Communities: a vital — but often overlooked — customer service channel

Today’s customer is going to talk about your business

You can’t stop the discussion—it’s a fundamental part of the world we live in today—but you can impact the course that conversation takes, and the prevailing sentiment.

Your company may already be using social listening to monitor digital channels, understand public feelings about your brands and products, and intervene in conversations to convert negative brand experiences into positive ones. But it’s easy to forget about another critical channel — your own customer community.

Redefine how you think about “customer service”

The next step in the evolution of the contact center is adding user communities as a customer service channel. Online forums are nothing new: most companies have them to enable peer-to-peer connections, share best practices, and raise awareness of events. But few companies realize their full potential as a digital channel in their customer experience (CX) tech stack.

Communities can be a private arena for handling customer issues in a social media-like environment where today’s customer is comfortable—and an opportunity to catch negative sentiment before it ever goes public. It’s a containment chamber for social interaction where your customers are invited to express themselves and be heard by a finite audience.

This makes your community an ideal place to identify and create support cases. In today’s digitally interactive world, it makes sense to dedicate customer service agents to your community and treat it like the contact center channel that it is. And from a staffing perspective, communities offer significant efficiencies. In traditional phone centers, the synchronous nature of live conversation requires agents to handle interactions one at a time. But in a community, it takes far fewer people to provide a human touch via multiple discussion threads.

In your contact center platform, you will want to ensure that:

• Your customer community is integrated with your case management system, so you can continue the conversation without transferring them to another channel or agent.
• Customer service agents can see community discussions alongside CRM data, case history, and social media posts, so they have the complete picture in front of them and can personalize every conversation.
• Your customers feel confident that they’re being listened to, no matter where they engage.

More than ever before, customers are disinclined to have a phone conversation. As traditional channels fade in value, others step in to take their place. The community is proving to be the next crucial digital channel in any customer service solution.

By Derek Adams

Derek Adams is a product marketer at Sprinklr and a life-long storyteller. He’s worked in technology for over 20 years and loves chronicling how it continuously evolves to enhance humanity.