Building Community

We are building a Community of thoughtful individuals interested in self-improvement and authentic relationships. It is a place for learning among your peers, being curious, asking questions, challenging yourself to think differently and paying it forward.

How do we define this Community?

It starts with motivated people who are eager to grow and help others grow. And we shouldn’t forget compassion and patience as other characteristics of community builders as well.

“It’s how we lean on each other and learn from each other that allows us to grow and get better every day. The group of people is second to none and we’re constantly exchanging ideas and iterating in the best ways.” - Ben Segal, Pair Eyewear

At Zendesk, I am building our Startup Community, by fostering authentic relationships, as I have done previously at AWS. I grew up in the Bay Area and had the privilege to attend Santa Clara University. I love being with family and friends, in the pool, or skiing in fresh powder at Lake Tahoe. Our Community is built on the values that bring positivity to both our professional and personal lives. Those attitudes and values include humility, kindness, gratefulness, alacrity and grit lead to authentic relationships.

I first met Ben Segal and Brian Kale in December 2019 over fried chicken, and we had a lot of laughs. Little did I know that my life would be changed.

“I believe humans are inherently good by nature. So of course we’ll always try to lean in and help someone in need. The only thing that steps in the way of that is a lack of an environment where that sort of help is encouraged and appreciated. Having a community where no questions are judged and we can all ask whatever and whenever is key to allowing human nature to take its course. We all want to help each other, we just need the proper forum.” - Ben Segal, Pair Eyewear

How can strangers meet and positively impact one another?

Prior to the pandemic, I leveraged Meetup to organize pizza and beer events in San Francisco and New York, giving the leaders the mic to tell their story while focusing on learning, friendship, and fun. The 2020 plan was to build out the Community in other cities.

What if technology can enable friendships and foster learning with a few laughs?

As the pandemic hit, in-person events gave way to Zoom. But were people actually learning? The lines blurred on working hours and days became weeks, and weeks became months, and then the conversation became 2021.

“Excuses don’t feed the bulldog.” - my dad?

I thought to myself: focus on building a community to foster engagement, learning and friendships. Along the way, we can have a few laughs and a lot of fun.

How do we connect?

When Zoom engagement declined, we pivoted to launch a Zendesk Slack Community for CX leaders and founders. Community leaders helped to create a mix of channels. I now conduct weekly interviews in Slack, and these interviews generate content. To foster authentic relationships, we created Coaches, a program designed for Founders to meet with other Founders/CX Leaders to jumpstart their CX journey.?

We launched a Slack Community in July of 2020 and engagement rose with a small intimate Community of you and your closest 2,500+ friends, but engagement started to decline in March 2022. The world started to open again, and leaders were no longer glued to their computers.

When the numbers declined in February, we started to take the learnings from these stories from a private, gated Community in Slack to LinkedIn, an open platform. The results were unexpected.

LinkedIn provides an opportunity to like, celebrate, and “insert your favorite emoji here.”? Shares serve as an expanded marketing effort with an unintended consequence: a reminder to log back into the Slack Community. With our July bounce-back, the Community achieved our second highest month since we began this journey.

As we look ahead, beyond Slack and LinkedIn, the goal of every interaction remains the same: building authentic relationships that are mutually beneficial.?

“What I love about working in a very customer centric role like Customer Success & Experience is that everyone who works in this field is also just as customer centric. We are naturally thinking about how to help others as part of our ethos and roles - which in turn means that our community is super open to helping others in the community.” - Brian Kale, Novo

Where is the Community headed?

Help isn’t a straight line, and often it is multiple lines parallel to one another. The idea of 1:many and 1:1 isn’t a new concept; however, in this instance, we have a twist.

Slack has become a 1:many motion where peers answer questions from founders + CX leaders. In addition to a 1:many motion, a 1:1 motion is found through Volunteer Coaches who dedicate their time to help mentor founders early in their support journey. This Community has experienced organic growth from referrals that drive the expansion of the group.?

As we look ahead, the future is exciting. Defining roles and deepening relationships with Community Coaches, growing our presence regionally and perhaps globally, and continuing to positively impact others by giving them the mic to share their unique stories is what the Community will continue to accomplish.