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Customer Community

by Alexandra Vazquez
A customer community is a space for customers to interact with each other and company representatives. Learn more about its benefits and how to build one.

What is a customer community?

A customer community is a space for customers to interact with each other, discuss goods or services, ask questions, and connect with company representatives. Customer communities come in different shapes and sizes, and may not use the same platforms or have the same uses. Companies leverage customer communities to build brand loyalty, nurture existing customers by offering closer support, and learn more about their target market. 

Companies use online community management software to build and manage their customer communities. These tools allow businesses to create an internal or external digital community, gauge customer satisfaction within the platform, and moderate interactions to ensure a safe community environment. These software solutions also integrate website features like FAQs and help desk programs all in one community hub.

Types of customer communities

There are four major types of customer communities. Some companies create environments where different types can live together within the same community. 

  1. Social community: a social media platform like Facebook or Instagram. This is a public forum that invites customer interactions such as liking and sharing company posts. Users can also comment and have conversations on a company’s social media account. Social communities are an excellent place for companies to keep an eye on trending topics within their target market.
  2. Advocate community: a space for loyal customers to advocate for a good or service. Companies often invite dedicated customers to join this user community to discuss what they love about their products. Companies may use positive incentives like coupons or free shipping to entice customers to share feedback. 
  3. Support community: a community of customers willing to offer support to other customers. This may take place on the company website or within a forum. This customer service community benefits the company by providing aid when company support representatives are unavailable. For example, G2 invites customers to start discussions within a software category’s resource page. Users can ask each other questions and even communicate directly with vendor representatives.
  4. Insight community: a group of customers chosen for research. An insight community acts as a focus group for companies to create customer segments and gain feedback and information about what users think of their goods or services. Communication with this community is usually in the form of carefully selected questions and prompts.

Benefits of a customer community

There are a lot of benefits to creating a thriving customer community. These benefits help companies understand their customers and enhance the user experience. 

  • Improve customer engagement. Above all, customer communities get companies closer to their customers in a comfortable and accessible environment. They help bridge the gap between customers and the company by humanizing the user experience. Visitors can hear from real consumers and communicate quickly with business representatives. It unlocks a new level of customer communication that cannot be replicated outside of a community. 
  • Build brand loyalty. People who feel heard and valued are more likely to become repeat customers. Customer communities allow companies to listen to and appreciate their customers by answering questions and facilitating conversations. The more important a customer feels, the higher the chance they will become loyal to the brand and interact within the community to improve their overall experience.
  • Offer personal customer support. Customer communities give companies a way to connect with their customers on a new level. Because customers can ask questions or seek advice in the community, companies can use those conversations to have their customer support team reach out directly to a user in need. Companies can also identify frequently asked questions or concerns to change elements of their offerings and improve the user experience.
  • Encourage customers to interact with each other. Company customer support can’t be everywhere. Customer communities act as a resource for customers to interact with and help each other successfully use a good or service. Customers can even share unique tips and tricks that only a satisfied user would encounter. 
  • Develop customer advocates. A company’s best salespeople are those who enjoy the good or service so much they share it with others. A customer community is an excellent way for users to discuss a company’s goods or services in an appropriate environment. 
  • Gain customer insights. A customer community proactively offers valuable information about a company’s target market. Getting feedback from customers and engaging in conversation helps companies identify their customers' wants so they can change marketing efforts and product portfolios accordingly.

How to create a customer community 

A customer community may look completely different from company to company, but most businesses follow the same six steps to create, develop, and identify the advantages of their community. 

  1. Goals: Before building and implementing a customer community plan, companies should outline precisely what they want to achieve. This includes whether they hope to drive more customers, nurture existing ones, or collect data for research and development. After identifying those goals, there will be more precise decision-making along the way.
  2. Type: After identifying the goals, a company can determine which type of customer community makes the most sense for them. Combining different types of communities can help companies tackle several goals at the same time.
  3. Platform: Once a community type is chosen, companies must determine where their community will live. A customer community can be on social media, a blog, a public forum, a company website, or through emails and surveys. 
  4. Engagement: The worst thing a company can do is create a community and walk away. The best part of a customer community is that the company actively engages with users. Companies should take the time to keep the conversation going on their community platform. 
  5. Success: Companies must decide how to determine success. They should build a list of key metrics that show whether the customer community is succeeding the way they had hoped. This may include a certain number of new customers, problems solved over customer support, a better ratio of positive reviews, or anything else they deem important to prove that their customer community has a return on investment.
  6. Utilize: Customer communities are full of valuable information that companies can use to improve the way they sell their goods or services. Customer data is priceless, and a customer community streamlines data collection. 

Customer community best practices

There are a few things companies should remember as they create, build, and maintain a customer community. 

  • Keep the customer in mind. Companies should take a customer-first approach throughout the entire creation of a customer community. Before focusing on how sales will be made, companies must consider the user experience and create a community worth joining and engaging with.
  • Pick the right environment. Choosing a platform can make or break a community before it even begins. Extensive research may be necessary to ensure that the community is built in the right place. Explore this guide on best online community management software, reviewed, ranked, and ready to help you build a space your members will actually want to return to. 
  • Start the conversation. There has to be a reason for users to visit a community. Companies should start discussions by asking questions, requesting product tips and tricks, or sharing exciting information. A community description can also help users understand the intent of the community. If there is an interesting dialogue, customers will find their way to the community and join the conversation.
  • Protect the community. Moderation is very important in a customer community. Companies should ensure there is a team allocated to keeping an eye on the customer community and preserving brand integrity.
Alexandra Vazquez
AV

Alexandra Vazquez

Alexandra Vazquez is a former Senior Content Marketing Specialist at G2. She received her Business Administration degree from Florida International University and is a published playwright. Alexandra's expertise lies in copywriting for the G2 Tea newsletter, interviewing experts in the Industry Insights blog and video series, and leading our internal thought leadership blog series, G2 Voices. In her spare time, she enjoys collecting board games, playing karaoke, and watching trashy reality TV.

Customer Community Software

This list shows the top software that mention customer community most on G2.

Influitive helps B2B marketers capture customer enthusiasm and use it to turbocharge marketing and sales efforts.

Gainsight Customer Communities is a purpose built, modern online community tool to centralize customer-facing content with a full suite of community modules including forums, knowledge base, product ideation and more brought together with federated search and generative AI.

Sell faster, smarter, and more efficiently with AI + Data + CRM. Boost productivity and grow in a whole new way with Sales Cloud.

Deliver excellent customer service with a 360-degree view of your customers, an enterprise grade knowledge base, agent productivity tools, service contracts & entitlements, and analytics for complete visibility all on the Salesforce Platform.

Leading Engagement Platform that empowers marketers to build brand value, grow revenue, and prove impact.

We help you build loyalty, enhance your reputation, feed innovation, and boost sales with Advocacy Marketing Programs. Strategy and consulting, program execution, community management, platform admin and analytics., case studies and video content creation. Remote execution in 30+ languages.

Oracle’s B2B Cross-Channel Marketing solution, Oracle Eloqua, enables marketers to plan and execute automated marketing campaigns while delivering a personalized customer experience for their prospects.

Provide customer support by email, social media, voice, and mobile phone with complete data reporting, TRUSTe certification, and 90+ integrations.

Saba Cloud provides unified workflows between training elearning and talent management, giving managers and employees access to development plans & activities.

Administer, deliver, and track training to reduce compliance risk, improve business productivity, and increase your employee engagement.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 14 software combines power and simplicity so you can make your photos look extraordinary.

Sendoso helps companies engage, acquire, and retain customers by integrating digital and physical sending strategies into mission-critical revenue programs.

Seismic Learning is the powerfully simple training software that helps customer-facing teams learn, practice, and do better work.

Magentrix Customer Success is designed to deliver better customer service, reduce costs and save on development resources.

Salesforce Partner Relationship Management recruits, onboards, trains, and supports your indirect sales channels with theThis channel management software gives you a direct view into the performance of you channel partners so you collaborate better and drive more deals features that increase partner engagement.

Happeo is a leading all-in-one digital workplace platform that empowers internal communicators to connect with employees in entirely new ways. The platform brings together intranet, collaboration and social networking into one unified solution.

Automation Anywhere Enterprise is an RPA platform architected for the digital enterprise.

Certinia ERP Cloud is a full-featured financial system that takes a fresh approach to keeping track of the numbers, built on Force.com.

Facebook Groups helps connect with people who share your interests. Meet new people, share knowledge or get support. Find the group for you.

Get workload-level visibility into AWS, Azure, and GCP without the operational costs of agents. You could buy three tools instead… but why? Orca replaces legacy vulnerability assessment tools, CSPM, and CWPP. Deploys in minutes, not months.