Along with the use of self-service and automated tools, customer communities increasingly have been deployed by organizations wishing to connect and improve engagement with their customers. These online destinations allow organizations to bring together new customers, expert users, evangelists, and company experts to improve customer engagement, success, and overall satisfaction, while also generating and surfacing useful insights that can be leveraged across the entire scope of business operations.

Community platforms are offered as standalone platforms that can connect to contact center, marketing automation, CRM, or other platforms, or as components of large, comprehensive CX platforms. While traditional customer support relies solely on company resources, communities allow product and service knowledge and insights to be delivered and derived from users, many of whom have extensive expertise, and take pride in being evangelists or advocates.

Community platforms can serve as a go-to resource for basic support questions, often using an integrated, self-service knowledge base. This provides customers with quick and easy answers to questions, allowing customer support or success teams to focus on more complex or higher-value activities.

Furthermore, the creation of a community space can improve engagement around a company’s product or service. Within a community, users can provide significant levels of support and encouragement to other users, which is helpful for new customers, or for those struggling with what they perceive to be a unique issue. By creating a space for users to connect, solutions to challenges or issues can often be shared among customers, without requiring the customer to connect with the company’s support teams.

As customers increasingly utilize a community, overall engagement with the company and satisfaction generally rise, as any interaction with company representatives within the community demonstrates a willingness to engage with, listen, and interact with customers directly.

However, driving engagement from a community platform is far from a set-it-and-forget-it proposition. Jessica Daniels, Grove Community Manager with Sequoia, a provider of HR services and technology. Sequoia utilizes Gainsight’s Product Experience platform and Insided’s community platform to manage and analyze its customers’ use of the Grove Community. In a webinar, Daniels discussed several keys to successfully manage a customer community.

“The driving forces are connect, cultivate, and curate,” Daniels says, referring to the tasks of reaching out to customers who are not yet involved in a community, cultivating their experience by making information easily accessible and digestible, and selecting relevant topics to further relate how the company’s products are relevant to the customer’s business.

Sequoia began its community by leveraging the strong relationships it already had with existing clients, where there was mutual respect, inviting the first 100 clients to help kick off the community as a beta group.

“So, we just continue to build on those relationships that our service team and our support teams have already done a great job at establishing a rapport,” Daniels says. “And then we use those folks to help bring in that knowledge that they have, or the experience that they have, or we have them join us as a guest expert for these [Ask-Me-Anything question-and-answer] community events.”

Connecting with customers can be achieved by directly reaching out to people via private messaging, or by sending out a newsletter with a call to action to encourage other people to engage with the community. “I think that weekly newsletter with a call to action in it really helps drive those that re-engagement each week,” Daniels says. “And quite frankly, the HR industry folks are really busy, so they don’t always remember, ‘oh, I was going to log in and check out the community’.”

However, timing is key, as Sequoia’s customer base is often busy driving healthcare benefits renewals during the last quarter of the year. “Anytime between October, November and December, I’m probably not going to be asking for content from people because they’re so busy driving those renewals, getting open enrollments done,” Daniels says. “We have to align the value of our community and where it can be valuable at the right time.”

Cultivating the right content is also a key to developing a community that will be used and embraced. Daniels says that Sequoia will leverage the expertise of its internal product and service teams to identify knowledgeable vendors and client experts to contribute to the Ask-Me-Anything events, with all questions and answers posted in the community so that members can refer to them at any time. The goal is to identify experts who have their finger on the pulse of topics that are relevant to the issues that interest community members, but also relate to Sequoia’s services and offerings.

“And so, if you think about it from a community standpoint, you’re getting double the engagement because they are your clients, but they’re also your experts,” Daniels explains. “So those posts and all those visits and all the answers are collaboration happening among your clients, but you’re also leveraging the fact that you have vendors or experts that are your clients, too.”

Finally, Daniels says that curation of content is important to the success of the community. “We create resources to help you navigate the platform and our products and have product updates, guides, and tutorials on kind of how to do things in a self-service manner,” she says. “We don’t create resources and content just to create them – everything is tied to a product, the platform, or something along those lines.”

However, Daniels says that while content in the community is related to the platform and product, the messaging is non-promotional, to keep the community from being perceived as a sales platform. “If I’m asking anybody on our internal teams to go in and help answer questions, they’re answering the questions and then they’re saying, if you want to follow up, let me know. But the community is for our people; it’s not for us to push our products – we have other places where we can do all those things.”

Perhaps most importantly, Daniels highlighted the need to be consistent.

“Sequoia does not do anything that is unusual as far as community goes,” she says. “What we do correctly is consistency. So, all these things are things that you’re probably doing in your community or what you’ve thought about doing or should be on your radar if you haven’t started a community yet. But we’re just doing them consistently and we understand to put our people first.”