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Evaluating Customer
Community Platforms
A buyers guide
Table of Contents
¢¢ Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 1
¢¢ Customer Communities Are at the Heart of Customer-Centric Businesses.  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   . 1
¢¢ What to Look for in a Customer Community Platform.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  2
#1: A Simple, Easy-to-Use Interface that Invites Customers to Engage.  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   . 2
#2: Multi-Channel Access to Engage Customers Wherever They Are.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 2
#3: Tools for Building a Dynamic Community Knowledge Base.  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   . 3
#4: A Quick and Affordable Implementation Process.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 4
#5: Analytics for Deeper Buyer Insights.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 4
#6: Tools to Cultivate and Expose Customer-Generated Content.  .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   . 5
#7: Easy Integration with Other Business Systems .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 5
¢¢ Community Checklist .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 6
¢¢ Conclusions .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 5
Are You Ready for a Customer Community? .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 5
Learn More.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . 6
1
¢¢ Putting Customers at the
Center of Your Business
If you’re in the process of evaluating community
platforms, then congratulations! Your organization
is clearly moving toward creating a more customer-
centric business. In today’s increasingly connected
world, the most admired companies are starting
to have one thing in common: they are becoming
customer-centric organizations that deliberately
invest in a comprehensive customer experience
strategy. This strategy must address the new ways
that today’s “social,” tech-savvy customers expect
to interact with brands. The goal is to provide the
best possible experience at every touch point that
customers have with your company, whether they
are in stores, reading marketing materials, talking
with your sales people, visiting your website, or call-
ing your support center. The customer experience
even extends to your brand’s presences on social
networks and the organic results they see in Google
and Bing.
As noted by Michael Fauscette, Group Vice Presi-
dent of Software Business Solutions at IDC, a key
part of any customer experience strategy is provid-
ing a branded customer community – a safe, brand-
driven online space where customers can share and
interact with your brand and each other wherever
they are. People should be able to find and access
your community from your website, social networks
where you have a presence, search engines, and
their mobile device. As noted by Fauscette, com-
panies are using branded communities to “provide
information about products and services, facilitate
peer-to-peer interaction and support, nurture influ-
encers to encourage word-of-mouth marketing, and
even get feedback about the kinds of products and
services that customers are really looking for.”
¢¢ Customer Communities
Are at the Heart of Customer-
Centric Businesses
Customer communities are the evolution of online
forums made popular in the 90’s. They are interac-
tive, open spaces where people come to have
conversations about the products and services they
care about. Unlike traditional customer-company
touch points like chat or email, customer com-
munities are always on, connecting people to one
another, your company, and the answers they’re
looking for. Today, customer communities even
more valuable when they are also:
•	Proactively managed by companies and
customized to match a brand’s look and feel.
•	Tightly integrated with the company’s website
so shoppers can connect with others without
leaving the purchase flow.
•	Written in the natural language your
customers use every day. This makes
conversations more findable by a wider
variety of users through search and browse.
•	Strongly linked to social networks, so people
can easily access the community and your
company through any channel.
•	Full of relevant, accurate content that has
been created by people like them, vetted for
accuracy by the brand, and easily accessed
so that it’s relevant to members’ changing
context (in other words, when they are
a shopper, a new user seeking technical
assistance, or other context).
Many customer-centric companies have already
discovered the wisdom of using customer com-
munities to bring the voice of their customers to the
middle of product discussions, marketing messag-
es, and sales strategies. And they’ve been reaping
the benefits by building products that their cus-
tomers actually want to buy, using messages that
resonate, and leveraging brand advocates to create
more effective support and marketing content.
Leading companies like Kellogg’s, Netflix, and
Procter & Gamble have already achieved this kind of
customer experience nirvana – and they are reaping
the benefits of strong customer relationships and
brand loyalty, as well as higher sales and market
share.
2
What to Look for in a Customer
Community Platform
As a business seeking to realize these benefits of
a customer community, the question is, how do
you choose the best community platform for your
business? What features and functions are essential
to attracting customers and facilitating their active
participation in the community – and simultaneously
delivering value to your business in the form of
lower service costs, increased sales, deeper cus-
tomer insight, and more?
In the following sections, we’ll share the key fea-
tures and characteristics that have proven essential
to the success of customer communities.
#1: A Simple, Easy-to-Use Interface that
Invites Customers to Engage
First and foremost, a community platform must
have a simple, intelligent design that’s so intuitive
and easy to use that little training is needed. The
user interface should embed features that entice
customers to start using it immediately because
they align with what they want to find and do most.
For example, it should be designed to facilitate
simple, intuitive interactions that make it easy for
customers and prospects to get their needs met,
whether they want to get support, provide feed-
back, make suggestions, or share their experiences.
Here’s a checklist of UI features that create an
amazing user experience that will invite your cus-
tomers and prospects to engage and return, time
after time:
•	Widgets that extend the community to any
page of a website or into social media sites
like Facebook – so customers can access and
leverage the community wherever they are.
•	Search-optimized pages so they can find
exactly what they need, right away.
•	Intercept search to get customers to the right
conversations.
•	Threaded conversations that make it easy to
see the natural dialogue between customers
and the brand.
•	Official answers, provided by an employee
or Champion, as well as the “best” answers
from the community. These answers should
be clearly marked and show the user that it is
a valid and trustworthy response.
•	Content categories and tags, so businesses
can support different products, services, or
any type of content that needs segmenting.
Categories make it easy to organize and find
specific and relevant information that the
customer is looking for.
•	A “frictionless” login, so customers can log
into Facebook, Twitter, Google, and access
the community simultaneously via a single
sign-on capability.
Collectively, these interactions result in massive vol-
umes of brand-vetted, user-generated content – the
game changer that only a customer community can
provide. This is key because user-generated con-
tent is what ultimately attracts customers to your
community and keeps them coming back. Equally
important, it’s a literal gold mine of customer insight
when you have the right tools to analyze it. For
example, you can identify hot topics, see patterns of
expertise, and identify who to court to become new
advocates.
#2: Multi-Channel Access to Engage
Customers Wherever They Are
A generation ago, a call center was the most es-
sential channel for delivering a cutting-edge cus-
tomer experience. Now, picking up the phone is the
channel of last resort for most consumers. Today’s
customers are on the go, dropping off their kids
at soccer practice, sending emails, ordering team
snacks to be delivered – all while scheduling hair ap-
pointments and trying to get your product to work.
If your community content (for example, support
information) isn’t flexible and easy for customers
to access wherever they are, on whatever platform
they’re using, they will fail to engage, fail to gener-
ate new content, and potentially turn to a competitor
that’s willing to interact with them on their terms.
You should choose a community platform that com-
plements a multi-channel strategy. In fact, the value
and effectiveness of your community will increase
exponentially as more people begin participating in
it. So you want to have as many channels and entry
points as you can reasonably maintain — on mobile
3
devices and tablets, on social network sites, and in
relevant places on your website (not just stuck in a
support ghetto on one isolated page).
At a bare minimum, a community platform should
be accessible in the following channels:
•	Your website – through embedded widgets
that display relevant conversations on any
webpage or web experience, not just a
general support portal or help center.
•	Your digital product – inside your software or
mobile app.
•	Mobile browsers – so that the community is
optimized for all mobile devices.
•	A Facebook brand page – so your customers
can clearly see that they can participate in the
community through Facebook via a support
tile, for example.
Equally important, choose a platform that boosts
search engine optimization (SEO). Today, when a
customer has a question or issue, their first instinct
is to “just ask Google.” User-generated content
within communities is ranked highly by search
engines, so it is quickly found by customers and
prospects who want fast answers to questions.
For this reason, any customer community should
be structured to help its communities rank well in
search.
For example, in a Get Satisfaction community, the
URL of each community topic has the company
name in it, as well as the topic title phrased in the
words of the person who asked the question. That
means that each link is highly optimized for the
company name and the natural, organic language
that customers are using to ask questions and
report problems. (Differences between typical
“customer” language and “technical” or formal lan-
guage used by companies, for example, can make
it difficult for customers to find the answers to their
questions in traditional FAQs and knowledge reposi-
tories generated by internal experts.) The structure
of community topic URLs should directly combat
that issue since customers are likely to ask, answer,
and search about questions and issues using similar
language.
#3: Tools for Building a Dynamic Commu-
nity Knowledge Base
Your company may already have a traditional knowl-
edge base (KB), even if it’s just a list of “Frequently
Asked Questions” on your website. But if you don’t
have a community-driven social KB, you’re missing
out on the opportunity to leverage the value your
customers can bring you and one other. When
trying to scale support and keep up with the fast-
paced speed of business brought around by the
adoption of “social everything,” only a social KB can
help you tap into the knowledge and experiences of
your customers to deliver a comprehensive KB ex-
perience in real time. Why? Because your custom-
ers are constantly updating it with their questions,
solutions, and stories.
This doesn’t just have implications for the way you
address issues, but how you spot them as well. A
social KB can help you to identify and provide solu-
tions or work-arounds for issues that might not even
be on your radar if you didn’t have a dynamic, social
place for your customers to report them. By lever-
aging your customers as an integral piece of your
product testing and first-response support strategy,
you’re adapting to the ways social has changed busi-
ness and using it in a way that is truly proactive and
collaborative.
As massive volumes of customer-generated con-
tent are created, people need a way to find what
they need instantly (something traditional forums
have always done poorly). Look for a platform with
federated search that allows customers to type in
a question or topic and instantly surface relevant
information from multiple repositories. It should
pull information from places like your traditional KB,
FAQs, customer communities, product directories,
and more, and bring the best of all traditional and
social channels together in one unified place. This
gives your customers access to the maximum
amount of information, both social and non-social,
so they can easily find the type of information that’s
right for them.
To summarize, look for a platform with tools to help
you and your customers build and share knowledge.
4
For example, you’ll want:
•	Mechanisms that allow customers to say
what content is the best through starring or
voting.
•	Support for “Living” conversations that
allow customers to comment on or reply to
knowledge base articles.
•	Federated search capabilities that allow
customers to search the knowledge base
from the community (and vice versa).
•	Topic titles and conversations that are written
by customers in their natural language.
•	Support for real-time (or dynamic)
conversations around specific topic types,
such as ideas.
•	+1/Like feature that allows users to vote up
ideas and show the company that they, too,
have the same request or question as the
poster of the topic (which in turn gives you a
sense of what your customers want).
#4: A Quick and Affordable Implementa-
tion Process
As you compare community platforms, find out how
long each one typically takes to implement, as well
as the amount of time and effort required by your
staff. You’ll find that some require a few days to
set up, and others require several months to get up
and running, which significantly pushes out time-to-
value and limits your business agility. Consider the
fact that you might want to have multiple customer
communities – for example, one per product cat-
egory, or even one per new product launch so you
can capture early feedback from limited releases
and address issues swiftly.
Look for a platform that is fast and easy to imple-
ment – and doesn’t require IT resources or time – so
you can respond swiftly to new business needs and
realize value in weeks, not months. Look for imple-
mentation features such as:
•	A SaaS, cloud-based solution that doesn’t
require software configuration or installation
and will work in any environment.
•	A template-driven framework that makes it
easy to customize and configure the layout of
your community to suit your needs.
•	Pre-configured widgets so that you can easily
embed community experiences on any page
of your website.
•	Easy integrations, which allows third parties
to provide plug-in modules that can be
incorporated into the user experience.
•	Self-serve implementation options that
complement professional service offerings
that are easy to buy.
•	Implementation services, “getting started”
guides, and step-by-step “wizards” that help
ensure fast, early success.
#5: Analytics for Deeper Buyer Insights
If you count all customer touch points from support
interactions and in-person conversations to adver-
tisements, the average company has millions, if not
billions, of customer interactions a year across paid,
earned, and owned channels. For your business,
each channel touch point represents an opportunity
for greater insight. A branded customer community
connects your customers to each other and your
employees as they talk about your products and
services. The insight you can gain from analyzing
the conversations happening in your community are
incredibly valuable because they help you under-
stand your customers more deeply. For instance,
wouldn’t you like to know what motivates them to
buy more or choose to become brand advocates?
It’s critical that your customer community platform
include analytics that provide insight into key sup-
port metrics and community activity. Look for tools
to help you gather statistics for measuring and
reporting via a variety of resources. For example:
•	To understand how effectively and efficiently
your community is meeting customer needs,
focus analytics on customer support issues.
These data points help you understand the
self-sufficiency of community members,
consumer trends, hot topics, and real-time
community trends.
•	Consumer segmentation analytics help you
learn a great deal about who is participating
in your community and why — information
that can be used by marketing and support
organizations to better understand consumer
segments and their needs.
5
•	You also need a way to analyze the
effectiveness of your community content at
meeting customer needs. For example, with
the right analytics, you can answer questions
such as:
•	 What content is attracting new
customers?
•	 What content drives repeat visits?
•	 What products are people interested
in?
•	 Who’s looking at which content?
•	 What content moves prospects along
the life cycle?
•	 Are we moving each customer or
prospect along the life cycle? How
long is it taking, and where are
people getting stuck?
•	 What topics are the most effective at
getting people to join the community,
click over to the webpage to learn
more, and click over to the webpage
to make a purchase?
#6: Tools to Cultivate and Expose Cus-
tomer-Generated Content
Customer communities have the potential to gener-
ate customer-developed content that you can use to
support core business priorities, such as customer
service and support, search engine optimization to
boost web traffic, and lead generation via word-of-
mouth marketing. So be sure that the platform you
choose includes topic moderation tools so you can,
for instance, move SPAM, merge duplicate content,
archive topics that don’t have lasting value to oth-
ers, close topics that don’t need additional replies,
edit topic titles so they’re clear and descriptive, set
the status on topics so community members know
where you’re at with them, and promote relevant
employee replies as the “official response.” You’ll
also want functionality to help you keep topics orga-
nized by making sure they’re categorized properly
with relevant tags and product associations.
These types of actions help to organize customer-
generated content so that it’s easier for customers
to find, consume, and gain value from when and
where they need it most. For example, it makes it
easier for customers to find specific content de-
scribing the resolution of issues, which is critical to
enabling self-service via content in your community.
It also helps you optimize SEO, which drives more
leads to your website and community.
#7: Easy Integration with Other Business
Systems
Customer communities are by their very nature not
intended to be islands. They are designed to bring
people and processes together in breakthrough
ways. So to realize the full value of a community
for your business, you need a way to integrate it
with your current business applications. Look for a
solution that is easily extended via an application
programming interface (API) so it’s easy and afford-
able to integrate with business software.
For example, integrating with your CRM system
enables you to merge the content created by
customers in your community with your CRM data
for a true, 360-degree customer view. Integrating
with your help desk system will enable you to bring
cases into your support ticketing system. By inte-
grating with marketing automation software, you
can link campaign management, lead scoring, lead
capture processes, and more. Imagine being able
to bring in community participants to your marketing
automation software to score desired behaviors and
use this information to target these customers with
more personalized communications and campaigns.
And by integrating with your product development
management software, you can capture customers’
product ideas (generated at no cost on your com-
munity), reduce market research costs (because
customers will freely share their thoughts about
products in communities), and get real-time feed-
back from beta testers of your products sharing their
experiences in your community.
¢¢ Are You Ready for a
Customer Community?
Before you actually implement a community plat-
form for your business, be sure that you are organi-
zationally ready for it. Here are some signs that your
organization is ready for a customer community:
6
•	Your customer base is growing and you want
to continue to deliver an excellent customer
experience.
•	Your support team is overwhelmed with
tickets and requests, so you want to provide
a customer-friendly place where they can
self-serve and help each other find answers to
questions.
•	You have great content, but your customers
aren’t finding it.
•	Your customers are passionate, specialized, or
both and want to connect with others around
your brand.
•	You have a desire to break down silos
between Marketing and Support to align your
company around the voice of customer.
•	Competitive dynamics are favoring creation of
a more differentiated customer experience on
your website.
•	You have access to stakeholders responsible
for effectiveness of customer self-service,
web experiences, and customer satisfaction
and sentiment.
If your organization is not ready at this time, start an
internal dialogue with the right people to socialize
the idea. Help decision makers understand the ben-
efits that your brand might miss out on – benefits
that many companies have already incorporated into
their customer-experience strategies. For example,
these companies are:
•	Creating a seamless, branded customer-
support experience throughout social
networks, their websites, and other places
where their customer are.
•	Gaining deep customer insight to improve
their products or build new ones that they
know their customers want.
•	Taking advantage of high SEO rankings to
become a more discoverable brand.
•	Becoming a customer-centric company that
listens to their customers and improves
their business while keeping their customers
happy.
¢¢ Community Checklist Summary
#1: A Simple, Easy-to-Use Interface that Invites Customers to Engage
•	Easy topic search, browsing, and posting
•	Threaded conversations
•	Content quality (official and best answers)
•	Content categories and tags
•	Multiple login options (SSO, social login, etc.)
#2: Multi-Channel to Reach Customers Wherever They Are
•	Embed community in your website (with
widgets)
•	In your digital product or mobile apps
•	In mobile/tablet browsers on all devices
•	In social networks (Facebook and Twitter)
•	In organic search (SEO)
#3: Tools for Building a Dynamic Community Knowledge Base
•	Content ratings (stars, likes, me-too’s)
•	Federated search
•	Real customer-generated content (particularly
topic titles)
•	Real-time conversational content that’s
“always on”
7
#4: A Quick and Affordable Implementation Process
•	A SaaS, cloud-based solution
•	Pre-configured widgets
•	Easy integrations with social and CRM
technology
•	Self-serve or low-cost implementation
options, such as “getting started” guides
•	Comprehensive implementation service
options
#5: Analytics for Deeper Buyer Insights
•	Dashboards to understand community health
metrics (customer satisfaction, hot topics,
trends, etc.)
•	Customer insight analytics (such as sentiment
and segmentation)
•	Content analytics: most popular, most views,
most searched, etc.
#6: Tools to Cultivate and Expose Customer-Generated Content
•	Moderation capabilities (merge, edit, delete,
archive)
•	Ability to set topic status and mark official
answers
•	Content categorization and tagging
•	Sub-communities
•	User access controls and private communities
•	User management controls (such as banning
and promoting to champion status)
#7: Easy Integration with Other Business Systems
•	Social networks
•	CRM
•	Knowledge base
Learn More
Interested in taking the next step to make your customer service more social? Want to deliver exceptional,
differentiating customer experiences with a community platform while also saving costs, enhancing produc-
tivity, and increasing revenue? Get Satisfaction enables you to create engaging customer experiences by
fostering online conversations about your products and services at every stage of the lifecycle. Companies
of all sizes such as Intuit, Kellogg’s, and Sonos rely on the Get Satisfaction community platform to acquire
new customers, provide better service and build better products. We power 70,000 active customer com-
munities hosting more than 35 million consumers each month.
Contact us at 877-339-3997 or contact@getsatisfaction.com for a customized demonstration.
To learn more about this study or how Get Satisfaction can help your business, visit
www.getsatisfaction.com.

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Buyers Guide To Evaluating Customer Community Platforms

  • 1. Evaluating Customer Community Platforms A buyers guide Table of Contents ¢¢ Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ¢¢ Customer Communities Are at the Heart of Customer-Centric Businesses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 ¢¢ What to Look for in a Customer Community Platform. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 #1: A Simple, Easy-to-Use Interface that Invites Customers to Engage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 #2: Multi-Channel Access to Engage Customers Wherever They Are. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 #3: Tools for Building a Dynamic Community Knowledge Base. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 #4: A Quick and Affordable Implementation Process. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 #5: Analytics for Deeper Buyer Insights. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 #6: Tools to Cultivate and Expose Customer-Generated Content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 #7: Easy Integration with Other Business Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 ¢¢ Community Checklist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 ¢¢ Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Are You Ready for a Customer Community? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Learn More. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
  • 2. 1 ¢¢ Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business If you’re in the process of evaluating community platforms, then congratulations! Your organization is clearly moving toward creating a more customer- centric business. In today’s increasingly connected world, the most admired companies are starting to have one thing in common: they are becoming customer-centric organizations that deliberately invest in a comprehensive customer experience strategy. This strategy must address the new ways that today’s “social,” tech-savvy customers expect to interact with brands. The goal is to provide the best possible experience at every touch point that customers have with your company, whether they are in stores, reading marketing materials, talking with your sales people, visiting your website, or call- ing your support center. The customer experience even extends to your brand’s presences on social networks and the organic results they see in Google and Bing. As noted by Michael Fauscette, Group Vice Presi- dent of Software Business Solutions at IDC, a key part of any customer experience strategy is provid- ing a branded customer community – a safe, brand- driven online space where customers can share and interact with your brand and each other wherever they are. People should be able to find and access your community from your website, social networks where you have a presence, search engines, and their mobile device. As noted by Fauscette, com- panies are using branded communities to “provide information about products and services, facilitate peer-to-peer interaction and support, nurture influ- encers to encourage word-of-mouth marketing, and even get feedback about the kinds of products and services that customers are really looking for.” ¢¢ Customer Communities Are at the Heart of Customer- Centric Businesses Customer communities are the evolution of online forums made popular in the 90’s. They are interac- tive, open spaces where people come to have conversations about the products and services they care about. Unlike traditional customer-company touch points like chat or email, customer com- munities are always on, connecting people to one another, your company, and the answers they’re looking for. Today, customer communities even more valuable when they are also: • Proactively managed by companies and customized to match a brand’s look and feel. • Tightly integrated with the company’s website so shoppers can connect with others without leaving the purchase flow. • Written in the natural language your customers use every day. This makes conversations more findable by a wider variety of users through search and browse. • Strongly linked to social networks, so people can easily access the community and your company through any channel. • Full of relevant, accurate content that has been created by people like them, vetted for accuracy by the brand, and easily accessed so that it’s relevant to members’ changing context (in other words, when they are a shopper, a new user seeking technical assistance, or other context). Many customer-centric companies have already discovered the wisdom of using customer com- munities to bring the voice of their customers to the middle of product discussions, marketing messag- es, and sales strategies. And they’ve been reaping the benefits by building products that their cus- tomers actually want to buy, using messages that resonate, and leveraging brand advocates to create more effective support and marketing content. Leading companies like Kellogg’s, Netflix, and Procter & Gamble have already achieved this kind of customer experience nirvana – and they are reaping the benefits of strong customer relationships and brand loyalty, as well as higher sales and market share.
  • 3. 2 What to Look for in a Customer Community Platform As a business seeking to realize these benefits of a customer community, the question is, how do you choose the best community platform for your business? What features and functions are essential to attracting customers and facilitating their active participation in the community – and simultaneously delivering value to your business in the form of lower service costs, increased sales, deeper cus- tomer insight, and more? In the following sections, we’ll share the key fea- tures and characteristics that have proven essential to the success of customer communities. #1: A Simple, Easy-to-Use Interface that Invites Customers to Engage First and foremost, a community platform must have a simple, intelligent design that’s so intuitive and easy to use that little training is needed. The user interface should embed features that entice customers to start using it immediately because they align with what they want to find and do most. For example, it should be designed to facilitate simple, intuitive interactions that make it easy for customers and prospects to get their needs met, whether they want to get support, provide feed- back, make suggestions, or share their experiences. Here’s a checklist of UI features that create an amazing user experience that will invite your cus- tomers and prospects to engage and return, time after time: • Widgets that extend the community to any page of a website or into social media sites like Facebook – so customers can access and leverage the community wherever they are. • Search-optimized pages so they can find exactly what they need, right away. • Intercept search to get customers to the right conversations. • Threaded conversations that make it easy to see the natural dialogue between customers and the brand. • Official answers, provided by an employee or Champion, as well as the “best” answers from the community. These answers should be clearly marked and show the user that it is a valid and trustworthy response. • Content categories and tags, so businesses can support different products, services, or any type of content that needs segmenting. Categories make it easy to organize and find specific and relevant information that the customer is looking for. • A “frictionless” login, so customers can log into Facebook, Twitter, Google, and access the community simultaneously via a single sign-on capability. Collectively, these interactions result in massive vol- umes of brand-vetted, user-generated content – the game changer that only a customer community can provide. This is key because user-generated con- tent is what ultimately attracts customers to your community and keeps them coming back. Equally important, it’s a literal gold mine of customer insight when you have the right tools to analyze it. For example, you can identify hot topics, see patterns of expertise, and identify who to court to become new advocates. #2: Multi-Channel Access to Engage Customers Wherever They Are A generation ago, a call center was the most es- sential channel for delivering a cutting-edge cus- tomer experience. Now, picking up the phone is the channel of last resort for most consumers. Today’s customers are on the go, dropping off their kids at soccer practice, sending emails, ordering team snacks to be delivered – all while scheduling hair ap- pointments and trying to get your product to work. If your community content (for example, support information) isn’t flexible and easy for customers to access wherever they are, on whatever platform they’re using, they will fail to engage, fail to gener- ate new content, and potentially turn to a competitor that’s willing to interact with them on their terms. You should choose a community platform that com- plements a multi-channel strategy. In fact, the value and effectiveness of your community will increase exponentially as more people begin participating in it. So you want to have as many channels and entry points as you can reasonably maintain — on mobile
  • 4. 3 devices and tablets, on social network sites, and in relevant places on your website (not just stuck in a support ghetto on one isolated page). At a bare minimum, a community platform should be accessible in the following channels: • Your website – through embedded widgets that display relevant conversations on any webpage or web experience, not just a general support portal or help center. • Your digital product – inside your software or mobile app. • Mobile browsers – so that the community is optimized for all mobile devices. • A Facebook brand page – so your customers can clearly see that they can participate in the community through Facebook via a support tile, for example. Equally important, choose a platform that boosts search engine optimization (SEO). Today, when a customer has a question or issue, their first instinct is to “just ask Google.” User-generated content within communities is ranked highly by search engines, so it is quickly found by customers and prospects who want fast answers to questions. For this reason, any customer community should be structured to help its communities rank well in search. For example, in a Get Satisfaction community, the URL of each community topic has the company name in it, as well as the topic title phrased in the words of the person who asked the question. That means that each link is highly optimized for the company name and the natural, organic language that customers are using to ask questions and report problems. (Differences between typical “customer” language and “technical” or formal lan- guage used by companies, for example, can make it difficult for customers to find the answers to their questions in traditional FAQs and knowledge reposi- tories generated by internal experts.) The structure of community topic URLs should directly combat that issue since customers are likely to ask, answer, and search about questions and issues using similar language. #3: Tools for Building a Dynamic Commu- nity Knowledge Base Your company may already have a traditional knowl- edge base (KB), even if it’s just a list of “Frequently Asked Questions” on your website. But if you don’t have a community-driven social KB, you’re missing out on the opportunity to leverage the value your customers can bring you and one other. When trying to scale support and keep up with the fast- paced speed of business brought around by the adoption of “social everything,” only a social KB can help you tap into the knowledge and experiences of your customers to deliver a comprehensive KB ex- perience in real time. Why? Because your custom- ers are constantly updating it with their questions, solutions, and stories. This doesn’t just have implications for the way you address issues, but how you spot them as well. A social KB can help you to identify and provide solu- tions or work-arounds for issues that might not even be on your radar if you didn’t have a dynamic, social place for your customers to report them. By lever- aging your customers as an integral piece of your product testing and first-response support strategy, you’re adapting to the ways social has changed busi- ness and using it in a way that is truly proactive and collaborative. As massive volumes of customer-generated con- tent are created, people need a way to find what they need instantly (something traditional forums have always done poorly). Look for a platform with federated search that allows customers to type in a question or topic and instantly surface relevant information from multiple repositories. It should pull information from places like your traditional KB, FAQs, customer communities, product directories, and more, and bring the best of all traditional and social channels together in one unified place. This gives your customers access to the maximum amount of information, both social and non-social, so they can easily find the type of information that’s right for them. To summarize, look for a platform with tools to help you and your customers build and share knowledge.
  • 5. 4 For example, you’ll want: • Mechanisms that allow customers to say what content is the best through starring or voting. • Support for “Living” conversations that allow customers to comment on or reply to knowledge base articles. • Federated search capabilities that allow customers to search the knowledge base from the community (and vice versa). • Topic titles and conversations that are written by customers in their natural language. • Support for real-time (or dynamic) conversations around specific topic types, such as ideas. • +1/Like feature that allows users to vote up ideas and show the company that they, too, have the same request or question as the poster of the topic (which in turn gives you a sense of what your customers want). #4: A Quick and Affordable Implementa- tion Process As you compare community platforms, find out how long each one typically takes to implement, as well as the amount of time and effort required by your staff. You’ll find that some require a few days to set up, and others require several months to get up and running, which significantly pushes out time-to- value and limits your business agility. Consider the fact that you might want to have multiple customer communities – for example, one per product cat- egory, or even one per new product launch so you can capture early feedback from limited releases and address issues swiftly. Look for a platform that is fast and easy to imple- ment – and doesn’t require IT resources or time – so you can respond swiftly to new business needs and realize value in weeks, not months. Look for imple- mentation features such as: • A SaaS, cloud-based solution that doesn’t require software configuration or installation and will work in any environment. • A template-driven framework that makes it easy to customize and configure the layout of your community to suit your needs. • Pre-configured widgets so that you can easily embed community experiences on any page of your website. • Easy integrations, which allows third parties to provide plug-in modules that can be incorporated into the user experience. • Self-serve implementation options that complement professional service offerings that are easy to buy. • Implementation services, “getting started” guides, and step-by-step “wizards” that help ensure fast, early success. #5: Analytics for Deeper Buyer Insights If you count all customer touch points from support interactions and in-person conversations to adver- tisements, the average company has millions, if not billions, of customer interactions a year across paid, earned, and owned channels. For your business, each channel touch point represents an opportunity for greater insight. A branded customer community connects your customers to each other and your employees as they talk about your products and services. The insight you can gain from analyzing the conversations happening in your community are incredibly valuable because they help you under- stand your customers more deeply. For instance, wouldn’t you like to know what motivates them to buy more or choose to become brand advocates? It’s critical that your customer community platform include analytics that provide insight into key sup- port metrics and community activity. Look for tools to help you gather statistics for measuring and reporting via a variety of resources. For example: • To understand how effectively and efficiently your community is meeting customer needs, focus analytics on customer support issues. These data points help you understand the self-sufficiency of community members, consumer trends, hot topics, and real-time community trends. • Consumer segmentation analytics help you learn a great deal about who is participating in your community and why — information that can be used by marketing and support organizations to better understand consumer segments and their needs.
  • 6. 5 • You also need a way to analyze the effectiveness of your community content at meeting customer needs. For example, with the right analytics, you can answer questions such as: • What content is attracting new customers? • What content drives repeat visits? • What products are people interested in? • Who’s looking at which content? • What content moves prospects along the life cycle? • Are we moving each customer or prospect along the life cycle? How long is it taking, and where are people getting stuck? • What topics are the most effective at getting people to join the community, click over to the webpage to learn more, and click over to the webpage to make a purchase? #6: Tools to Cultivate and Expose Cus- tomer-Generated Content Customer communities have the potential to gener- ate customer-developed content that you can use to support core business priorities, such as customer service and support, search engine optimization to boost web traffic, and lead generation via word-of- mouth marketing. So be sure that the platform you choose includes topic moderation tools so you can, for instance, move SPAM, merge duplicate content, archive topics that don’t have lasting value to oth- ers, close topics that don’t need additional replies, edit topic titles so they’re clear and descriptive, set the status on topics so community members know where you’re at with them, and promote relevant employee replies as the “official response.” You’ll also want functionality to help you keep topics orga- nized by making sure they’re categorized properly with relevant tags and product associations. These types of actions help to organize customer- generated content so that it’s easier for customers to find, consume, and gain value from when and where they need it most. For example, it makes it easier for customers to find specific content de- scribing the resolution of issues, which is critical to enabling self-service via content in your community. It also helps you optimize SEO, which drives more leads to your website and community. #7: Easy Integration with Other Business Systems Customer communities are by their very nature not intended to be islands. They are designed to bring people and processes together in breakthrough ways. So to realize the full value of a community for your business, you need a way to integrate it with your current business applications. Look for a solution that is easily extended via an application programming interface (API) so it’s easy and afford- able to integrate with business software. For example, integrating with your CRM system enables you to merge the content created by customers in your community with your CRM data for a true, 360-degree customer view. Integrating with your help desk system will enable you to bring cases into your support ticketing system. By inte- grating with marketing automation software, you can link campaign management, lead scoring, lead capture processes, and more. Imagine being able to bring in community participants to your marketing automation software to score desired behaviors and use this information to target these customers with more personalized communications and campaigns. And by integrating with your product development management software, you can capture customers’ product ideas (generated at no cost on your com- munity), reduce market research costs (because customers will freely share their thoughts about products in communities), and get real-time feed- back from beta testers of your products sharing their experiences in your community. ¢¢ Are You Ready for a Customer Community? Before you actually implement a community plat- form for your business, be sure that you are organi- zationally ready for it. Here are some signs that your organization is ready for a customer community:
  • 7. 6 • Your customer base is growing and you want to continue to deliver an excellent customer experience. • Your support team is overwhelmed with tickets and requests, so you want to provide a customer-friendly place where they can self-serve and help each other find answers to questions. • You have great content, but your customers aren’t finding it. • Your customers are passionate, specialized, or both and want to connect with others around your brand. • You have a desire to break down silos between Marketing and Support to align your company around the voice of customer. • Competitive dynamics are favoring creation of a more differentiated customer experience on your website. • You have access to stakeholders responsible for effectiveness of customer self-service, web experiences, and customer satisfaction and sentiment. If your organization is not ready at this time, start an internal dialogue with the right people to socialize the idea. Help decision makers understand the ben- efits that your brand might miss out on – benefits that many companies have already incorporated into their customer-experience strategies. For example, these companies are: • Creating a seamless, branded customer- support experience throughout social networks, their websites, and other places where their customer are. • Gaining deep customer insight to improve their products or build new ones that they know their customers want. • Taking advantage of high SEO rankings to become a more discoverable brand. • Becoming a customer-centric company that listens to their customers and improves their business while keeping their customers happy. ¢¢ Community Checklist Summary #1: A Simple, Easy-to-Use Interface that Invites Customers to Engage • Easy topic search, browsing, and posting • Threaded conversations • Content quality (official and best answers) • Content categories and tags • Multiple login options (SSO, social login, etc.) #2: Multi-Channel to Reach Customers Wherever They Are • Embed community in your website (with widgets) • In your digital product or mobile apps • In mobile/tablet browsers on all devices • In social networks (Facebook and Twitter) • In organic search (SEO) #3: Tools for Building a Dynamic Community Knowledge Base • Content ratings (stars, likes, me-too’s) • Federated search • Real customer-generated content (particularly topic titles) • Real-time conversational content that’s “always on”
  • 8. 7 #4: A Quick and Affordable Implementation Process • A SaaS, cloud-based solution • Pre-configured widgets • Easy integrations with social and CRM technology • Self-serve or low-cost implementation options, such as “getting started” guides • Comprehensive implementation service options #5: Analytics for Deeper Buyer Insights • Dashboards to understand community health metrics (customer satisfaction, hot topics, trends, etc.) • Customer insight analytics (such as sentiment and segmentation) • Content analytics: most popular, most views, most searched, etc. #6: Tools to Cultivate and Expose Customer-Generated Content • Moderation capabilities (merge, edit, delete, archive) • Ability to set topic status and mark official answers • Content categorization and tagging • Sub-communities • User access controls and private communities • User management controls (such as banning and promoting to champion status) #7: Easy Integration with Other Business Systems • Social networks • CRM • Knowledge base Learn More Interested in taking the next step to make your customer service more social? Want to deliver exceptional, differentiating customer experiences with a community platform while also saving costs, enhancing produc- tivity, and increasing revenue? Get Satisfaction enables you to create engaging customer experiences by fostering online conversations about your products and services at every stage of the lifecycle. Companies of all sizes such as Intuit, Kellogg’s, and Sonos rely on the Get Satisfaction community platform to acquire new customers, provide better service and build better products. We power 70,000 active customer com- munities hosting more than 35 million consumers each month. Contact us at 877-339-3997 or contact@getsatisfaction.com for a customized demonstration. To learn more about this study or how Get Satisfaction can help your business, visit www.getsatisfaction.com.