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Build Communities

Learn how to drive engagement at scale with a thriving customer community

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Jessica.Quazza
Jessica.Quazza
started this topic

2024 State of Community Survey

Fostering a thriving customer community holds immense value in today's digital landscape. We are constantly talking to customers about the c...
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Community Unplugged Content Available On-Demand!

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ElleShutty
ElleShutty
started this topic

CC data in CS: Reporting Use Cases

If you’re just now tuning in, please check out my FAQ post as well as my Getting Started post regarding the CC+CS integration.Now that you h...
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287 Topics
Julian
JulianGainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
posted in Build Communities
inSpired Innovation Lab: Roundtable Recap #2 - Engagement

In the course of our inSpired Innovation Lab we hosted a series of roundtables. During the roundtable around engagement, 10 Community Managers and Moderators came together to discuss the topic of engagement on the community. Due to technical issues, the recording did not have the level of quality we expected. Hence we have decided to write out all the things that have been discussed, so that you can read back all the tips and tricks. This roundtable was started with two open questions to all participants: What pops up when you think about community engagement? Why is engagement important to you? The participants had different topics in mind when it came to engagement. Some focused on interaction and replies, while others were more concerned with the helpfulness of the content and creating a welcoming environment for new users. However, when it came to the “Why” question, everyone seemed to agree: Engagement is at the heart of the community. Without it, visitors will be much less

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Julian
6 years ago
Julian
JulianGainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
posted in Build Communities
inSpired Innovation Lab: Roundtable Recap #1 - Getting Started with Superusers

This is one of the learnings that Ditte (Community Manager at Sonos) shared during the roundtable ‘getting started with superusers’ at the inSpired event. In this article, we will cover some of the most interesting topics that have been discussed, so that everyone can learn from these and bring them into practice. Should you have your very own tips & tricks, then don't hesitate to add it to the comments! Over the course of two roundtables, 16 representatives of 11 different companies discussed their own best practices around superusers. Ditte guided them during the sessions with her extensive knowledge in finding, nurturing, growing ánd rewarding this very special group of users. She even revealed why she introduced her own ‘beer rule’ in her job as a community manager! Use your superusers' super power The first roundtable started with a lively discussion about the personalities of superusers: Make sure to align the ‘type of super users’ with the goals of your community. If your ma

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Julian
6 years ago
Ditte
DitteVIP ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
posted in Build Communities
The Superuser management one pager from InSpired Innovation Lab, May 2018

What are we looking for? Look at community goals · Regular, impactful activity (likes and answers – check your data) · Constructive criticism (it’s OK to disagree, if there’s an alternative solution presented) · Helpfulness and kindness vs advocacy and brand evangelists How do we reach out? · Pick a specific post, and start your praise from there · Make them feel important – appreciate their knowledge (@Mention is great for this) · Ask for their advice – manage expectations How do we know they’re right for us? · Check their support contacts – how do they approach your service personnel? · Stalk their social media – are they 🙂 or 😞 ? · The ‘beer test’ – Do you look forwards to hanging out with this person for an hour? · Gut feeling and intuition – trust it How do we make them “official”? · Public / formal - or - Private / hidden? · Closed area (controlled with role) · Start with at least 3 users ·

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Ditte
6 years ago
B
BasRutjesContributor ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
More ways to earn badges

Hey all, I was wondering if there is a possibility that the rules where users earn badges could get an update. By example: we would like our users to receives badges when they reply late at night, early in the morning, really fast or by the amount of likes they get on their replies. At this moment it is only possible to recieve badges by the amount of replies within a sub category. This leaves little room for creactivity and encouragement. Are there any other Communities that feel the same way about this subject? If yes i would love to hear more about it!

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Jurgen
6 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
SEO of your community

Search Engine Optimization refers to the series of techniques that are used to ensure that content matches people’s queries on search engines. An effective SEO strategy allows a website to appear in the first page(s) of the SERPs (search engine results pages), which contains the websites visited by the vast majority of people using Google, Bing or Yahoo. Improving the SEO value of your community ensures that its ranking on SERPs is higher for key topics. A higher rank in the SERPs means that users who may have ended up in your competitor’s community end up in yours. Communities publish large quantities of content on a daily basis. This large content volume explains why most of their traffic is the result of organic searches. The better this content matches people’s search queries, the more successful a community will be, in terms of its SERPs rankings. Improving the SEO value of your community ensures that its ranking on SERPs is higher for key topics. A higher rank in the SERPs means

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A
6 years ago
Julian
JulianGainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
posted in Build Communities
What can I find in Gamification, Activation & Super Users?

Hi, this category contains extremely important knowledge about everything around engagement: You can learn how to improve your ranking structure, making sure that questions are being answered, that users will return to the community as well as how to manage your super users the right way. These are very important aspects to take care of, especially if you are working in a service community. Regardless the context (and maturity) of your community however, you will certainly have questions and concerns on how to engage with your users the best. Don't be shy and let us know what you regard as a challenge, we have a lot of knowledge and will be happy to help you figuring it out! Cheers, Julian

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Julian
6 years ago
OVOdarran
OVOdarranHelper ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Creating a private area on the forum for superusers...

........how do you achieve this? Does it work? I was chatting to Tim at NLE and he mentioned they have this and it allows them to share information with them but not with the rest of the users. It sounds like a good way to really engage the superusers so I'm keen to find out if anyone else has done this? Does it work? Darran

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Julian
6 years ago
OVOdarran
OVOdarranHelper ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
How do you improve the level of peer to peer support on your community?

Being an energy company, a lot of the queries we are getting through the community are asked by users with the best intentions, but quite often we have to pick up the query as it is very account specific to that customer. On occasion others offer to help by giving some advice and we are working on nudging our more active users to step in and help, some of which are doing so off their own back. But I'd love to hear from you guys on what you've done to improve peer to peer support on your community? Any real successes in what you did that helped drive this forward? Look forward to hearing from you! Darran

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Hugo
6 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Conversations Everywhere - Interactive community functionality

Using interactive community functionalityWhile static and dynamic integrations can serve many use cases, injecting interactive functionality into your online channels takes the customer journey to a whole new level. Regardless of the type of interface - whether it’s a chat-based search assistant or a customer portal channel - smart and real-time community interactions will enable extensive reuse of your user-generated content, and will even help add to it. Starting with the essentialsUse case: harnessing search resultsAn obvious use case with high impact is arranging for true federated search. This means that community answer results will be adopted into your web and app search engines for service questions. Depending on the search engine used, this social layer can be built using either real-time API topic search queries or cached results which are synchronized from the API at regular intervals. Another method could be to apply third-party indexing and listing of community search re

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A
6 years ago
Ellen
EllenContributor ⭐️⭐️
posted in Build Communities
couple of questions : search bar / registratrion / launch of discussions

hey guys, In our statistics, I see that a very small percentage is using the search bar (ca 5%) so i was wondering whether that is the case in other communities as well? any ideas on how to increase that use? second question: what is your % of members who do not activate their account? seems pretty high (35 to 40%) in our community, what do you think about it? and third question: I would like to start with some great discussion topics next year, for instance, head of marketing who talks about evolution in the industry, you can post questions you would like him to answer, and react later on. Or something like that, just to stimulate the sense of community cause that is lacking. we have a lot of members who post their question, and then leave. what did you do in order to stimulate it? did you launch that kind of discussions already? some best practices maybe? thanks! ELlen

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Jurgen
6 years ago
Tanja
TanjaHelper ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
How do you measure co-creation value?

How do you measure co-creation value to your organisation? Of course showing a better or new improved product shows that it has value. But i'm looking for a model to show it with indicators. My company likes numbers 😉 Does anybody use a model?

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Julian
6 years ago
Jurgen
JurgenHelper ⭐️
asked in Build Communities
Advanced web analytics for your community

In the near future, we'll have some analytics dashboards available in the control environment. That's great of course. But if you add your own tagging and tracking to your company website and community, it's possible to get far more advanced web analytics than what Insided can offer. For example, it's possible to track what paths forum visitors are taking to and from your company site and to compare the visits of members and guests. The sky is the limit. Who else is tagging and tracking on their forum? Do you use Google or Adobe Omniture? Would you like to share insights? What would Insided advise to community managers to get started with this?

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OVOdarran
6 years ago
Haiko
HaikoGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Share your story: super user meetings

There are many ways to activate a community. One powerful -and relative easy- way is to organize offline meetings with your (super) users. By meeting face to face you really build a relationship with and among them, show them they are important to you and learn what is important to them. In such a meeting you can also share background information on your organization, turning them into even bigger brand advocates and enable them to help other customers better. Organizing a super user meeting can be as easy (and low cost) as inviting some super users to your office, show them around and have a pizza and a beer together. Or you could put more effort & time into it. I know there are many great stories on super user meetings. Please share your story: what did you do, what did you like the most about it. Footage is of course more then welcome😉 To kick it off I would like to share a story from T-Mobile (but people from T-Mobile please add more background and other stories:) T-Mobile in

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Hugo
6 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Community Growth: Step 3: Motivating (KB)

You already know how to reach out to your audience, and why creating relevant, persuasive and timely communications will allow you to effectively connect with potential users. The better you connect, the more you will grow your community. The last step in maximizing your community growth is motivating. Motivating people to join and participate on your community is key to community success. In this article, we explain how. Why your community? To be able to motivate people to join and participate in your community, you should have a clear and extensive list of reasons to do so. Possible reasons can be..Your community is the BEST source of relevant and complete information about your products and servicesYour community is the BEST source of trustworthy reviews about your products and servicesYour community provides teasers and news on new products before any other channelYour community provides the most up to date information about outages and service failuresYour community is a place wh

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A
7 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Community Growth: Step 2: Connecting (KB)

You have already learned about how to reach out to your (potential) audience. The second step in growing your community is connecting. Connecting with your audience is all about creating relevant, persuasive, and timely communications about your community. Or in other words, presenting your community members with the right content, at the right time. Here's how! Why relevant? Your content and communication should be as relevant as possible. In other words, as tailored as possible to your target audience. You may rightly so wonder, what if different types of people receive my communications? In this case, the pitfall comes when we give in to the temptation of trying to talk to everyone at the same time. In most cases, your audience (e.g., your customers) are already segmented in, for example, 3 types or personas. When for instance sending out a mailing, it may be wise to use this segmentation to create three versions of your email rather than sending one, generic email to your entire a

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7 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Community Growth: Step 1: Reaching out (KB)

Growing your community begins with reaching out to those who do not yet know about your community. You must begin by spreading the word about your community and making sure that people who can benefit from your community's content will be able to find it quickly and with as little hassle as possible. In other words, you must begin by asking: how do I make potential members aware of my community and convince them that they can gain from signing up? This should be done by reaching out using different channels and through different messages. Why different channels? Not every individual you are trying to target uses the same channel(s). In fact, we know that people actually tend to have a preference for a certain channel. Some are more active on Facebook and go to your company Facebook-page, others use Instagram, yet another group will go to your company homepage, and many others use Google to find directly what they are looking for. This is why it using different channels to reach out to

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A
7 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
How to sell your community internally and highlight its value: How to prioritize your efforts? (KB)

You probably realize by now that your community can potentially benefit your company in a variety of ways. The natural question at this point is usually: “where should I begin?” Prioritizing your efforts matters. The starting point should always be given by your community objective and your community concept. Both aspects provide you with a clear guidance about where the opportunities lie, as well as help you determine the opportunities that are consistent with the role that your community is playing within your online ecosystem. To make sure that you are able to highlight the potential value to internal stakeholders there are several practical steps that your should consider. Begin with ensuring that your company’s digital media or website owners help you position the community towards your customers. Integrations are central in helping you bring relevant traffic to your community and to show the preference that customers have for user-generated content in comparison to sponsored or

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A
7 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
How to sell your community internally and highlight its value: Advantages of using a community for improving products and services (KB)

Your community is a rich source of data about your customers and prospects. Conversations in the community can reveal insightful data on frequent issues, popular features and most desirable improvements to your products and services (See also Post Field Analysis). The community is also the perfect source of product and process testers. This is because, on the one hand, Super Users often display high levels of technical knowledge about a company's products and services. On the other, regular users can be seen as a representative sample of customers, who will therefore use a product as a typical customer would. Your product and development team can select testers based on their role in the community, therefore ensuring that they have the required knowledge on products, belong to the right demographics or are loyal customers, all of which ensure that testers remain engaged throughout the different phases of testing. Product and development teams can therefore conduct different types of

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7 years ago
A
Alex ZumaGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
How to sell your community internally and highlight its value (KB)

Why sell your community internally? The more involved the different business units within your company are in your community, the more embedded the latter will be within your online ecosystem and within your business. Involvement from other business units can vary in intensity, but in general terms every area of the business can gain from the rich data produced by your community on a day-to-day basis. A community can directly deliver value to at least three areas of your business: Customer Care, Product and Development and Marketing and Sales.  For Customer Care and Support a community can potentially result in big savings on call deflection as well encouraging higher levels of peer-to-peer support and self-service. A community can help your Product and Development team improve current and future products. A community can help your marketing team promote products and leverage their branding efforts. Marketing and branding units can also incorporate the community within premium or loya

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A
7 years ago
OVOdarran
OVOdarranHelper ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Get inSpired by.. OVO! How do you activate your new community?

Starting out with the OVO Community was a challenge for sure. We were first timers, never done anything like this. So how did we tackle getting the community up and running with a well established customer base? To start, we knew we needed to engage people that we had a good idea would be interested in at least the concept. We offer customers an online discount for managing their account online, so these customers were an obvious choice to target with our first communications. We already know they like to manage things online, therefore are more likely to want to get help/self serve online. Secondly, we were lucky enough to have a research community that was already up and running which we knew had engaged OVO customers ready and willing to support us. Last but not least, our social audience. Again, these customers fit right into the target pot for launch. Anyone in a social space, again more likely to want to self service, and also gives us more chance of someone sharing this,

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tomasmouton
7 years ago
Anouk
AnoukGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
The value of UCG

User-generated content is hot! Consumers rely more heavily on each other's opinion than on branded content. Thus, UGC is one of the most (if not the most) powerful tools you can have in building trust with your customers and prospects! Read more about how this works in this inSided blog. How do you ensure there is an abundance of UGC in your community? Share your story and help out the community!

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Anouk
7 years ago
Anouk
AnoukGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Improve your community NPS now!

Simyo, T-Mobile and KPN have the highest NPS (Net Promoter Scores) measured in The Netherlands, scoring well above the country average. Beside all three being telco’s, they have two important things in common; they are some of inSided’s first clients, and they have a longstanding commitment to customer experience. Read here about what value you can achieve with your community conversations. What value have you gained with the content your members create? Let us know by commenting and help out the community!

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Anouk
7 years ago
Anouk
AnoukGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Community conversations for better IoT shopping experience

By 2020, the IoT (Internet of Things) market will be worth close to an annual $4 billion, says McKinsey. Supporting the people who buy these IoT appliances through the power of your community in essential, as we discussed in this blog, but conversations in your community can also have a big impact on the pre-sale phase of these electronic goods. Read here how communities deliver detailed information, more qualifying opportunities, and smarter upsell. Do you see your community helps customers make quicker and better purchasing decisions? Tell us how you do it by commenting!

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Anouk
7 years ago
Anouk
AnoukGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Get inSpired by.. Eneco's Toon!

We have talked previously about how communities can add value to organizations in the IoT (Internet of Things) space. You can read about how they enhance support and how they help customers make purchasing decisions. Eneco’s smart thermostat called ‘Toon’ is a good example of an IoT product, and is so important to Eneco that they have created a dedicated inSided community. Read about it in this blog and get inSpired by the Toon community.

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Anouk
7 years ago
Anouk
AnoukGainsight Employee ⭐️
posted in Build Communities
Customer communication to solve IoT complexity

IoT (Internet of Things) can make our homes safer, more comfortable, and more enjoyable. But getting all your appliances from different manufacturers to “talk to each other” can be quite complex and confusing. Read here how your community can help reduce this complexity by connecting members that are new to the technology with their more knowledgeable peers. How does your community bring together members to learn from each other? Let us know by commenting!

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Anouk
7 years ago

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