Customer Communities Posts

Marketers and membership professionals continue to see the value of leveraging their online community to increase revenue and control costs. However, the path of taking a social business strategy from business idea to business impact can be less clear.

Your CEO doesn't care about your social business strategy in the same way that you do. As more organizations moved toward implementing social software to engage prospects and customers in 2011, marketing, customer care, and strategy executives have a lot for which to be thankful.

Somewhere in the country, an executive is scratching his or her head over how to build a community of their customers or members. Their goals are clear, but with over 170 million tweets flying around each day, finding the right information to get started can be daunting. After acquiring a firm grasp on the impact they would like their online community to have on their organization and the critical problems that their customers would like solved, their first question should be:

Creating an online community that focuses on helping members or customers become more successful in their jobs, businesses, and lives is much more that a social strategy - It is a strategic imperative for all mid-sized and large companies and membership organizations.

In business, there are times where you should focus on the end of the race before you think about the beginning. Planning an online customer or member community is one of those times.  There are many different ‘flavors' of online community software and social business platforms.  Though the tools and methods you use are largely determined by what you want to accomplish with them, the role measurement and analytics play in the success of your private online community is always very important.

Why do you lose customers? The #1 reason that customers leave you is because they think that you don't care about them and their success, according to a study by the Rockefeller Foundation. Over 65% percent of the survey respondents gave this as the primary reason customers take their business elsewhere.

In has long been proven that it takes more time, resources, and capital to earn new customers than it does to keep your existing customers.  I want to take a minute to outline what an online customer community is and where they fit into the world view of most marketing, product management, and customer service executives.

I recently had the pleasure of joining a few dozen members of one of our customer organizations for a tour of Washington DC. It was wonderful evening filled with good people, fun facts, and great product feedback. I love talking to people in our market – customers and non-customers. In my experience, the answers to how we can continue to meet the needs of businesses and membership organizations are going to come from outside our building.

The expectations of B2B customers and the complexity of problems they are trying to solve have grown dramatically in the last decade. While your customers' businesses have become more multifaceted, the solutions that you have created to help them solve their problems have also become more intricate. This is one of the major reasons that online customer communities have evolved into the platform of choice for many B2B companies to maintain high customer satisfaction levels and collect data from their market.

How an Organization Positions Their Online Community Can Be The #1 Factor in Its Success or Failure

A private online community can be a tremendous driver of customer retention, revenue generation, and member/customer satisfaction. The way that your organization positions its online community for customers, or members, is one of the most important decisions in creating a viable social strategy. Why? How your online community is positioned determines how much usage it will get, the amount of value your audience sees in your organization, and how your organization is perceived as viewing community building and its customers.