Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Guide Professional or higher |
| Access | Admin |
A community lets customers answer each other. Valuable when it works, and it only works with sustained attention.
What it is
A forum on your help centre: topics, posts, comments. Customers ask, other customers and your team answer, and the result is searchable alongside your articles.
Where it genuinely works
- Products with enthusiasts. People who enjoy knowing more than average and helping others.
- Complex products where customers develop their own ways of working.
- A large user base, because a community needs a critical mass of people.
Where it does not
Transactional support. Customers with a billing question do not want to ask other customers; they want an answer from you.
And small user bases. A forum with three posts a month reads as abandoned, and an abandoned forum on your help centre is worse than none.
What it costs
Somebody's attention, every week, indefinitely. Answering unanswered questions, moderating, and keeping it alive in the early months when nobody else is posting.
That is the real decision. The feature is free; the commitment is not.
Wrong answers are the risk
A customer confidently giving another customer the wrong advice, left standing, becomes your documentation as far as search is concerned. That is what moderation is for, and why an unmoderated community is a liability.
Thinking about a community? Talk it through with us first. The question is rarely whether the feature works; it is whether you have the audience and the time.
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