external community Archives

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 Through unpublished data from the 2022 State of Community Management research and in-depth looks at real community programs, this ebook provides a practical guide for anyone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.

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.

Save the Date: Customer Community Summit is June 15th

April 13, 2022 By Jim Storer

After a two-year hiatus, we are thrilled to welcome our community audience back to Boston for a one-day, exclusive customer community summit. This all-inclusive experience will take place at Convene Boston on Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

This event is designed for community professionals working with external communities – including customer or partner communities focused on support, product innovation, and marketing/brand awareness.

We’ll combine live product demos featuring new features and functionality from leading customer community platforms, with expert panels and case studies from some of the top customer communities today.

What: The Customer Community Summit is a one-day immersive learning experience for customer community professionals.

Why: Launching, maintaining, migrating, and managing online communities can be overwhelming and, without an experienced team, can lead to expensive and time-consuming mistakes. Learn from solutions providers and online community professionals who have been in your shoes.

Who: Anyone responsible for launching, managing, and evolving online community initiatives. Community managers, project managers, stakeholders, IT professionals, and more are welcome!

We’ve also built in a lot of time for networking with community peers, and connecting with community technology providers to help you get the information you need when selecting a new community platform, or migrating an existing community to a new solution.

The Customer Community Summit will take place at Convene Boston – which means the food will be amazing, and there will be unlimited coffee, drinks, and snacks all day.

We’ll cap the Summit off with a casual cocktail party and head to a series of dinners hosted by our community partners. This is a the perfect event if you’re looking to learn more about the customer community landscape, are currently evaluating a new community platform, or just want to connect with community professionals facing similar challenges.

You can view the agenda and learn more about registration here.

The Evolution of Customer Communities

November 11, 2021 By Jim Storer

In 2021, online communities are table stakes for brands that want to connect and engage with their audience.

Community professionals are now handed the task of not just connecting with a brand’s audience, but deciding what kind of engagement is needed, and how to build a long-term strategy to foster and maintain that activity.

Today, customer communities typically fall into one or more of three core categories: support communities, brand marketing communities, and innovation communities.

We partnered with Khoros to explore these three community types, and to look at how community professionals can make their customer communities more valuable to their brands.

This ebook takes new, unpublished data from the State of Community Management 2021 and looks at how online customer communities contribute to both audience engagement and satisfaction (like higher CSAT scores) and how they make a meaningful impact on the organizations broader goals.

In addition to this new, externally-focused data, we profile three innovative online communities, that are using their customer interactions to drive advocacy, empowerment, and innovation.

Download your copy of this State of Community Management eBook for free.

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.

Andrew Mishalove on Migration and Customer Communities

January 15, 2019 By Jim Storer

Welcome to the latest episode in our community management podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about their community journey. They ask the community questions you want to know the answers to, including:

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How would you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be community questions…)

Episode #51 features Andrew Mishalove, Technical Community Manager and Strategist Company at Dell Boomi.

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Listen in as we chat about Andrew’s recent migration to the Salesforce Community Cloud, and how this move has facilitated a comprehensive customer journey solution for their customer community. We also discuss how empathy is a superpower, and learn the story behind the fortune seen below!

This podcast was recorded in partnership with Salesforce. To learn more about the Salesforce Community Cloud visit our Vendor Resource Center.

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.

Community Skills in Internal vs. External Communities

April 18, 2018 By Jim Storer

In The State of Community Management, our comparison of internal and external communities described them as “similar, but different.” That holds true for internal and external community professionals as well. Our research finds that, when you focus on active members, the engagement profile of internal and external communities isn’t that different — they have similar percentages of lurkers/listeners, contributors, creators, and collaborators. And when you look at the skills internal and external community professionals value, they rank the skill families in the same order: strategic, engagement, content, business and technical.

But look below the surface, and things start to change.

While promoting good behaviors, facilitating connections and selling the benefits of community are seen as highly-valued in internal communities, data and member support skills play a much more powerful role in external communities. And looking at the most-valued skills role by role, more marked differences emerge. For example, skills like executive coaching, consulting, and training development and delivery score much higher for internal community managers and strategists than external ones.

Conversely, skills such as response and escalation, and moderation played higher in external community managers’ skill sets. In the end, though, these different approaches are judged very similarly.

Top 10 highest-valued skills by Community Type:

Internal Community

Community Strategy Development
Community Advocacy And Promotion
Promoting Productive Behaviors
Facilitating Connections
Selling, Influencing And Evangelizing
Measurement, Benchmarking And Reporting
Communication Planning
Listening And Analyzing
Member Advocacy
Consulting

External Communities

Community Strategy Development
Listening And Analyzing
Community Advocacy And Promotion
Measurement, Benchmarking, And Reporting
Data Collection And Analysis
Evaluating Engagement Techniques
Empathy And Member Support
Communication And Planning
Writing
Member Advocacy

The general themes of performance evaluation may be the same in each use case — but achieving success on these measures requires different strategies, skills and approaches from internal and external community professionals, and the specific data the define “success” varies.

Explore the Community Skills Framework:

Clint Heath on Spearheading a Grassroots Community Effort

October 20, 2015 By Jim Storer

Welcome to the latest episode in our community podcast series, “Conversations with Community Managers.”

Join TheCR’s Jim Storer and Shannon Abram as they chat with community managers from a variety of industries about clint heath, cloudera

What’s your best advice for someone just starting out in Community Management?
What are your best practices for increasing community engagement?
How can you survive the zombie apocalypse? (Ok – they might not ALL be comm
unity questions…)

Episode #34 features Clint Heath, Community Manager at Cloudera. Join us as we chat about his move from engineering to community management, how he spearheaded a grassroots community effort at his organization and why friendliness is a super superpower.

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