cx Archives

Creating Lifelong Fans: The Power of Online Communities for Retailers

November 15, 2023 By Guest User

For many brands, one of the most powerful marketing tools is the legion of dedicated customers whose passion for the company’s products and services sees them reach a whole new echelon of consumer – the super fan. Creating these lifelong fans is something any brand can achieve.

This guest post is sponsored content provided by Verint. Learn more about Verint here.

This most loyal section of the customer base can be found across any industry. From people who swear by Levi’s jeans to the family dressed as superheroes lining up for the latest Marvel movie, fans are everywhere.

And it’s not just the big household names or media giants that attract these passionate groups of consumers. Even businesses operating in more niche markets can draw on a small yet mighty group of dedicated enthusiasts who are desperate to engage with other like-minded devotees. The key for businesses is to provide opportunities to harness this following. A powerful tool to do just that is an online community.

These virtual gathering places, where customers can come together not only serve as hubs for discussions and shared interests, but also play a pivotal role in turning buyers into lifelong fans.

How Online Communities Help Retailers Do More with Less

Turning regular customers into loyal fans has never been more important for retailers. With inflation causing shoppers to scrutinize their purchases more thoroughly, retailers need to not just meet customer expectations, but exceed them to ensure they win their loyalty.

Take this quote from Verint’s CX Holiday Survival 20 23:

“Without question inflation has caused a serious challenge to our business as more and more customers are simply spending less in fear and uncertainty about which direction our current economy is heading,” said a C-level executive at a company with 10,000 to 49,999 employees.

So how can retailers exceed customer expectations and go about creating lifelong fans?

The same report, 45 percent of retailers polled said say that handling the increased volume of customer interactions is a major challenge over the holiday period. A successful strategy to ensure customer interactions are handled quickly and effectively is to reduce the need for customers to reach the contact center in the first place.

Download the CX Holiday Survival 2023

And what better way to do that than by harnessing a thriving online community where fans are on hand to help answer each other’s questions 24/7. Here’s how golfing brand Titleist leverages the power of their community to connect with customers, provide key product information, and drive sales.

How the Team Titleist Community Hit a Hole in One

Before implementing Verint Community, Titleist had to rely on either indirect feedback received from retail stores and re-sellers (not detailed enough nor scalable) or direct feedback from public social media channels (not always action oriented nor friendly).

With the power of Verint Community, Titleist was able to transform its digital platform into a space for members to access “behind-the-scenes” content, share golf tips, and openly provide product feedback – and in turn creating lifelong fans from customers. As a result, Titleist’s online membership grew by 500 percent in the first year alone.

This approach has enabled Titleist to add value for its community members, putting themselves in their customers’ shoes and providing the best possible digital experience.

Perhaps most notably, Titleist experienced a change in customer buying habits and shopping trends. For one, the amount of time spent in the “research phase” of pre-purchase. This meant that buyers were spending time online finding out more information about the products before they made a decision. This analysis led to significant insights for Titleist, and with a capable digital platform now integrated, they were able to take action to capitalize on their customers’ new behaviors.

The Team Titleist community is a perfect example of providing exceptional customer experience that creates brand loyalty while also deflecting customer interaction volume away from the contact center, helping to reduce support costs – a win-win for both the retailer and consumers.

Read the full Titleist case study h ere

How the MyOlympus Community Cultivates Customer Loyalty

Olympus, known as for its digital cameras, sought to connect more effectively with its European customer base. Their goal was to create an online community that unites photography enthusiasts, inspires them, and offers support, all while cultivating brand loyalty.

Verint Community served as the foundation for MyOlympus, a community where photography enthusiasts could share their work, engage in contests, access photography tips, and find community-driven support.

MyOlympus succeeded in bringing together like-minded individuals who shared a passion for photography and Olympus products. The community empowered members to discover new ideas, participate in challenges, and receive self-service support, fostering lasting brand loyalty.

Recognizing that sustaining a thriving community requires continuous improvement, Olympus enhanced the user experience and functionality of its community, paving the way for custom plugins that expanded core features, such as YouTube galleries, image galleries, and more.

With over 401,000 members, 504,000 monthly page views, and 263,000 shared photos across Europe, MyOlympus continues to drive customer loyalty while reducing support costs by enabling customers to self-serve.

Read the full Olympus case study here

The power of an online community cannot be overstated when it comes to creating brand loyalty. By offering a dedicated space for like-minded individuals to connect, share, and find support, businesses can nurture a deeper emotional connection with their customers as they become lifelong fans. This connection translates into customer loyalty, where individuals also expand their product.

Communities Drive Meaningful Change Management

December 1, 2022 By Jim Storer

From improving customer satisfaction to providing fast and easy support and empowering members, online communities drive increased revenue, boost customer satisfaction, and make connecting easier than ever before.

This eBook contains new, unreleased data from the 2022 State of Community Management report, explores trends in online communities, and showcases what success looks like in communities at the forefront of this innovation, like Spotify, Flexera, and Zoom.

Power remote collaboration

Drive business outcomes

Turn customers into advocates

You’ll learn about how online communities add business value to the organizations and get tactical ideas on how you can implement similar community-based programs at your organization.

Download your copy of Meaningful Change Management here.

We partnered with community platform company, Khoros, to dive into what customer support communities look like today. Through unpublished data from the 2022 State of Community Management research and in-depth looks at real community programs, this ebook provides a practical guide for anyone looking to increase the impact of their online community program. Don’t have an online community yet? You’ll learn what success looks like – and get ideas for starting your own.

5 Ways to Put Your Community Members First

September 20, 2022 By Jim Storer

Online customer communities solve many tangible business problems. They can increase case deflection, lower support costs, enable distance collaboration, and connect global audiences. Customer communities also empower their members by making them feel seen and heard.

Empowerment might not be on your radar as a community use case, but connecting with your audience can pay big dividends. When your members know you care the online relationship shifts from a transaction to an interaction. A whopping 62% of customer communities report that their members feel seen and heard through online community initiatives. How can you make sure the communication in your communities is a two-way street?

Here are five ways we’ve found to put your members first – making them feel valued and contributing to long-term engagement and member satisfaction.

1 – Integrate members into your strategy

For a lot of you this is going to be a big, “yeah, obviously” but online community members often take a back seat to corporate initiatives when it comes to strategy. Create formal member input channels for member feedback, like ideation programs, suggestion boxes, and event old-fashioned contact us forms. Also critical?

Make them easy to use. You want the barrier to contributing to be very low. You can set up a regular cadence of surveys for members, either tied to your editorial calendar (ie. surveys happen in June and December every year) or tied to member milestones like anniversaries or engagement markers.

The most important step here isn’t collecting the data, it’s truly integrating member input into your strategic conversations. Regularly review ideas and bring member feedback to relevant conversations. Don’t forget to acknowledge member contributions to help members understand where and how you are using their feedback.

2 – Give members visibility

The first rule of member feedback is: give credit! Always mention the member who originated an idea/attach their name to the feature, both internally and externally. This both provides positive reinforcement for the behaviors you want to see in your community and encourages others to share their feedback and ideas. You can also give shoutouts in the community and internally at your organization for those that might not have ideas or feedback that is used but are taking their time to contribute.

You can also create a formal recognition program (often called superusers, advocates, etc.) to tie member contributions back into the strategy of the community. This can be gamification, badges, branded swag, or awards, and doesn’t need to be physical gifts. Banners/labels on a profile or special mentions during calls or events are great rewards that don’t tax your budget. You can learn more ideas for superuser programs here.

3 – Recognize your members

Regularly spotlighting members and their work is a low-lift way to increase individual visibility in your community. Member recognition and spotlight programs do double duty as an engagement tactic, as they recognize the work of members and provide a way for members to get to know each other.

Sharing member contributions publicly may not always be an option for you, depending on your community type and organization’s standards. However, if you have a community Twitter, Facebook group, or LinkedIn you can cross-post content there. Sharing about community members publicly gives some visibility to what they’re doing behind the scenes.

4- Listen!

Make sure you’re proactively connecting with members with regularly scheduled check-ins. Don’t wait for them to come to you! Pay attention to what members are talking about, asking for, and challenged by. You can then create content and design programming that applies to these situations, even if they didn’t ask for it explicitly.

You can say you’re listening, but unless members see the result of that, are you really? Be sure to act on what you see, hear, and are asked about. Be flexible and willing to act (often easier said than done!) but your willingness to implement ideas and enact changes turns your listening into tangible action.

5 – Be transparent

Regularly share your strategy and roadmap and then listen to your customer community’s input. If online community members do have a say in your strategy/roadmap, make sure you touch base with them regularly to keep them involved. Don’t make them feel like an afterthought. If they have taken the time to influence your work, understanding how their contributions are being implemented is gratifying. If members aren’t directly involved in your strategy/roadmap, you can still update them on progress and plans to help them feel more connected to the community program.

When possible, share the reason why decisions were made. This leads to telling them why you make the decisions you do which can help them understand why your community operates as it does. Be straightforward and explain whether and why something works or fails. This transparency leads to trust, and if members trust you, you have truly built a community.

Three Ways Verint Community Drives Success

August 24, 2022 By Guest User

Online community case studies from Sage Software, Olympus Cameras, and Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

This guest post is sponsored content provided by Verint. Learn more about Verint here.

More and more companies understand that support communities can play a key role in their self-service and customer success strategies. Many customers view the online support community as the most powerful, convenient, and responsive place to turn to when they have a question, concern, or need about a company’s product or service.

The problem, however, is that organizations often don’t fully recognize the full value, capability, and potential of their online community. That’s why at Verint, we realize that a community needs to be customizable so that it not only fits the look and feel of the brand but also reflects the organization’s values and business goals.

Verint Community is designed to meet your specific business goals, and we’ve had years of experience building customized communities across a myriad of use cases and industries. Verint Community’s capabilities range from delivering instant information for customer service to building brand loyalty to making life easier for employees.

Here are some of the different ways Verint Community meets the diverse needs of our customers and employees, as well as some success stories from our customers.

Instant Customer Support

One of the most useful and popular elements of an online community is delivering immediate, instant, and around-the-clock customer support – whether that’s through forums, FAQs, articles, or other avenues of information. We’ve seen firsthand how organizations have used their community to deliver a better customer experience, and higher CSAT scores, increase call deflection and save on contact center costs all while placing the information their customers need in one centralized place.

To see this in action, look no further than Verint Community user Sage. Leading companies around the globe trust Sage to deliver software solutions for everything they need to manage accounting and financials, operations, people, payroll, and payments. In North America, Sage offers 22 different solutions for customers, and with such an expansive portfolio, meeting customer expectations and providing agile customer support is a major priority.

That’s why they chose Verint Community to create their customer-facing community, which they named Sage City. After launching this platform, they reduced licensing and maintenance costs by consolidating on a single community platform, increased customer engagement to more than 20,000 visits each weekday and grew return visitors to account for two-thirds of total traffic. Here’s a case study detailing the success of Sage City.

Elevating the Voice of the Customer

One of the most rewarding results of launching an online community is that it allows for the brand to see the people who use their products or services turn from customers to devoted fans. By bringing together likeminded customers, a brand can use their community to build the sort of loyalty that drives real results – especially when prospective customers see the energy and excitement happening on the community forums.

This is how Olympus Cameras used their Verint Community to create MyOlympus, which has driven an array of positive results across Europe. They’ve evolved their services to meet changing customer needs while also growing their platform. Currently, they’re engaging with more than 400,000 European users for more than half a million monthly page views.

Here’s a case study that shows how MyOlympus has delivered real results with Verint Community.

Enhancing Team Productivity

An online community isn’t solely a customer engagement tool. At Verint, we’re seeing more and more organizations using their community to build relationships, give workers the tools they need to do their job, and create a virtual watercooler and collaborative space at a time when more people are working remote.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is the professional body for HR and people development with more than 145,000 members across the world. CIPD provides thought leadership through independent research on the world of work and offers professional training and accreditation for those working in HR and Learning & Development (L&D).

For more than 18 years, CIPD has been using Verint Community to connect members and employees. They’re currently seeing more than 200,000 users stop by their community at some point during the year, including a significant increase in mobile users in recent years.

Learn more about CIPD’s experience with Verint Community here.

Sam Pirok on Expectation Management

January 28, 2021 By Jim Storer

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI, and more.

Episode #76 features Sam Pirok, Sr. Project Manager at Extreme Networks.

Sam shares the benefit of setting customer expectations, how to bring a neglected, older community back to functioning/flourishing, and how to form positive relationships with disenfranchised/disgruntled users.

Listen now:

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As mentioned in the podcast: extremely good boy, Ranger:

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About Conversations with Community Managers*
To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.
Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.
These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.
Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Esha Singh on Empowering Members

December 6, 2020 By Jim Storer

Episode #73 features Esha Singh, Product Manager at Workday.

In this episode of the podcast, Esha shares how to empower members to keep coming back, the differences between a transactional community vs experience focused community, and how determination is a underrated superpower!

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3 Customer Engagement Tips from Powerschool, Tealium Education, and Acer

December 3, 2020 By Jim Storer

Check out how customer support organizations across industries use online community programs to engage with their audience and improve the customer experience.

You know community is important, but what is the actual impact of a mature, well-resourced community program?

Community programs leveraged as tools to support the customer experience have an out-sized impact, improving everything from engagement rates, satisfaction levels and NPS results.

Consider these three ideas when thinking about how you can use an online community to meet your customers on their journey with your brand.

1. Use Collaboration to Support Customers

“We are currently trending 30% higher in activity since last year.”
Jbid Kissel, Senior Manager, PowerSchool
Community Use case: Customer Support

PowerSchool designed their community to empower and streamline customer experience, bringing a multitude of customer support channels under one roof. Using the Khoros platform, the community supplements a direct business-to-customer support system with a collaborative space that increased activity by 30% over the past year. Learn more.

Think about where your customers want to connect with you? How can you meet them there with your community? By offering collaboration support solutions you not only get your audience connected with the information they need, you empower advocates to share their stories.

2. Start at the Beginning (Every Time)

“We are replicating many community features in our Employee Portal, because of the growth we have seen.”
Kristen Meren, Community Manager, Tealium Education
Community Use Case: Advocacy Programs

Tealium Education recently revamped their community and added two community managers. The update aligned advocacy initiatives with the pillars of their community, identifying three core advocacy tasks: create killer content, drive engagement, and build internal advocacy. The Tealium team focused on welcoming new members and engaging previously passive members. Learn more.

On-boarding is crucial, but also can be a drag on resources. Remember, every time you on-board someone into your community it is their first time (every time). What may be dry and rote to you is new and valuable to new members.

3. Extend Your Reach (and Your Value)

“Our community allows us to provide a level of support and expertise that would be impossible otherwise”
Brad Bliven, Sr. Program Manager Digital Services, Acer
Community Use Case: Customer Support

Acer has been supporting its customers with a community for almost a decade. As a mature community, it has captured and delivered a lot of expertise – but it extends its impact by generating visibility and value for the company via public search engines. The Acer community team can connect its engagement to a range of strategic business goals across the customer lifecycle; awareness and branding, communications efficiency, lower support costs, and customer loyalty. Learn more.

Connecting your community to your wider business isn’t just good for your current customers. Extending the reach of content helps educate interested parties, and keep your employees in touch with the voice of the customer.

Brian Oblinger on Customer Experience

April 16, 2020 By Jim Storer

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, customer experience, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more.

Episode #67 features Brian Oblinger.

In this episode of the podcast, Brian shares his perspective on why customer experience is a powerful brand differentiator. He also discusses how community programs can impact the end-to-end experience for customers, members, employees, and the power of communities at scale.

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