NETTING IT OUT

In this updated version of the eighth critical success factor presented in Customers.com, we discuss how fostering community can attract new customers, strengthen relationships with existing customers, and have a variety of other benefits for your business. As customers, especially those in younger generations, are expecting more and more that they’ll be able to connect with other customers, if you aren’t already working to build or foster a community, it should soon be part of your business’s planning.

The important factors in fostering community include:

• Entice customers into the fold.
• Introduce customers to others with common interests.
• Introduce and reinforce common terminology and values.
• Let customers “strut their stuff.”
• Encourage customers to become part of the “in crowd.”
• Promote the interests of the community.
• Show customers that your company is invested in the community, too.

UPDATING THE CUSTOMERS.COM CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS (CSFS)

The Eight CSFs

In Customers.com, we identified eight critical success factors for making it easy for your customers to do business with you. The CSFs are:

* Target the right customers
* Own the customer’s total experience
* Streamline business processes that impact the customer
* Provide a 360-degree view of the customer relationship
* Let customers help themselves
* Help customers do their jobs
* Deliver personalized service
* Foster community

In this report, we update the eighth critical success factor, Foster Community.

FOSTER COMMUNITY

The Internet is a natural venue for building and sustaining community. Here’s an example: People who care for relatives with Alzheimer’s disease have a very difficult time. It’s a thankless, relentless, and despair-producing activity. Realizing this, an Alzheimer’s clinic in Cleveland, Ohio, formed a computer support network for families of people with Alzheimer’s. They purchased computers for families who didn’t have them, set them up in their homes, and showed them how to access the Internet. They formed an online discussion group and an online resource library. And they made sure that one of their staff was monitoring the discussions, in the same way they made sure that there was always someone available at the end of a phone line. Any time of the day or night, a despairing person could log on, look at the suggestions others had offered for situations they were facing, and pose their own questions (“He keeps asking for the car keys; what should I do?”). The “hottest” time for activity turned out to be in the wee hours of the morning. When their charges had finally gone to sleep, these beleaguered caretakers would log on to the network and gain a few moments of solace in the company of others facing the same rough road.

While there are different types of communities, each with its own set of goals and objectives--fans of the TV show “24” spend time on Fox Broadcasting’s discussion boards for very different reasons than software developers do at the PayPal Developer Community--there are things that most online communities have in common.

For example, communities are generally built around one of two things: common interests or common practice areas.

* COMMUNITY OF INTEREST: In this type of community, members share a common interest or passion, such as raising roses, tasting fine wines, or listening to folk music.

* COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE: In this type of community, members typically have similar roles in common practice areas. Java programmers, landscape architects, and tax accountants are all people who belong to communities of practice no matter where they happen to reside.

If you have a customer base that shares a common interest or practice, you have it made. You can create a community to keep customers coming back for more. And by eavesdropping electronically on customers’ public communications with one another, you’ll learn what’s on their minds, what they value, and what they care about.

Back in the early 1990s, I created a community among Lotus Notes users who gathered around our Notes-based information service. These customers would ask and answer one another’s questions not only about Notes-related issues but also about many other initiatives they were involved with in their companies. I showed these discussions to a visiting marketing executive. He took one look and said, “My God, this is primary research--you have your hand on these people’s pulses. Most companies would kill for this kind of information. And you say your customers are paying you for this privilege?”

CUSTOMERS ARE EXPECTING COMMUNITY

The Internet culture has raised people’s awareness of the importance of community. Long before the advent of the World Wide Web, people were drawn to the Internet because it was a community of communities. That’s one of the things that makes it so fascinating. There are tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of very interest-specific or practice-specific communities. On the Internet, people can find and communicate with others, anywhere in the world, who share their interests. No matter how esoteric their interest or how small their field--I once met a mathematician who told me that there were only three other people in the world who understood the work she was doing--they’ll find people with common interests.

And they’re expecting you to help them do this...especially those in the younger generations, for whom connectivity and the Internet is interwoven into their lives.

We’re all getting more familiar with communal aspects of Web sites. We’re used to reading customer-written book reviews at Amazon.com and customer-written movie reviews at the Internet Movie Database. And we’re used to reading not only blog posts by the blog’s author, but the responses by other blog readers. We now come to expect these things.

So your customers (and potential customers) expect to see what your other customers think about your products and services. And they expect you to provide the mechanism for making this happen. Those businesses that don’t connect customers with each other will be at a competitive disadvantage.

HOW TO BUILD COMMUNITY

Being a member of one or more communities makes customers feel special and helps them take care of one another, while giving you an unparalleled opportunity to learn much more about what they want and need. Once you’ve decided you want to foster a community, how can you build one? A number of key steps are required. They are:

* Entice customers into the fold.
* Introduce customers to others with common interests.
* Introduce and reinforce common terminology and values.
* Let customers “strut their stuff.”
* Encourage customers to become part of the “in crowd.”
* Promote the interests of the community.
* Show customers that your community is invested in the community, too.

Let’s take a closer look....