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:
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!
Being a brand that people love is all about making them feel like they’re a part of your brand story. That means including them in the conversations that guide your business, being responsive to their issues and feedback, and empowering them to speak out on your behalf.
It was with that in mind that the founders of Get Satisfaction launched our platform to bring the customer to the center of those conversations with branded communities. Six years and 70,000 communities later, we’ve learned a thing or two about how companies can get the most success from their community, and how they can measure that value to make a compelling business case.
We don’t want to hold all this knowledge up in our heads—we want to share it with everyone who has a customer community and everyone who’s thinking about getting one. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Join us on Thursday, May 2nd for the conference that is all about creating and measuring value from community.
The morning of the Customer Success Summit will focus on how day-to-day community managers and practitioners can achieve tactical success building their communities, driving engagement, and using specific features and integration.
The afternoon will focus on how the executives of customer-centric companies are incorporating community as a critical piece of their customer experience strategies. This will highlight customers, the business value they’re realizing, and how other companies can realize and measure similar value.
It’s going to be a fun event, with awards recognizing noteworthy communities, exciting announcements from Get Satisfaction’s CEO, Wendy Lea, and lots of great people sharing knowledge and experiences. Hope to see you in San Francisco!
Customer-centric companies have already discovered the wisdom of bringing the voice of their customers to the middle of product discussions, marketing messages, and sales strategies—and they’ve been reaping the benefits by building products their customers actually want to buy, using messages that resonate, and leveraging brand advocates to create support and marketing content.
But today’s social customers expect access to these departments anyway, and they expect it to be immediate, transparent, and comprehensive. No pressure.
The good news is that technology has evolved along with your customers, allowing you to assess and meet their needs, expectations, and preferences. Branded communities bring your customers together for online conversations about your products and services. This connects them to one you and one another, and unites your various business departments around the voice of the customer.
The business value community creates is evident in departments across your company. Want to know what we mean? Check out the infographic below!
@allformykids2 On PC or phone? What phone model/carrier/iOS are you on? Log the issue on getsatisfaction and we will check it out asap
3 Critical Skills Community Managers Can Learn from “Whose Line Is It Anyway”? http://t.co/lgB5bogvEj via @TheCMgr | @getsatisfaction
RT @mcockell1: Building Online Communities “@ilse8: @DaveKerpen digital marketing blog: http://t.co/lWPOyIbn0s"
@SOCAP @getsatisfaction @SocialHerd
Building Online Communities “@ilse8: @DaveKerpen digital marketing blog: http://t.co/lWPOyIbn0s"
@SOCAP @getsatisfaction @SocialHerd
RT @alleywatch: Community Management Must Be Considered a Strategic Imperative #CMAD infographic by @getsatisfaction http://t.co/d48SfRz2Mx
