Support

You should use a community to improve customer retention. Create a self-service forum where your customers can ask questions and receive answers to common problems from other community members. It is vital to have an in-house support/technical team as part of your Community so that they can quickly respond to highly unusual or technical questions. Conduct post-interaction surveys and monitor how your support tickets are changing (have they increased or decreased?) to see how effective your Community is.

Product

Gain insight from the Community for your research and development efforts or improving the product or service. Organize a contest or space in the Community where you can monitor what customers dialogue about and what they do with your product – these insights can lead to product innovation. Keep cultivating your Community and let them know which new features are based on their feedback so they'll stay engaged and increase their participation.

Acquisition

Having a strong community can help your sales and marketing generate leads effectively. Through content or events, a community increases awareness of your brand, helps determine what problems members are looking to solve, and gauges their readiness to buy. Getting your marketing team involved in your Community will increase traffic and exposure to all the activities they conduct – boost customer acquisition.

Contribution

Communities should promote contributions and collaborations. Aim to collect at least one quality contribution per month, and promote the one that gets the most upvotes. Demonstrate how customers are excitingly using the product and encourage others to do the same. You could also hold a hackathon to let the Community crowdsource talent around your product and make a difference.

Engagement

Retains and cultivates long-term customer loyalty through meaningful engagement. Measuring engagement requires integrating data from the Community with data from current customers. Look for correlations between the Community and repeat customers to determine how the Community affects your business. How well your company is doing in your Community will be determined by the percentage of those who renew their contracts. Integrate with your customer relationship management (CRM) for seamless data analysis.

Success

Build a community that empowers others to succeed and assists others in doing the same through mentoring, instruction, sharing resources, etc. Make it easy for the Community to contribute their content - videos, articles, and posts. Count how many mentees and customers consume your content and buy, renew, or upgrade.

Final Thoughts

Community is key.

Ensure that your brands are viewed positively within your communities. A community that tries to do too much loses its uniqueness and effectiveness, making it fail. Recognize that Community is just one of many touchpoints for the customer. Throughout the buyer's journey, the Community plays a significant role in influencing the decision.

You will enjoy immense growth opportunities if you partner with the right service provider. Get a better start with Zooloo. Our team is happy to assist you with your journey towards digital transformation. Please contact us at sales@zooloo.asia.

• Discover more about Customer Service Strategies
• Find some tips on B2B Sales Strategies
• Looking closer at Marketing Strategies
• Read about The Digital Transformation Journey
• Learn more about our “Digital Backbones”

Tags: #CRM #MicrosoftDynamics #digitaltransformation #B2B #digitaladoption #digitalintegration #digitalsolutions #wholesaletradesector #wholesaletrade #ecommercestrategy #smestrategy #edg #emarketplace #customerengagement #customerretention