Customer engagement is at the core of Customer Experience success strategies in B2B Software companies. It is not just a major indicator for customer retention, raising engagement is a certain way to receive feedback on your product while supporting the exchanging of best practices among your users.
Online Community Impacts
That mentioned, fueling customer engagement doesn’t simply occur overnight, and there are several ways for you to apply. Obviously, you could employ groups on social media, schedule events for your customers, or send surveys/emails to your users. However, these means can be hard to arrange, expensive, and, as regards social media, you can encounter complications as you do not own the customer generated content.
One method to address these issues, enhance your Customer Success effectively and grow customer health is to involve your users by means of an online community.
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These are some of the reasons:
1. You’ll Grow Customer Engagement
Let’s begin with the obvious. Online communities offer your present customers a transparent platform to engage and exchange best practices with one another, and your business. Moreover, communities promote the feeling that customers form part of an interactive and exciting group that permits them to know from each other and propels engagement.
What is the benefit? The general rule of thumb is that in SaaS companies 9though it is not always the case) a rise in customer engagement through online communities leads to an improved customer experience, which causes greater customer satisfaction and probability of success. And this will finally result in a growth in customer retention and greater revenue.
Design how-to’s, collect together motivating case studies and utilize the events you arrange as content engines on your community also. Share all of this superb stuff across your main customer community and ensure to shift it to users with appropriate, personalized notifications.
You can also employ gamification within your community to award personalized badges to super-users to enhance competitiveness and partnership among your community. Members arrive for the content, and remain for the community.
Furthermore, customers can vote on the finest answers in a community which not just raises interaction, it lessens pressure on your customer support crews by permitting customers to self-serve and aid each other.
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2. You’ll Scale Self-service Efficiently
Peer-to peer conversations improve online support and make it more scalable, and they present a human touch that the latest ‘cost-lowering’ technologies like AI and bots will always toil to copy – at a fraction of the resource expense of customer service conversations.
Certainly, you’ll always attempt to develop your products in such a manner that your users revel friction-free usage and simple on-boarding. But the reality is that questions will always be there. You’re likely already well aware that the choice towards self-service has shot up in the previous few years which is being seen to continue growing.
As a matter of fact, as per a Forrester report, a huge 73% of consumers say that valuing their time is the most essential thing companies can accomplish to offer them with excellent customer service. What does that imply? Essentially, your users are ideally happy to self-serve if the process is simplified and uncomplicated for them.
That’s where the charm of your online community pours in!
Your entire customers integrated probably know plenty more regarding your product than you imagine – and many of them are ready to exchange their expertise. So present your community as a first line of contact. If the answer isn’t existent, and people begin inquiring, make your in-house professionals involved, and make their answers gain many users well into the future, instead of simply the one user who is inquiring at present.
The consequence? It is seen that nearly 50% of customer support questions can really be answered by peers conveniently. On the Infoland Community for instance, customers react to 40% of community queries, which can hugely benefit your support team and better the user experience. For those difficult questions that can’t be replied to in your community, ensure your customer base always possesses the alternative to talk with support or CSM. Activating this mechanism can divert 25 to 50% of the questions presently hitting your support crew. Ensure to incorporate your community with your CRM or ticketing system like Zendesk to smoothly escalate hard community questions to your support desk.
Remember, with a community you’re not simply aiding present users to self-serve. Since community content rates so highly with Google, a big majority of a community’s traffic usually emerges from organic search – generally in the range of 60% to 80%. Prospective customers seeking to self-educate can also be assisted here.
Bear in mind, the self-service content in your community isn’t restricted to a single standalone destination. Employ your platform’s API to insert knowledge articles, posts and support documents within your apps, portals or software products. Ensure to promote self-service at each stage of the customer journey.
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3. You’ll Receive Useful Insights Into Your Product
Utilizing your community to declare updates and obtain feedback from your users on your product is a splendid way to assure your roadmap is moving in the correct direction and you are developing a product that meets the needs of your users.
An online community permits you to recognize first-hand the most (and minimum), common user requests – fortifying you with concrete business proposals from your customers to carry to your Product team. This, conversely, permits your product team to highlight requests on the basis of strong community data, the whole while inspiring a more streamlined and data-oriented relationship between your Customer Success and Product team.
Obviously, as a Customer Success Manager you can’t hear to your entire customers at once, but it’s essential to remain near them to prioritize what insights and feedback to give to your product team.
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Better Product Adoption- Online Community Impacts
Effective product adoption is integral to permanent success for B2B software companies. The on-boarding stage is your opportunity to show the worth your product offers your customers – thus enhancing retention, preventing churn and developing revenue. These are only some ways your community can uphold product adoption:
Enable your super users relieve the pressure off your support team by offering answers to different users during product adoption.
Make announcements. Utilizing your community to make ‘pre-announcements’ to your users can go a long distance to relieving users’ apprehensions regarding product alterations. People are afraid of the unknown – enlighten them utilizing your community!
Direct latest user queries to your community and prevent your product or support crews replying queries repeatedly. The greater questions that are replied to by your community, the bigger your knowledge base gets.
Grow peer-to-peer association in your community, particularly in the matter of adopting latest product features. Motivate users to exchange and discuss their true-life use cases and present tutorials, finest practices and how to’s for particular scenarios.
These are 3 concrete ways an online community can enhance your Customer Success efforts and run a long way to aiding you keep customers. An online community is a perfect way to unify your users, permit them to exchange best practices and receive feedback on your product. Raising customer engagement and growing self-service has never been so simple.
An online community constitutes a forum where people can join virtually and render necessary help or services. Brands have been seeking to cultivate powerful online communities as a means of knowing their customers better. This approach has the following benefits:
- Cultivating connection
- Faster customer support
- Improved customer insights and brand engagement
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Instances Of Customer Experience Communities
1. Lufthansa
Lufthansa needed to assure the interaction of trainees in-between workshops at the Lufthansa Business School. Markus Eichel, operational manager at Luftansa’s School of Business, was seeking a means of exploring how to better team collaboration. He wished to employ a community platform both in-between and during workshops to accomplish this. Markus discovered that it was hard to possess a platform that was responsive and mobile-friendly. He knew that reaching the platform from anywhere would raise the chances of enhancing team association. Markus worked with other platforms previously.
This was how he understood the issues they had with flexibility and size. Markus found that the CMNTY platform permitted him and his crew to customize each aspect of the community experience. Markus stated, “The flexibility made it really easy to react quickly based on the needs of our community. This aspect of the platform really added to its value for us.” The result? Enhanced team association and trainees experienced that their opinions and feedback were being valued.
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2. Blauw Research- Online Community
Blauw Research, a mid-sized research agency, got to change their way of tasking and better revenue for them and their clients with the utilization of communities. They required a way to acquire insights for their research purposes. This way, they could sustain with the research dynamics on quantitative and qualitative levels.
The solution that Blauw witnessed with the CMNTY platform was that it was able to aid them to inquire in different ways, while also offering support for uploading videos and images. These aspects of the CMNTY platform aided Blauw record promoted client associations and improved customer insights.
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Conclusion of Online Community Impacts
Customer anticipations are greater than ever and word of mouth travels quickly!
And as the customer gets even more entitled, it raises the value of the customer experience. Customer experience is a region that requires constant nourishing and care and, with more focus on customer experience strategy, companies will get a positive impact on customer trust, greater retention and elevated revenue growth.
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