We started a subreddit for our app earlier this year and it’s provided a ton of value for both us and our customers. There’s no lack of communication with customers; I’ve spoken to more customers at GameChanger than at any of my past product jobs. But we were looking for more organic and communal discussion. Something that wasn’t initiated by a customer support case or us wanting feedback on a specific new feature. We wanted a space where our customers could feel free to express their opinions and engage with others. So our head of CX started a subreddit.
While it’s no r/wallstreetbets, we’ve seen a lot of discussion and the signal to noise ratio of that discussion has been very high.
Here’s an overview of what we’ve seen.
The Community is self-sufficient. The bulk of the content generated on the subreddit is from the community. We posted early on to jumpstart the conversation, but now we see a steady flow of posts. Some examples:
People share how they use the product. Our product allows scoring and streaming of youth sporting events and folks have been very willing to share their respective set-ups with one another.
The community answers each other’s questions. While we do answer inquiries that people post, we see a high reply rate from the community itself. Sometimes it’s answers to straightforward questions like ‘How would you score this play?’ and sometimes it’s really going in depth about all the cameras and equipment they use to live stream a game.
It’s a great source of ideas/opportunities. Give a bunch of engaged users a forum to post thoughts and they no doubt have opinions.
People go deep on product requests. Reddit isn’t constrained by a character limit and it’s not a chat app so people have many ways in which they can express themselves. Someone made a Y/N poll on whether we should add a certain feature (Y won lol) and someone else even wrote a user story!
We found people that want to hear from us. We’re not really looking to push any features, but we love talking to people directly.
The community is so active and vocal that they’re a natural fit for beta testing new features and participating in user interviews. They provide so much value that we make a concerted effort to involve them in testing or give them ‘VIP’ customer support. For example, we’ll DM with them in Reddit for specific issues with the product.
Our product has been around for a while and we have product market fit (thanks to my colleagues, I just started) – so simply setting up a subreddit may not produce the same results we’ve seen. But I do think the combination of an already engaged audience and Reddit’s UX (posts, comments and up/down votes) has been key to the high quality discussion we’ve seen.
Check it out for yourself: https://www.reddit.com/r/GameChangerApp/