Nicole Saunders

Nicole Saunders is Senior Director of Customer Experience Strategy at Higher Logic and a recognized leader in community-driven customer engagement. With more than 15 years of experience building and scaling community programs for global technology companies, Saunders specializes in designing engagement strategies that connect customers, products, and brands through collaborative digital experiences.

At Higher Logic, Saunders defines how community supports the entire customer lifecycle—from onboarding and education to advocacy and long-term engagement. Her work focuses on helping B2B and B2C organizations integrate community into their broader customer experience strategy, ensuring that peer collaboration, customer insights, and shared knowledge become central drivers of engagement, retention, and growth.

Saunders brings extensive experience from leadership roles at leading enterprise technology companies, including Zendesk and Coupa, where she helped build innovative community programs that strengthened customer relationships and created new pathways for customer advocacy and collaboration. Across these roles, she developed a reputation for transforming communities from standalone support channels into strategic engagement ecosystems that connect customers, product teams, and brand leaders.

At Zendesk, Saunders played a key role in expanding community as a channel for customer connection and knowledge sharing, enabling customers to collaborate with peers, contribute expertise, and influence product development. Her work demonstrated how well-designed community programs can unlock valuable customer insights while strengthening loyalty and brand trust.

She later continued this work at Coupa, where she helped expand community programs that supported customer education, advocacy, and peer-to-peer collaboration across a rapidly growing enterprise customer base. By aligning community strategy with customer success, marketing, and product teams, Saunders helped demonstrate how communities can serve as a central hub for engagement across the entire customer journey.

Saunders’ leadership in the community profession has earned significant industry recognition. She was named a finalist for the 2022 CMX Community Professional of the Year Award, one of the most respected honors in the global community management field. In 2024, she led the team that received the CMX Best New Community Award, recognizing innovation and excellence in building impactful digital communities.

These recognitions reflect Saunders’ growing influence in shaping how organizations approach community as a strategic driver of customer engagement.

At the heart of Saunders’ work is a belief that community is one of the most powerful tools organizations have to build authentic relationships with their customers. She advocates for a model of engagement where customers are not simply recipients of information but active participants in shaping the brand experience. When organizations create spaces where customers can share expertise, collaborate with peers, and contribute ideas, they unlock deeper levels of trust, advocacy, and long-term engagement.

Saunders is particularly passionate about helping organizations rethink the role of community in the age of intelligent technology. As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in customer experience platforms, she believes communities will become even more valuable as environments where real people exchange expertise and solve complex challenges together.

Through her work and industry conversations, Saunders explores how AI can enhance community experiences by helping organizations analyze engagement patterns, surface valuable discussions, and connect members with relevant expertise more quickly. At the same time, she emphasizes that AI should complement—not replace—the human relationships that make communities meaningful.

Her approach focuses on combining the analytical power of AI with the authenticity of human interaction, creating engagement ecosystems where technology helps scale insight while people remain at the center of the experience.

Beyond her leadership role at Higher Logic, Saunders is an active contributor to the broader customer experience and community strategy conversation. She co-hosts the CX Nexus podcast, where she speaks with industry leaders about the evolving role of community, customer advocacy, and engagement in modern organizations.

Saunders holds a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of Minnesota. Her interdisciplinary background informs her approach to community strategy, emphasizing the importance of storytelling, collaboration, and cultural understanding in building meaningful connections between organizations and their audiences.

Today, as Senior Director of Customer Experience Strategy at Higher Logic, Nicole Saunders continues to champion the role of community as a cornerstone of modern engagement. Through her leadership, organizations are learning how to transform customer communities into dynamic ecosystems of knowledge, collaboration, and advocacy—unlocking the full potential of engagement in an increasingly connected digital world.

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