Communities that mean business. Get yours today!
Without a doubt, a positive online brand experience creates loyal customers. As several studies have discovered, the majority of consumers who engage with a brand in the digital space – whether by participating in a contest or by ‘liking’ a brand on Facebook – tend to not only purchase the products, but also make recommendations to their friends and family. Click below for big-ass version.
In honor of Community Manager Appreciation Day we’ve prepped this infographic taking you inside the mind of today’s community manager. Click for full size:
In the age of social everything, word-of-mouth love from your customers is the best marketing you can ask for. Creating that kind of authentic, organic love between customers and brand can feel like a complex chemistry problem, but some companies are just.so.good.at it. You know who we mean—those companies whose customers rave about them, seek them out on social networks, have their back when something goes wrong, and (most importantly) turn to them for all their purchase needs.
So how do you create the kind of fanatical brand following that makes Apple fans blush? We studied the ways of some of our favorite brands to understand the answer to that question. Check out what we learned in the infographic:
Prezi’s awesome community manager, Alyssa, accepts their Heart of a Champion award.
It wouldn’t be a Get Satisfaction party without goodie bags, some surprises, and recognition of the people we love the most. No, not Rihanna…our Customers! Part of our commitment this this fabulous group of people is that we want to empower them with all the tools, best practices, and capabilities to achieve success supporting and connecting with their customers….and we want to shower them with praise when they do.
When we first started planning our Customer Success Summit, it was a no brainer that customer awards would be in the mix. We decided to call them the Love Your Customers Awards, because not only do we love ours, but they love their customers as well.
The Love Your Customer Awards are a fun way for our team to say thank you to all of our amazing customers. Every day we’re blown away by all of your creativity, patience, and passion, and so this is our way to recognize a few of you. So, without further ado, the 2013 Love Your Customer Awards winners (drum roll please):
This award was created to recognize a customer that has an amazing Champions program. A lot of our customers have really excellent Champions programs that showcase their most knowledgeable, passionate, helpful users, but the award had to go to PREZI once we learned that they’ve actually hired a few of their Champs to join their support team. That’s a really special type of awesome.
This award is meant to recognize a customer that has done an outstanding job customizing their community. We’ve seen a lot of really excellent and creative customizations over the last year, but the Best Dressed Award goes to KOODO for the way they’ve incorporated their company’s culture into their community, and for the way they’ve integrated Badgeville’s gamification platform. With a community so awesomely customized to meet their customers’ needs, it’s no wonder they’re Canada’s most recommended mobile service.
This award affectionately known as Chatty Cathy goes to a customer whose community has just been ROCKING with activity. The CROWDFLOWER community is consistently one of the most active communities month after month… in fact, they had over 11,000 posts in their community last month alone. Congratulations Crowdflower!
We’re pretty big fans of user generated content, and we love it when we see our customers get just as excited about it as we do. The Widget Wizard Award goes to a customer that has done a stellar job implementing our Engage widgets and really leverages UGC. BLACKBAUD has several widgets placed throughout their help pages and is religious in curating content so that only the most important and relevant pieces show up.
Much like the Wardrobe in CS Lewis’ famed fairy tale, a well-thought out set of entry points can take users on a magical customer experience journey. The Narnia Closet Award recognizes the creativity around community entry points… the paths that customers take to find their way into a community, whether it be through widgets, the facebook application, or through custom web experiences. We’re very excited to present SPS COMMERCE with our Narnia Closet Award for their creative entry points.
As many of you know, the Company-Customer Pact was developed by our founders in effort to help positively shift the way companies and customers interact with one another. It’s a philosophy that’s deeply rooted in the culture of Get Satisfaction and one that we love to see expressed by our customers in their communities. This year, the Company-Customer Pact Award goes to inMusic Brands for their daily commitment to their customers and users. They run 9 different communities with passionate employees who go above and beyond to help their customers in the music industry. Their conversations are frank and transparent, yet empathetic. They’re a great example of what our founders had in mind when they created the pact.
These next 2 awards are actually recognizing two specific Champions in our community. I’m very grateful for them and for their passion toward our community and product. The first award we’d like to give is our Champion Rookie of the Year and it goes to KRISTEN GASTALDO of BLACKBAUD. Kristen became a Champ last fall and has done an awesome job answering the questions in our community along with managing her own community. She’s even authored a guest blog post for us. We’re really grateful for her help and support and are excited to keep working with her. Thank you Kristen!
The second award we’d like to give is our Champion Lifetime Achievement Award and it goes to BOB JONES. Bob, more commonly known in our community as AussieBob has been a Champ for several years now and is truly amazing. He’s always there to help knock out spam and answer questions in the community when our team is out of the office… I definitely rest easier during evenings and weekends knowing that he helps out. I sincerely hope that everyone has a Champ like him in their community!
The Customer Success team is in charge of onboarding all of our new customers and I can’t tell you how much we love it when a new customer comes in and totally knocks our socks off. This year, our Customer Rookie of the Year award goes to CITRIX. Citrix launched 4 communities with us last year and has completely embraced community within their corporate ecosystem. They’ve got beautiful customizations and entry points, and have built up a great resource for their customers. Congratulations Citrix!
This award has to our friends over at TECHSMITH. TechSmith has been a longtime customer with a great track record of community success. They’ve got an incredibly successful community that’s used predominantly by their product and development teams to gather customer feedback about their various software products. We’ve really enjoyed working with the TechSmith team over the last 5 years and are really looking forward forward to the next 5! Congratulations TechSmith!
That’s all we have for you this year. Keep rocking building awesome communities, and maybe next year you’ll be recognized in the Love Your Customer Awards!
Customers are our Kings (although apparently in this picture, I’m the Queen!)
Every once in a while, a company hits a milestone that truly makes a CEO stand back and smile. Our Customer Success Summit on May 2nd was one of those days.
We spent the day with more than 150 of our customers and partners listening, learning, and sharing (essentially a live version of a customer community). Never before have we heard from so many customers about their experiences with Get Satisfaction—our product, processes, and our team.
It was exhilarating to learn about the impact they are seeing using our online community platform. Customers like SPS Commerce, Applegate, Kenandy, and Citrix shared the best practices they’ve developed in building community that both strengthens their relationships with their customers as well as with their internal stakeholders.
It was a day of the familiar (our team presented all the practical information we’ve learned through six years and 70,000 communities, and I announced our new Dummies book, which sums it all up in one easy-to-consume guide) and the unexpected (our photo booth with throne and props evoked some hilarious responses).
Product innovation was a key theme of the day. We were all excited (and proud) to get a preview of our new capabilities from our CTO, David Rowley. As a result of his presentation, even more new product ideas were generated from our customers. The collaboration was fun to be part of.
VP of Product Marketing, Scott Hirsch, sheds light on how to drive and measure the business value of community.
IDC analyst, Michael Fauscette, gave us all an education in why customer community is an essential piece of any customer experience strategy. He shared how a company can leverage online community to build true engagement at every stage in the customer life cycle.
Many attendees were pleasantly surprised to learn how community can break down business silos to foster teamwork within a company. For example, attendees loved the presentation on how community teams can bring product and development teams into the community to get valuable product feedback, conduct mini focus groups, beta testing, and more.
Although many of our customers use Get Satisfaction for support, two marketing executives—Chris Selland, VP of Marketing at HP Vertica, and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO of Mindjet—talked about how community is helping them create a cultural shift both inside their organizations and with their customers. The vision these executives have for community as a guiding force to connect more closely with their customers whenever and wherever made us all proud.
Get Satisfaction customer, Ben Norris, wins the award for the best conference sketchnotes! Learn more on his site: www.benjaminsnorris.com!
There was also a wealth of information for those working with community on a more day-to-day basis—from our own Senior Community Manager, Caty Kobe, sharing her insider knowledge about the skills, tools, and best practices for managing a thriving community, to industry veteran, Stephen Mann, teaching us how to use community to handle thousands of inquiries through self-service and peer-to-peer support.
From the inception of our product six years ago, Get Satisfaction has been central to helping companies both large and small build trust-based, long-lasting relationships with their customers. It was extremely gratifying to hear so many examples of how companies are using community to build loyal customer relationships that translate to explicit business value as well. The voice of the customer has never been louder or more accessible, and we’re so honored to be trusted by so many great companies to be the medium for that voice.
So please keep the conversation going and join us in our Get Satisfaction Community in topics we have created to continue the dialog:
How do you measure the value of community?
How can you optimize self-service support with community?
How can you leverage the voice of the customer as marketing content?
Thanks TSIA audience for voting us winner of the 2013 Service Revolutions Vision Award!
Last week about 800 of these support professionals gathered at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) TSW Conference to discuss the changes going on in the industry, and the trends, tools, and best practices to help you navigate the new landscape. Get Satisfaction was a sponsor at this event, and we relished the opportunity to get a better sense of the concerns and challenges many support teams are facing, and the solutions they’re using to solve them.
There were some key themes that emerged over and over again—social technologies (no, that’s not the same things as addressing support issues in 140 characters or less), personalization, data fragmentation, self-service support, and mobile. These trends are the driving force behind many innovative, exciting new solutions, and it was great to connect with others who get as excited about them as we do.
TSIA is a leading force in the service and support industry, and their team were the backbone of our conference experience providing us with relevant data, context, and guidance to make sense of what we were learning. We found the results of John Ragsdale’s The State of Social Support 2013 survey particularly interesting—for example, in 2013, 80% of survey respondents will be investing in customer communities as a way to provide better social support. However, 77% of respondents are not seeing or do not know how to measure the ROI they’re seeing. Wow. Clearly there’s a disconnect there.
The how-to of measuring the ROI of community and social support in general is a question we get a lot around here at Get Satisfaction, which is why we’ve been working with industry thought leaders and analysts to identify just how much these technologies are saving companies—through ticket deflection, self-service, and peer-to-peer support. We now offer an ROI calculator that can help you measure the results you’re seeing. (Reach out to us directly at contact@getsatisfaction.com if you’d like to put it to work to see how much you are or could be saving).
We brought one of our favorite customers, Zoli Radnai, Community Support Team Lead at Prezi, to share a beautiful Prezi presentation about how they’re realizing and measuring the ROI of their community (anywhere from $1.2 million per year, all the way up to $7.2 million per year, depending on how conservatively or optimistically you measure call deflection).
Between the aesthetically awesome presentation of the information (haven’t heard of Prezi? Check them out here), the impressive savings, and the audience response to both….let’s just say it was a tech nerd’s breed of exhilarating.
Scott Hirsch passionately presents his product demo at the Vision Awards.
There were other highlights as well—our VP of Product Marketing, Scott Hirsch, demoed our product (specifically our powerful SEO capabilities, responsive design for any size screen, and social interaction model) at the TSIA Service Revolutions Vision Awards on Wednesday. The Service Revolutions Vision Awards recognize the latest innovations in technology services, so we were extremely pleased and honored to be named the winner of the commercial category. This win was based on real-time audience votes, which made the victory that much sweeter.
What did we take away from all this? Well, for starters, we were pleased to hear that our focus on bringing community everywhere your customers are is on target with what support agents are looking for.
It was also validating to hear the focus that everyone was putting on community. In the various sessions we heard and presented at, the message that this is the year where community moves from early adoption to mainstream support necessity was vocalized again and again. Time will tell if that’s true, but it’s hard to deny the energy that statement had behind it (and how exciting that was for us!).
And we also learned some important information about the Giants and the latest Game of Thrones episode. Who would’ve thought? ;)
If you were building a customer community a few years ago, you may have been successful accomplishing your goals, but there weren’t a ton of resources and knowledge available to help guide you along the way.
Thankfully, that is no longer the case. Today there are abundant resources—blogs, thought leaders, webcasts, etc—available to help you build a community, drive participation and engagement, and measure the business value.
Yesterday we hosted our first Get Satisfaction Customer Success Summit, which was geared towards providing our customers with the skills, tools, and know how to build thriving, valuable communities. This event was the culmination of six years and 73,000 communities of learned knowledge. It was a lot to cram into one day, but it felt great to share everything we’ve learned with our customers (Couldn’t make it? Stay tuned for the wrap up post next week).
At the conference we launched our CEO, Wendy Lea’s, new book—Customer Communities for Dummies. This book is a step-by-step guide to building an active community, leveraging it for company-wide business value, and building better relationships with your customers online. We know that community managers are smart, charismatic, professionals (in other words, not at all Dummies), but the book is a great resource to guide those who manage communities or are thinking about incorporating one into your customer experience strategy.
We want as many people as possible to have access to the learned knowledge in this book, so we’re giving away the eBook for free. Want to win a hard copy singed by our fabulous CEO, Wendy Lea? Help us spread the word by using the share buttons on this blog or on the eBook download site using the hashtag #GetSuccess. We’ll send the top 10 sharers a free, signed copy each week.
Good luck, and happy community building!
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