Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of digital customer experience. My name is Akshay.

Been focusing on helping businesses enhance their digital customer experience and thrive in the digital landscape. And today we have my co host, Vaishali. Hi back again. My name is Vaishali, and I work as a Senior customer experience strategist. My focus is to integrate emotions in the world of technology and enhance better experiences. So our topic here today is digital community, something that Akshay is super passionate about, and could go on for hours and hours on this, but we'll try to keep this shot. I promise, a very exciting topic, because this is what brings you and us closer. It's a community. It's an online space where we share each other's knowledge, each other's passion, and really learn a lot from each other. It's about bringing things together and enhancing experiences for customers. But I'm very curious. Akshay, what about you as a business owner? Why you so passionate about community and digital community specifically?

Yeah, no, I think this, like you said, I'm really, really passionate about building digital communities and being part of them, because I feel like they bring people together, gives them a common goal, right? And I've actually seen this, which is very interesting, whether it's a product, whether it's a service, whether it's a retail store or retail store chain, communities help people as well as the company or product that is providing that community support, and what it does is it engages people. People feel supported. As long as you have a community which is kind and has some rules around it, you will find that this thriving community, they advocate for your service or a product, and I think it kind of helps you improve your service and product as a customer as well. And that, to me, is super important. Because I think if when companies give importance to these communities, they are your customers really all they're all you're doing is, hey, I have a concentrated version of a subset of people who are contributing it in a different way.

That's the way I think of them. And then, you know, thinking about it from a technical perspective, I'm part of both technical communities, which are very, very, very tech specific, as well as non technical communities, and both act in a very, very similar way. It's just fostering that culture of togetherness. And here, what is the purpose? Our purpose is to help each other solve issues, help discuss in a fair way of what's happening and how things are affected. But I'm curious, what have you seen from a CX and a marketing perspective? Vishali, oh, my God, I'm on so many Slack channels and LinkedIn groups, and it's amazing. And even you know different meetup groups, that's a great place to kind of just connect with like minded people. So I feel personally that from a marketer's perspective, it's a front seat view to different diverse customers, because though I might have experience with manufacturing or education of FinTech, somebody else might have in a completely different and a new industry that I have not dived deeper into, but I learn from those people, or from those different marketers on, like, how do their clients behave? And they become like a use case scenario for us to say, oh, you know, this is how education would do differently versus a non for profit, or do differently versus, you know, FinTech would do differently. And just sitting down together and talking about these different use cases a we're enhancing our own knowledge, but we're also able to dive deeper into understanding end of the day, it's all about emotions. It's about how people feel. It's a people business. So it's beautiful to kind of learn from each other and then also understand pain points and different goals. But one of the things I would definitely call out and point is that I've seen this personally in the last six, seven years, is that it's more collaborative then competitive, and that's the beauty of how community is. And I love you said it's about making healthy boundaries and having right governance in place to continue being more collaborative together.

Yeah, I think at the end of the day, the key takeaway, right? So, be part of communities, whether you start one, on your part of one, engage. Try to help one another. Like the bad part about being in a community is consumption, right? A lot of the 90% of other people consume, only 10% contribute. So try to be a contributor. Try to help someone. Try to share your knowledge.

And engage with people advocate for what you think is right is super duper important. One thing I'll mention is I've seen communities from the set code community, digital experience community, all the way to the other side of the spectrum, where Sephora has a community, agency has a community. And again, they're very alike in a lot of ways, very different in different ways, but the purpose remains the same. So engage and support. Hopefully this, this helped you out. See you. See you in the next episode. Bye. You.