Question

Many online organizations establish user communities. Discuss the ways that a community of satisfied users can be useful in customer acquisition, operations, customer satisfaction, and customer retention.

Note: this is a fifteen point question, so expect the answer to be more comprehensive.

Hint: the question asks about usefulness in four areas. Arrange your answer in four sections to address each of those areas.

Answer 1

User community:

Every customer not just feel that they are listened but also addressed the right solution to the expressed concern. User community is a model, where users of particular product are freely discussed and shared their experience. This allows the organization to improve the services or product experience pro-actively.

Customer acquisition

Earlier, customer acquisition used to take place through word of mouth. In the present technology world, customers are sharing their experiences in the user communities by providing ratings and reviews. This helps the new customers to understand the attributes such as quality, durability etc., of the product.  Moreover, the satisfied customers are likely to spread about the brand, then it allows the new customer to gain good impression about the product. Thus, it provides an opportunity for seller to acquire a customer.

Operations

In these communities, users are allowed to provide suggestions for the improvement of product or services. This allows the companies to get ideas on improving the operations efficiency. For example: A online company has a customer care support through call system. if any user advises the company to opt chat services as well, then company can conduct the survey in the community to know the majority of the users opinion. Further, it can initiate the changes required based on the survey results.

Customer Satisfaction

Using the customer communities, companies can strengthen the trust between the brand and the user. User communities helps to measure the customer satisfaction through surveys. For example: If the survey conduct in first quarter shows 60% customer satisfaction, then company should aim to increase it to 70% in the next quarter. This way company can understand the needs that require to address in order to improve the customer satisfaction. The more satisfied customers, the more likely it is to spread positive about brand in the market.

Customer Retention

Most of the customers do not quit immediately from their seller if they find something wrong with their experience. Customer definitely express the interest to get it resolved by raising a query. User community acts as a two way communication between seller and buyer. If the customer query is addressed efficiently, then it helps to gain customer trust and retention for future transactions. Further, company can focus to minimize repetition of those mistakes.

Thus, user communities help the companies to stay closer to their communities which further improve their customer acquisition, satisfaction, retention and operations.