Company: Square
Company background: Square, Inc. is an American financial services and digital payments company based in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey and launched its first platform in 2010.
Contact: Kelly Jurotich
Title: Beta Community Manager
Related URLs: sellercommunity.com/beta
Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community
1. Describe your community(s) and how you decided to start a community or grow/change it in the last year? (user request, Khoros suggestion, internal idea, etc.) What is the purpose of your community?
Square's Beta Community is a remarkable solution for connecting our sellers to our launch readiness program to test new features before release. Launching in April 2020 with less than 80 members, our subset of the greater seller community has reached 6000 sellers testing over 5 countries, and expands daily.
Previously our beta group only was able to support Square's Beta App - and quickly grew into a community to provide feedback, report bugs, submit feature requests, and connect directly with our team over all product launches in our different Square Platforms.
We are currently supporting 32+ beta features, have 20+ active groups for specific and ongoing tests, and preform regular feedback and discovery sessions for early iterations. Beta community is the fastest growing community with Square and allows us to connect quickly and easily with our sellers.
2. Tell us about how you made it happen? Did you stage it first? Who got an early look? How did you drive adoption? Did you get executive buy-in? Did you have any key iterations?
Beta community started as facebook group then moved to Khoros after we looked for the ability to manage/own our own content. Our internal team of 2, staged the community based on user feedback and tested UI with a small subset of our active community members. Based on this feedback, we designed the community with a mobile first approach that would allow our sellers to interact with our community in an app like fashion- from onboarding/signing the Square NDA to viewing bug submissions and recent discussions first.
Our leadership team was eager to see our beta community and continues to watch it grow.
Our most proud launch in Beta Community is utilizing ideas boards to create a scaled bug reporting system. Using Grazitti interactive, we designed the idea boards so that a customer could submit their bug, and we could easily triage like messages to the same. Using the idea boards allows us to communicate the status of a bug at scale with the other subscribers to the thread. If a bug is under investigation, we can show the status as "assigned to engineering," or if a bug is resolved, we can communicate a "fixed" status, and all sellers are notified. This has greatly reduced the contact points in communicating updates and resolutions in our beta programs.
We utilize a similar feature for our Feature Request status's allowing sellers to see where in our roadmap a feature may present itself.
3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business. Please include metrics if possible.
Beta Community has changed the way our team is able to gain and recruit possible testers, as well as creates a repository for engaged sellers. We've seen an increase in beta engagement, and shift in communications to our scaled community platform. Our little but mighty team is able to work and manage 32 active beta programs (and more, 2472 engaged beta sellers who visit the beta or seller community and advocate for our products, and well as turn around potential recruitment to a matter of hours rather than weeks to find available sellers.
Using Events boards we're able to have regular roundtable meetings with our customer to discuss upcoming releases and tests, feature requests, and report pain points in the user experience. Our product teams are able to conduct quick and easy discovery sessions to make sure our business's releases fill our company philosophy of "remarkable experiences." And all of this is supported over 5 countries, in 2 languages (English and Japanese) and serves a global repository for our beta programs.