A wide range of community measures are being promoted and are increasingly adopted, particularly in customer success and improving user engagement/loyalty.
This article describes the close relationship between customer success and communities.
In recent years, more and more companies have been looking for close user communication to enhance customer success and engagement.
✔ Popularity of subscription business models
✔ Prevalence of software with steep learning curves
✔ Higher customer expectations to reflect the VOC (Voice Of Customer)
✔ Growing media power of customers
✔ Higher recognition of CLV as a management metric
So, how should your company approach customer success?
Customer success can be broadly categorized into four “touches;” high, low, tech and community.
In the States, 45 of the top 50 listed SaaS companies by market capitalization implement community initiatives, illustrating how popular communities have become.
So how do communities affect customer success?
Broadly speaking, four types of values can be generated.
Traditionally, customer communication methods had the following characteristics; [Analog], [Disconnected channels], [Flow-based], and as a result, it was generally inefficient.
[Analog]… It means relying on analog methods such as visits and phone calls
[Disconnected channels]… Sales team visits, CS team, receives customer feedback, support team answers phone inquiries, announcements of new features are sent via email newsletters, etc.
[Flow-based]… Each interaction is ad hoc and duplicated with many users.
Even in the context of customer success, this high inefficiency creates a puzzle that cannot be solved by relying on high-touch (one-to-one) communication.
For specific customer segments, you have to choose between two options; either “adopt the high-touch model and improve churn rate while reducing profits” or “suspend CS operation and maintain profit margins while the churn rate remains high.”
In this situation, online communities enable the following transitions; from analog to digital, from disconnected to integrated channels, and from flow-based to stock-based, improving customer communication efficiency and scaling customer success. You can provide value to all users and solve challenging puzzles through the digital transformation of customer touchpoints.
Furthermore, by allowing users to solve their problems with each other, you can reduce the cost of customer service and success per customer company.
For example, MIKAWAYA21, a franchisee of a local welfare business, has consolidated all customer communications into Commmune, which is also utilized as a system to store their contents. That allowed them to successfully reduce the cost of customer support and success per franchisee while achieving better customer communication and experience.
Community touch brings businesses and users closer together while bringing each user closer to one another. Therefore, it allows us to have more interactive communication in each case.
Interactive communication between your company and users allows you to have conversations with your users about new features, which was previously a one-way communication. It also makes obtaining feedback from users quicker than ever before.
Furthermore, through interactions between users, you can increase customer engagement even with approaches that are difficult to implement in communications between companies and users.
For example, specific use cases and efforts about how users utilize your service are inherently significant as they effectively improve other users’ utilization of your service. However, it is difficult for companies to provide such value to users.
Therefore, connecting users through your community allows them to directly exchange valuable information, such as detailed use cases about service utilization, with each other.
Users’ service utilization and enthusiasm level are structured as a pyramid model. You can generate higher value for both users and your company by creating a positive influence between each layer.
For example, our customer is an RPA provider, USAC System, which communicates with their users about how to build RPA systems in detail.
However, the customer success department could not resolve complex building issues by itself, and the support department had difficulty handling discussions in areas where the correct answer is yet to be determined. Having a community allowed them to boost their users’ better use of their RPA system.
The catalyst for our founding members to launch Commmune goes back to our previous business, a supplement subscription service. It is crucial to constantly evolve and improve the product in subscription or SaaS business models.
The most important source of this is the feedback from your subscribers.
However, it was very time-consuming/costly to collect customer feedback to improve our business of supplement packs despite not having that many users when we had just launched. We realized that the root of the problem was the distance between the company and our users, and there was a need for community measures to solve this problem.
By utilizing communities to bring your company and users closer together, you can expect the following benefits in gathering customer feedback.
Significant improvement in logistics speed. (One of our customer companies was able to finish customer interviews in a week that previously took up to a month.)
Asynchronous communication (not restricted by time or location) allows each user to provide feedback/ideas in their optimal way.
Not only users can answer a survey in a question-and-answer format sent from your company, but they can also provide feedback proactively.
Because of communities’ interactive nature, it is easy to see what other users think of a given user’s feedback (weighting can be assigned based on other users’ reactions).
Therefore, you can expect not only cost reduction but also maximized impact, both of which are major features of gathering insights and hearing from customers via your community.
For example, Tableau, one of the most popular BI tools, collects customer requests for service improvements efficiently through their community and links them to develop a superior quality of product. To date, 486 features have been added by their community.
The catalyst for our founding members to launch Commmune goes back to our previous business, a supplement subscription service. It is crucial to constantly evolve and improve the product in subscription or SaaS business models.
The most important source of this is the feedback from your subscribers.
However, it was very time-consuming/costly to collect customer feedback to improve our business of supplement packs despite not having that many users when we had just launched. We realized that the root of the problem was the distance between the company and our users, and there was a need for community measures to solve this problem.
By utilizing communities to bring your company and users closer together, you can expect the following benefits in gathering customer feedback.
Significant improvement in logistics speed. (One of our customer companies was able to finish customer interviews in a week that previously took up to a month.)
Asynchronous communication (not restricted by time or location) allows each user to provide feedback/ideas in their optimal way.
Not only users can answer a survey in a question-and-answer format sent from your company, but they can also provide feedback proactively.
Because of communities’ interactive nature, it is easy to see what other users think of a given user’s feedback (weighting can be assigned based on other users’ reactions).
Therefore, you can expect not only cost reduction but also maximized impact, both of which are major features of gathering insights and hearing from customers via your community.
For example, Tableau, one of the most popular BI tools, collects customer requests for service improvements efficiently through their community and links them to develop a superior quality of product. To date, 486 features have been added by their community.
So when should we start working with communities in customer success?
The answer is: “The sooner the better. There are three reasons.
Communities speed up product improvement. This effect is relatively higher in the early stages of service provision. For example, in the case of Tableau mentioned above, a graph showing the number of features actually reflected in the service over time shows that the younger the service is, the more community input is reflected. Communities can be a powerful tool in carefully listening to customers and building co-creation relationships with them.
2. On the other hand, once a service is PMF (Product Market Fit), it is necessary to engage in serious customer success efforts. At that point, the more the service grows, the greater the risk of relying on high-touch and the more limited its effectiveness becomes. (Naturally, the level of difficulty from an adoption standpoint will also increase rapidly.)By positioning the community as the mainstay of customer success from an early stage, achieving scalable customer success while maximizing the effectiveness of high touch is possible. Sansan, a previous speaker at our event, launched their community initiatives around the same time they introduced Gainsight, an integrated customer success management tool, in 2018. It could be said that the best time to launch a community is when you are fully committed to customer success.
3. Communities are a stock-type measure.
All communication history with past users is an asset with media value for future users. In other words, from the first year to the second year, from the second year to the third year… The value to the users of the location will increase. The earlier you start, the more valuable your community will create as your user base expands.
The value of community in customer success is fourfold:
Communities contribute to customer success in a scalable manner.
Communities increase customer engagement.
Communities are a better acquisition channel of customer feedback.
Communities create abassadors and customer marketing effectiveness.
What are the next steps for your company? Let’s discuss with us.
