Ways Community Forums Benefit Businesses.
Community forums are where your customers connect and collaborate. They can also help you provide better support and boost brand loyalty. A 2015 survey found that 15% of all internet users read or comment on discussion forums. But why in the age Facebook and other social media sites are forums still used so extensively?
People love to gather in groups and discuss the topics they're most interested in, whether it's in person or online. That's why online platforms are becoming more popular as the days go by. Many consumers nowadays turn to community forums when they need information or support from their favorite brands. These online platforms are where users can come to ask questions, enter into debates, share knowledge and discuss topics of common interest. In many cases, users can get information about how a product works or ask questions about specific features.
Indeed, community forums provide a multitude of benefits. They pay for themselves by providing your business with valuable insights into what your customers want and how to solve their problems, all by using minimal company resources.
In this blog post we are going to look at some main benefits of online forums and why you should be using them to improve productivity within your team and other stakeholders.
#1. Improve communication
With email now considered a major productivity killer by many employees, organizations need to find new ways to improve communication. An online forum can help form a key part of your communication plan. Rather than searching through a packed inbox of emails, you can simply ask a question within the forum and see everyone's responses in a clear, chronological order. Another advantage is that the key points raised in the discussion don't have to be lost. The most popular platforms will allow you to pin specific posts to the top of the discussion so no one misses any key statements.
#2. Reduce support costs
As a public user-generated knowledge base, a community forum can help shrink support costs by allowing users to answer one another's questions and share information and tips. Once a query is answered by community members, it becomes permanently visible to users, allowing them to find the answer online and refer back to it. Thanks to the previous posts collected in your community forum, questions answered once can be used forever for all who enter. This reduces the number of tickets and as a result, the need to utilize multiple team members, keeping your support costs down. Instead, your company may choose several people to serve as community managers and grant them varying levels of permissions. Even if the forum doesn't fully answer a user's question, it will likely reduce the ticket load by providing some level of help. And if the community managers notice a situation in which users weren't able to answer a question, they can quickly bring in members of the support team to help. In many cases, the number of support tickets decreases because the forums allow users to find the answers they seek independently, operating as a type of self service platform.
#3. Improve customer support
One of the key benefits of having a forum is great customer support. In the age of the customer, post-sales support has never been more important. Poor customer support can spell the death of even the best products and services. No one wants to wait for a reply to an email or sit in line on a call in the hope that someone will eventually pick up. One of the roles of a discussion forum is to provide peer-to-peer self-service support, where support representatives and customers alike can share and upvote resolutions to common problems. Not only does this enable better and faster support, it also eases the burden on customer service teams by deflecting tickets pertaining to known issues.
#4. Increases collaboration
Improving collaboration should be the near top of your list of priorities. Why? For a start, 75% of employers rate team work and collaboration as ''very important''. That's not all though. Collaboration can help to bring out the creative sides of your team members, as they can work closer together and bring new ideas to the table. What better place to do this than in a forum? People can contribute their ideas in the knowledge that it is stored in an online workspace that can be referred back to at any time. #5. Boost customer loyalty
Online forums can help build a sense of community by connecting users to others with similar needs and interests. This often translates to users feeling more supported by the brand. Plus, if you give forum users the space to share their knowledge, they'll presumably be an advocate for your brand in every position they hold. For instance, one Zendesk community forum user landed a job by showing off his skills as a Zendesk administrator. If that person is going to go to that company and be their Zendesk administrator, he is going to fight to keep Zendesk no matter what because he's a huge fan of the company and he knows he can get advice and support he needs from the community.
With these guides I hope you will now go the community way to build your business. Feel free to share any other ideas in the comments section
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Written by: Antony Moturi
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