I had subscribed to tune into ProdPad’s webinar about launching a successful Slack community (they’ve proven that their Slack community has reduced churn by 99% – WHICH IS INSANE!) but I couldn’t listen in as I had an offsite meeting.
Would love to hear from anyone who caught the webinar if there are any takeaways.
Also if you’re not following ProdPad’s community updates, they’re excellent! I get emails forwarded to me from folks throughout my company at least once a week.
That does sound a little too good to be true. For starters, you would need almost 100% participation in the community to make that work.
My guess (and this could be wildly wrong) is they measured the participants in their Slack community against those that aren’t participants and noticed a huge difference.
Which is a pretty common thing to do. It’s a bogus metric, but tends to get used often.
I caught their recording of their webinar today and they went into a bit more detail about those stats.
Their churn rate is now under 2% (could be too good to be true? could also be their churn rate of community members), and 90% of the customers in the community stick around because they have access to talk to their team directly.
What I’m really interested in is this stat:
“15% of users who are part of the [Slack] community and cancel – are saved.”
As a Product Community, to be able to provide that ^ would be quite significant for us. I’m still hesitant to adopt a Slack community, I have so many questions still…
What I’ve done is created a Slack channel for our power users (Experts), but have contained the rest of the community in the forum so we sooort of have the best of both worlds at the moment. I’d be curious to hear more about what it’s like being a community manager for a Slack community.
Without knowing more about the data, I’m skeptical. For two reasons:
Another interesting point is whether they’re referring to active members or not. If they’re referring to anyone who has ever joined the community, it’s clearly a bogus stat. If not, there could be something in it. At best though this is definitely correlational data.
This is really easy to track and prove. The harder part is proving the community is the cause of them being saved and how it compared to other channels.
Hey Jess! Andrea from ProdPad here, hope you have a chance to see the webinar 
It’s here if you’d like to see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC6J7wibv3Q&t=165s
To answer your questions:
Yes our churn rate is quite low, and the Slack community has been a huge part of it. That being said, it’s not the only effort we have towards churn prevention!
A few other things that have helped:
“15% of users who are part of the [Slack] community and cancel – are saved.”
I looked at the numbers and that is in fact true. Now keep in mind this is 15% of the users that are in Slack. This means that of 500+ customers right now, of those that have canceled or were churning somehow, we managed to save those accounts by engaging in active conversations with them.
There is also a subset of clients that ask to remain in our Slack community because they intend to take ProdPad to their next job, and would like to stay in touch in order for us to facilitate that transition. We’ve already done this with a handful of clients and it’s been great!
To add to your other questions:
How do you spend your time when you’re not responding to Slack messages?
We’re a startup, so there’s quite a bit of other things I do around here. I give demos, help with support, write blog posts, and look at new engagement opportunities and strategies. I don’t see community isn’t just one channel, but rather an initiative worth exploring in different ways.
Does it cause you to become immune to Slack notifications in general? (I have this problem already, being in so many different teams and channels)
Not at all. I think what’s unique about our Slack is that people will engage when and where needed, and I don’t need to push conversations to happen. Sometimes silence is ok, at the end of the day our customers are busy, and we don’t need nor want the community to be a source of stress!
How do you strategize new engagement initiatives?
That’s definitely a really interesting question, and I’d love to hear more about from others as well! I’m always looking at what others are doing and seeing if there are things we can apply. It’s all about trial and error sometimes - what works for some won’t work for others, and that’s ok.
Hope that helps!
I’m curious if anyone here is using an online community forum, plus a Slack channel for customers? If so, how does that work? Or, were you thinking of using Slack as your Community tool, and what would that look like?
I do. It serves two different audiences – the ones that want an immediate response which they don’t need to refer back to (ephemeral) use Slack. The forums are more of a knowledge base.
This article is about Discourse but you could swap that out for any forum platform.