Companies that embrace community benefit from a company-wide transformation as departments align around customer needs, priorities, and concerns. We call this the Community Effect, and you can achieve it, too. The second in three-part series, this practical guide will cover the patterns, tactics, and best practices necessary to achieve the Community Effect.

1. The Community Effect (part 2)
Creating a Differentiated
Customer Experience
The Science of Enabling a Successful Customer Community
This paper is the second in a series on the ART, SCIENCE, and TOOLS that enable com-
panies to realize the “Community Effect.” Get Satisfaction has been on the forefront of
community management and technology development for six years. We know communi-
ties better than anyone – and offer a unique perspective on the future and strategic value of
communities.
About Get Satisfaction
Get Satisfaction helps customer-centric organizations engage millions of consumers in
meaningful conversations about their products and services every day. The Get Satisfaction
community platform transforms these conversations into powerful, user-generated market-
ing content and insights, enabling businesses to create differentiated customer experiences,
acquire more customers and bring new innovations to market. Headquartered in San
Francisco, Get Satisfaction has customers around the world, including Citrix, HootSuite,
Intuit and Kellogg’s.
Table of Contents
¢¢ Why Community – and Why Now?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
¢¢ The Science of Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
¢¢ Market Your Community by Building Connections Wherever Your Customers Are. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
¢¢ Make Your Community a Content Powerhouse that Keeps People Coming Back. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
¢¢ Monitor, Track and Analyze Your Community. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
¢¢ Create a Customer-centered Business. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
¢¢ Are You Ready?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
¢¢ Conclusion. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

2. Why Community – and Why Now?
As explored in the first paper in this series, “The Com-
munity Effect: Becoming a Customer Experience Leader,”
the benefits of customer community go far beyond reduc-
ing support costs and generating SEO-friendly market-
ing content. Get Satisfaction customers who actively
embrace their customer community observe a company-
wide transformation. We refer to it as the Community Ef-
fect. It happens naturally when you harness the power of
customer conversations and elevate them to their rightful
place — the heart of your business.
When you have a strong Community Effect:
• Customer conversations raise the level of
accountability that departments and even
individual employees have regarding the quality of
the customer experience.
• Departments start to work together to address
customer issues, questions, and ideas raised in the
community.
• Employees are in regular communication, allowing
them to move beyond bureaucracies, policies, and
inflexible processes that hinder collaboration and
innovation to take action.
• Everyone – companywide – is on board with what
customers are saying and asking for, and your
customers feel heard, important, and proud to be a
loyal customer and advocate.
In other words, your business becomes more customer-
centric and better equipped to deliver an outstanding
customer experience. The business performance of
companies that successfully differentiate their customer
experience speak for themselves; an analysis done by
Watermark Consulting of the six-year stock performance
of customer experience leaders compared with laggards
and the S&P 500 (2007 – 2012) shows that customer
experience leaders significantly outperform the market
(see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Customer experience leaders outperform the market.
Achieving the Community Effect requires the right
combination of ART, SCIENCE, and TOOLS. This paper
focuses on the science of community – the technical
aspects and best practices that enable your community
site to work optimally for you and your customers so it
delivers mutual value quickly.
Part of a Three-Part Series on the Art, Sci-
ence and Tools of Community
This paper complements our first paper in the series,
titled “The Art of Community,” which answers the
question, “How do you organize internal processes and
prepare your people to make your customer community
a success?” It also discusses the human and organiza-
tional aspects of community success and touches on
some of the practical to-do’s as you prepare for your
community’s launch.
The series will conclude with a series of case studies that
highlight “The Tools of Community.” In it, we’ll share
practical examples of how Get Satisfaction customers
are cultivating and unleashing the Community Effect
to create a customer-centered culture that enables excep-
tional customer experiences and differentiates their
business.
2

3. The Science of Community
Launching a community does not automatically make
your business a customer experience leader. A communi-
ty is a vital catalyst for companies seeking to achieve this
goal – but to maximize the Community Effect, it needs
to be set up, moderated, and curated according to specific
best practices. We call this the science of community.
In our experience, it’s not enough to take a “build it and
they will come” attitude. You have to invite customers
into your community, systematically integrate it into the
everyday customer experience, and reward them with
dynamic, highly-relevant content that is carefully culti-
vated, repurposed, preserved, and discoverable.
In addition, you must apply a data-driven, analytical
approach to understanding your community so that you
can proactively grow engagement, manage participation,
assess the effectiveness of your content, and gauge impact
on customers. Analytics are essential to understanding
what’s working, what’s not, and why, so you can system-
atically optimize your community.
These are just a few examples of what’s involved in the
science of community. Investing in a community and
failing to apply these recommendations and best prac-
tices is akin to buying a smartphone and just using it to
make calls. You’re leaving so much potential value on the
table. To get the most from a smartphone, you need to
connect it to the Internet; set up your email, voicemail,
and calendar; deploy apps; monitor and respond to
incoming calls and text messages, and so on. You also
need to tell other people how to reach you on your device.
In much the same way, customer communities require a
certain degree of set-up and optimization to make sure
they deliver maximum value.
Let’s take a deeper dive into Get Satisfaction’s recom-
mendations and best practices, which are based on six
years of experience helping customers deploy successful
communities.
There are two markers of a thriving
customer community: engaged people
and high-quality content.
Market Your Community by
Building Connections Wherever
Your Customers Are
In order for you and your customers to realize maxi-
mum value from your community, you need to attract a
healthy, engaged population. As a first step, this means
announcing your community to the world – for example,
by sending a newsletter announcement, writing a blog
post, and posting to active social channels. Many busi-
nesses write press releases as well.
But is this enough to attract the widest possible range of
customers to your community?
Companies with the most successful communities know
otherwise. They take an outside-in perspective, devel-
oping a communications plan that takes into account
customer preferences and expectations. For example, this
may mean asking:
• Where are customers and prospects spending most
of their time online? What makes them visit our
website?
• Which channels do we use to interact with
customers online currently? How will our
community align with these existing channels?
• Where do our customers go to find support for our
product? Where do they go to get advice?
• Where do our prospects go to explore, evaluate, and
make purchase decisions? How can our community
support the buyer journey?
3

4. Based on this analysis, they can employ lots of lesser well-
known approaches for creating multiple doors to their
community. And in our work with customers, we know
these strategies work.
Here are a few technical tips to get you started on the
path to rapid community growth.
Turbo-charge Your Website with
Community
According to Incyte Research (2012), company websites
are the preferred destinations for information to support
a purchase decision – not social networks. This makes
your website a key “door” through which you can invite
members to join your community. (See the sidebar,
“Where Do Customers Go to Learn More About Prod-
ucts?” to learn more.)
Where Do Customers Go to Learn More
About Products?
When Incyte asked nearly 1,900 qualified consumers (all
of whom actively use the Internet and represent adults
from all age, socio-economic, and geographic groups
in the U.S.) to name their primary destinations for
researching products or seeking customer service via the
Internet, their top choices were:
• Visit company website to make a purchase decision
— 89.3%
• Visit company website for service/support questions
— 68.8%
• Contact the company via e-mail — 43.5%
• Use an Internet community dedicated to the
product/service — 27.3%
• Use a social network — 21.2%
Social networks still have had a major impact on the way
that today’s customers expect to communicate with your
brand online. Incyte’s findings revealed that consumers
don’t want brand interactions cluttering up their social
networks. They do, however, want company websites to
be more like their experiences on social networks. This
way, they get the best of both worlds when researching
new products and services: detailed product information
from the company and authentic, real-time answers and
opinions from other customers.
In 2014, engaging websites will be the norm.
By integrating your community with your website, you
quickly make your website more social by giving cus-
tomers access to trustworthy, dynamic content from
peers. For example, you can embed your customer
community on your homepage, help pages, and product
pages. Figure 2 provides an example of how
Kiddicare.com, one of the United Kingdom’s fastest-
growing retailers, has complemented its product pages
by embedding community content just below the buy
button. When you look at this content, note the ques-
tions that are most commonly asked about this product
within the community. They start rather generic (for
instance, “Will this fit in my car?”) and then they get ex-
tremely specific (for example, “Will this fit in the middle
position in an Audi Q7 2009?”).
Similarly, B2B companies have as much (or more) to
gain by implementing customer community as part of
the purchase experience. For example, Get Satisfaction
customer, HP Vertica, offers a database product for big
data analytics, a complex and much discussed space in
tech circles. Their customer community has become
a primary destination for widespread conversations
about big data; it’s also a place where their prospects can
discover the relative benefits of the Vertica solution over
other database products. As more and more of this con-
tent has become discoverable through Google searches,
Vertica has seen a corresponding increase in inbound
marketing traffic and product trials.
Whether your business is a B2B or B2C, community is
an easy way to meet customer demand for detailed prod-
uct information from your company and other custom-
ers. And at the same time, your website becomes a new
door to your customer community, and vice versa.
Figure 2: Place product-specific community conversations next
to that item on your eCommerce pages to help shoppers make
purchase decisions.
4

5. Be Where Your Customers Are
Consumers have been leading the way when it comes to
adopting new social channels. However, according to
recent research from Incyte Research, this doesn’t mean
that they want to engage with companies and brands
through their social networks. The best practice is to in-
vite them to connect to your customer community wher-
ever they already are – on Google, Facebook, Twitter, and
others. You can also post links to relevant community
conversations in social channels to improve engagement
and acquire more community members.
We refer to this strategy as an outside-in approach to
capturing community members. It’s not about reinvent-
ing the wheel – it’s about channeling current customer
interactions back to your community. To simplify this
process, choose a community platform that is on top
of consumer trends and integrates easily with existing
online channels. Get Satisfaction, for example, integrates
with Facebook and HootSuite for social media manage-
ment and offers widgets that allow you to place commu-
nity seamlessly on any web page or even in your applica-
tion. This allows you to bring customer conversations
to and from social networks, increasing your brand’s
visibility among a larger audience.
Promoting Community Is a Marketing
Campaign
We’ve found that the most successful communities have
managers who think creatively and outside the box – and
provide entry points to your community through other
online sources. Here are some ideas to get you started:
• Add a link to the footers of all employees’ email
signatures.
• Promote your community from your other support
resources – for example, online tutorials, static
FAQs and knowledge bases, bulletin boards, older
forums, and more — so you can redirect your
customers looking for answers.
• Embed community in your online applications and
products, so users have an in-app way to identify
bugs and share real-time feedback.
• Reference your community in print materials and
conversations with customers and prospects. They
need to know that your community is an official
channel.
Leverage the Power of Search Engines
Because of the long-tail nature of conversations and the
preference that search algorithms give to user-generated
content, community produces some of the best SEO re-
sults. So make sure you’re including keywords in conver-
sation titles and tags so they’re easy to search for within
your community and by search engines. Your website,
blog, resources, and customer community all need to be
optimized for the keywords your potential customers are
searching for. If not, you’re likely not even making it to
the “evaluate” stage of the customer lifecycle.
It’s also important to select a community platform that
is structured to rank well in search engines like Bing and
Google. This is determined by the size of the community
platform you choose, the URL structure, and how open
the platform is. For example, Get Satisfaction hosts more
than 10 million pages that are crawled by search engines
several times an hour. This sheer size of the platform
makes it a magnet for search. In addition, the customer-
generated content actually appears in the URL structure
of conversation threads, making it more likely that the
content you want will be indexed with keywords similar
to those that other customers are searching.
Go Mobile
Whether customers are in between meetings, on the
train, or waiting to pick kids up from school, they are
increasingly likely to be browsing the internet and
searching for information via cell phones and tablets. So
you can’t afford not to implement your community in a
mobile-friendly way.
5
Figure 3: Get Satisfaction communities are built with respon-
sive design, so they automatically adjust for attractiveness and
usablility on any screen size.

6. But providing a mobile customer experience is no longer
solely about offering a mobile app. It requires that you op-
timize your browser-based experience for all screen sizes
– regardless of the viewer’s device and operating system.
For example, to do this, the Get Satisfaction community
platform leverages Responsive Design principles — a
web design approach that focuses on crafting sites to give
users an optimal viewing experience on any size screen.
The design enables easy reading and navigation with a
minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling, regardless
of device. This is also a much more scalable approach
than designing device-specific community apps.
By going mobile, you also have the
opportunity to capture additional
context associated with the content
contributed from mobile devices, such as
customer location.
Make Your Community a
Content Powerhouse that
Keeps People Coming Back
Getting customers to find and join your community is a
vital first step to community success. To keep them com-
ing back and engaging in real, authentic ways, you need
to provide them with an engaging, “sticky” experience.
Much of the value of community for your business comes
from its ability to generate lots of customer-generated
content. This is what helps your community stay fresh
and relevant, valuable for customers as a source of trusted
information, and a healthy source of customer insight for
your business. But our customers will only create content
in your community if you’ve established it as place where
they find value and meaningful engagement.
The following techniques and best practices can help you
create a vibrant community for your customers – one
where they are motivated to respond to user questions,
share product ideas and experiences, write reviews,
provide advice, report problems, and offer solutions to
problems.
The “golden rule” of community is
simple: to realize value from your
community, you must first provide
value to your customers by making it a
worthwhile destination for them.
Seed Your Community with Quality
Content
You probably already have an idea of the questions and
issues that your support team receives most often. So as
you launch your community – and then manage it on
an ongoing basis – be sure to post content that addresses
these questions. Seed answers to your FAQs right off the
bat as conversations, so they’ll be available when your
first customers come looking for them.
You should also periodically post topics and ask ques-
tions of your community that will generate ideas and
drive engagement (for example, asking customers for
suggestions on future products). You’ll be amazed at the
insight your customers have to offer when prompted. You
can also tweet community conversations to invite a wide
range of responses, without the restriction of character
limits. Or send specific community queries directly to
champions to build community engagement and owner-
ship.
Moderate and Curate Content on a
Regular Basis
6

7. Ideally, your community will be constantly growing and
changing, so it needs careful oversight. Your community
manager needs to tend to your community like a gar-
dener – for example, by seeding it with helpful content,
weeding out outdated or irrelevant information, and
cross-pollinating it with links to and from other places.
For instance, when moderating topics, they can merge
duplicate content, archive topics that don’t have lasting
value to others, 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
they stand, and promote relevant employee replies as the
“official company response.” In addition, it’s important to
keep topics organized by making sure they’re categorized
properly with relevant tags and product associations.
Curating effectively is hard to do without the right tools.
So look for a platform that offers a wide range of tools
that empower community managers to curate content
quickly and effectively. For example, Get Satisfaction
provides community managers with:
• Powerful moderation tools to edit, fork, merge,
archive, and delete conversations, as well as
mark their status (such as “answered” or “under
consideration”)
• The ability to allocate moderation tools to customer
champions for extra community support
• People management tools for managing and
segmenting users in the community and banning or
promoting them, as well as limiting their access to
specific “private” content categories
Bring in Customer-generated Content
from Social Networks
Your customers are already on Facebook, Twitter, and
other social channels, generating questions and responses
– but this content still requires one-to-one response and
tends to have a very short life (a matter of minutes, in
the case of tweets). So as a best practice, deploy tools that
allow you to harness this content and bring it into your
community.
For example, Get Satisfaction offers an out-of-the-box
integration with HootSuite to streamline community
management and social media management in one
dashboard. Once integrated, HootSuite allows you to
pull tweets and Facebook Posts into your community,
extending their shelf life and giving them SEO power. It
also allows you to respond to social support requests with
links to relevant community conversations, freeing you
from the restrictions of character or platform limitations.
To accelerate community building, it also allows you to
send content the other way – for example, by inviting
your social audience to join the conversation taking place
in the community.
Peer-to-Peer: Know When to Get Out of the
Way
Sometimes, when customer questions are raised in your
community or in another social channel, you have to
step back and let your community members take over.
By designating a specific wait period before responding,
and even reaching out to specific Champions or custom-
ers to see if they’d like to respond, you empower your
community members to step up. This gives your com-
munity members – especially your more committed,
active advocates – a sense of purpose. At the same time,
it allows you to get more value from your community.
Make Your Community a Campaign
Destination
Today, most marketers know that content is king. In fact,
compelling content is your single biggest driver of in-
bound interest. Cutting-edge marketers also realize that
if content is king, then engagement is pure gold. Every
marketing event or content publication – for example, a
webinar or white paper – is an opportunity tool to bring
people to your community, where they can discuss the
7
Figure 4: Bring conversations from your social pages into
your community to turn them into long-lasting, SEO-friendly
resources for future customers to come.

8. asset at hand and create even more value. Posting this
material in your community also gives it an SEO boost.
We recommend that you anticipate upcoming events and
milestones being managed by other departments and
strategize with them on how use your community as a
platform for greater engagement.
For example, once marketing announces an upcoming
webinar, you should also launch a community conversa-
tion to solicit questions about it. Participants will be
thrilled to engage with speakers before and after the
event in a community thread. This strategy will not only
drive participation, but it will also give speakers more
insight into what they should cover in their presentation
and help them create more meaningful connections with
participants afterwards.
For example, Aerohive, a Get Satisfaction customer and
wireless networking company, used their community as
a platform to promote thought leadership and attract in-
bound interest. They did this by hosting an all-day “Ask
the Expert” event in their community. On the day of the
event, they worked with an industry expert to field a wide
range of customer questions. Unlike a webinar, which
requires a replay to get additional value, the community
conversations generated during the event became long-
lasting assets that continue to receive great organic traffic
from search engines as prospects search for information
about the new standard. At the same time, Aerohive’s
marketing and sales teams can analyze the questions
raised by attendees to get new insights about trends,
identify customers that need personalized follow-up, and
even target prospects for sales campaigns.
Monitor, Track, and Analyze
Your Community
The backbone of a healthy community is analytics that
allow a company to see what’s working well, what’s not,
and a whole lot more. Armed with insights, community
managers can be more intentional and strategic about
community management.
But what exactly should you be monitoring? And how
can you use the insights gained to systematically opti-
mize the community experience and the value of your
community for your business?
Figure 5: Community Health Analytics help you achieve maxi-
mum impact with your community.
As we’ll explore here, you need sophisticated analyt-
ics to better understand customers and trends, make
more informed business decisions, and operationalize a
customer-centered processes.
Understand Community Health
Your first priority is to monitor the overall health of your
community. The best way to assess this is by tracking key
statistics such as total number of visitors, revisits, users,
new users, active users, community page views, topic
page views, new topics, and new topics with replies. In-
dicators of a healthy and thriving community are highly
dependent on your overall community strategy (see Part
1 of this Series for more detail: “The Community Effect
Part 1: Becoming a Customer Experience Leader”). For
instance, a B2B company with a sophisticated lead nur-
turing program may want to assess the depth and quality
of community conversations, while a B2C that serves
millions of customers may be more interested in tracking
breadth of engagement.
Understand Which Content Is Most
Successful
It’s important to understand what content is popular and
what’s not, as this helps you focus your time and invest-
ments in the right areas. For example, you can identify
certain types of content that drive conversions and then
choose to surface more or less of it, as appropriate. To do
this, you’ll want to track metrics such as:
8

9. • Search trends: This metric allows you to identify
top search terms from within your community
(versus from the web) to understand what prospects
are looking for.
• Top searches for specific products: This provides
insight into consumer intent about particular
products. For example, if you see a lot of support or
installation questions for a product, an opportunity
exists to increase efficiency by creating an FAQ or
online video that answers common questions.
• Real-time community trends: Community
analytics can help you see trends and uncover issues
in real time. For example, you can detect if there is
an issue with a particular product before you start
getting support tickets and, you buy yourself time to
proactively address issues.
Understand the Needs and Interests of
Community Members
You’ll also want to capture data to understand how ef-
fectively and efficiently your community works to meet
customer needs – especially if you’re using it for customer
self-service. This involves capturing data about user
behavior, such as what conversations they follow, what
content they create, and their overall sentiment.
These data points help you understand:
• Consumer trends: Analytics can help you better
understand interesting trends and generate insights
in consumer behavior. Leaderboards are an effective
way to understand who your most active and
engaged customers are.
• Hot topics: Communities are key in helping
companies understand what customers care most
about — insights that could not be determined by
looking at other data sources. For instance, you can
see the breakdown of conversations that are getting
the most page views.
• Sentiment: Having customers self-assess their
sentiment helps community managers gauge
customer satisfaction and the overall health of their
community.
Monitor Participation and Cultivate
Advocates
You’ll also want to monitor participation and identify
power users – or advocates – to help build a thriving
community. Here are some proven techniques and best
practices to get you started:
• Identify the people in your community who are
most vocal, knowledgeable, and helpful. These
are your Champions, and they might be in your
branded community or your greater social media
and customer community.
9
Figure 6: Asking questions of your community is a great way to build engagement and get to know your customers.

10. • Reach out to them with questions to encourage
engagement between customers. Guidance from a
community manager can unlock the goodwill of
your best advocates. You just have to ask.
• Treat your champions to perks—for example, host
them in your office or at an event or give them
exclusive access to new products before they launch.
Most champions are highly motivated by these non-
monetary incentives.
Get More Community-based Insights by
Integrating with Core Business Systems
Consider using your community to track individual cus-
tomer behavior as people interact with the rich content
that lives in your community – and then share this data
with marketing. For example, you can integrate your
community platform with:
• CRM systems (such as Salesforce.com or
SugarCRM) – You can sync the data you capture
about each customer, such as topic pages viewed,
community topics created and replied to, and more
– with customer contact data to create a 360-degree
view of each customer.
• Marketing automation platforms (such as Marketo)
– This type of integration helps you track prospect
behavior in the community to nurture and score
leads and identify buying signals. For companies
with a direct sales model, tracking community
participation in the lead record also helps sales
initiate more valuable sales conversations.
Measure the ROI of Your Community
Many companies are realizing significant return on
investment from their online communities – and the
impact can be significant. For example, according to For-
rester Research, just a 10% increase in a company’s expe-
rience score can result in $1 billion in additional revenue.
Executed and managed effectively, communities can
help you boost your score. But as a rule, you’ll want to
measure metrics that align with your strategic objectives
for investing in a community. Areas where businesses are
realizing rapid ROI include the following:
• Reduced support costs – through ticket deflection,
increased peer-to-peer support, and self-service.
10
Figure 7: Integrate community into your web presence for a seamless digital experience.

11. 11
• Faster and more targeted product innovation – by
using the community to beta test products, solicit
real-time feedback, and community-source market
research.
• Revenue generation – by identifying and nurturing
qualified sales leads, understanding the content
that’s effectively converting prospects, and driving
more traffic to these key pages.
The value of these ROI areas can be measured by com-
paring he metrics captured in community analytics
against benchmarked data. For example, if you know
that your community has deflected 55% of your support
calls, you know that each call costs an average of $15,
and you had an average volume of 100 calls a day before
implementing community, you can compute that your
community is saving you $16,500 a month, or $198,000 a
year using the formula below:
Other metrics to pay attention to include:
• Number of ideas submitted
• Most popular ideas (according to community votes)
• Number of people participating in community
conversations
• Peer-to-peer engagement rate
• Percentage of community visitors who never post
a question to the community (a segment of this
number represents people who self-served)
• The increase in search engine traffic to pages with
community content embedded in them
Create a Customer-centered Business
It’s one thing to capture the voice of the customer (VOC)
through your community. But unless the VOC is going
to the right people and changing behaviors and decisions
internally, you’re just paying lip service to customer-cen-
tricity. The key is making sure that your employees are
seeing the right things and responding to them swiftly –
and fostering individual accountability for taking action.
As a best practice, your community manager should
work with the various lines of business to design tailored
reports and ensure they are seen by the right people. For
example, with the Get Satisfaction platform, you can
create word filters and generate reports with information
relevant for different teams such as billing, sales, market-
ing, and product development.
You can also integrate your community with other
enterprise software. Consider how integration with a Get
Satisfaction community and Salesforce.com adds value by
driving rich, social, customer engagement in the CRM.
With this integration, Get Satisfaction customers can am-
plify the value of customer conversations by embedding
them in Salesforce as “topic objects,” a perfect addition to
the social enterprise to bring the outside-in value of social
engagement to the system of record. Users can also take a
look at customer-generated content by customer, contact
and more, as all customer-generated content and infor-
mation is now stored in one place.
Stay Tuned!
In the final piece of this series, “Tools of the Community
Effect,” we’ll share several case studies that explore in
detail how Get Satisfaction customers are harnessing the
community effect to create thriving, customer-centered
businesses.
Are You Ready?
The decisions you make during the technical build-
ing and execution of your community are critical to its
long-term success. They determine how easily people can
find and create content in your community, how quickly
it grows, how much value they find there, how often they
come back and contribute, and more. With the right plat-
form and strategy, you can embed community through-
out your online customer experience – as they conduct
product research and make purchase decisions, seek out
service and support, and provide post-sales feedback
and ideas. In this way, community content can influence
consumers at just the right time. You also need to elevate
selected customer conversations to your executive team;
in this way, you can essentially give customers a seat at
the executive table, as community managers can identify
and share trends, ideas, and issues that customers care
about most.
Cost saved
per week
(Cost per call) * (Number of calls/week)
(Percent calls deflected in community)
=

12. Conclusion
Providing an outstanding customer experience is really just about prioritizing the customer at each step of
their journey with you. Customer communities are uniquely capable of providing this exceptional experi-
ence by allowing companies to build mutually beneficial relationships with their customers. Get Satisfaction
customers who actively commit and invest in these relationships by way of a community are observing a
transformational shift in their business, as they align around customer needs, priorities, and expectations. This
is the power of the “Community Effect.” Unleash it to naturally float up above the competition in the eyes of
the people who matter most — your customers.
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 productivity, 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.
Contact us for a customized demonstration.
(877) 339-3997
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