a publication of

5 SignS Youneed a

CommunitYa guide for Support Professionals

5 SignS You need a CommunitY. A Guide for Support Professionals 2

a CraSh CourSe in CommunitYThis guide is intended to help you identify whether or not your company is in need of a customer community…But what is a customer

community? You remember the forums of the 90’s, right? Even before the adoption of social everything, consumers were turning to forums

to have threaded online conversations around the products, services, and companies that interested them. These were decent tools for the

time, but they were not optimized for easy navigability, resolution, or anything that didn’t require serious patience.

The forum is not dead, but it has evolved into the customer community of today. As you’ve observed—first from forums, then with the

adoption of social—consumers want to connect with each other and the brands they care about online. Communities provide a smarter

method to build this engagement in a way that provides your customers with navigable issue resolution, and provides your company with

feedback and insight that benefits departments across your organization.

A customer community can bring value across your company—to reduce support tickets, improve SEO, drive product innovation, and

identify Champions you can leverage for customer-created marketing content. But how do you know if one is right for you? Read on to learn

the 5 signs…

5 SignS You need a CommunitY. A Guide for Support Professionals 3

1. Your Business and Your Customer Base are GrowinG, and You want to Continue to deliver exCellent support

A customer community is a great tool to scale support as your business is growing. Community-based support provides a great customer

experience since it allows them to get answers quickly, form real relationships with your company and fellow customers, and provide you

with real-time feedback. Because Get Satisfaction also cuts down support tickets dramatically (an average of 50%, for the data lovers

amongst you), it’s a great tool to keep support costs and workloads manageable while still building great customer relationships.

5 SignS You need a CommunitY. A Guide for Support Professionals 4

2. Your support aGents are overwhelmed with tiCkets

We already mentioned that a Get Satisfaction helps our customers cut support tickets an average of 50%. Wondering how? We help

support agents rise above the flood of tickets by connecting customers to them, one another, and (most importantly) tons of great content

in the community. Community content ranks extremely well in search, so customers can self-serve their own answers easily, whether

they’re looking for them in your community directly or using a search engine. And it connects them to each other and your employees for

collaborative, social support. If the answer to their question is not already in the existing repository, and a fellow community member can’t

answer it, then (and only then) does your support agent get involved to solve it. Once that happens, the answer will exist there permanently,

gathering page views and acting as a resource for people who will have the question in the future.

3. You Get too manY repetitive questions

Your support agents know your product inside and out. It’s ironic, then, that they spend the bulk of their time answering the same,

repetitive questions over and over again. Get Satisfaction searches your entire community before letting someone post a new question. It

points them to similar content that already exists, so they’re often able to find the answers to their question immediately, and your agents are

spared having to answer one-off repetitive questions. This frees them up to deal with complex problems, allowing them to be more effective

and your customers to be more satisfied.

4. You don’t have a knowledGe Base (kB) or enouGh staff to ConstantlY update it

You want to provide your customers with up-to-date, official information, but if your product changes quickly or your team is small it can be

particularly challenging to do so. By using a customer community, you can leverage your customers to help you have the most up-

to-date KB possible. Information about workarounds for bugs that you might not even know existed will pop up because of the collaborative

nature of community. Just mark customer responses as “official,” and they will become a part of your living, breathing KB.

This can exist in a vacuum, or it can work to compliment your traditional KB. Get Satisfaction offers federated search, which pulls from all

your knowledge repositories to provide customers with the best of your social and static information. This provides your customers with

“official” commentary, as well as community content which is oftentimes more timely.

5 SignS You need a CommunitY. A Guide for Support Professionals 5

5. You have Great support Content, But no one Can find it

You can have the best content in the world, but unless people are finding it, it doesn’t mean anything. You want to make sure you’re showing

up in search for the keywords and phrases that people are actually searching for (hint: this is typically different than the internal language

your team uses to refer to your products, features, and bugs).

A Get Satisfaction customer community is uniquely structured to help its communities rank well in search. The URL of each community topic

has the company name in it, as well as the topic title phrased in the words of the person who asked the question. That means that each link is

highly optimized for the company name and the natural, organic language that customers are using to ask questions and report problems.

Also, Get Satisfaction is home to 70,000 communities. Because of the sheer size of the network, as well as the extent of customer-

generated content and engagement that takes place there, search engines are constantly crawling the entire Get Satisfaction platform. And

user-generated content is viewed as authoritative by Google, so it ranks particularly well. Once a topic is posted, it’s likely to start

showing up in search almost immediately.

Launch a customer community to help bring customers to support answers, product reviews and praise, and company information. Embed

it in your website and landing pages to improve the search rank of those pages. And bring praise and FAQs people ask you in social networks

into your community to make them long-lasting resources that will discoverable long term for other customers and prospects.

There you have it. If one or more of those signs rings true for you and your company, a Get Satisfaction customer community will help you

scale, provide better, more up-to-date support while reducing costs and tickets, and improve your SEO.

Interested in learning more about how a Get Satisfaction customer community can help you acquire more customers, drive product innovation, and deliver excellent, low-cost social support?

CALL: 877-339-3997to schedule a demo, or visit us at

https://getsatisfaction.com/corp/solutions/index