Integrating Online Communities to Build a Cohesive Strategy for Success-Insights From Community (re)Focus, 2022

How is your community impacting your organization?

This thought might have crossed your mind many times if you’re a community professional.

A business involves a wide variety of functions and processes on a daily basis. The data is procured from different channels which might become difficult to manage without a proper tool.

Integrating your community with other tech systems lets you track how engagement activities influence business goals like revenue and retention. Not just this, community integrations enable you to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the data collected.

Our community expert, Andrew Mishalove, VP of Community, Matillion touched base on all this and more in an insightful session on “Integrating Online Communities to Build a Cohesive Strategy for Success” at Community (re)Focus, 2022.

The Evolution of Communities and Alignment With Brand Goals & Vision

Andrew explained that many brands believe the misconception that communities do not contribute to the growth of an organization directly. However, busting this myth, he stated that internal-facing and external-facing communities add a lot of value to the organization.

Communities empower brands to get deep insights into employees’, as well as customer preferences. These serve as a goldmine of information for the brands to improve their offerings and services. Talking about evolution, he further stated that the question-”Do you have a community?” has quickly transformed into questions such as “How big is your community?” or “How many knowledge articles does your community support?”, and more.

Customers today are seeing and acknowledging the value that communities deliver to them. All they have to do is quickly log into the community to get the latest updates and information about various products, services, support cases, etc. He also mentioned that online communitie now have become a norm more than an exception for any brand.

Community Integrations to Create Seamless Customer Journeys

Moving ahead, Andrew mentioned that communities provide intelligence and data that enables brands to be more predictive in analyzing customer behavior. Brands can leverage the valuable information provided by customers to innovate and deliver true value for their investments.

He continued to explain that in terms of business value, brands get the opportunity to maintain a close connection with customers. This allows them to tap into all the insights at multiple touchpoints and understand their needs. Moreover, integrating communities with CRM and data empower brands to accelerate support delivery and improve user experiences by solving key business challenges that they face.

Integrating communities with these systems also gives brands the ability to identify lurkers and incentivize their participation to convert them into active members. This provides additional data points to understand how impactful the community actually is.

Best Practices to Align Business Goals with Communities

Andrew suggested that choosing the right technology is the most important step when building your online community. It is crucial to understand whether the features that your community offers are in tandem with your business objectives or not. Next, setting a vision is the key that will determine the growth of your community. Factors such as community partners, tools, and budgets should also be kept in mind.

Concluding the session, Andrew stated that as a brand, involving your customers and employees in your community should top your list of to-dos. User engagement is the key to creating vibrant, thriving online communities.

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