In the customer-centric world of commerce, it’s more important than ever to harness the power of online customer communities to drive business results. Too often, brands miss opportunities to align their communities with their commerce engines. This results in fragmented customer experiences and missed revenue-generation opportunities.
How customer communities enable customer loyalty
Loyalty is just one click of the mouse away. But how can brands ensure that happy customers become repeat customers?
One way is to incorporate different areas of the customer journey that impact online sales – including marketing and customer service – into a single central location.
By having this holistic strategy in place and focusing on personalized commerce, contextual marketing, and immediate customer service, companies can achieve that “Holy Grail” of customer loyalty and greatly impact commerce success. Businesses can provide this essential link with online customer communities.
Four ways customer communities drive business value
Fifty-four percent of companies state the greatest frequency of customer dropout occurs during the explore and buy phases of the customer journey, according to a 2016 Forrester study commissioned by SAP.
The study also uncovered that just 28% of companies believe they are fully harnessing the sales potential of branded social/community sites.
What can you do to impact your commerce program for success?
By tightly integrating your customer community with the core business applications you use to run your business, you can ensure that your customer community drives business value.
You can:
- Make it easy and compelling for customers to engage (and re-engage) with your brand during every step of the buying journey
- Leverage ratings, reviews, and community-contributed content such as blogs, Q&A boards, and discussions
- Instill buying confidence by offering relevant, authentic, and trusted content
- Lower the total cost of customer acquisition by inspiring loyalty
Begin your path to commerce success with a customer community
Today’s customers have more choices, maintain higher expectations, and are more connected than ever before.
With this evolution, customers are choosing brands that offer buying experiences that make sense, prove they know their customers through marketing outreach, and provide immediate and accurate access to customer service.
