How Can Cultivating an Engaging Community Enhance Customer Experience?

Businesses are hunting for new ideas to craft a better customer experience every day. How about fostering a positive community culture that can work in favor of your customers? Once your customers purchase your products or services, they would be discussing their pros and cons online.

Given that different customers exchange ideas based on their experience, knowledge sharing on public forums and communities can generate new ideas. So, marketers and business owners should know what’s going on in these conversations. Once you are informed about your customers, you can tweak your product features or marketing strategies to enhance their experience.

So, having a community of customers for your brand keeps them in the epi-center of conversations. Closely observing their voices, you can come up with fresh ideas and come up with after-sales customer satisfaction tactics. This would eventually craft a better customer experience and elevate the brand image of your enterprise.

Here are some strategies that would help businesses to create a healthy community to leverage customer experience.

1. Provide transparent and scalable support

In the first place, brands need to be proactive while developing a community forum to foster a transparent exchange of information. Based on the conversations in these communities, they should offer expert input and support. Besides, a willing and ready set of peers would contribute with online resources to the customers. This implies that your clients need not reach out to your agents every time through the traditional channels. As a result, the traditional channels would remain free for other customers who need the support of your dedicated agents.

It makes sense to have a mechanism that involves external moderators as participants. These are like community leaders who are incentivized and motivated for knowledge sharing and nurturing more engagement. This way, you can steer the conversations in the communities to productive shores. At the same time, community leaders can escalate complex needs to the designated authorities at your company.

2. Develop a self-service resource

Forward-thinking companies come up with valuable self-service resources for their customers. These resources are readily available, and you can consider them as an extension of the self-service you offer. Industrious clients often stop at these help centers on your website. Whether you enrich your FAQ page or update your website with the latest features of your product, customers can significantly benefit from them.

Also, your self-service resources should inform potential clients about different customization options of your products or services. You might be offering them across different sizes and versions. Adequate information about these products can help your clients make informed decisions. Also, these resources can bail them out of their dilemmas with realistic information.

Now, if any of your customers find the self-service resources inadequate or incorrect, he or she can inform you in the community. Also, you can develop self-service content on your website based on the demands of your community members’ customers. This way, you can enrich your self-service resources to cater to the needs of diverse customers.

Successful brands already have their always-on support channels in place. These resources help their clients post questions and replies at any time of their convenience. They also enjoy the liberty to pick threads up or leave them as they require. Besides, this type of support would help them customize the experience they expect from your brand. If they have any queries that other customers don’t habitually ask, they can reach out to you with them. Accordingly, your customer support agents can help them out with relevant information.

3. Consider customer’s expectations while creating products

When you have a community, why not use it as a platform to understand your customers’ expectations? Successful companies are already deploying smart analytics to feel the pulse of their clients. The problem with off-brand channels is the abundance of bad advice. As a result, customers find it challenging to come up with feedback.

Often, you might have observed customers using social media platforms to vent their frustration. They also request brands to alter some product features. Due to the massive volume of comments, their valuable feedback often gets lost. However, when you have a community for your customers, they can publicly post their queries and requests. Also, you would be having an inhouse moderating system that would ensure the proper functioning of the community.

It makes sense to study the comments and adopt some suggestions to incorporate new product features. This also ensures transparency of conversations and helps in growing a healthy relationship with your clients.

When you adopt some of the suggestions that come up in the community, you would be able to capitalize on the best ideas. At the same time, you would be delivering a better experience to your customers. So, when you incorporate the product feature, your customers would be gratified since you had listened to their demands. By fulfilling customers’ expectations, you can propel your business to success.

4. Think beyond support while enhancing your customer experience

In the end, customers remember your brand for the experience they enjoy while working with you. Regardless of how you organize things to deliver the necessary support, customer experience is more important than support. The experience is crafted at every touchpoint. It starts from the user experience on your portal to the ease of interactions. Whether they sign up for a subscription, demo, or newsletter, you should focus on the ultimate experience they gain. It pays to work with other support channels to provide a personalized experience to your customers.

Conclusion

With your community of customers, you can educate potential clients about new product features. It would be wise to develop your community that can serve as a dedicated wing to carry out external communications. 

By connecting with your customers and networking with people, you can feel their pulse and know their expectations. This would help you enhance your customer experience as you share resources, integrate product features, or address specific requests. In the digitized business infrastructure, information is valuable, so make sure to cultivate an engaging community.