[tchock23]

I don't understand why companies are building customer communities on Slack or Discord.

I kind of get it for consumer brands where there is a natural passion around the topic/product, but the last thing I want to be invited to as a B2B customer is a Slack or Discord group.

Who has the time to figure out the channel structure and community rules/conventions, get even more notifications, scroll through endless chat threads, etc. just to stay up to date or share feedback about a B2B product?

Am I just an oddball and don't get it? HN please help me figure out what I'm missing because I keep getting invited to Discord customer communities for B2B SaaS products and I just have zero desire to join, ever...

[shaburn]

It's the worst. They are blackholes for information and search is funcitonally non-existent.

[porphyra]

Discord search is actually great but you are right that the information is invisible to Google search and other external search engines. Likewise, at my company, a huge amount of knowhow is stored in internal chat logs. This sort of knowledge is the true "deep web" --- unindexable and unsearchable.

[Firmwarrior]

Yeah, man, it's going to be tragic when discord shuts down at some point and all that knowledge just disappears forever

[ls15]

The information is also often locked behind login walls. That accounts can be created for free (for most people) does not mean that the information is freely accessible.

[pranavbadami]

Hey, great question! I think a chunk of people like the immediacy of getting help over chat and find it easier to talk naturally with other members. In turn, we’ve seen people grow closer to the community and spend time hanging out there. However, I agree that it isn’t for everyone, especially if you’re mostly looking for support.

UX in terms of navigation, search, and configuration can definitely be improved, 100%, which is a huge reason why servers use us currently.

[thenightcrawler]

agree

[kirso]

Continuous discovery? Your customer is partially your roadmap, some are helping you distribute the product. Its a super smart way how to get real world information, then shuffle and decide what to do.

[tchock23]

I fully understand the benefit to the company.

What I don’t understand is the benefit to me as a customer.

[sanketc]

Some customers prefer asking in a community because that can lead to responses from other customers (at times it can even be faster response than a company rep getting to respond). A good example is dev infra related companies, where a customer can get a lot of value by hearing from how other customers think about a specific problem. You don't get that through a typical customer support software which is one to one.

It comes down to preference. The trend is that companies have to meet where customers are already hanging. Some customers will prefer only email (and for them you still need a ticketing software), some will prefer social (depending on industry), and some will prefer chat/forum communities. If you want to stand out as a company (esp when you are starting out), you have to serve them where ever they prefer. Sure, if you have an amazing product with a strong moat, you have more leverage on how you want customers to interact with you. But that comes much later in a company lifecycle.

[TheLML]

You can even do tickets on Discord. I've been on a server where users were able to create a ticket and then a new channel with the ticket number was created. The channel is private and only the ticket opener and users with the support role(s) can see the channel and communicate in it.

[tchock23]

I get what you’re saying and agree, but the synchronous nature of Discord and Slack aren’t the best interaction model for what you’re describing. Async forums (which have existed since the beginning of the web) are much better suited for that…

[kirso]

I am not affiliated with the folks here, but I think this is a matter of opinion and where it diverges.

I am part of several channels that like to have a native feature request / bug reporting in Discord => once the thread is created it sends the ticket to JIRA / Linear

The issue is that the alternative with communities is people sending you DMs with requests so its hard to keep track.

As a community user, I can just /command create_request, fill in my description + screenshot and send over to their team to process