Renewed customer and community focus

Up: § 2023 Shareholder Letter Index

One of our key efforts in going down-market and significantly increasing the number of people actively using Buffer, has been to become even more customer centric and engaged with our community.

In 2023, we rolled out two key initiatives to drive us to not only be listening to our customers, but held accountable by our customers. This shift has helped make it easier for us to ensure we’re genuinely building functionality and making improvements that our customers need.

We launched a new feedback forum called Buffer Suggestions, for customers to request features and improvements, and vote and comment on existing ideas. This is a public and transparent forum where if we do not actively manage it and engage with customers, it will reflect poorly on the brand. This was a significant step towards a strategy of embedding customers much more into how we work and build as a company. We’ve already found this to be a goldmine of insights for us in building the product.

Additionally, we also launched an Open Beta program. In the past we’ve included customers in the rollout of new functionality, however this was done through a closed beta approach where we would reach out specifically to a subset of customers and invite them to try new features. With Open Beta, we’ve made it possible for any user to opt in to access and receive new functionality on beta in advance of it launching to the wider customer base. We have a new page available in every Buffer Account where users can view all the current functionality in beta, enable or disable beta at any time, and a button to share feedback (this links to the Buffer Suggestions page for that feature).

We have continued to invest in our community space which exists primarily in Discord, alongside actively engaging with our community across all of our social channels. We had a thriving community in our earlier days, but neglected it and let it wither during years where we had a strategy more focused on businesses. With our renewed focus on the down-market segment, our community is once again a vital component of the equation of Buffer thriving. It has taken some concerted and diligent effort to rebuild our community, and it is now on track and feeling like a win-win for community members and Buffer.

Finally, we started an effort in the later part of the year to make a step change improvement our already great customer support. We finished the year with a median first response time during business hours of 2.15 hours, a 41% improvement year over year. Our current baseline goal is to have the majority of customers receive a response to any customer support request within 2 hours, and for 99% of requests to be answered within 24 hours. In an industry known for awful customer service, we believe this can be an additional competitive advantage.

• Community
• Advocacy
• Being held accountable by customers