5 ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS TO BUILDING
A SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER SUPPORT COMMUNITY
A PLANNING CHECKLIST
A customer support community can
make a powerful contribution to a
company’s customer service and
support strategy. Communities give
customers a wide range of support
options, and they enable customers to
share knowledge and learn from their
peers.
To gain these benefits, it’s essential
for businesses to take a best-in-class
approach to building customer support
communities. A poorly implemented or
managed community will deliver less
value, and in fact such a community
may actually have a negative impact on
customer engagement and loyalty.
Better yet, a successful customer
support community doesn’t just benefit
your customer service organization. It
also gives your customers a platform
for sharing product suggestions
and feedback, and it can help your
marketing team to understand
customers’ business challenges and
buying preferences. As a result, your
company can deliver an improved
experience at every stage of the
customer lifecycle, from marketing and
sales to service and support.
The following checklist offers an
overview of the five most important
elements to consider when planning
a customer support community, along
with suggestions on how to evaluate
and implement these elements.
Communities
give customers
a wide range of
support options,
and they enable
customers to
share knowledge
and learn from
their peers.
These communities can also have an
extraordinary bottom-line impact:
According to a University of Michigan
study, companies enjoyed a 19%
increase in incremental revenue
from customers after they joined a
community.1
1
1
Implement an online community
platform with robust tools for
creating, finding and sharing
community content.
A support-focused customer
community depends heavily on its
ability to deliver relevant, timely and
accurate content — and to make it easy
for customers to find this content.
In addition, a customer support
community should provide this content
in ways that reflect a range of customer
preferences. Some people will want
to search a knowledge base for quick
self-service support; others will want
access to a forum where they can ask
other community members for advice.
Still others might want to suggest
new product features or to provide
feedback on your firm’s latest beta
release.
Descriptive
tags and filters that let
community members organize and
prioritize content based on their
own needs and preferences.
intuitive user interface customers
An
can master quickly and easily,
making them more likely to create
and contribute content.
A supportfocused customer
community
depends heavily
on its ability
to deliver
relevant, timely
and accurate
content — and to
make it easy for
customers to find
this content.
When your team evaluates an online
community platform, look for features
that support all of these requirements,
such as:
Intelligent search capabilities that
give fast and accurate access to
relevant content.
Rating
and voting tools that allow
community members to identify
the most valuable content and
contributors.
2
2
Pick an online community platform
that allows you to identify and
empower brand advocates.
Brand advocates — customers, as
well as members of your partner
ecosystem, who are passionate and
vocal about your products and services
— can deliver a powerful competitive
advantage. According to one study,
90% of Internet users consider
consumer recommendations to be the
most credible form of advertising, and
two-thirds spend more online after
getting recommendations from an
online community.2
Brand advocates drive many of these
recommendations. In addition, brand
advocates are typically worth up to
five times more than other customers,
due to the sales impact of their
recommendations and their own
increased spending on your products
and services.3
ill the platform allow you to
W
empower these individuals with
additional privileges, such as
elevated content creation and
moderation privileges?
oes the platform make it easy for
D
your brand advocates to engage
with other users, for example, by
responding to requests for help
and advice?
Your very best brand advocates don’t
want compensation for their efforts —
they simply want to share their passion
and enthusiasm with other customers.
If your online community platform
can support them in these efforts,
your customer service team will win a
powerful and valuable group of allies.
Brand advocates
are typically
worth up to five
times more than
other customers,
due to the sales
impact of their
recommendations
and their own
increased spending
on your products
and services.
Clearly, it’s important to make
brand advocates a core part of your
company’s online community. When
you select an online community
platform, ask three questions about its
capabilities in this area:
Does
the platform allow you to
identify potential brand advocates
with robust activity tracking and
data analytics tools?
3
3
A best-in-class online community
platform also motivates casual users
to create content and to participate.
While it’s important to pay special
attention to the brand advocates within
your community, the bulk of your
traffic — and a key measure of your
success — still depends upon a much
larger group of current and potential
customers. The most successful brand
communities find ways to encourage
and reward participation across the
board, and to keep customers coming
back even when they don’t need help
with a problem.
The process of applying game-design
thinking to applications in order to
make them more fun and compelling
— also known as gamification — is
an important piece of this puzzle.
According to one study, while 42%
of consumers are willing to advocate
a brand freely, another 40.5% of
consumers are willing to do so only
when they have an incentive.4
Gamification allows a community
to provide these incentives without
resorting to payments or other
financial motivations — a costly and
risky approach that can actually hurt a
community’s legitimacy.
Reputation
points that other
community members award based
on the quality of a contributor’s
comments and advice.
Badges
that recognize members
who cross milestones, such as a
certain number of support posts.
eaderboards that compare a
L
member’s status and reputation
score to other community members.
Gamification allows
a community to
provide incentives
without resorting
to payments or
other financial
motivations.
ersonalization tools that allow
P
members to associate these and
other capabilities with a customized
user profile.
Finally, these capabilities serve another
important purpose: They focus not
just on the content, but also on the
reputation of the people creating this
content. That can be an important
benefit, since it adds credibility to your
community contributors — whether they
are customers, internal subject-matter
experts or third-party experts from a
partner community.
What sort of gamification capabilities
support community participation? A
few key features to look for include:
4
4
Look for robust communitymanagement tools, especially those
related to workflow management.
Community managers — usually
members of your customer service
team — play a vital role in nurturing
support communities. Yet most
community managers perform a huge
variety of tasks, from strategic planning
activities to daily management,
participation and maintenance tasks.
These tasks run the gamut from finding
and removing objectionable content
to analyzing trending topics for your
support and marketing teams.
An online community platform’s
management tools should be able to
simplify and automate many of these
tasks. Yet they should also support
the ability to deliver better customer
service — for example, by ensuring that
community member support requests
are routed quickly to the right member
of your brand team. Above all, good
management tools make it possible
to deliver immediate responses to
support requests, which can be a
critical factor when your product or
service impacts the customer’s work
and productivity.
otifications that automatically
N
alert community managers and
other stakeholders when action
is required, such as moderating
discussion board posts.
Automated
tools for identifying and
flagging objectionable content.
management and workflow
A
interface that is clear and intuitive
for non-technical users on your
brand team.
Finally, it’s important to find a platform
for which content updates and
styling changes can be managed
without relying on an IT department
or professional web developers — a
bottleneck that can seriously impact
the speed and efficiency of your online
support operations.
Good management
tools make it
possible to deliver
immediate
responses to
support requests,
which can be
critical when
your product or
service impacts the
customer’s work
and productivity.
A few specific capabilities to look for
in an online community platform’s
management tools include:
5
5
Find a solution that lets you put
analytics at the heart of your customer
support community strategy.
Studies suggest that best-in-class
communities are almost twice as likely
to know their value.5 This means having
the right analytics to track the health
and performance of the community —
identifying what’s working and what’s
not, and knowing where to invest time
and resources.
How do you accomplish this in
practice? Look for analytics tools that
feature the ability to:
Identify
the most popular content,
contributors and community
features, allowing you to focus
more resources in the areas that
your community members consider
valuable.
ighlight trending topics that
H
may give your support, marketing
and product development teams
insights into your customers’
product and service needs.
emonstrate the value of your
D
customer support community by
tracking key success metrics.
Studies suggest
that companies
with a best-inclass approach to
online customer
support are more
likely to be able to
measure the value
of their online
communities.
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Putting Together the Pieces
of a Successful Support
Community Strategy
All five of these capabilities are
essential to planning and implementing
a successful customer support
community. Taken together, they will
give your brand the right tools and
technology capabilities to deliver faster,
more cost-effective customer support;
to empower and encourage your brand
advocates; and to create happier and
more loyal customers.
Keep in mind, though, that technology
will only take your community
strategy part of the way toward its
goal. The rest will depend on your
company’s commitment in terms
of supporting and nurturing the
community, participating actively, and
making the community a core part
of your customer support strategy.
If your brand supplies the right mix
of technology, talent and passion,
a customer support community can
make a valuable and lasting business
contribution.
If your brand
supplies the right
mix of technology,
talent and passion,
a customer support
community
can make a
valuable and
lasting business
contribution.
Sources:
1
http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/releases/20192-firms-own-social-networks-better-for-business-than-facebook
2
http://socialmediatoday.com/tiffaniallen/1894606/power-brand-advocacy
3
http://zuberance.com/whitepaper/whats-a-brand-advocate-worth/
4
http://stevensonfinancialmarketing.wordpress.com/2012/08/29/5-steps-make-drive-more-engagement-with-branded-customer-communities-than-with-facebook/
5
http://www.communityroundtable.com/community-maturity-model/announcing-state-community-management-2014/
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About DNN Software
DNN provides a suite of solutions for creating rich, rewarding online
experiences for customers, partners and employees. DNN products and
technology are the foundation for 750,000+ websites worldwide. In addition to
our commercial CMS and social community solutions, DNN is the steward of the
DNN Platform Open Source Project.
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