Ryder - hopefully not too late for you, but this is how I shared impact of our community across the business.
The key here was that we had associated KPIs that were aligned and shared with those departments, which is what helped us prove business value. The ones that are in green are ones we actively measured and were tied to specific metrics.
Ultimately, the only things my execs cared about was money saved and money earned, so we needed to make sure that whatever we did with our community was able to translate into that.

#general - May 09, 2025 at 09:02 AM

Morning & Happy Friday! Not sure if this is the right place to post to say hi 👋 and introduce myself here. (Apologies if it is, and thank you for indulging me if it isn't ;))

🌍 Location: South London 🇬🇧 (and originally from )
💻 Role: CX/Post Sale Marketing Leader (Former Sr. Director of Customer Experience Marketing at Blue Prism & more recently Former Community Marketing Programs Lead at Reddit)
💪 Intro: I've spent my career at the crossroads between community management, CX and marketing, and I truly believe that B2B marketing needs a good shake-up and get closer to customer functions. Working hand-in-hand and breaking silos with Customer Education, Support & CS was a complete game changer for us at Blue Prism. I am currently between jobs (first time in 8 years) and doing some freelance work until I find my next ✨ dream job ✨
🫶 Love: My tiny human, Pixel 🐾 and my other half. I am an unapologetic nerd, and have enjoyed spending time catching up on some classic RPGs on my handheld gaming PC when I'm not reading some trashy romantasy.
😆 Fun fact: I found my career calling from being the president of a fan-club for a Dutch heavy metal band in my early 20s
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlottekennett/

#general - May 09, 2025 at 08:59 AM

Aaaah - so I completely rebuilt our VoC program when I got promoted in my last role, and we our NPS surveys alongside CS leadership.

We made it as an always-on program, and following a specific cadence. We used Gainsight's Journey Orchestrator to manage the segmentation and outreach, and built specific playbooks to help them serve it. The team really benefitted from our team's marketing skill set to get that going.

However, we would then push all the data in Qualtrics which made the data easier to manipulate, and was our central repository for all things surveys and feedback analysis, the dashboards were also easier to customise for our execs and leaders, as well as the text analysis.

I would suggest that NPS is just one data point, and would also report on Customer Effort Scores across our digital platforms and various transactions, and again we aggregated all of the feedback and data into Qualtrics, so that we had a full picture of everything.

Happy to connect on it further if helpful :)

#general - May 09, 2025 at 08:54 AM

Hey @Madeline Coke - we tracked this in SFDC, and only the legal team and my team were allowed to make the updates. We'd track all of the "acts of reference" in Gainsight (and so did the CS rep if we didn't have visibility on it), and that got pushed into SFDC too.
We spent A LOT of time doing enablement with sales to educate them on how/when they could use (and couldn't use) logos, and I just generally became everyone's biggest pain in the butt when they weren't following the rules.
But yeah, you need governance and alignment for it to work, do you have someone who could support you in imposing said governance?