Long-term, sustainable growth requires a thriving customer base. Beyond upsells and expansion opportunities, existing customers build the foundation of the community that surrounds each company. A strong community can help foster relationships, drive feature adoption, and act as references for potential customers.
In other words, an active, engaged community is critical for growth.
The problem most organizations run into is how to maintain a healthy community, especially if they don’t have the right resources and tools to support their efforts. While many companies can get by with social media platforms or instant messaging apps in the beginning, they fall short when it’s time to scale.
To illustrate how important it is to invest in a purpose-built community platform, we put together a list of benefits. From growth to informed product roadmaps, here’s what you can expect:
1. Consistent Growth With Focused Work
A CS team can work on myriad tasks on any given day. New strategies, customer outreach, and revenue opportunities present themselves all the time. In some cases, that can lead to Customer Success Managers (CSMs) working on tasks in an unfocused way.
This is particularly common when CS teams engage with the community on messaging apps exclusively. Constant notifications can create a sense of urgency for questions that aren’t a priority for your CSMs.
Instead, with a central community platform, customers can use each other to share knowledge, strategize new use cases for your product, and advocate for the value it provides. Fostering that kind of collaboration in an organized way means new customers can access previous conversations as well as start their own.
The result is much less strain on support teams, more focused work from CSMs on revenue-driving activities, and a stronger community around your product. However you think about it, your company will work more efficiently with those benefits!
2. Access to Customer Data Beyond CS Engagements
Today’s SaaS companies thrive on customer data. The way companies conceptualize their roadmap comes down to what they know about their customers. From CS teams to Marketing, everyone wants access to as much information as possible.
While social media platforms, like Facebook groups, can tell you how many members you have or how many engagements you got in a given month, that’s not information that will drive strategic growth.
A community platform built to facilitate growth can offer much more useful customer data. Metrics like active users per account, strongest advocates, or information on most popular employee responses all come with the platform.
Your team won’t have to waste time trying to understand the value your community brings to your customers. Those reports will always be available to anyone at any time.
3. Knowledge Sharing Leads to Increased Adoption
As much as companies strive to standardize the onboarding process, each account will get slightly varied information based on the questions the users ask and the needs they have as an organization. But the inconsistency is only a problem when it stays siloed in each account.
A community platform allows all accounts to share the nuances they learned either during onboarding or on their own. It also gives customers a place to trade ideas and strategies for making the most of your product. Finally, it allows your team to see what information isn’t landing with customers in their training.
Customers won’t adopt features they don’t know exist. They also won’t see the value in your product if they don’t think you offer what they need. Both scenarios lead to churn. If you want to prevent unnecessary churn, give customers a single place to find the answers they need and get help instantly.
4. Community Feedback Builds Better Solutions
As we mentioned, companies often use community platforms to understand how their product is being used and what they can add in the future. Of course, sometimes your team will need to take big swings to innovate in ways that customers might not predict. But when it comes to more regular feature updates, your community is an excellent source of inspiration.
Look for ways to update trainings to be more clear. Notice what workarounds are popular in your community platform and make them available out of the box. Post polls and other discussion topics to understand which accounts prefer which features.
Armed with direct responses from your customer base, you ensure that you’re constantly adding value and never wasting resources on features that won’t help your customers reach their goals.
Unlock the Strategic Advantages of a Community Platform
Want to dive deeper into the benefits of a community platform? Check out our new webinar with Richard Millington, Founder & Managing Director of Feverbee: ‘Good Enough’ Is No Longer Enough: Recognizing Your Community’s Needs Beyond the Basics.
