February, 2016 | Advanced Communities

Customer Communities Must Look Great

Posted on February 12, 2016July 14, 2024 by Stas Dunayev

Let’s talk about the importance of website design and online customer community design for your business.

Online Support Community

First, let’s imagine that you have a main website which represents your brand. It has a main page, a list of your products or services, a picture gallery and a contact page. It’s a typical website for doing business online – it can be done well, it can work well and be fully fit for purpose.

You may also have another website with a completely different purpose – to provide all kinds of customer support. This second resource is necessary to:

Provide essential information about your new products or services
Share news about your company and about your current discounts and offers
Answer your customers’ questions about products or services
Analyse your customers’ complaints or solve any issues related to your products or services (unfortunately, it happens in any business)

According to modern marketing trends, the second website has to be identical in design to your main website. If your customers would like to ask a question or find an answer in your FAQs, they go to your online customer community website. This transfer from one site to another has to be as seamless as possible. It’s really essential to have an online customer community theme that’s similar to your main website theme (which must look visually stunning too). Otherwise, your support community will look cheap to new visitors and will spoil your positive company image at a critical point. The perfect situation is when these two websites are identical – your customers won’t even notice when they were redirected to another website.

A well-designed theme is essential, but you also need your online community to be as functional as possible. Salesforce provides three templates for online customer communities with basic functionality for customer service. The Napili template has the richest set of features (but bear in mind that it is limited in some aspects). To demonstrate your attention to customer care, make sure you use the resources of the Salesforce online community to the full. These templates and resources will allow your customers to express their opinions or find the answers they need quickly with the help of the easy-to-use interface in the self-service community.

Registered users can:

Find information with dynamic search and see a list of related articles
Read articles, leave comments and evaluate them
Create their own discussions and attach links to external resources, images or videos
Follow the latest news and discussions with the help of My Feed
Share their experiences with other community members or contact the community manager directly

If you have successfully combined excellence in web design and rich functionality within your online customer community – consider yourself an outstanding customer support provider! Good luck!

Looking Outwards: What Is Modern Customer Support And How Exactly Does It Work?

Posted on February 8, 2016February 1, 2023 by Stas Dunayev

Customer Communities

Provide outstanding customer support service or lose your customers forever!

An average employee in a customer support role has to deal with hundreds of phone calls every day. Customers have questions or complaints about a company’s products or services, and not all of them are in a good mood. The employees in the call centre have to stay calm and friendly, despite the frustration that customers take out on them. However, as the day passes, the customer support employee inevitably gets tired, feels miserable and starts to provide a lower quality service to customers.

So, how can you provide outstanding customer support 24/7?

There is a good way to escape this stressful scenario and to prevent customers’ dissatisfaction.

Today, business owners use online customer communities to improve the quality of their support service.

What is an online community? It is a perfect resource for customers, partners and experts to discuss, share and brainstorm. Used as a customer support service, an online community enhances customer engagement around any issues involving products or services.

The main advantages of an online community are:

Searching for answers online. Similar to using Google, many customers search for answers in a community or on a FAQ, instead of making a call. According to some statistics, more than 70% of buyers do online research before buying a particular product or service. Some customers prefer the anonymity of an online community, because they can express their opinions without sharing their personal information.
Fast information sharing. Instead of answering customers’ basic questions via phone calls or emails, share the most important information on the home page of the online community. This will save a lot of time and customers will be able find the answers they need as soon as they log in. You will reduce service calls by up to 50%, if you enable customers to answer their questions online.
Great self-service options. Instead of asking an employee in a customer support centre, users can find answers in online community discussions. People that already have the answers are able to share their knowledge with other members of the community. The community manager just has to mark the best answer to make it ‘officially’ correct. Online communities also have the benefit of a dynamic search function, so customers can easily find solutions to issues or questions that have already been dealt with.