Building customer communities to accelerate innovation and growth
Increasing customer loyalty in today’s difficult economic times might seem impossible, but the rewards are well worth the extra effort and commitment. According to Forbes, customer-centric companies are 60 percent more profitable than companies that don't focus on their customers. This statistic on its own is probably enough to bring customer satisfaction and retention to the forefront of most C-suite agendas, if it wasn’t a priority already. However, there’s much more value that happy customers can bring to a business than profit alone.
By creating an engaged customer community, companies can also become more innovative and competitive, speed up new product development, and grow their customer base through referrals. Building such a community requires planning and patience, and is a balancing act between efficiency and resources. Its success relies on defining the best communication channels, at the right cost, to connect with customers.
Creating trust through communication channels
Putting customer service at the heart of a business is the first step towards creating a proactive community. Outwardly, businesses often promote that they are customer-centric, but this declaration must have real substance to engender trust. If it is simply marketing hype then it won’t take long before customers see through it, and take their money elsewhere. Equally, a great customer experience can be ruined by an offering that doesn’t live up to expectations, so products and services must deliver value too.
Communication channels should be a matter of choice for every customer, not a one-size-fits-all approach. To address this, companies need to devise a multi-channel strategy that suits different types of inquiries and customers’ varying preferences.
Exact planning is required to ensure both quality and quantity in the channels provided. By building layers of overlapping channels, organizations can successfully build a comprehensive customer communication and engagement strategy that will ensure their customers’ needs, desires, and expectations are met, if not exceeded.
The key is giving people the choice -- be it chatbots, FAQs, online chat functions and support forums, or named account managers and on-shore customer support teams. Trust is built -- or lost -- through each and every one of these interactions.
Using social media to create a sense of belonging
Tech companies have been especially successful at harnessing the power of online communication by using social media networks to reach more customers, better understand their preferences, and cultivate loyalty. They have done this by making sure customers are aware of their ideology and purpose, as well as showing how products and services can help solve problems or add value. Not only does this help to build trust, but it can also foster a feeling of belonging.
This approach was particularly appealing when Covid restrictions were at their height and people could no longer meet or work face to face. Technology companies that had a robust digital presence were able to engage more effectively with their followers, which enabled them to strengthen loyalty as many users were craving interaction and diversion. Even today, the legacy of remote working can still lead to isolation and online communities provide other positive ways in which people can interact and share content.
Now, the tech companies that nurtured customer communities during the pandemic are benefiting from the relationships that they cultivated, and are leveraging them to drive more sales, fuel innovation, and strengthen their brands.
Not forgetting the human aspect
Seeing and talking to customers face to face remains an irreplaceable element of a multi-channel approach for many organizations. Although there may be some reluctance to return to face-to-face meetings, it is worth persevering because the value of this interaction must not be underestimated. It would be all too easy to stick to online meetings, in the bubble of our new post-covid, remote working world, but limiting communication to this single channel will lead to a lack of engagement and personality. Building a relationship with customers -- learning what they want and how you can fit into the equation -- is difficult to do behind a screen. There is no better way to understand someone than to be in a room with them where you can assess their body language, physical reactions to the conversation and the general atmosphere of the room.
Why engagement turbo-charges innovation
Customers and users know how products and services are working better than anyone within the organization that developed them. Whether they use them every day or once a year, they can advise on what’s good, what’s missing, and why competitive options might sound more attractive.
Businesses can try to replicate this level of knowledge internally, but they will never match the same depth and breadth that users can bring. Through cultivating meaningful engagements with a customer community, companies can consolidate their input to identify trends that can turbo-charge innovation.
How to build a proactive customer community
To build a proactive community, companies will need to encourage customers to connect with each other. Organizations may initially seem nervous regarding this collaboration, assuming it will highlight more problems than solutions. Instead, businesses must view it as an opportunity to resolve issues, as well as supplying an inexhaustible source of ideas for new products and services or updates for existing ones. When an organization is confident enough to facilitate communication between customers that isn’t heavily moderated, and takes the time to understand customer's decisions, it will be in a much better position to make lasting and worthwhile improvements.
In summary, here are five key requirements to help companies create a vibrant and valuable customer community:
- Enable communication channels. Wherever feasible, businesses should encourage customers to choose the way they communicate and align the channel to the type of inquiry. Trust isn’t built transactionally.
- Encourage collaboration. Companies must provide a platform for their customers to act as a community, giving them the freedom to share opinions and experiences, whether online or in-person, or a combination of both.
- Ask why. Businesses should not only ask why they buy their products, features and services, but also why they have chosen the company specifically -- whether that’s culture, ethics, the company mission, leadership profile, brand etc.
- Keep listening. Ensure there are both formal and informal ways of listening. For example, organizations should collect feedback formally through online surveys and polls, and informally by analyzing chats and messages. Also, they should provide an easy way for staff who talk to customers to relay relevant information from calls and meetings.
- Cultivate referrals. Engage with customers about their willingness to recommend to others, such as through reviews, testimonials, customer stories, etc. For high-value purchases, especially for B2B sales, consider one-to-one references and site visits. According to Gartner, 75 percent of B2B customers check with three different sources for recommendations before they buy.
These pointers will help businesses harness the expertise and loyalty of customers to enable accelerated innovation and increased sales, as well as helping grow a community of advocates for the future.
Image credit: ratmaner/ Shutterstock
Richard Sampson is Chief Revenue Officer at Tax Systems