As organizations around the world accelerate their digital transformations, becoming closely aligned with customers’ technology needs has never been more important. Companies that ignore opportunities to formulate customer communities that drive technology development do so at their own peril.
Humans thrive in communal spaces. Social connections make people healthier and happier. They also enhance feelings of connection with and loyalty to a brand. McKinsey calls reaching consumers via communities “the ‘big idea’ in 2020s marketing.”
In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating an engaging community for your business:
A customer community is a place for customers or users to connect on all sorts of topics, including product or service discussions and feedback, best practices, industry news, announcements and updates. It’s also a place for customers to connect with internal experts to brainstorm ideas and share meaningful insights and feedback.
As with other business decisions, the choice to start a community is a representation of your values. What kind of message do you want to send to your existing and future clients — and what kind of relationship do you hope to establish with them?
Below, we explore several goals you might have as you set out to build a customer community.
A community is a way of showing your customers they’re at the forefront of your mind. When they feel included and important, they’ll be more likely to generously offer up feedback and valued insights as the ones who interact with your team and benefit from your services.
➡️ Achieving this goal is all about perfecting how you communicate with clients.
Understanding customers’ needs and challenges is crucial in developing new, relevant services. Having close, conversational relationships with clients in your community gives you clear direction for brainstorming and identifying common themes and new ideas.
➡️ A community can serve as part of a larger client retention strategy.
There’s nothing that quite measures up to a community if your aim is to give your customers access to a robust, personalized resource at any time. Your community should feel like a safe space to ask questions and receive quick, thorough answers from peers and experts.
➡️ Train your team to be accessible while maintaining boundaries.
If you feel ready to explore what a community could do for your business, here are our recommended first steps to prepare for launch:
Because building a community requires a significant investment of time, money and effort, you should approach the process with patience and intention.
If you keep your broad business strategy top of mind in setting up and moderating your community, you could witness some tangible short- and long-term outcomes, including:
Want to see what an active client community feels like? Here’s how we’ve set up Accelo’s.
The Accelo Community is a comprehensive resource for product news, best practices, upcoming events and industry news. We encourage members to share best practices and post questions. The community is moderated by support engineers and customer success managers, who engage and collaborate with users.
We have three community subsets:
In addition to building and maintaining customer communities, you can improve client relationships and prevent churn with some simple training strategies to help your team deliver better client service.
