Customer Communities (CC)

We’re happy to welcome you to the new and improved inSpired Community! Following many of our customers, inSpired has also switched to branded templates. What are branded templates? In case you didn't know; branded templates incorporate best practices from inSided's 100+ community implementations. And because it's a true SaaS product, every (re)new(ed) functionality will be updated seamlessly. Branded templates adopt a consistent, streamlined design that helps community users get to the content they need as quickly as possible. At the same time, branded templates provide multiple configuration options, including header images, fonts, and topic icons. In a future release, these customizations will become fully self-service - meaning that you can make design changes to your branded-template community on the fly. So, enough sales talk 😉 ... Earn badges! In addition to a fresh new design, the inSpired community now includes badges. Post, like, and comment, and before you kno

Hey everyone, It has been several weeks since we launched our first branded template. Meanwhile we have launched multiple communities and improved a bunch of things. We hope you noticed any changes, if not we got you covered. TL;DR 🙈 Branded templates are the latest community templates from inSided. We provide continuous automatics updates of new features without extra costs. Over the past weeks we released more than 100 items to your community. Some small, some big, some new and some improvements, we did it all. We hope you enjoy the things we’ve been working on. NEW ✨ Configure community homepage image and tagline via Control. Change your community image wherever you want, whenever you want. Unified list view. Discussions, questions, answers, articles and surveys all combined within one category. Articles. Publish high-quality content in the community. Include a full width featured image above the content and the topic will be highlighted in the community by adding a label to

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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!

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!

Hi everyone, I hope that you guys can help me out here. ☺️ When I upload images with good quality on our communitypage the images lose quality. The text on the images that were easy to read are vague after uploading them on the community. Does anyone know what the quality of the images must be so they also look good after uploading? It would be even easier if it was possible to upload pdf-documents on the communitypage. Is this something that Insided is planning to do in the future? Greetings, Jeannie

After a successful migration last year, Elisa community has reached a few days ago the 100k members milestone. On behalf of inSided team, I wanted to congratulate @Riina for this big success and we are looking forward continuing to help you grow your community. https://palsta.elisa.fi/

Hi! As you may know our product team is working hard on the development of analytics and dashboard for our platform. I want to use this topic to ask about Moderation activity KPIs exclusively. Please help us answering the following 3 questions: 1. From 1-5 how important is for community managers to be able to track activity that is SPECIFIC to moderators? 2. What is the main purpose of tracking moderator activity? 3. What are in your view the 5 most important KPIs on moderator activity? Feel free to add any additional comment on the subject that you feel is essential for moderator teams to be effective and to contribute to your community's goals. Thanks!

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!

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.

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!

Your community members are eager to help you innovate your products and services, but are you getting the most out of their knowledge and insights? Read this blog to find out how to leverage your community for ideation. Did you use other techniques to gain insights from your community members? Or do you have further questions on how to use the mentioned methods? Let us know by leaving a comment!

Are you aspiring to make your community the first place your customers go when they have questions? You can achieve it in just 3 simple steps! Read about how Simyo did it here. Are there any other steps you have taken to put your community in first place? Let the community know!

The look and feel of your community matters, our data shows. We have seen it lead to higher amounts of posts, more traffic, as well as longer time spent on the community website. Learn all about the 3 benefits of design here. What are your website elements that contribute to your community’s engagement? Let the community know!

Let us know by voting in the poll what you would like to see more of on inSpired! Have another suggestion? Don't hesitate to let us know by commenting!

Nearly half of your Millennial customers are willing to help you develop your products and services. But they also have different customer service expectations; they use different channels and do not wait around for their answer before switching to another channel. Do you see this happening in your community? Learn how Millennials are wired differently and take action to better engage them: Read all about how to do it here. Share your own insights on the topic by simply replying!

Want to know how to use your community for low-cost content marketing and peer advice? Learn right here from Sonos how to turn your customers into content marketers! Let us know in the comments how you got inSpired.

Hi, I am new to the product, orientating myself, and looking for an online description of the Insided API. Does anyone have a link for me? Thanks, Bas.

In the videos listed below, Rogier shares community benchmark metrics from 18 telcos and explains where the true business value lies within telco communities. Or read his article about this. Learn what role a community plays in enhancing your customer journey. Learn how a community adds to the pre purchase phase in the customer journey, which we call conversational commerce. Learn how a community adds to the post purchase phase in the customer journey, which we call conversational service. Enjoy the videos! We love to discuss your findings, don't hesitate to share your thoughts!