A customer community creates a customer hub where customers can connect with you, connect with each other, and find what they need for success.
If you’re trying to improve the customer experience, start by looking at whether your digital customer experience is disjointed.
As a SaaS provider or B2B company, “digital” might be the only way a customer interacts with you. If all they experience is disconnected, frustrating processes where they have to login multiple times and go to multiple systems in order to get their problem answered, you’re not delivering an optimal experience.
One approach to fixing the problem is to centralize the customer experience around a customer community.
A customer community creates a space where customers can connect with you, connect with each other, and find what they need for success.
Your customer community should be a digital hub; a place where customers can access everything they need regarding your company or product during every stage of the customer lifecycle.
Here are three ways you can use a community to improve the digital customer experience.
People don’t connect with businesses, they connect with other people. An online community enables customers to build connections that help them be successful. Here are a few examples of reasons customers might visit your community:
You get the idea.
You might be wondering: Why can’t the digital hub just be my main website? Generally, websites are your prospect-facing, lead-capture tool, not designed with existing customers or the customer journey in mind. Even if you have designed your website with existing customers in mind, customers still can’t use it to connect with other customers.
Related: 3 Ways This Customer Community is Humanizing the Customer Experience
To be a digital hub for the customer experience, you should build your customer-facing tech stack around your community.
Why? To make your community that one-stop shop where customers can come to find support and success, engage with you and other customers, provide feedback and download resources, your community must play well with other key tools.
The most essential integration? Community and your CRM. Your CRM is the central hub of data. It’s not customer-facing, but it helps you keep your customer data organized on the backend. The community and CRM work together to support both the customer-facing and the company-facing experiences.
Beyond that, you’ll want your community to complement other key software you use to support the customer journey. For example, maybe you’ll prioritize support ticketing software, product development software, or a learning management system. Build the plan that works best for your company’s community use case and the problems you’re trying to solve.
The last reason community is such a helpful tool for improving the digital customer experience: It’s fundamental to every stage of the customer journey. We’ll explain: