Client communities serving the world's leading companies

Building customer and partner communities is becoming a necessary part of customer experience management strategy. The existing functionality of social social networks does not allow to implement the entire pool of tasks for the development of relations with the consumer. The article discusses the goals, opportunities and features of the platforms, allowing to build and develop client communities, seeking to increase loyalty, increase commitment, increase satisfaction and simultaneously reduce the cost of customer support.



According to analysts, up to 67% of all customer relationships in the world are built online. The rich possibilities of the Internet and social networks have allowed to bridge the gap between the company and its customers. No more than two decades have passed and the management of consumer experience has become an important part of the marketing strategy of leading companies. Together with the growing consumer involvement in social networks, this has created wide opportunities for the development of client and partner communities. And only the presence of the company's representative offices in social networks does not allow to fully build client / partner interaction, at best, it only helps to collect feedback from customers about the company's products and services. Sometimes we get an interesting experience, when a company creates different groups for different tasks, for example, at the request of Rostelecom, VKontakte issues 1,200 groups . And surely some of these groups are created by users, and sometimes such “adopted children” turn out to be much more popular than their parents.
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Pros and cons of groups in public social networks to promote the company's brand.



Currently, there are solutions on the market (for example, Jive Software's Jive-X product) that allow you to solve the entire pool of tasks and at the same time exercise control over the client community:

• Share files and materials;
• Lead joint discussions;
• Create a knowledge base;
• Suggest and vote for the idea;
• Provide technical support;
• Sign users on different news feeds;
• Regulate user rights;
• Implement segmented distribution;
• Moderate content;
• Use gamification to engage users;
• Perform targeted and customizable search;
• Organize events from inviting users to supporting the activities of participants after the event;
• Build SEO optimization.

If you compare the capabilities of communities and the website with a huge number of modules, the main difference is in the personalization of content and that each message / document / news / blog has an author with a profile that allows you to see all the materials created by this person, his position and favorite photos .

What goals can a full-fledged partner / client community:

• Increase customer loyalty through interaction all the way for the customer (customer journey) from informing to after-sales service and further to brand brand commitment
• Attracting new customers through search results and contextual advertising;
• Accelerating the sales cycle;
• Expansion sales funnel;
• Introduction of innovations due to the ideas of consumers and their feedback (for example, Jive Software itself uses this mechanism to create a roadmap for product development);
• Improving the quality and acceleration of service, reducing the load on traditional call centers;
• Deep analytics allows you to understand what interests each individual visitor of your client / partner community;
• Expression of recognition and respect for active users.

Many leading Western companies are already implementing this strategy, gaining advantages over competitors:

Apple - https://discussions.apple.com/welcome
BMC - https://communities.bmc.com/
Cisco - https://communities.cisco.com/welcome
T-Mobile - Welcome | T-Mobile Support
Hitachi Data Systems - https://community.hds.com/welcome
Intel - Forum: Support Community | Intel Communities
ADTRAN - https://supportforums.adtran.com
Bank of America - https://smallbusinessonlinecommunity.bankofamerica.com/welcome
CA Technologies - https://communities.ca.com/welcome
VMware - https://communities.vmware.com/welcome
Adobe - https://forums.adobe.com/welcome

Here are some results of introducing client-partner communities:

• 29% increase in customer satisfaction (Strongview)
• Increase order quantity and re-purchases by 240% (EMC)
• 76% greater willingness to make a purchase (Analog Devices)
• Reducing the number of support calls by 40% (T-Mobile)
• Partner service time decreased by 30% (Toshiba)
• $ 2.6M per year savings in support costs (McAfee)

Separately, it is necessary to say about the protection of content in closed groups (accessible only to a limited circle of people) and about the delimitation of content for unregistered and registered users, which was thought out more carefully than in public social networks. Even if some user shared a link to a document in a closed group or to a document that is available only to registered users, such a document will not open, and the system will necessarily indicate that this content is not available for viewing and advise or contact the administrator or register .

Thus, if you are interested in strengthening and developing relationships with your customers and partners (which all the world's leading leaders and marketers insist on), then take into account the fact that many companies do this no longer in social networks, but in their own clients. communities that have much richer functionality and management and control capabilities. Of course, for the most part these are commercial products, and if the company has a task not to develop client relations, but simply to collect feedback, then the group in social social networks is fine.

Ekaterina Buzulukova Facebook | LinkedIn