Beyond the "recommendation" effect, developing and animating a customer community has many advantages, including being a real lever for innovation or a very effective substitute for customer service. Certain sectors such as fashion or retail have not been mistaken.
And what if software publishers decided to use it to boost their business?
Here is what your customer community could do for you.
1. Make people want to choose your solution
From TripAdvisor to Trust Pilot, it is now difficult to choose a product or make a purchase without having first screened the brand through comparators and customer reviews! The software world is obviously no exception, with platforms like appvizerto name but one.
The difficulty is that you have no control over what happens on these platforms...
Creating and animating your own customer community means offering your best supporters a space where they can express themselves and say what they think of you.
And that's not bad. At least, judging by the results of a clothing brand like ASOS, which observed, for example a 45% increase in spontaneous mentions of its brand among the "ASOS Insiders"...
2. Ensure the success of your next modules
Another good thing about customer communities is that they are a goldmine of inspiration and good ideas to fuel internal innovation and guide R&D investments.
The LEGO toy brand, for example, has developed a strategy via social networks and its LEGO Ideas platform to identify its future bestsellers. The choice of new models to be marketed is made through a consultative and collaborative process , which includes the Beatles' Yellow Submarine!
Others, such as Décathlon, go even further in co-designing their products with their community of customers, by establishing direct collaboration between the development teams and users, who sometimes propose very precise ideas concerning the resolution of a technical problem or an unsatisfactory use case.
This is an area in which software publishers are generally quite comfortable, as developers are often very involved with users in resolving bugs or limitations encountered and taking note of requests for improvements.
3. Test and improve your new applications
In the same vein, Société Générale has chosen to rely on its customers to create "the LAB", a community of beta-testers that enables it to optimise the functioning of its mobile application.
As soon as the bank wants to integrate a new feature into the app, the developers first put it online on the LAB. Users can then try it out and give their feedback.
They can also give their opinion on the design, the colour, etc... The aim is to develop the solution that is closest to the needs and expectations of its customers.
4. Nurturing interest in your solution
As already mentioned, customer communities are also great vectors of visibility, notoriety, legitimacy and influence!
By mobilising their customers around the design of their products, LEGO and Decathlon not only ensure that these products "meet their public" when they are released, but they also create a real teasing of the future product and thus generate a strong expectation effect around it!
Sans aller aussi loin, il suffit parfois de récompenser vos meilleurs clients pour leur fidélité ou leur utilisation assidue de votre solution pour créer le buzz autour de votre marque : c’est ce qu’a parfaitement réussi la start up Tilkee avec l’envoi de sa « Black Card » à ses 100 meilleurs clients, bien relayé sur les réseaux sociaux.
5. Supporting your users effectively
Finally, customer communities are a real asset in terms of customer care. User forums are sometimes more responsive than support teams, and your regular users are the best Happiness Managers!
The most active self-help communities can come from unexpected sectors: every day, for example, more than a hundred questions are answered on average four times by enthusiasts on the online fishing tackle sales site pecheurs.com!
The SNCF and BlaBlaCar community support chats are led by experienced users, with a proven positive impact on the transformation rates observed on their sites!
One of our clients, a manufacturer of photovoltaic panels, saw its customer community on what's app become its best support and meet with immediate success with the craftsmen who install its products : the speed and relevance of the answers provided was unrivalled in solving the technical difficulties of its customers. This enabled the company to quickly identify areas for improvement in its products.
All these approaches can be widely applied in the software publishing sector and thus contribute to your development.
In any case, the success of a customer community is not a matter of chance and depends on the respect of some good practices and key steps:
- Define a goal for your community: what should it contribute (to my company and its members)?
- Define a target (What type of customers? How to identify them? How do you "recruit" them? How do you build customer loyalty?)
- Choose the channel: social networks, specialised platform...? (Which channel will be the most relevant to animate this community? Make sure that its members "make it live" in an autonomous way)
- Define transparentrules (for facilitation, participation / contribution)
- Reward and value the most active customers (points/benefits systems, gift vouchers, highlighting, rewards, etc.)
- Set upan efficient internal organisation to animate the community and use the feedback generated (product/service improvement, customer relations)
The examples cited in this article are largely based on these sources:
https://potion.social/fr/blog/communaute-de-clients-4-exemples-concrets/
Some examples (and a comparison) of platforms dedicated to the animation of online communities:
To learn more about targeting and building a customer file, you can also watch our webinar:
