What is the added value for your business of offering a one-stop service? How to delight your customers in order to build a community?
How to delight your customers in order to build a community? Photo by Anthony Fomin on Unsplash
The term “community” opens a wide set of possibilities to every company. Like we have told your about in previous blog entries, understanding what a community is, how to build it and the great advantages it offers can be a crucial element for success in terms of the organizational culture. But the concept is not limited within the company: it extends to every interaction and customer wise practices.
At brand level, but also regarding your business model, the community around your company and the services you offer changes the game.
Here we explain why.
The value of community for brands and companies
Nowadays, companies are submerged in a digital environment. This implies that their way to reach their audiences, as well as the way in which they offer products and services must have a digital component.
With this in mind, creating a community helps to have better metrics and a direct communication with customers.
In fact, according to an article by senior lecturer in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard, Jeffrey Bussgang, and Jono Bacon, community and collaboration strategy consultant for companies like GitHub, there are three clear competitive advantages of understanding and servicing your customers as a community for any business model:
- Delighted and enthusiastic customers will help you to promote and recommend your services, which reduces acquisition costs.
- Members of a community are less likely to abandon it. In other words, you improve retention and increase a customer’s lifetime value (CLV).
- Higher gross margins thanks to a lesser service cost originated by better communication between members of your community which reduces the need for bigger support efforts.
How to turn your customer base into a community
Having established the value of turning your customer base into a community the question arises: how to do it? In Apprendo, we identify 3 basic steps to help you begin:
Set the foundation of a branding strategy
From your logo, to the last comma in your social media posts. Everything your brand communicates must be aligned to a single vision regarding your brand and what it offers. Define it and make sure all your team knows this identity to be able to transmit it accordingly to your public.
Establish clear communication channels
In hand with how your company projects itself, there are spaces and processes to foster a community creation. Have dedicated teams to listen and service all of your customer’s needs, in order not just to solve problemas or give support, but also to make your offering evolve based on your community’s standards and expectations.
Turn your products into integral digital experiences
Execution and service delivery is what makes the difference between just another product and a full service experience. For that, make sure you create a sustainable scalable quality ecosystem that, through adaptable and accessible technology, can be able to add more value to your customers, while expanding your own services
Scale and improve your digital services and create a solid community that makes your business model more profitable
Book a demo and get to know all the tools we offer your in order to turn your services into a real one-stop experience capable of delighting your community
Author: Alexandra Ortiz
