Community Creation and management!
Now, that's a ton of work!
Yup, at the beginning it is.
The more you invest into it, the better the community gets.
The better the community gets, the less work it becomes.
How do you create this?
I heard this post from reddit the other day. It went something like this...
I had a problem and I need a fast solution. So I went on to reddit and asked the question.
As I'm waiting for the answer I log in from a different account and I give myself a solution that is clearly wrong.
I then wait for an hour and I will get multiple people giving me the right answer.
People would rather tell somebody they're wrong.
It never fails.
In your company's online community, you want to create an opportunity for people to help each other.
Why would people do that?
You are capitalizing on people loving to teach other people.
How does this start?
Here are some short steps.
1. You need a good message board.
You need to create a platform for people to respond to a message and will keep that message around indefinitely until removed by your customer service team.
What else does it need?
2. You need a recognition system
In a perfect world, we wouldn't need to reward people for helping others.
We don't live in a perfect world.
We love to be rewarded for what we do for somebody else.
Give them that endorphin hit!
Allow people to upvote and downvote the solutions.
This way people can say what the best solution was. It will record that on the person's profile who answered the question.
3. You need to start.
You need to start with a great customer service team. One that knows what they are doing.
You need them to be comfortable with public conversation.
They need to be able to have enough experience with your product that they can help the people asking for help.
A couple of them need to have the moderator tag.
A few of them, although paid by you (or us if you want us to do this) you do not want to have employee tags on them
This will kickstart the community.
From there, the more sales you get, the bigger this community will get.
This community cannot be your only customer service solution, but the bigger your product gets the more people will go to the community first.
This will relieve the customer service contact by up to 80% depending on your clientele.
A statistic that I got from the Harvard Business review says the following:
81% of all customers attempt to take care of issues themselves before reaching out to a live representative - across industries. 91% say they would use a knowledge base if it met their needs.
40% of customers contact a call center after they've tried to self-serve.
If you want to have amazing customer service, you will need to have some sort of self-serve option.
If you don't have that yet, reach out to me at Legacy Innovative LLC and I would love to be able to help set you up with one.
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