As organizations around the world accelerate their digital transformations, becoming closely aligned with customers’ technology needs has never been more important. Companies that ignore opportunities to formulate customer communities that drive technology development do so at their own peril.

- Raj Sethuraman

Humans thrive in communal spaces. Social connections make people healthier and happier. They also enhance feelings of connection with and loyalty to a brand. McKinsey calls reaching consumers via communities “the ‘big idea’ in 2020s marketing.”

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating an engaging community for your business: 

• What constitutes a customer community
• Goals to keep in mind when you start a community
• First steps for creating a client community
• Outcomes of having a collective space for clients
• What Accelo’s community channels look like

What Is a Customer Community?

A customer community is a place for customers or users to connect on all sorts of topics, including product or service discussions and feedback, best practices, industry news, announcements and updates. It’s also a place for customers to connect with internal experts to brainstorm ideas and share meaningful insights and feedback. 

Goals of Building a Customer Community

As with other business decisions, the choice to start a community is a representation of your values. What kind of message do you want to send to your existing and future clients — and what kind of relationship do you hope to establish with them?

Below, we explore several goals you might have as you set out to build a customer community.

Demonstrate a customer-first mindset 

A community is a way of showing your customers they’re at the forefront of your mind. When they feel included and important, they’ll be more likely to generously offer up feedback and valued insights as the ones who interact with your team and benefit from your services.

➡️ Achieving this goal is all about perfecting how you communicate with clients.

Help your team better understand clients’ needs

Understanding customers’ needs and challenges is crucial in developing new, relevant services. Having close, conversational relationships with clients in your community gives you clear direction for brainstorming and identifying common themes and new ideas. 

➡️ A community can serve as part of a larger client retention strategy.

Be more responsive, accessible and approachable

There’s nothing that quite measures up to a community if your aim is to give your customers access to a robust, personalized resource at any time. Your community should feel like a safe space to ask questions and receive quick, thorough answers from peers and experts.

➡️ Train your team to be accessible while maintaining boundaries. 

Getting Your Community Started 

If you feel ready to explore what a community could do for your business, here are our recommended first steps to prepare for launch:

1. Start with a goal. Whether you identify with any of the goals above or have another reason for creating a community for your clients, it’s important to decide what you hope to achieve before diving in.
2. Identify challenges. What roadblock do you anticipate, if any? Does your team have the capacity to moderate a community — or the interest in doing so? Think about questions like these before you commit.
3. Get buy-in from internal team members. Share the “why” behind client community implementation, and offer training to help your employees feel comfortable responding to clients in a way that reflects your company values.
4. Decide on a format and platform. After you’ve covered all of the above, you can get to the practical step of exploring software options, social platforms or website add-ons that will make your ideal community come to life.  

Outcomes of Shaping a Strong Community 

Because building a community requires a significant investment of time, money and effort, you should approach the process with patience and intention.

If you keep your broad business strategy top of mind in setting up and moderating your community, you could witness some tangible short- and long-term outcomes, including: 

• Increased collaboration and engagement amongst clients: An open forum for customers makes them feel they’re not alone. You may notice more collaboration and unprompted conversation amongst your clients, rather than just between them and your team. 
• Improved customer experience and satisfaction: If you measure customer satisfaction or request feedback or reviews, you may see a positive change once they have a go-to resource for things like product news, best practices, upcoming events and announcements and industry-specific news.
• A running log of inquiries and conversations: A community is a great historical resource for your team. Especially if the interface is searchable, you can use your community as an external source of input in internal meetings and planning.

Find Community With Accelo

Want to see what an active client community feels like? Here’s how we’ve set up Accelo’s.

The Accelo Community is a comprehensive resource for product news, best practices, upcoming events and industry news. We encourage members to share best practices and post questions. The community is moderated by support engineers and customer success managers, who engage and collaborate with users. 

We have three community subsets: 

• Support Forum: Accelo users can ask questions, share tips and discuss best practices with fellow users and Accelo’s Support team. 
• Developer Forum: Developers and API enthusiasts can ask questions, share ideas and provide feedback related to Accelo’s APIs.
• Product Forum: Users can go here to stay in the know about planned updates and other product news. 

In addition to building and maintaining customer communities, you can improve client relationships and prevent churn with some simple training strategies to help your team deliver better client service. 

About the Author

Darby Kiernan is a Customer Success Manager at Accelo, where she is a supportive partner providing effective solutions to customers’ unique challenges. In nearly two years at the company, she has held roles in sales development and customer success. To further her commitment to the customer experience, Darby is currently working toward her Customer Success Manager certification via the Success League.