Heather is Higher Logic’s Chief Community Officer. She was the first to hold the position at Higher Logic and one of the earliest to hold the title in the industry. I’ve been involved in community management for around 13 years. When I started, I didn’t even know it was a profession, and I was flying solo. I think a lot of us started that way in the early years. The techniques that we developed back then and refined over the years were based on gut instinct, combined with marketing techniques, behavioral psychology, and trial and error. We accomplished many amazing things this way, but fortun ..read more

Customer communities – what do they do for your business, really? Is a community a nice-to-have or a must-have?   Michael Torok and Chris Detzel lead community efforts at their SaaS companies, Delphix and Imperva, respectively.  They joined us to share why they began their communities, and the benefits they believe community will create for their customers and their organization. We’re sharing those big ways a branded community benefits your customers and your organization. 1. Communities Grow Customer Retention Delphix, a data operations platform for the cloud, launched their custo ..read more

If you’re trying to improve the customer experience, start by looking at whether your digital customer experience is disjointed. As a SaaS provider or B2B company, “digital” might be the only way a customer interacts with you. If all they experience is disconnected, frustrating processes where they have to login multiple times and go to multiple systems in order to get their problem answered, you’re not delivering an optimal experience.  One approach to fixing the problem is to centralize the customer experience around a customer community. A customer community creates a space where custo ..read more

The hard truth: Your digital customer experience may be disjointed. Forrester Research writes, “Digital experience delivery is a business-critical obligation.”  For many companies today, especially B2B or SaaS companies, the digital customer experience is the customer experience. Your customers likely interact with you almost entirely online (as they do things like submit support tickets, tag your business profiles on social media, or visit your website), making evaluating your customers’ digital experience a key step on the road to improving it. You might think your digital customer exper ..read more

When executed with proper planning and resources, a customer community can have a tangible impact on key business performance indicators, including ticket deflection, revenue generation, and customer satisfaction. According to Aberdeen Research, firms with online communities: Enjoy 5.4x greater annual increase in customer satisfaction rates Achieve 41% greater average customer profit margin Are 2x more likely to have a formal strategy to encourage loyal customers to become brand advocates Improve (decrease) support costs by 32.9% year-over-year Grow customer retention rates by 15 ..read more

Each year, the CX Network surveys customer experience professionals, solution providers, and industry experts on customer experience trends in the Global State of Customer Experience 2019. They ask respondents which companies they think have the best customer experience, and this year, these five business-to-consumer (B2C) companies rose to the top: Disney Apple Uber Amazon Zappos These B2C examples provide critical examples for business-to-business (B2B) companies to learn from and apply as we try to transform our organizations to become more customer-centric. As companies that s ..read more

Have you had a recent brand interaction that impressed you? Maybe a company answered your support question quickly or accommodated you in a way that made you feel seen and appreciated. These experiences stand out to us, because too often, human, relatable customer experiences are rare. For example, remember the video of the West Jet airline steward that went viral? He made his customers laugh, and they actually paid attention to the safety demonstration (a feat in and of itself). People all over the internet loved seeing him make a human connection with his customers. (Here’s the clip if yo ..read more

The Net Promotor Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) score, and the Customer Effort Score (CES) are the current trifecta of tools for measuring the customer experience. Together, each survey type provides a valuable, unique perspective on how your customers feel about their customer experience. The Customer Effort Score is the newest of these survey tools and is gaining popularity as companies and customer experience experts uncover more of its value. What exactly does the Customer Effort Score measure, and why does it matter? The CES looks at how much effort a customer has to (or f ..read more

Many customer success teams are short on time and understaffed. Maybe you’re even a team of one. In an ideal world, every account would get the same amount of time, but that’s not always possible. It’s imperative to prioritize your time and your customer list, especially when a customer might be at risk for churn.    Fortunately, we’ve identified seven key areas where you can watch for customer churn, and the types of behavior that signify they’re at risk. These indicators will help you identify areas where you can step in before a customer doesn’t renew.  Here are the top places to watch f ..read more

Do you want to make customer support more convenient for your customers? And reduce your support costs? Well, we’ll let you in on customer support’s best-kept secret: your own customers. Your customers are a wealth of knowledge about your product or service. They ask your support team questions that other customers may have already asked and gotten answers to. So why not create a space where they can search for answers and share knowledge, instead of sending them straight to a support ticket queue? The benefits of connecting your customers in an online community are vast and varied. You ..read more