Customers tend to rely on other customers more than Customer Support staff who are paid to sell. Potential customers want to get genuine answers to their questions. An online community helps you structure the conversations and to drive conversion on your website.
Imagine, you are going to have a big Mexican fiesta for your friends and family this weekend. It’s a very busy week at work, so you are thinking of ordering your groceries online to be more effective. However, you’re concerned about the avocados. To make your famous guacamole you need them to be perfect. How do you ensure that they are, when you don’t hand pick them yourself?
You have the option to call customer support to ask them about the process, but you don’t think that they will give you an honest answer or that they really understand how important this is to you. There are too many uncertainties, and you can’t risk your guacamole, so you end up not using the online store.
What if instead the online grocery retailer had provided you with a better and simpler way of finding the answer? You most likely would have ordered right? After all, you are clearly keen to order quite a lot of food for the fiesta.
What if you were able to ask the question on the website of the online grocery retailer and get a fellow customer to answer the question?
This could be a real conversation in an online community:
Customer A: How are their avocados? Making my famous guacamole on Saturday :)
Customer B: Throughout the 6 months I have used this service I’ve only got bad avocados once. When I mentioned that to Customer support they added two new ones to the next order free of charge.
Customer A: Thanks! I will place an order and hopefully have the same good experience as you!
A customer is much more likely to place an order if the answers are provided by a fellow customer. Or would you trust customer support more than a peer?
Contact us at Centigo if you would like to discuss online communities and how they can improve your digital customer interaction!
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/ Viktor Mikaelsson & Albin Johansson
