You don’t have to be in the same
room to be on the same page.
Amplify conversations and drive opportunity in the new digital landscape.
How to Turn Your Customer Connections
into a Customer Community
Acquiring customers is a complex, expensive effort. Yet, you don’t have time to waste once you have them. The focus now is hanging onto the customers you have, helping them succeed, and keeping them informed and engaged.
That’s not easy in the fast-changing, competitive world of software and technology.
Luckily, there’s a new way for you to stay top of mind with your customers. It’s called Customer Community, and it helps you expand your market share by better connecting and engaging with your customers and partners.
Read on to learn more about the emerging world of Customer Community – or how to give your customers the chance to connect, ask questions, share solutions, and build their network.
Here’s what you’ll learn:
- What is Customer Community?
- Benefits of building a customer community
- How to build a customer community
- Strategies for customer community success
- Examples of customer communities done well
What is Customer Community?
We know how hard it is to communicate effectively with customers. It’s noisy out in the Software as a Service (SaaS) marketplace, and you can’t be sure your ideal prospects and customers will hear you.
In addition, because many SaaS companies are growing quickly, customer communication can be a little messy and chaotic at times – even with sound strategies and best intentions in place. (Ever heard from a customer who feels like the last to know about your product or service updates?)
Enter a Customer Community solution.
This multi-featured, private online community for enterprise-level customer relationships leverages technology and collaboration concepts to nurture your customers in new ways. For example, customers can share ideas, communicate solutions, and solve challenges together or participate in forums organized by topic, special interest, or network.
Companies like yours use Customer Communities to deliver an improved customer experience, increase customer referrals, generate new business opportunities, and gain new customer insights.
Benefits of building a Customer Community
If we’ve learned anything during the pandemic, it’s that you don’t have to be in the same room to be on the same page. Similarly, you can deliver tremendous value and realize various benefits by bringing customers together – even if it’s virtually.
Creating powerful connections
Right now, you probably have customers who are highly experienced in working with the nuances of your solution. Because of that, they’re an untapped source of valuable information for your other customers.
By providing a community platform to ask questions, share ideas and connect with other like-minded business owners or customers, you help customers build their network and create meaningful connections. Best of all, they don’t have to cut through any clutter to find each other.
Another benefit is how WorkOutLoud creates connections between your employees and partners. Imagine a secure platform where everyone can stay connected and communicate with each other without worry (e.g., company departments, sales teams, HR onboarding new employees, and partner channels for companies that offer a partner program).
Forming strong relationships
Another benefit of Customer Community is deepening the relationships you have. For example, you stand a greater chance of converting prospects into loyal brand advocates when you offer them a Customer Community that makes them part of your company’s ecosystem.
Leveraging proprietary data
You’ll want a Customer Community solution that gives you complete autonomy on what data you collect and how you use it. The software provides data and insights about your customer segmentation, interests, challenges, and preferences for most solutions, including ours. And all of that data belongs to you.
Achieving measurable results
Ever wished you had the analytics to understand your customers at scale? The comprehensive reporting Customer Communities provides means your hit or miss days are over. You can run more informed and effective campaigns.
Powering new growth
Growth happens when your audiences understand and believe in what you’re doing and when those audiences feel a part of what’s happening at your company. When you have a Customer Community, you also have critical competitive advantages for your customers through exclusive insights, perks, and networking opportunities.
How to build a customer community
An effective Customer Community solution should make it easy for you to build and maintain private customer communities that foster learning and collaboration.
Over the last 8+ years, we’ve worked with thousands and thousands of users from B2B companies just like yours. During that time, we’ve designed a simple process that’s:
Fast – Go from zero to fully deployed in as little as 2-3 weeks.
Easy – Our streamlined, intuitive platform is simple for users and administrators.
Flexible – Built-in agility means WorkOutLoud will grow with you.
Reliable – Get trusted data that’s a single source of truth for deeply understanding your customers.
More specifically, our process includes these primary steps:
Strategy – Launch call and platform strategy session
Branding – Set up key platform functionalities and branding
Onboarding – Design of member onboarding process
Training – Get members and administrators up to speed
Support – Ongoing support, training, and analytics with a Community Success Manager
Strategies for Customer Community success
Once your Customer Community is up and running, you can leverage messaging, forums, social feeds, virtual and in-person events, surveys, and more. Best of all, it’s your community, your members, and your rules.
Events
Whether in-person, virtual, or hybrid, events are a great way to connect and learn. As you assess potential partners, look for a vendor that can manage everything from invitations and registration to payment processing, reporting, and analytics to event communications
Surveys
Don’t overlook the value of ongoing customer surveys to strengthen your community. Whether you keep it simple with a single-page survey or go deeper with a multi-page option, surveys give you quick access to client feedback and preference. Ask potential vendors about their survey reporting and analytics package so the data is easy to share and actionable.
Collaboration
You can help customers find and collaborate with each other within your Customer Community platform. Be sure to ask about features that make it easy for customers to search, find and contact people like them.
Other helpful features include group and member management, text messaging, chat functionality, forums, and feeds. And of course, you’ll want to give your customers the ability to connect, follow, favorite, share and reply and sign up for notifications – all of which are social-style features they use on other platforms.
Integrations
Ideally, you want a Customer Community tool that seamlessly integrates with your existing tech stack – whether that’s a marketing, sales, and service platform like HubSpot, a CRM like SalesForce, a campaign management platform like Eloqua, or a remote meeting technology solution like Microsoft Teams.
These integrations help you deliver the right content to the right people at the right time.
Marketing Campaign
To add the most value to your business, a Customer Community tool should also work with all aspects of your marketing campaign (e.g., email, social, advertising). Don’t forget to ask about list management, post-campaign reporting, and analytics.
Ready to amplify conversations & drive opportunity?
Experience WorkOutLoud.