The difference between an outstanding customer service team and one that is lacking in performance can be made by a thriving community online. Customer Experience Trends report shows that high-performing teams are likelier than low-performers to have an online community. Why? Self-service forums reduce the workload of your customer support staff, so they can better assist customers.
Arion Forums is a great forum tool to use if you are looking to build an online community. The community forum software can relieve your agents of some pressure while increasing customer engagement. Retaining customers is more cost-effective than acquiring new ones if you have been doing business for a while. How about investing in an affordable tool that allows you to do both?
You can do this by using community forums. A survey found that online forums with branded logos helped to:
- 66% of respondents say they improve their customer retention.
- 65% of the leads are new.
- Sales increased by 55%
What is a Community Forum, and how can it benefit you?
What is a Community Forum (CF)?
The community forum allows all community members to post questions and receive answers. The two types of community forums are internal and external.
Community Forums For Internal Community
A private forum where company employees can talk about business matters. You can, for example:
- Share industry or company news.
- Ask other departments in your company for feedback about your latest ideas.
- Lessons learned after completing a project can be shared.
- Talk about the best ways to introduce a new marketing strategy.
- Try out the changes and see if they are well received.
Internal discussion forums encourage interaction between teams and employees and strengthen bonds.
Forums For External Community Discussion
Employees and customers can discuss your public face in the external community forum. You can, for example, use forums to exchange information, solicit feedback, and find bugs. The forum is a good platform to gain knowledge:
- What is the solution to problem X?
- What is the best way to implement this product in a remote environment?
- Add this feature to your website
- When are you going to launch your next update?
Answers can come from a team of dedicated employees, community members, or a mixture. Community forums serve several functions, including feedback, support, and collaboration. The functions of both types are the same: It is important to note the ROI before we get into the benefits and features of a forum. Both internal and external forums have measurable ROI, according to a report. The ROI is very variable: an internal forum saw 1,967% on average, while external forums averaged 6,130%.
Benefits of a Community Forum
Here are some community forum software benefits that you can enjoy when you implement a successful community forum.
Customer Service Is Important
A community forum is a great place for customers to check if their issue has already been resolved. They won't need to call your support team if they can find an answer. Your support team can then focus on more complex cases. The user may start a topic if the question seeking is not there. This will benefit them as well as future users. Community forums can go far beyond customer service, which is often a technical-oriented business. Users can, for example, discuss and exchange strategies, tricks, and tips.
Customer Loyalty And Engagement
According to a report in Internet Research, co-creation is an important part of user experience. This leads to a more active community and increased word of mouth. Forum members report that feeling heard 63% of the time. You can increase trust and community engagement by pro users with place tours that discuss products and services. Engagement is evident as 70 percent of forum users contribute to the discussion, and an active user, on average, shares six responses per year.
Get Great ROI
A report found that the ROI for the average forum was 4,530%. ROI grows over time. It starts at 1,469% the first year and reaches 5,315% ten years later. The cost per user also decreases as the forum gets older. The cost savings are due to several factors, including the ability to scale. However, it is the bank of answers that is the main reason. Users can access and utilize the information without additional work from your support team.
Inform Your Customers
Many forums have a homepage with search functionality and an overview. This is a great place to announce upcoming events, share announcements and discuss upcoming changes.
Find Out What The Problem Is
Customers will report any bugs they find or issues with the user experience as soon as they become accustomed to using the forum. These reports are often categorized in support so that designers and product developers can easily review them.
Increase SEO
For some external community forums, users must log in to gain access. Oose to make the forum searchable by Google and share it publicly. Forums that are publicly accessible increase organic traffic and direct users to you when they've searched Google for answers.
Keep Your Facebook Account Out Of Facebook's Hands
Facebook groups can be a great way to start a community discussion. Facebook groups can be hard to navigate, as well as hosts, have poor search capabilities, and require users to create a Facebook account to join. You can host your community's discussion without adhering to Facebook rules and limited functionality.
New Ideas Are Based On The Customer's Demand
In a community survey, 90% of the respondents said they had used suggestions for improving their service or product. Forums are an excellent place to collect features, help prioritize development, and obtain feedback from loyal customers.
Success Stories Of Source Customers
You can use a community forum to find satisfied clients to feature in testimonials and case studies. You can directly approach enthusiastic users, or you can use the discussion threads to ask them to get in touch with you.
Arion Forums
Arion Forums has been rated the best open-source forum software by verified users based on its features. There's always a way to create an effective customer service community, no matter how big or small your company is. Provide a subtle user engagement with key features for potential customers in user moderation following social media platforms in parallel with mobile optimization and their basic features in content management in multi-language support for a community platform
Our forum software solution is a popular forum software with advanced features that connect to our Customer Service software. Agents can profile a client and see their entire online activity while responding to an email or private messaging. Support teams can turn community posts into tickets to conversations when issues are complex. The built-in analytics and upvotes or downvotes show you which discussions are most followed and what comments have been made.
This helps to keep track of your customer's feedback and keeps your community updated. Arion's AI also removes repeated threads and duplicate questions. It reduces noise and allows customers to find answers more quickly. Arion ERP is a great tool for large and medium companies because it allows them to keep conversations on track. The information is streamlined, so valuable tips and tricks for your clients aren't lost in the content.
The Following Are Some Features Of the Community Forum
Anticipate Your Customers' Needs
- Take advantage of hot topics.
- Analyze the most popular, most visited, and most discussed topics to track your customers' wants. Google Analytics is built into the forum to allow you to track likes, shares, and comments even when they are not on your site.
Create Your Library Of Documentation
- Use the answers that your community has provided.
- With the "Promote Documentation" tool, you can convert the best answers into official documents with just one click.
Provide Outstanding Customer Satisfaction
- Reduce your workload and improve your support for your products
- Topics can be categorized to make content more accessible and well-organized.
- Layout intelligent answers. Group-related responses in a forum.
- Promote your content with the most popular posts and answers with the highest ratings at the top.
Badges
- Give Badges: To active contributors. Reward them with badges based on their contribution.
- Members can Earn Points by Participating: Which will keep them engaged and allow them to access new features.
- Access to Additional Tools: When participants achieve a certain Karma level, they can access functions such as voting, commenting, or editing.
- Personalization of Profiles: Users can customize their profiles and showcase their work.
Make Yourself Stand Out In The Crowd
- Enter any topic to find content.
- Tags can be used to filter out questions and answers that are related.
- Sort the content by relevance, date of last activity, latest, answers, votes, etc.
- For better accessibility, highlight conversations: All the conversations you are following or haven't received a response will be highlighted.
Post Something
- Register on the Forum and Ask Questions: Simply register on the forum to post questions and answer existing ones.
- Please Share the Link: Send interesting content to all members of our community. You can also start regular discussion threads.
- Discussions: Share and receive insightful advice and information on any subject.
- Correct & Edit: You can edit and correct your questions, answers, or comments even after publication.
- Enrich Discussion: Add videos and images to your private message board to enrich the discussion.
- Email Gateway: You can reply to any email directly from your inbox.
- Subscriptions: Sign up for interesting content to receive email notifications when new answers are posted.
Modest
- Rating the Answer: Members can rate answers to highlight the most valuable contributions.
- Karma Points: Use our Karma points system to ensure all forum participants follow the rules.
- Edit and Delete: Be sure to keep an eye on the content shared and that everything follows your set of rules.
- Register-Only Participants: This will prevent spam and one-time users by requiring registration.
How to Maximize Community Forums with a Knowledge Base
We've seen that a forum for your community can help reduce the stress on customer service staff. The incoming questions must still be answered. Answering repeated questions by whoppers that haven't searched for an answer satisfied can be time-consuming. Knowledge base software can be very useful in this situation.
Knowledge bases are central hubs where information can be stored, maintained, and shared. Internal knowledge bases allow you to share documents and reports with your colleagues. Customers can use a customer-facing knowledge base as a self-service portal, and they often have FAQs, tutorials, and troubleshooting.
Two main reasons why community forums and knowledge bases work so well together:
- Suppose the answer to the question is available in a Knowledge Base. In that case, the customer may never need to post a query in the forums.
- You and your support team can use the Knowledge Base to find answers to questions.
This is a great combination - 77% of community forums software solutions that focus on support also include knowledge bases.
Keep In Mind These Four Points
Set A Strategy
You risk creating a forum without a clear plan that won't help you achieve. Considering why and how you will use the forum is important for you to start. What kind of categories, for example, do you require? Will you moderate the responses? What employees will be answering the questions in your organization? Which metrics are you going to track? You will have more success if you start with a plan.
Make Your Experience Seamless
Can you offer a seamless experience when a user moves from your website to the knowledge base? Finally, the knowledge base and community forum can be customized to align with your brand. You can start with logos, fonts, and colors. But it would help if you kept your tone consistent, regardless of whether you want to appear friendly, eccentric, or knowledgeable.
Knowledge Base Articles Can Be Used To Answer Forum Questions
Have you written an article explaining your customer's problem or even a part of it? You could ask customers to read a tutorial before giving customized advice - such as CSS codes - that suits their unique needs.
Learn As Much As You Can
Are you getting a lot of similar questions? You often find yourself explaining to a client how you solved a common problem. You can turn it into an article for the knowledge base! You'll be able to reduce future customer service requests for that problem.
Wrapping Up
You can use a community for customer engagement with your customers, reduce customer service costs and receive valuable prodThe forum is even more powerful when feedback. When combined with an online store, it is more powerful. The forum platform must be used to build your company's knowledge base for both employees and clients to be easy to use and secure. Arion Forums will assist your business in creating a vibrant online community for your product or services.
The community will help you build a cross-channel strategy to support your business by catering to your customer's self-service requirements. The article gave a list of useful features for community forums. Many are also necessary for a knowledge base, including great search analytics tools and easy methods to create, edit, and manage answers. Arion ERP offers the best community forum software services for all that and more. Our customer service can even customize your community forum software for you. Arion ERP is available now.