#TipTuesday: Are you focusing on the User Journey or Organization goals alone?

KrisKing

When selling the idea of community internally, we must ensure the goals of community are aligned with organization goals.

This will typically start with the focus of the team or department presenting, Marketing will promote advocacy goals while Support will promote ticket deflection and improved customer experience, while trying to tie these to high level organizational drivers such as reduced churn and increased retention.

These goals are extremely important and the outcomes they drive are paramount to the communities success….BUT to achieve these goals you have to keep the customer in mind.

The community has to provide value to the user in order to lure them in, but more importantly to get them to return time and time again.

This value is going to be different for each community and customer base and it's crucial to understand what this is or your community might flop.

Ways of going about gaining this understanding:

• Beta / Test launch your community to a small subset of Users
• Survey / Poll customers
• Customer Roundtables / Events

Items to help provide value to customers

• Sharing product / roadmap information and inviting customer to take part
• Tips & Tricks / Best practices
• Launch post / webinar providing details
• Asking for feedback relating to content (relevant / not relevant)
• AMA
• Gamification
• Office Hours (Customer collaboration events)
• Access to Event calendar

Higher Logic will help you build a strategy around driving community engagement, specifically with Acquisition and Retention in mind.

We take new clients through our CARGO process where we mutually explore Concept, Acquisition, Retention, Goals and Outcomes of your community.

It's never a bad idea to revisit this periodically to ensure community is still aligned with the organizational goals and outcomes are aligned.