So how do you know if offering a community support option is right for your company? This post explores what goes into making that decision – and what you can do to help ensure success if you do.

When does community support make sense?

Online communities where customers offer support to other customers are likely to succeed in companies that sell products or services that inspire excitement and command loyalty among customers.

Two great examples are Apple and Harley-Davidson. Both have customers who are among the most zealous and loyal in any industry – brand evangelists who live and breathe the products and who are happy to spend time sharing their expertise and enthusiasm with others.

But even if your product or service doesn’t seem quite that exciting at first glance, don’t count out your customer base just yet. There just may be a critical mass of people who love talking about the subject and just need a little nudge to channel that excitement and expertise to “work” for your brand. After all, that’s the beauty of the Internet: There are people online all over the world who are excited to share what they know about every topic imaginable (and many times you don’t need a huge group to see a notable impact). Peer-to-peer support is a great way to find your people and harness their knowledge to benefit both your customers and your company.

Bear in mind, too, that community support doesn’t have to be about a specific company or product; sometimes, it’s the general field or industry that fires them up. For example, auto enthusiasts are at the heart of an active, vibrant online community at Edmunds.com, a popular site among people who are shopping for cars.

How companies are making peer-to-peer support work

Once you determine community support is a good fit for you, how do you know those excited customers will really post high-quality, reliable content on behalf of your company? They will – if you lay the right groundwork for it. Here are three specific steps you can use to help ensure your effort is a success.

1. Recognize expertise

   Customers enjoy being recognized for their efforts, and any peer-to-peer support system should have a structure in place to highlight those who contribute valuable content to the program. One common way to do so is with detailed profiles, which showcase who your experts are and what they do. Over time, the people who provide the most thoughtful and helpful answers to customer questions are recognized as “thought leaders” for your company and your industry, which helps further their own online reputation. That is a powerful incentive for people who know how to turn that online reputation into opportunity.

2. Reward time and effort

   For some experts, the satisfaction of growing an online reputation is enough – but others may be inspired by more immediate rewards. A good community-support system should be able to effectively identify top performers and give specific rewards based on their activity. Such rewards can take the form of badges and titles, as well as more tangible certifications, promotional merchandise, discounts or even prizes. One company that does all of this well is ABB Group, which allows users to redeem any reputation points earned for tangible rewards.

3. Moderate thoughtfully

   When you invite customers to be part of the process of providing information and support to other customers, it’s important to have a system in place for reviewing and approving content that comes in. It’s up to you whether this happens before or after posting; the important thing is that you have awareness of what’s coming in and the ability to manage it. This will help you keep reasonable control over the content that is presented on your site and that represents your brand to your other customers.

   At the same time, you also don’t need to over-control customer communities. In fact, trying to manage community members too tightly can backfire, as a Harvard Business Review article cautions. Moderating content for appropriateness is one thing, but censoring legitimate complaints or opinions about your product or business can lead to anger and resentment among the very people whose help and support you seek. Don’t fear criticism; instead, see it as an opportunity to improve your product and to win even greater customer loyalty and respect.

   In the end, customer-generated content and your response to it both reflect on your brand. Keep an eye on your community and maintain an active presence in it with that idea in mind.

Where to start if you feel peer-to-peer support is a fit

Feeling confident that your brand or company has the customer base that could provide a robust source of customer support information? Then it’s time to determine the form and structure you want it to take. Start by exploring your current systems to see if there is a peer-to-peer support option available that is robust enough to do the job. If not, there are tools like Jive, Lithium and Answerbase that allow you to easily add peer-to-peer support options to your customer support efforts.

The results of creating such a support system can include freeing up more time for your customer service representatives, offering your customers the best answers from the best possible sources and increasing the credibility of those answers because they come from a wide-ranging community of experts – not just paid employees of your company. As the examples of successful online community support in this post show, you may find that the benefits of offering peer-to-peer support are well worth the effort.

The post When to Offer Community Support – And How to Do It Well appeared first on Answerbase.

You can establish yourself as a thought leader by consistently providing information that proves useful and credible, beginning with topics that focus on supporting people who are actually using your products or services. Once you’ve achieved that, you can move on to providing higher-level information and views about your industry more generally, not just your own company.

Both types of thought leadership – about your products or services specifically and about the larger industry – are important. The first enables you to become the one that people count on to support them as users of your products or services. And it lays the foundation for the second, broader kind of thought leadership.

We’ll talk about the best ways to reach customers and potential customers with your information and views later in this post. But first, let’s look at why it’s so important to assume the role of thought leader in your field – and at the specific ways in which thought leadership benefits your organization.

Lead, follow or get out of the way.

When you establish yourself as a thought leader, you differentiate your company, setting it apart from your competitors as the source that can best meet the demand for authoritative information in your field. This serves two purposes: It establishes your authority about how best to use your products or services, and it sets you up as a trusted source of guidance for helping plan larger strategies and initiatives.

For example, if you run a software company that serves marketing directors, once you’ve become known as the best source of information about your product or service, you can go on to become a valuable source of information for higher-level considerations like content strategy, content distribution, multi-channel marketing strategies and so forth. You learn a lot by partnering with your customers to accomplish their goals, and that puts you in a position to share what you’ve learned, which can serve your market as a whole.

If you don’t fill the role of thought leader, people will look elsewhere for someone to do it – and that’s likely to be a competitor. It doesn’t matter whether they go to a competitor’s website, a general forum or a media channel; the point is that if they’re looking to someone else, you’re missing the opportunity to be the one who controls the message that’s out there about your field and even your own products and services.

This brings to mind the old expression “lead, follow or get out of the way.” In this situation, you want to be the one who leads the thinking about your company and your industry – the source people immediately think of to go to when they need information about your products and services and how to use them effectively. Being that leader enables you to:

Retain existing customers who appreciate having readily available support content around your products and services to help them when they have questions or issues.

Enhance relationships with customers who see the support and information you provide – both about your own products and services and about related industry topics – as an added value of doing business with you instead of with someone else.

Upsell current customers by educating them about ways to meet their needs.

Attract new customers who are using search engines to find information that’s relevant to them and their needs.

People today are hungry for information. When you consistently provide content to satisfy those cravings, you become the leader they’re looking for in your field.

Top three ways to share your expertise and be a thought leader

Let’s be clear on one important point: Thought leadership isn’t about self-promotion. It’s about helping people when they need information. As one communications consultant described it, “Thought leadership is about writing what you know, sharing your expertise and addressing potential customer pain points.” With that in mind, here are three things you can do to achieve thought leadership in customer support.

1. Publish blogposts and articles to share your expertise.
   Regularly publishing blogposts and articles on your website about topics of interest to customers and potential customers enables you to engage with them directly to share information that’s of value to them, building their trust over time. For example, if your company provides IT support to small businesses, you might start by simply offering some practical guidance on how to troubleshoot a particular computer problem, and then expand into blogging about larger topics such as how to decide when it’s time to upgrade systems and software.
2. Maintain a Q&A knowledge base of helpful information.
   One of the main reasons people use search engines like Google is to find answers to questions. When you maintain an online knowledge base of questions and answers in your field, you set your company up as a source for the answers people are looking for. One of my favorite examples of this is the services referral company Angie’s List, which has built an extensive knowledgebase from which to provide expert information. Google “How much should water heater installation cost?” for example, and an answer from Angie’s List tops the non-paid search results.
3. Engage beyond your own website on social media and other channels.
   It’s important to have content on your website to establish thought leadership, but it’s even more important to expand your reach by engaging with customers and potential customers through other channels online. Instead of just posting articles on your site, put the content on LinkedIn, link to it via Twitter and Facebook, and refer to it in general-interest online forums like quora.com or more specialized communities like stackoverflow.com. This is also a great opportunity to provide a link to your own blog or knowledge base and bring people back to your environment.

A content strategy that includes all three of these things allows you to create a presence across several different channels, increasing the odds that people who are looking for information will find you wherever they look. It also helps ensure that if you don’t reach your audience in one channel, they’ll find you in another.

Don’t miss your chance to lead the thinking about what you do – which both serves your current customers while leading more potential customers to your company, products, and services.

The post In Business, Thought Leadership Starts with Customer Support appeared first on Answerbase.