Having designed, built and run online communities since 1980, there is no question in my mind about the potential value of these resources, especially for Customer Success. I’ve seen it proven, over and over. Today, with the tremendous pressure on Customer Success groups and executives worldwide to do more with less, the potential for virtual communities is even greater. However, this is not an “if you build it, they will come” scenario. To win, you first have to determine very clearly what you are trying to accomplish, and how you will know you’ve succeeded. It’s vital to understand the nature of the technology and how to design, build, market, and manage the elements of your digital customer success program. Otherwise, you’ll waste a lot of time and money only to end up with little to show for your investment.
Why Are We Doing This?
Are you hoping to spread out the workflow of your CSMs by engaging the members of your ecosystem to do a percentage of the communications and customer encouragement? If so, do you know which categories of communications you want handled by the community? Are you intending to divert some number of support cases each month? Will this be a marketing initiative, to attract prospects and to help them learn more about your product/company? Is finding and developing customer advocates your objective? Sharing useful content with the customer base? All of these are worthy goals, but their metrics are very different. You can achieve all of them, but which is your priority?
Understanding the Technology
Available 24/7, 365 days per year, worldwide, at low or no cost — what could be better? The technology will certainly deliver that, but if no one visits, or is able to find what they’re looking for, or able to use it if they do — what have you accomplished?
Online communities have some inherent limitations that will need to be overcome by effective configuration and management. For example, visitors don’t tend to read more than 2 pages of entries down, so you’ll need to offer multiple sections, arranged by logical topic if you can.
There is more to an online community than just the threaded message discussions. You also should have either en embedded Library where the entries can be referenced by posts, or an external library that can support the same linking function.
A robust search function and careful tagging of entries is crucial. Note that many will not search, they’ll just open a new topic — with the result that there is flood of entries and noise. This is why having an effective Moderator to actively manage the forum is a requirement. If you don’t have a skilled moderator on your staff, retain one from outside and have them build up a team of resources to assist from your ecosystem.
Designing the Community Resource
What is your desired audience? How will you reach the members and what might motivate them to visit and participate in the ongoing discussions? What else do you want them to do for you? All of these questions and more need to be carefully considered in the process of designing the user interface and layout. An online community should be considered as a product, and designed and built as such.
The interactions you want to move to the online community are not free; someone has to be responsible for developing those resources and maintaining them. That can be an employee or a consultant, but either will need to be paid. Your ecosystem partners may be willing to donate some content, but that won’t be enough by itself, and the process still has to be managed.
Marketing Your Community
Opening the virtual doors is only one piece of what needs to be an ongoing, effectively designed and executed marketing campaign. It never stops. Just as with your company website, the more links and conduits that bring people in, the better.
I started The Customer Success Forum on LinkedIn back in 2009 with 350 members. It now has over 60K international participants, but as a Public group, its reach is far, far wider. New posts are added to the general feed of all visitors to LinkedIn according to their algorithm. Readers who are not members of the specific group can react/Like posts, but cannot comment unless they first join the group. That’s one channel. Your website is another. Advertising, ecosystem partner referrals, search engines, conference presentations, webinars — use all of them.
Proving the Point
In a recent LinkedIn discussion, a participant commented: “How can an online community advance value realization at scale, beyond product, training and adoption? How could it at scale drive success plans, business outcomes and quantifiable business value that currently really seems to be the exclusive domain of high touch engagements?” It’s an excellent question, for those high-touch engagements require seasoned domain expertise and subject matter experts — and those people aren’t cheap. You need them, but wouldn’t it make sense to focus them on the things only they can effectively deal with? Your online forum can help. By asking the right questions in the forum, you get people thinking about how the answers might apply to their businesses, encouraging them to do their homework. Second, by resolving a whole host of minor issues via the forum, you increase the amount of time available for those high cost domain experts to focus on the most serious of issues.
If you really want to explore what an online community could do for your Customer Success initiatives, let’s talk about it. We can limit the discussion to just your online community, or broaden it out to include an overview of your entire corporate ecosystem. Either way, start here with a brief survey to get the data. Then schedule an Office Hours session for followup.
