Using community to elevate the customer experience

For a long time, community was treated as a side project, often owned by support, and focused mainly on deflecting tickets.

That’s no longer enough.

Over the past few years at Box, I’ve seen how community can become a strategic force across the entire customer lifecycle. Not just in support, but in sales, product, customer success, and even category creation.

But to unlock that potential, we need to stop thinking of community as a forum—and start thinking of it as a driver of experience, insight, and growth.

What is a community?

People often confuse a crowd with a community. But the distinction lies in intention. A group of people rushing into a store on Black Friday isn’t a community. A community forms when there’s a clear mission and a shared identity – when people show up not just for what they get, but because they feel part of something.

And while B2B communities might not be as wild as the running of the bulls in Pamplona, the same psychological dynamics are at play: belonging, identity, and shared purpose.

Community always comes down to two things: who it’s for, and why it exists.

For any company, if you can define the “who” and the “why” around your product and mission, you’re on the right path. In fact, the more specific you can be in the early days, the more traction you’re likely to gain. Specificity builds momentum. From there, you can expand.

How community supports go-to-market

When our COO asked for a treasure map to show what community could do for Box, it sparked an important reflection.

Community has evolved significantly over the past few decades. It’s no longer just about support or ticket deflection – it’s now about digital engagement and building full customer lifecycle hubs.

That’s the vision we’re working toward at Box. We’re exploring how to integrate community everywhere, because customers are engaging with your brand in more places than ever before.

Whether it’s a Slack channel, a Reddit thread, a LinkedIn post, or your own forums, these are all touchpoints where community can help you meet customers where they are and make a lasting impression.

The rise of self-service and peer learning

We’re seeing a major shift toward self-service. While it's been talked about for years, it's still underutilized, and when it is used, the experience is often lacking. But that’s changing, especially with younger generations, who increasingly expect seamless, self-guided product experiences.

This is where community can step in as a powerful tool, particularly for education. People learn from documentation and videos, yes – but they often learn more from their peers.

When someone sees another user solving a problem or using a product in an innovative way, that’s inspiring. It creates momentum. It also allows customers to see what’s possible with your product in real-world scenarios.

Measuring the impact

Common Room, a revenue intelligence platform, did a detailed study of 140 B2B SaaS companies. The results showed clear links between strong community programs and metrics like ARR expansion and feature adoption. And those findings match what I’ve seen in my own experience.

Community is a value exchange. You give value to your customers, and in turn, you receive value back. That might mean giving them a platform to share expertise, boost their careers, or gain recognition.

And what you get back is equally powerful: insight, advocacy, and loyalty.

You can measure that value in a variety of ways, some quantitative, some qualitative. But the key is to be intentional about how you approach it.

Breathing life back into Box’s community

When I joined Box in 2021, the community program was, quite frankly, lifeless. The forums were empty: digital tumbleweeds. Previous community managers had left, and it was the middle of COVID. There was almost nothing to build on.

So I started with the basics. I asked for a list of customers who had shown a genuine interest in Box, I ran a survey over a few months and followed it up with small virtual events. I even sent out lunch vouchers to encourage participation.

The goal was simple: understand what customers wanted from a community. The answer was clear – they wanted more opportunities to connect with peers, to explore use cases, and to network more broadly.

Starting small and building patterns

At the time, we were still using Zendesk as our community platform. While great for support tickets, it wasn't designed for rich, interactive community experiences. And with pandemic restrictions still in place, in-person events were off the table.

So I focused on what I could do: virtual enablement sessions. I picked topics relevant to Box and its ecosystem, like security and key integrations such as Box and Salesforce, and ran sessions regularly.

It wasn’t flashy, but it was consistent. And consistency is everything in community building.

Quality over quantity

Our initial participation was small. With over 6.5 million weekly active users, Box has a massive reach, but many of these are marginal users. They might interact with Box through a shared document, without understanding the broader value of the platform.

So yes, the numbers were modest. But what mattered more was who showed up and why they kept coming back. Some customers participated in over 30 events a year. That kind of commitment doesn’t happen unless you’re delivering real value.

After 18 months, things started to become self-sustaining: a major milestone for any community program.

Proving value to the business

Data is crucial when you're reporting back to leadership, but so are human stories. Community gives you access to both. It’s one of the best ways to gather aggregated feedback at scale and to package that feedback with emotion and narrative.

Over the past year, our community program has influenced over $11 million in ARR. Our analytics team was able to directly attribute that to community touchpoints. Is that game-changing revenue for a billion-dollar company? Maybe not. But it was enough to earn the attention of leadership and secure deeper investment.

Scaling with purpose

In July, we relaunched our community on Gainsight Customer Communities. We now have over 4,000 members, and we’re approaching growth with intentionality.

When I created the registration form, I deliberately added friction. I didn’t want a one-click sign-up experience. If someone isn’t willing to answer a few thoughtful questions, they’re unlikely to meaningfully engage. It’s about curating for quality, not just quantity.

We’ve got the pulse back. The next step is getting the patient out of the stretcher. And that means focusing on four key areas:

1. Integrating community into the customer journey

We’re working to embed community into the broader customer experience. That means placing the right content in the right places – whether it’s inside the product, on the forum, or elsewhere.

We recently formed a team to look at how community can support a cohesive, end-to-end journey. It’s not easy, but it’s foundational.

2. Scaling content and thought leadership

If we want to lead the category of intelligent content management, we need to shape the conversation. Just as Notion and Figma became synonymous with their categories, Box must lead on topics like secure content, metadata workflows, and AI-driven automation.

3. Expanding our events footprint

With in-person events back, we’re beginning to explore what our offline experience looks like. It’s different now, more curated, more community-driven, but there’s clear potential to create meaningful face-to-face moments that build trust and deepen relationships.

4. Growing our partner ecosystem

Our most engaged community members often come from our partner ecosystem. The community gives partners visibility into customer conversations at scale, and we’ve started letting them build their own pages within our community hub.

The intersection of community and support

Let’s talk a bit about how community supports the support function itself.

In the Common Room survey, one standout insight was the untapped potential of your most engaged customers. There's a tendency to underestimate just how willing (and eager) these customers are to share their knowledge and help others.

If someone has been using your product for years, they’ve built up a deep well of expertise. But unless they work in your company or are formally part of a customer advisory board, there are often very few places for them to share that knowledge.

A community forum becomes one of the only outlets for that, and many are happy to contribute when given the opportunity.

Peer-to-peer support at scale

As our technical writing and support teams face natural bandwidth limitations, the community has emerged as a valuable extension of support, enabling faster responses and broader coverage.

Users help each other troubleshoot. They swap insights and workarounds. And often, the help comes faster than it would through a traditional support queue.

Responding with transparency

We know that software issues are inevitable. But what defines the customer experience isn’t the issue itself; it’s how we respond to it. If something goes wrong and there’s no communication, that silence can do more damage to your brand than the original problem.

That’s why community can be a key channel for transparency. It gives you a space to communicate honestly, rally support, and respond in real time.

Where AI and community meet

No conversation today feels complete without touching on AI, and for good reason. It's becoming more pervasive by the day. But while there’s plenty of excitement, I believe the key to long-term success lies in human–AI collaboration.

And one of the best places to enable that collaboration is within your customer community.

AI should complement, not replace, the human layer

There’s understandable enthusiasm around what AI can do, particularly in areas like summarizing content or answering support questions.

Gainsight, for example, has released new tools that we’re starting to experiment with in our own community. These tools are great at things like recapping long threads and surfacing insights.

But here’s the catch – relying too heavily on AI, too quickly, comes with risks. What people still want (and value) is the knowledge, reassurance, and empathy that only another human can provide.

So your community becomes the critical place where customers know they can connect with real people, not just bots.

Personalized community experiences

One area where AI shows huge promise is in personalization. Imagine being able to deliver a tailored experience to each community member based on their role. That’s our goal at Box: serve the right content to the right person at the right time.

Real-world AI wins: Box Hubs in action

We released a product called Box Hubs last year, which allows customers to curate and share unstructured content in a centralized hub. A recent example from Baylor University showed just how powerful this can be.

They built an internal hub to organize their IT policy documents. Then they began using the AI capabilities in Box Hubs to query the content. When someone asks a specific question, like “What’s our bring-your-own-device policy for iPads?” – the hub could interpret the policy and return the right answer, just as a human might.

That’s a game-changer. It freed up their IT team and made their policies more accessible and actionable.

Just last week, our own Chief Customer Officer built a hub using our Zendesk knowledge base as the source. It’s now a resource we’re actively sharing with customers to showcase how curation plus AI equals a better support experience.

One of my pet peeves with traditional search? You ask a question and get thousands of results, but none of them actually answer your query. Recently, we’ve started seeing smarter responses in our own hub and in some external tools, too. The AI is finally starting to say, “We don’t have that answer.”

That might sound like a small thing, but it’s a huge step forward. It shows that well-curated content and intentional AI design really can improve the customer experience.

AI as an extension of support

Here’s what I’d like to see more of: if AI can’t find the answer, it should route the query to the community, where a human might be able to help.

With product innovation moving at such a rapid pace, it’s inevitable that knowledge bases fall behind. Technical writing teams are often understaffed.

So, the best approach is to curate what you do have, layer AI on top, and then have a human in the loop for moderation or escalation.

Giving customers the power to bring their own models

One of our most exciting developments at Box is enabling customers to bring their own AI models into our platform. Whether it’s a customer support persona or an HR assistant, they can shape tone, intent, and content, all while securely managing their own data.

There’s so much happening in this space right now. It's moving fast. But I truly believe that the combination of curated content, smart AI integration, and a strong human layer is what will define the next generation of great customer experiences.

Getting started: Build with, not for

If you’re thinking about building a community, here’s my favorite piece of advice: build with, not for.

I’ve seen teams spend months obsessing over how to launch, what platform to use, how to structure it, how it should look. But the key is to just start. Don’t overthink it. Get your customers together. That simple act (creating a space for people to connect) is high value in and of itself. For them. For you. For the business.

Your customers will guide you. Their feedback will shape the direction and help you focus on what really matters.

Cultivate identity and let rituals emerge

There are plenty of great resources and books out there on community building, but this isn’t a static process – it’s an evolution. It starts with bringing people together, then gradually shifts into something deeper.

You begin to notice patterns. An identity starts to take shape. You start to understand who these people are and what connects them. They may have totally different job titles and work in different industries, but something binds them.

At Box, we’ve found our community tends to attract “future of work” personas – people who care about how content flows through their organization and who approach that responsibility with precision.

Over time, you’ll see repeat attendees. You’ll develop rituals. That’s when it really starts to click.

Choose your focus, prove your impact

Community is both a blessing and a curse – it can serve so many areas of the business, but trying to do everything at once will dilute your efforts. The key is to choose where you want to make an impact and focus there first.

There’s a natural maturity curve. Many communities start by improving the customer experience and then grow into a driver of expansion and advocacy.

At Box, our path was a bit unusual, we began with events that directly influenced ARR, and only later did we start to more tightly integrate community into the broader customer journey.

Now, with the right platform in place, we’re doubling down on making that experience more seamless and impactful.

Budget and the business case

Community often falls into a gray area when it comes to budgeting. It’s not quite support, and it’s not quite marketing. As a result, it’s frequently underfunded despite being one of the highest-value touchpoints a company can offer.

If you can show ROI – if you can connect community to outcomes like retention, ARR, or faster onboarding, you’ll earn the investment you need.

And you don’t need it all at once. Community is built over time. It rarely takes off overnight.

Final thoughts

I want to leave you with a quote from our founder and CEO at Box. It’s from a few years back but the spirit holds true:

“Community should be a tailwind for everything else in the business – support, product, marketing, and the customer experience.”

That’s the goal. Community isn’t just another tool in the stack. It’s the connective tissue that strengthens every part of your go-to-market engine.

Done right, it becomes the place where human connection, shared knowledge, and real value converge – and that’s what truly elevates the customer experience.

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