When we started building Mava, we wrote a piece on how customer support in web3 is broken, outlining our ideas on how to solve the most pressing pain points. We’ve transformed those ideas into the Mava product you know today, which is already used by hundreds of communities.

Now, we want to unveil the next phase of our journey.

Our mission is to build a customer support and engagement OS for any community-driven company using the power of AI and web3.

We will discuss the future of customer interaction and engagement, and how Mava and will be on the forefront.

The Changing Landscape of Customer Interactions and Support

Interactions between companies and users have evolved. Every decade brings new technologies and behaviors, requiring a new set of tools to effectively support and engage customers.

We believe the current support and engagement stack isn’t fit for purpose for community-first companies. That’s why we are building Mava, a new community OS specifically designed for the needs of community-driven organizations.

To provide some context, let's take a brief look at some key technological and behavioral trends that have defined recent decades, creating multi-billion dollar companies out of those  able to effectively capitalize on each period of change.

90s: Computers & Call Centers

The rise of computers created a need to modernize call centers and integrate telephone and computer databases. Genesys, a company that recognized this opportunity, developed sophisticated contact center software. Even today, Genesys remains a market leader in the contact center industry, generating $2 billion in annual revenue.

00s: Digital & SaaS

Mass personal computer and internet adoption, made online communication increasingly important. Although some existing helpdesk software offered omni-channel capabilities, companies needed a consultant to get started and it was complex and costly to implement.

One such consultant recognized the need for a simpler solution, which led to the birth of Zendesk in 2007. Using a SaaS model, Zendesk launched a web app that eliminated the need for complex infrastructure setup and made powerful support software accessible to smaller businesses. Recently, the company returned to private ownership valued at over $10 billion.

10s: Social & Smartphone

With a smartphone now in everyone’s pocket, alongside the rise of instant messaging and social media platforms, email started to feel slow and outdated. Consumers increasingly expected quick, conversational responses. It was Intercom - now a unicorn - who best played into this trend with a keen eye for design and a slick user interface.

20s: Community, AI & Web3

Over the next decade, companies will increasingly become community focused, requiring a different set of tools to effectively support, manage and engage their customers. This shift is both being driven and accelerated by the developments in AI and web3 technology.

Mava is reimagining what customer support means in the era of community-first companies and is building the community OS to support and accelerate this transition.

90% of the next wave of successful startups are going to start with a Minimum Viable Community

“The Minimum Viable Community (MVC) is the new Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Everyone is overwhelmed with options. Attention is scarce. Community is the new moat.”

As Reddit founder, now VC Alexis Ohanian put it.

Becoming more community-centric will be fundamental for almost all companies over the next decade, driven by a need to foster brand loyalty and build better and more differentiated products in a competitive environment where acquiring customers has become increasingly expensive.

Community focus has also reached the boardroom, as indicated by the Community Table's State of Community Management report, which shows a significant increase in senior executives' support for community programs from 56% in 2017 to 88% in 2022, yet only 18% of companies have so far integrated their community platform with other engagement channels and business systems - meaning we still have a long way to go.

Web3 communities represent the strongest expression of this community-first movement, making it an ideal initial target market for Mava. For example, many web3 and open source organizations operate as a foundation or DAO, with the community literally deciding what’s next and being highly involved in the organization’s day-to-day operations.

However, web3 is not alone when it comes to its focus on community; open source and gaming companies exhibit extremely similar traits. In fact, the community-first approach has been successful for many companies in the past decade. Unsurprisingly, fashion and lifestyle brands like Peloton or Supreme have built strong communities. However, the winners in less obviously social categories like B2B SaaS and fintech often also put strong emphasis on community building. Companies like Notion, Shopify, Canva, and Webflow all have active communities with hundreds of thousands of members, and if users have questions about the product, the community is often the best place to seek answers or engage in discussions.

The Chief Community Officer: Customer Support, Customer Experience and Community-Led Growth

The increased emphasis on community also means teams are changing. More companies will include positions like "Chief Customer Officer" or "Chief Community Officer" in their C-Suite. This trend has already begun, with even some large public companies appointing CCOs.

These executives are responsible for the end-to-end customer experience and often oversee customer support and success, as well as (some) marketing teams; according to Gartner, the presence of executives with direct responsibility for customer experience has grown 1,000 percent over the past 5 years. As the cost of acquiring new customers continually rises, it has become increasingly important to focus on retaining and upselling existing customers and making them feel part of the journey.

As a result, companies will not only emphasize community efforts, but will also increasingly seek to understand how these efforts contribute to revenue, and how to optimize them.

Mava's aims to become a go-to tool for Chief Community Officers and their teams. Providing a holistic solution that will help them grow, retain, and engage their community while also showing them how community positively affects the bottom line.

What does a community-centric strategy mean for customer support and engagement

There is a fundamental difference between the communication patterns of community-driven companies compared to legacy organizations: one-to-one vs many-to-many interactions.

This new interaction pattern isn’t compatible with the existing support and engagement stack and has a number of other implications, requiring a new community OS.

1) Organizations use different platforms

Many-to-many interactions don’t happen on email, they happen on social and community-oriented platforms like Discord, Telegram, Slack, Lenster, Twitter or Stackoverflow in real-time, 24/7. Messages and support requests flow in via a mix of public channels, direct messages, group chats and makeshift support solutions.

Current support systems are designed for one-to-one conversations between a customer and a dedicated customer support team, via more traditional communication channels.

They aren't inherently collaborative and don’t enable teams to manage the mix of private and public interactions exploding across new and existing community  channels.

There will continue to be a place for private support tickets (think billing or shipping queries) across new and traditional channels, which Mava is already supporting, but this decade will also see the rise of a hybrid, multi-platform approach that existing tools don’t support.

2) Public, peer-to-peer support and decentralized teams

Transforming into a community-driven company means an increasingly decentralized approach to work. Whether operating as a full-on DAO or simply working with ambassadors and volunteers around the world.

Community-first companies (e.g. Discord, OpenAI and Polygon) leverage their community to engage and support users. Developers help each other, community managers appoint ambassadors to foster engagement, create content and support other users.

This means a large portion of support happens in public, which is a stark difference from how support is traditionally done. Community managers will become the conductors of these fragmented operations, but don’t have the tools to effectively support or monitor this activity, let alone efficiently scale them.

In the next phase of our journey, Mava will be looking to tackle many of these challenges. Our Discord AI Bot answering questions in public channels, is an example of a tool to manage support in public. We will continue to build solutions to empower community teams to manage and scale their public and peer-to-peer support, by providing the right tools, insights and automations.

Beyond Support: The Community Operating System

Community and support tooling will become increasingly entwined in community-first companies with community teams taking (partial) ownership of support, user experience and growth. This requires multiple integrations and data sources, powerful analytics, actionable insights and a suite of automations.

Taking support as a starting point, Mava aims to build an operating system for every community-driven company; a comprehensive solution that helps teams to start, hyper-scale and support their communities, and measure how community efforts impact the organization’s bottom line.

Mava's platform will emerge as an essential tool for Chief Community Officers and their teams, empowering them to foster community growth, retention, and engagement.

Why now?

Whereas the rise of SaaS combined with new communication channels propelled the likes of Zendesk into highly successful companies, it’s the combination of AI, web3 and a community-first approach that will give rise to this decade’s unicorns.

1) Community-first becomes the new paradigm

As we touched upon in the sections above, community-driven companies will become the new norm. In today’s competitive environment, it has become more challenging than ever to capture consumer’s attention and gain loyalty. Fostering a community of enthusiastic users and brand ambassadors is  crucial to help drive retention and growth.

2) AI breakthroughs and easily accessible APIs

AI is inevitable and any strong support product is going to rely heavily on AI. However, the role of AI in customer support and community management is going to be infinitely bigger than acting as a chatbot. With the current and rapidly accelerating state of AI, it only makes sense to consider AI in every piece of the product and business strategy: from onboarding to pricing to helping automatically resolve bugs.

In addition to its obvious role in customer support, AI is a powerful tool in helping manage and grow communities. For example, new and more powerful LLMs will be able to much more accurately understand what’s going on in the community, assess sentiment, and even, for example, automatically convert engaging conversations into compelling shareable content. Furthermore, AI now offers an unparalleled level of personalization, accessible to smaller communities too; the AI can learn from and adopt the personality of the community, to help craft messages and speak to community members in a way that resonates.

With little legacy technology to worry about, Mava can fully embrace AI and adopt an AI-native approach, giving us a competitive advantage over incumbents.

3) Web3 supercharges web2 communities

Web3 principles and technologies will help build best-in-class communities.

One of the most important, yet challenging, tasks for a community manager is keeping the community engaged. Web3 technology will supercharge a community manager’s ability to reward and engage their community.

Over the past two years, numerous prominent brands, including Nike, Prada, Starbucks, and Reddit, have experimented with NFTs and web3 loyalty programs and we expect this trend to continue.

“Web3 is an opportunity to reinvent customer relationship management, and it’s not about duplicating our web2 CRM in web3,” says YSL Beauty Chief Digital & Marketing Officer Diane Hecquet about their loyalty NFT program launched this year. “We want to reinvent the link between users and the brand; traditional CRM is more based on purchase behavior, while, with web3, it will be based on engagement. With web3, we could have this long-term, always-on loyalty program with our community.”

Mava will make full use of these new capabilities, and natively integrate web3 technologies to help community managers reward and engage their communities, as well as integrate with third-parties to enable teams to have the relevant on-chain and off-chain context and allow them to automate their operations and convert users.

Mava: The operating system for community-driven companies

To summarize, many of today’s most successful companies focus on community and this trend is on the rise. Community-driven companies interact with their users differently and existing support and engagement tools are not fit for purpose. Mava aims to be the go-to tool for anyone managing these new types of interactions.

Why now? In addition to the increasing importance of community and new ways of interacting, AI and web3 are key technological developments that Mava is making full use of. The power of AI is unparalleled and as a new platform, Mava can fully embrace AI technology and build from the ground up keeping AI in mind with everything we do.

Lastly, brands will increasingly add web3 elements to strengthen their communities and increase customer loyalty; Mava will integrate relevant web3 capabilities and tools and as a result will establish itself as the ultimate control center for modern community teams.

The Mava community OS will serve as a collaborative hub to facilitate many-to-many support and engagement interactions as community-first becomes the new norm.