That’s the title of a great post on MyCustomer.com by Neil Davey. There’s a lot there that we at Helpstream agree wholeheartedly with, and are trying to offer as an integrated SaaS solution. Let’s take a look:

•1. Use your online communities as a tool for feedback and innovation.

Check! Helpstream has built in Idea Storming that comes for free as part of the package for every customer. We think it’s that important. It let’s your customers provide their suggestions and vote on which ones make the most sense.

But why stop there? You can deploy as many Idea Storms as you like for special purposes. Why not give Sales a private Idea Storm (we allow private sub-communities for limited audiences or you could set up another workspace) where they can talk about and vote on what they need to sell more product? Same with partners.

To try out our Idea Storms, sign up for a free workspace, and then you’ll have your own Idea Storm. If you’re already a customer, head over to the Idea Storm on our support portal and tell us what you’d like to see us do to the product.

It doesn't have to be just Michael Dell who has access to this kind of customer intelligence!

•2. Ensure you are managing your reputation online

We couldn’t agree more. Neil mentions that studies show the majority of brand comment online is negative and that firms need to engage with these commentators. Absolutely!

Now let’s add a couple of wrinkles. That conversation is going to go on about your brand whether you like it or not. Wouldn’t you like to bring at least some of the conversation in closer to make engaging easier? Wouldn’t you like to have your best customers involved in that engagement too?

That’s exactly what we’re about with Helpstream’s community module.

•3. Move from monologue marketing to dialogue/conversational marketing

More goodness in an increasingly webby world. And what sales person would choose to have a monologue if they could have had a conversation anyway? Use Helpstream to create that two-way conversational opportunity.

•4. Know your customers (lifestage, values, and lifestyle)

What better way to do this than to build a community (with Helpstream or other tool if you prefer) where they can get together and share those values. Birds of a feather do flock together, and we guarantee you’ll learn a lot from hosting the party.

•5. Learn to locate real customer insight

Signal to noise ratio is a tough problem on the web. You need tools to help you identify the really insightful stuff that’s going on. There is no substitute for the foundational work Davey describes, but you can also get your customers to help you with this. With Helpstream’s community modules, everything can be voted on and reported on. You can tell which questions, comments, ideas, and responses are the most popular among your customers. You can tell which customers are the valued contributors. Putting together both the ideas and the people gives rare and deep insight into what’s going on in your customer base.

•6. Measure your customer experience

Root causes. Modeling from the customer’s perspective. Not being overly reliant on cryptic KPI’s.

These are all good tips from the article. But they’re pretty strongly focused on telephone interaction. That’s great, the phone isn’t going away any time soon, but you haven’t lived until you’ve seen the breadth of information that comes from watching an online community in action. There’s just so much more data available to enable you to measure your customer’s experience.

•7. Ensure your staff are your biggest brand advocates

Jennifer Kirkby is quoted as suggesting frontline staff be engaged in product and service design. Absolutely! At Helpstream, every single employee is subscribed to everything that happens in the online Community and Customer Service System. They see it all, and this is a very effective Voice of the Customer experience for them.

Going beyond just listening, we also empower many (after a little training on how to be customer facing) to help customers in the community by answering their questions.

Going even beyond that, we have a number of customers who empower some of their best customers to act as surrogate Customer Service Representatives. Helpstream’s permissioning system is flexible enough to make that easy without giving away too many permissions.

Lots of other powerful capabilities are there. You want your partners to be brand advocates, right? No problem. We host internal communities for our partners such as Oracle where they get direct access to us to learn everything they need to know to be more effective advocates when joint selling. It’s been a powerful tool.

Conclusion

That was a great set of lessons from Neil Davey. They sure fit our thinking about the space, and we’ve worked hard to incorporate each principle into the very fabric of our Helpstream software.