Thinking About a Customer Hub? Here’s Why an Online Community Should Be the Core
We’ve all heard it: how a business succeeds or fails depends on how customers feel about your product, service, or brand. And we’ve seen the research—customers have no patience for bad experiences. But here’s the reality: despite investing in onboarding, support, and retention technologies, many companies still lack a central place for customers to connect. The result? Customers bounce from system to system, getting more frustrated with every click.
If you want to deliver a genuinely great customer experience, it’s time to move beyond just a few menu links on your website. You need to build something seamless, simple, and integrated. That’s where community comes in.
At the heart of it, an online community is where customers go to get the information and interactions they need—whether it’s answers to questions, product feedback, or connecting with peers. It becomes the hub that ties everything together, and it can make a real difference in how your customers experience your brand.
Why Community Should Be the Hub
Placing community at the center of your customer experience strategy creates a unified journey. Whether it’s a prospective customer finding your brand through a Google search or an existing customer needing help with a product issue, the community becomes the central touchpoint. It’s where discussions happen, ideas are shared, and relationships are built.
When integrated properly, community isn’t just a collection of forums—it becomes an extension of your brand, streamlining everything from discovery (hello, SEO) to seamless workflows that connect with your internal systems like CRM, support ticketing, and even product management. Customers shouldn’t have to figure out how your backend systems work. When the community is the hub, it just works.
Key Elements of a Customer Hub
To bring the concept of a community-centered customer hub to life, let’s break down the key pieces and how they work together.
Knowledge Base
While community discussions are a goldmine for real-time knowledge sharing, your Knowledge Base (KB) is the single source of truth for product documentation and best practices. Integrating your community with the KB allows the wealth of community knowledge to feed into your product’s official documentation. When customers run into a product issue or need a specific feature breakdown, they can access both peer discussions and formal documentation from a single location.
Also, your teams can easily identify trending topics or common questions in the community, update the KB as needed, and cross-link articles back into those conversations. That makes it easier for customers to find answers without jumping from one tool to another.
Support ticketing
We all know traditional support ticketing can be slow and expensive. One-to-one support means that each customer requires individualized attention, often with repetitive questions being answered multiple times. By integrating support into your community, you create a one-to-many support system where a single answer can help multiple customers. However, for personalized issues, the community can also integrate directly into your existing ticketing system, funneling specific requests through familiar workflows.
With ticketing integrations, community posts can be automatically escalated to support based on criteria like activity, keywords, or sentiment. Support agents can respond to these posts directly from their ticketing system, while ticket statuses are updated across both platforms in real time. This means community managers don’t have to leave the community to manage tickets, and customers can easily track the progress of their inquiries without switching platforms. Any changes in ticket status—like when a ticket is closed or moved to in-progress—are automatically reflected in the community, keeping both teams and customers aligned without the need to juggle multiple tools.
Advocacy and recognition
As your community grows, so will the emergence of customer advocates. These are the individuals who go above and beyond, helping others, sharing their expertise, and engaging in discussions. Identifying these advocates early is crucial, and your community platform can track engagement metrics to pinpoint the most active and influential members.
From there, you can integrate the community with your CRM and rewards system to recognize advocates by awarding badges, exclusive titles, or early access to new products. This recognition can also extend into your marketing and referral programs, allowing you to turn these advocates into case study participants or brand ambassadors.
Training and skill development
Customers aren’t just looking for answers—they’re looking to grow. Whether it’s product certifications, training courses, or leveling up their industry skills, integrating learning management systems (LMS) into your community enables your customers to engage in continuous learning.
A community serves as a natural environment for this. Members can share their progress, ask for advice, or connect with others on similar learning paths. At the same time, your company can create and spotlight training programs or certifications tied to trending topics within the community. You can also use community insights to shape future training based on what members are discussing and what skills they need most.
Product feedback
Customer feedback is invaluable, but it’s often scattered across multiple systems—surveys, emails, support calls. Bringing this feedback into your community streamlines the process, allowing customers to discuss product improvements, share ideas, and vote on feature requests.
By integrating the community with your product management tools—like Productboard or Jira—you create a direct feedback loop. Product managers can quickly capture community feedback, prioritize it, and communicate updates back to the community. Customers don’t need to know the technical details—they’ll simply see that their input is being heard and acted upon.
Customer success data
A fully integrated community allows you to sync customer interactions with your customer success platform or CRM, creating a complete view of each customer’s journey. Imagine knowing not just who your top advocates are, but what they’re interested in, what challenges they’re facing, and how they’re engaging with your content.
With this insight, your sales, marketing, and customer success teams can take personalized action. Whether it’s targeting community members with relevant content or providing tailored support, the data from your community hub enriches your customer profiles.
Federated search
One of the biggest frustrations customers face is not knowing where to go for information. A federated search tool that covers your community, KB, product documentation, blogs, and training resources solves that problem. It’s the ultimate one-stop-shop. A single search query pulls in results from across your ecosystem, ensuring customers can easily find what they’re looking for without hopping between systems.
The Bigger Picture
Scattered resources create a fractured customer experience. Customers don’t want to navigate multiple tools to find the right answer—they want simplicity. A centralized community hub brings everything together in one place, creating a seamless customer journey. Whether it’s support, product feedback, training, or advocacy, your community is the anchor that connects it all.
And while customers enjoy the streamlined experience, your internal teams gain efficiency, working within their preferred tools while the community hub ties it all together. The result? A win-win.