Are you are considering building a new Salesforce Customer Community to better engage with your customers? Or do you have an existing Community that is struggling and are looking to improve the overall experience? Then here are some tips based on our experience helping our customers do just that!
- Don't build an 'Empty Bar'. Imagine walking into a pub/bar/coffee shop and there was no music, no people, no action. How likely are you to stay and order anything? Your Community is the same way. If there is nothing in your Community that is interesting or inviting, your customers will leave and likely never come back. Avoid this by: Filling your Community with interesting content. Invite people to collaborate. Start conversations.
- Connect your Community to a Business Need. This may be common sense, but many customers want to build a Community just because it seems like a good idea. You need to have a reason to make this investment. Do you want to improve customer service efficiency by letting customers create their own Cases? Do you want to get product improvement ideas from your best customers? Then measure success based on the impact to this business need.
- Plant 'Seed' Content. Ultimately, you want your Community to be a place for your customers to collaborate, help each other and develop useful content. But this doesn't happen on its own. You have to create content in advance. Develop 'how-to' literature, start Chatter conversations, post stories of other customer success and challenges.
- Designate a Moderator. You will need to make it someones responsibility to manage your Community. Otherwise, it will manage itself into extinction or worse, your customers will organize against you! A Community needs someone to keep content fresh, intercept & resolve customer issues and deal with problem users and promote internal engagement with customers. You will want to manage this just like any other program with measurable outcomes. Possible metrics are number of new content pieces created, customer retention rate, trends in activity, etc.
- Empower External Champions. Customers who love your products or services will likely be excited if you asked them to help spread the word. Enlist these customers to be regular contributors in the Community. In the mind of a skeptical customer, what these 'champions' say has a lot of credibility. Reward your champions with early access to products, t-shirts & mugs with your logo, spotlight stories on your website, etc.
Luckily, the new Summer 14 release has a great new set of features to help manage all of this: Community Engagement Console. This new tool is a centralized place for Community Managers to monitor Community users and activity. The Reputation component lets you identify active users and give them some recognition. The Communities Analytics component gives you powerful Reports and Dashboards to monitor the health of the Community. Check out the Communities Managers Guide (PDF) for more details.
