SaaS Customer Community: setup checklist

Before you start

• Decide support hours and publish them
• Decide what goes to tickets vs public forum (billing, account data = tickets)

Structure

• Create roles, categories and channels
• Create forum tags and post guidelines for #help, #bug-reports, #feature-requests
• Set a default reaction (for example 👍) on #feature-requests for voting

Community features

• Enable Community
• Onboarding questions and default channels
• AutoMod rules, alerts to #mod-log
• Make #announcements an Announcement channel so customers can follow it

Bots and automation

• Ticket Tool: invite, configure panel on the dashboard, send panel to #open-a-ticket, set transcripts channel
• Webhook for #changelog from GitHub releases or your changelog tool
• Optional: Linked Roles to verify customers

Launch

• Seed #help with your 10 most common questions as solved posts
• Add the invite link to your app's help menu and docs
• Run the first office hours as a Scheduled Event

Roles to create (top to bottom)

1. Admin: Founders
2. Team: Employees: support, product, engineering
3. Community Mod: Trusted volunteers
4. Customer: Verified paying customer (badge + priority)
5. Beta Tester: Opted into beta program
6. Release pings: Opt-in changelog pings