Consumers appreciate your Facebook page, and might be willing to hit ‘like’ every now and then, but they don’t always appreciate discussions from their brand of dish soap popping up on their private wall.
A managed customer community is proven to lower customer support costs. Customers develop a large repository of FAQ and support material that is easily managed and analyzed through a platform such as Get Satisfaction.
An excellent primer in customer community building was written by Get Satisfaction’s CEO, Wendy Lea, who has been a great advocate for the evolution of enterprise social media away from the fuzzy metrics of the FB page, and toward active, managed communities with a measurable impact on ROI.
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Let us now understand all the key considerations and steps that will help any company grow their customer community:
To begin with, no brand community will work if you do not have a product/service that works as an inspiration for the audience. So, before you begin investing your effort and time to create a community for your company, ensure that all your customers are satisfied. In fact, it is better to have a small but happy customer community rather than a large but lukewarm one.
Customers are open to joining communities when they feel that they can get closer to the brand. And while you work towards growing your company, user-generated content is what the company’s strategy should include. But for you to build bonds with your customers without your interference, you will have to be a large part of the initial discussions.
It is very simple to do. Pick a platform and start a discussion. Be open to feedback, and respond to every query and feedback that comes. Make your customers feel like they are a massive part of the company’s product development process.
Once your company has grown a bit, it is understandable that you, being the CEO and/or founder, cannot be involved in discussions. But this does not mean that you should install chat bots to do the work for you. Being able to interact with people who are from the brand is a great reason why many people then join a community. In short, a customer community always wants to know about the product updates before anyone else.
They want to be included and asked for advice. Customers here want to test the product before it gets to the market. They want to get good product support, find out if the product does help them, and have all their queries answered. You need to have a customer support team up for this.
All in all, your brand should be approachable. Your customers should be able to feel free to ask questions and interact with your team. Ensure you have a customer feedback strategy set up along with this to build your customer community.
Screencaps are an essential feature in customer communities, too. Customers need to share information: where did the Web site break? Which button do I press next? And screen caps are an enormously efficient way of doing this. Customers can exchange multiple forum/wall posts before they reach a mutual understanding of, and solution to, a problem. A screencap can reduce those steps to one.
And there is always the fundamental business case of customer service: the average CS call lasts 5.97 minutes, and can cost the enterprise up to 1 dollar per minute. A screencap can significantly reduce that cost. The e-commerce basket isn’t refreshing properly? The registration form won’t render in Mozilla? The customer doesn’t know how to update their personal information? A screencap sent before the call can quickly reduce the time to pinpoint and resolve the issue.
Email, Chatbot, IM, VoIP… and, finally, screensharing. Screen sharing has always been a part of the CS process, but is a method of last resort: when the Web site or the product is broken so irretrievably that the customer must give permission for client-side software to be installed, and give further permission for the CS agent to access the desktop and perform some operation under the customer’s guidance.
It’s a long, arduous process, and is intrusive for the customer. But what if the customer were able to provide this level of information before a CS call was initiated, without software install, and to pre-empt the need for significant agent intervention?
Getting more information from the customer while deepening customer interaction and ‘engagement’ might be the result, but ROI and cost reduction should be the final yardstick, and screen capture clearly contributes to the bottom line.
We invite you to try out our service for free. Sign up for our 15-days trial program!
To know more about why you need a customer community, check out our content hub here. Find out more about Usersnap as well to begin using it here!
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