Uncover the Benefits of an Online Community. Ask the Experts

Transcription

1 Uncover the Benefits of an Online Community Ask the Experts

2 Contents Section Introduction Section 2 Jon Allen, VP & GM, Social Communities, Telligent, A Verint Company Section 3 Jon Allen, VP & GM, Social Communities, Telligent, A Verint Company Section 4 John Chmaj, Sr. Practice Director, KM Strategy, Verint Section 5 Omer Minkara, Vice President, Principal Analyst Aberdeen Research Section 6 Sr. Marketing and Communities Manager, Large High-Tech Organization Section 7 Communities Manager, American Sporting Goods Company Section 8 Cameron Hissey, Director, Global Product Strategy, Verint

3 Introduction Online communities are an excellent way for customers to engage with your organization and get help in a low-cost channel. In addition to these benefits, organizations that leverage an online community can also see greater customer satisfaction, increases in year-over-year customer lifetime value, higher customer retention rates, better website conversion rates, and annual company revenue growth¹. In this ebook, experts from a variety of backgrounds explain why now is the time to invest in an online community. ¹ Five Reasons Why Investing in Online Communities Pays Off for High-Tech Firms, Aberdeen Group, February 206.

4 Jon Allen VP & GM Social Communities Telligent, A Verint Company Jon, you ve been involved in the online community market for many years. Why are online communities becoming increasingly popular today? I think there are a number of factors. Self-service usage has risen to the point that it is the preferred way for customers to receive help. At the same time, there has been a massive societal shift with the rise of social media. This behavior has changed customer expectations to lean more towards collaboration and conversations online. Online communities bring these trends together, providing a collaborative way for customers to self-serve. I think that many organizations are seeing tremendous business benefits from online communities, so other companies are looking to do the same.

5 Jon, like most enterprise software, success with an online community involves more than just purchasing technology. What are some best practices to make your online community successful? Customer effort is always an important factor. It is important to give customers a reason to come back to your community, and this starts by providing useful and relevant content that members can get only from the community. Making it easy for customers to find the right topic with an answer, and a way for them to post questions and comments, are key. Because customers are able to post answers, it is also important to monitor the community and verify or correct information posted. To encourage engagement in the community, you should recognize and reward those customers who are active as your champions. Lastly, make it fun by using reputation scoring, badging, leaderboards, and gamification to help you drive consistent engagement.

6 John Chmaj Sr. Practice Director KM Strategy John, what is the relationship between structured knowledge and social community content? Verint Structured knowledge is incredibly valuable for self-service, as it is easy to search and read. It s also a verified source of accurate information. Meanwhile, online community threads often expose questions and contexts of emerging needs, so they can be extremely helpful to frame and identify new or unusual issues to formalize. The best self-service sites allow users to search both structured and unstructured information at the same time, and emerging issues from online communities are automatically routed to authors to create structured knowledge, providing the best of both worlds.

7 Omer Minkara VP, Principal Analyst Aberdeen Group Omer, can you tell us about the business benefits of an online community? Buyers vote with their wallet, and as such growth in client spend is a strong indicator of company success in the area of customer experience management (CEM). Our Online Communities research shows that companies with online communities enjoy 40% greater profit margin per account, compared to others (35% vs. 25%). Furthermore, those companies also enjoy 5.9% annual increase in customer profit margins whereas peers without an online community platform observe a 0.4% erosion in this metric. Growth in profit margins is an indicator of an organization s ability to create happy buyers. There are two main influencers of profit: revenue and cost. The aforementioned findings indicate that use of an online community platform helps organizations increase revenue and reduce costs to enhance profit margins. Therefore, look no further than investing in an online community platform if minimizing cost of CEM programs and increasing client spend are among your top objectives. 2 2 The ROI of Investing in an Online Community Platform, Omer Minkara, Aberdeen Group, March

8 Sr. Marketing Manager Communities and Social Media, Large High-Tech Organization How has your online community helped you engage with customers and improve your support? Our community members are highly technical IT administrators who want to learn more about our products directly from our engineers. We create a bridge between our engineers, prospects and customers to share knowledge and helpful information. The community shows that we are personal, social and helpful to our customers.

9 Communities Manager American Sporting Goods Company At your company, the social media strategy is more about interacting with fans than customer service. Can you tell us about the benefits the online community provides as a part of your social strategy? Our overall view is to deliver timely and relevant content to our fans that is exciting and captivating. While we know that there is a better chance of creating a deeper, more immersive connection within our online community, we don t want to miss opportunities to start the relationship with a potential lifelong brand fan in another channel. Hopefully, we can show the value, commitment and authenticity in those channels that will inspire the fan to engage with us on our online community.

10 Cameron Hissey Director, Global Product Stategy Verint How is Verint uniquely positioned to help customers with these online communities? By combining traditional enterprise knowledge management with online communities, we are uniquely positioned to help organizations have confidence that every customer is getting the right answer at the right time with minimal friction. Further, I believe Verint provides the answer to how your knowledge base can evolve over time with community curated answers. The result is up-todate knowledge that preserves the quality and accuracy you require. Meanwhile, online community threads often expose questions and contexts of emerging needs, so they can be incredibly valuable to frame and identify new or unusual issues to formalize. Discover how Verint can help you take your online community to the next level at

11 About Telligent, A Verint Company Telligent, A Verint Company is a leader in software for customer support, digital marketing, and employee engagement. Its social software solutions help bring together modern collaboration technologies into a single integrated suite that includes social applications and services that enable organizations to create communities of interest for their customers, partners, and employees. Verint. Powering Actionable Intelligence. Verint is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions with a focus on customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance. Today, more than 0,000 organizations in over 80 countries including over 80 percent of the Fortune 00 count on Verint solutions to make more informed, effective, and timely decisions. Unauthorized use, duplication, or modification of this document in whole or in part without the written consent of Verint Systems Inc. is strictly prohibited. By providing this document, Verint Systems Inc. is not making any representations regarding the correctness or completeness of its contents and reserves the right to alter this document at any time without notice. Features listed in this document are subject to change. Not all functionality is available in all configurations. Please contact Verint for current product features and specifications. All marks referenced herein with the or TM symbol are registered trademarks or trademarks of Verint Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries. All rights reserved. All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners. 207 Verint Systems Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide VERINT info@verint.com