As customers, we interact with businesses on a daily basis and as companies we spend a small fortune on making our customers happy. Customer experience, also known as the way the customer interacts with the company, should be used as a company’s most valued asset. Business owners should understand this to help keep customer service consistent, workplace environment stress-free and, most importantly, the customer coming back.
As Forrester research analyst Kim Celestre puts it, companies that deploy successful online communities are able to position themselves at the front of customer interaction. Companies don’t always know where to start improvements – yet smart companies prefer customers to discover, explore and engage within their community on their own terms. Besides, the right information delivered at the right time during a customer service resolution is crucial for establishing lifetime customer relationships as well as cultivating new ones. At the same time, maintaining a unified customer approach and knowledge management is not without its challenges. Oftentimes, the knowledge base information is kept stored in various silos that make it difficult or even impossible to locate quickly.
Introducing a community demands a few changes to how you approach not only customer service, but company operations as a whole. Consider that:
- There must be broad support for the community across all departments. Since moderators won’t be able to resolve every issue in the community, they should be able to collaborate with relevant departments in your company (such as marking, pr, legal, IT and most importantly, customer service). Once community management becomes a company-wide responsibility, employees become directly accountable for customer satisfaction.
- Who will be given the role of moderating the community and chair community development meetings? Department managers should understand that a successful community depends on engagement and collaboration around questions, ideas, problems and praise shared by customers. In many ways, this requires breaking down traditional business silos to foster collaboration and innovation.
- Communities should funnel content from all sources. Moderators can add content as customers ask questions via email, forums, live chat, and interactive widgets on a company’s website or social media. For example, when customers ask a question via your Facebook or Twitter page, you can link the appropriate community topic with your answers. Existing support teams can ease into the role of community moderators if your community is linked with proper customer service software.
When a company has a thriving customer community, no one can be oblivious to what the users really think about the brand or its products. There’s always room to engage when the product doesn’t work like it should, or when a user needs clarification regarding the brand.
The main benefit of a community is the unique opportunity it gives the company to follow up on customer feedback on an individual basis. This is a critical step, as customers at this point are most encouraged to give input if they know a decision-maker is listening and that feedback can be driving change.
Some benefits of implementing a brand community on your website are:
- A company website is still the primary destination for customers seeking support. It’s estimated that about 90% of customers prefer to get company-related questions answered directly from the company website, as opposed to other sources such as social media and business review sites.
- A community is made for the people by the people. This means users are more likely to engage with each other once they see tangible benefits in doing so. This encourages individuals to report problems, ask questions, share ideas, give praise – allowing support agents to prioritize responses more efficiently.
- Successful communities have an outside-in perspective. Whether your customers are on social media or your competitor’s website, they need a way to be drawn in on your turf. Online communities give your audience and informative, unbiased platform of knowledge with unique opportunities for engagement.
- There is immense benefit in creating a hosted community that drives SEO traffic.
For example, communities tend to use the title of the topic in the URL linking to that topic, greatly increasing the chances that this particular question will be crawled by the search engines when a different user is looking for an answer.
Research organizations such as Forrester and Gartner have always stressed the importance of community engagement as a catalyst for sustainable growth. Due to this, communities are particularly useful in incorporating customer ideas into action: feedback can be channeled into decision-making processes into departments of all levels, including top management. Communities put the modern, social customer in control. This support strategy allows for greater ROI without an increase in staff, scaling as you grow. Lastly, the marketing potential of communities is immense: a community promotes a customer-centric culture and customer-generated “word of mouth” content that is authentic as it is effective.
The community channels the voice of your company: it must be friendly, empathetic, supportive, and most of all, helpful. This voice is an extension of your brand and has the ability to improve customer value, boost customer loyalty as well as generate leads. In all, a community is essential for delivering a positive customer experience.