When companies contact us about starting a community to help manage customer experiences, they often wonder about ROI and will it be worth the money they invest? A simple answer is that it will cost you a lot more not being connected to your customers. The Internet is already managing your customer experiences on a variety of places such as YouTube reviews, Google and Apple app store reviews, and various other forums. Customers don’t want to search through pages, or various platforms to find answers to their troubles, or a place to give negative or positive reviews. Brands need to be able to provide a one stop solution for customer support, and reviews and comments.
By creating a branded community customers can leave comments and suggestions, or find the resources they are looking for. Think of the Adobe community as an example. Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and a variety of other products under their suite are powerful but also complicated. When Adobe created a community to help troubleshoot and teach, the activity within the community was astounding. The community grew beyond the company resources. Individuals experts of Adobe began contributing to the community by providing solutions for newbies. Adobe was able to oversee the contributions and solutions and allow the community to grow beyond their staff.
Other companies worry that members will leave bad reviews and are hesitant about starting communities. We often respond that if your products warrant bad reviews these reviews will appear on the internet regardless, with or without a community. By allowing the bad reviews to take place in the branded community the company is able to see these sooner rather than later and allow the company to get on top of fixing the problems. Customers are forgiving if they know the company recognizes the trouble and are looking to solve the problem.
By creating a company for your customers you are allowing the users into the boardroom to help provide assistance to how products can be made better. You are also allowing greater customer service solutions, by seeing trends in support areas and being proactive to fix them. When individuals wonder if the cost of creating a community is worth it, we often respond that not having a community is costing a lot more than having one.
If you would like to find out more about our community software please do not hesitate to contact us.
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