Customers are our Kings (although apparently in this picture, I’m the Queen!)

Every once in a while, a company hits a milestone that truly makes a CEO stand back and smile. Our Customer Success Summit on May 2^nd was one of those days.

We spent the day with more than 150 of our customers and partners listening, learning, and sharing (essentially a live version of a customer community). Never before have we heard from so many customers about their experiences with Get Satisfaction—our product, processes, and our team.

It was exhilarating to learn about the impact they are seeing using our online community platform. Customers like SPS Commerce, Applegate, Kenandy, and Citrix shared the best practices they’ve developed in building community that both strengthens their relationships with their customers as well as with their internal stakeholders.

It was a day of the familiar (our team presented all the practical information we’ve learned through six years and 70,000 communities, and I announced our new Dummies book, which sums it all up in one easy-to-consume guide) and the unexpected (our photo booth with throne and props evoked some hilarious responses).

Product innovation was a key theme of the day. We were all excited (and proud) to get a preview of our new capabilities from our CTO, David Rowley.  As a result of his presentation, even more new product ideas were generated from our customers. The collaboration was fun to be part of.

VP of Product Marketing, Scott Hirsch, sheds light on how to drive and measure the business value of community.

IDC analyst, Michael Fauscette, gave us all an education in why customer community is an essential piece of any customer experience strategy. He shared how a company can leverage online community to build true engagement at every stage in the customer life cycle.

Many attendees were pleasantly surprised to learn how community can break down business silos to foster teamwork within a company.  For example, attendees loved the presentation on how community teams can bring product and development teams into the community to get valuable product feedback, conduct mini focus groups, beta testing, and more.

Although many of our customers use Get Satisfaction for support, two marketing executives—Chris Selland, VP of Marketing at HP Vertica, and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO of Mindjet—talked about how community is helping them create a cultural shift both inside their organizations and with their customers. The vision these executives have for community as a guiding force to connect more closely with their customers whenever and wherever made us all proud.

Get Satisfaction customer, Ben Norris, wins the award for the best conference sketchnotes! Learn more on his site: www.benjaminsnorris.com!

There was also a wealth of information for those working with community on a more day-to-day basis—from our own Senior Community Manager, Caty Kobe, sharing her insider knowledge about the skills, tools, and best practices for managing a thriving community, to industry veteran, Stephen Mann, teaching us how to use community to handle thousands of inquiries through self-service and peer-to-peer support.

From the inception of our product six years ago, Get Satisfaction has been central to helping companies both large and small build trust-based, long-lasting relationships with their customers.  It was extremely gratifying to hear so many examples of how companies are using community to build loyal customer relationships that translate to explicit business value as well. The voice of the customer has never been louder or more accessible, and we’re so honored to be trusted by so many great companies to be the medium for that voice.

So please keep the conversation going and join us in our Get Satisfaction Community in topics we have created to continue the dialog:

How do you measure the value of community?

How can you optimize self-service support with community? 

How can you leverage the voice of the customer as marketing content?

Thanks TSIA audience for voting us winner of the 2013 Service Revolutions Vision Award!

Last week about 800 of these support professionals gathered at the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) TSW Conference to discuss the changes going on in the industry, and the trends, tools, and best practices to help you navigate the new landscape. Get Satisfaction was a sponsor at this event, and we relished the opportunity to get a better sense of the concerns and challenges many support teams are facing, and the solutions they’re using to solve them.

There were some key themes that emerged over and over again—social technologies (no, that’s not the same things as addressing support issues in 140 characters or less), personalization, data fragmentation, self-service support, and mobile. These trends are the driving force behind many innovative, exciting new solutions, and it was great to connect with others who get as excited about them as we do.

TSIA is a leading force in the service and support industry, and their team were the backbone of our conference experience providing us with relevant data, context, and guidance to make sense of what we were learning. We found the results of John Ragsdale’s The State of Social Support 2013 survey particularly interesting—for example, in 2013, 80% of survey respondents will be investing in customer communities as a way to provide better social support. However, 77% of respondents are not seeing or do not know how to measure the ROI they’re seeing. Wow. Clearly there’s a disconnect there.

The how-to of measuring the ROI of community and social support in general is a question we get a lot around here at Get Satisfaction, which is why we’ve been working with industry thought leaders and analysts to identify just how much these technologies are saving companies—through ticket deflection, self-service, and peer-to-peer support.  We now offer an ROI calculator that can help you measure the results you’re seeing. (Reach out to us directly at contact@getsatisfaction.com if you’d like to put it to work to see how much you are or could be saving).

We brought one of our favorite customers, Zoli Radnai, Community Support Team Lead at Prezi, to share a beautiful Prezi presentation about how they’re realizing and measuring the ROI of their community (anywhere from $1.2 million per year, all the way up to $7.2 million per year, depending on how conservatively or optimistically you measure call deflection).

Between the aesthetically awesome presentation of the information (haven’t heard of Prezi? Check them out here), the impressive savings, and the audience response to both….let’s just say it was a tech nerd’s breed of exhilarating.

Scott Hirsch passionately presents his product demo at the Vision Awards.

There were other highlights as well—our VP of Product Marketing, Scott Hirsch, demoed our product (specifically our powerful SEO capabilities, responsive design for any size screen, and social interaction model) at the TSIA Service Revolutions Vision Awards on Wednesday. The Service Revolutions Vision Awards recognize the latest innovations in technology services, so we were extremely pleased and honored to be named the winner of the commercial category. This win was based on real-time audience votes, which made the victory that much sweeter.

What did we take away from all this? Well, for starters, we were pleased to hear that our focus on bringing community everywhere your customers are is on target with what support agents are looking for.

It was also validating to hear the focus that everyone was putting on community. In the various sessions we heard and presented at, the message that this is the year where community moves from early adoption to mainstream support necessity was vocalized again and again. Time will tell if that’s true, but it’s hard to deny the energy that statement had behind it (and how exciting that was for us!).

And we also learned some important information about the Giants and the latest Game of Thrones episode. Who would’ve thought? ;)

Thankfully, that is no longer the case. Today there are abundant resources—blogs, thought leaders, webcasts, etc—available to help you build a community, drive participation and engagement, and measure the business value.

Yesterday we hosted our first Get Satisfaction Customer Success Summit, which was geared towards providing our customers with the skills, tools, and know how to build thriving, valuable communities.  This event was the culmination of six years and 73,000 communities of learned knowledge. It was a lot to cram into one day, but it felt great to share everything we’ve learned with our customers (Couldn’t make it? Stay tuned for the wrap up post next week).

At the conference we launched our CEO, Wendy Lea’s, new book—Customer Communities for Dummies. This book is a step-by-step guide to building an active community, leveraging it for company-wide business value, and building better relationships with your customers online. We know that community managers are smart, charismatic, professionals (in other words, not at all Dummies), but the book is a great resource to guide those who manage communities or are thinking about incorporating one into your customer experience strategy.

We want as many people as possible to have access to the learned knowledge in this book, so we’re giving away the eBook for free. Want to win a hard copy singed by our fabulous CEO, Wendy Lea? Help us spread the word by using the share buttons on this blog or on the eBook download site using the hashtag #GetSuccess. We’ll send the top 10 sharers a free, signed copy each week.

Good luck, and happy community building!

It was with that in mind that the founders of Get Satisfaction launched our platform to bring the customer to the center of those conversations with branded communities. Six years and 70,000 communities later, we’ve learned a thing or two about how companies can get the most success from their community, and how they can measure that value to make a compelling business case.

We don’t want to hold all this knowledge up in our heads—we want to share it with everyone who has a customer community and everyone who’s thinking about getting one. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Join us on Thursday, May 2^nd for the conference that is all about creating and measuring value from community.

The morning of the Customer Success Summit will focus on how day-to-day community managers and practitioners can achieve tactical success building their communities, driving engagement, and using specific features and integration.

The afternoon will focus on how the executives of customer-centric companies are incorporating community as a critical piece of their customer experience strategies. This will highlight customers, the business value they’re realizing, and how other companies can realize and measure similar value.

It’s going to be a fun event, with awards recognizing noteworthy communities, exciting announcements from Get Satisfaction’s CEO, Wendy Lea, and lots of great people sharing knowledge and experiences. Hope to see you in San Francisco!

But today’s social customers expect access to these departments anyway, and they expect it to be immediate, transparent, and comprehensive. No pressure.

The good news is that technology has evolved along with your customers, allowing you to assess and meet their needs, expectations, and preferences. Branded communities bring your customers together for online conversations about your products and services. This connects them to one you and one another, and unites your various business departments around the voice of the customer.

The business value community creates is evident in departments across your company. Want to know what we mean? Check out the infographic below!

• It had all the features we wanted, including the different topic “channels.”

• It allowed our company, Kenandy, to participate, and be identified as the host.

• It allowed us to build one searchable “knowledge base” instead of having separate knowledge bases created by Kenandy and our clients.

• It had the integration with Salesforce.

• It allowed us to build a private community, accessible from Kenandy via single sign-on.

Our community has helped us in many ways. We’re building knowledge with our clients, and the knowledge is improving our service and helping us build better products. One of the primary benefits of communities is that they make users and the company more productive. Users become more productive in several ways:

• They can build on and share product knowledge with their colleagues and the company. In the Kenandy Community, clients share tips and tricks on the best ways to use the product.

• They can build on and share ideas with their colleagues about ways to improve the product, as well as best business practices.

• If a client posts a bug and the company offers a resolution, other clients can benefit from the discussion.

• Users benefit from having one central portal that contains all the information and resources they need in a searchable format.

Companies benefit from many of the same capabilities:

• The shared product knowledge becomes part of the company’s domain. It can be included in the online Help and training, as well as in the marketing material. The knowledge can also be used to build user stories that support the development process.

• Having one way of receiving bugs makes it much simpler for companies to prioritize and resolve them.

SaaS providers should realize the benefits of communities as part of their overall strategy. It’s a tool that makes all the participants winners, because everyone is empowered to be more effective.

Stewart Florsheim is the VP of Marketing at Kenandy 

Our Company-Customer Pact (a document that has been guiding the company longer than I have!) says it best—“we, customers and companies alike, need to trust the people with whom we do business.”

Trust is at the heart of every human relationship, and loyal customer relationships have the same requirement.  Citrix Online Services understands the importance of building a business based on trust, which is one of the reasons we work together as a mutual customer and partner.

Their GoToMeeting product focuses on the human element, bringing people in different locations face-to-face for collaboration, removing the limitations of physical space. This gives us an immediate and flexible connection with customers, partners, and employees in remote offices, facilitating informal work sessions as well as formal presentations.

These conversations build trust, which then sets the stage for collaboration and mobility (two more values I hold dear).  After all, conversations are richer and more valuable when they factor in the perspectives of a variety of people. In today’s world, the people you want to include in your business conversations may not be in your physical space or even your time zone, but with tools like GoToMeeting, it’s easy to include them as if they were sitting in the same room.

Get Satisfaction is also a core tool for building collaboration and peer-to-peer connections. We help companies develop trust-based relationships with customers, prospects, and partners by giving them a direct line to people across their organization. This shows them that you value what they have to say, and gives you the benefit of their collective insight (as well as the analytic tools to make sense of it).

And we help build collaboration internally by breaking down the silos between product, support, marketing and sales to form a united front that revolves around the voice of the customer.

When your business is centered around people—and your processes, technologies, and systems support that focus—you can really build the trust-based relationships that allow companies to thrive.

Get Satisfaction and Citrix Online Services understand the importance of trust. It is at the core of our businesses and is something we strive to nurture within our organizations and with our customers. By trusting the people with whom we do business, good relationships are created and good business follows.

To learn how your company can nurture the trust necessary to succeed, check out the Meeting is Believing commercial featuring me, my dog, Casey, and members of our team!

~Wendy Lea, CEO of Get Satisfaction

One of the benefits of an engaged community is that it attracts new users while keeping existing ones satisfied. At HootSuite, we take great pride in our community building efforts. A healthy community around your brand is hard to cultivate, but it is well worth the effort.

At HootSuite, we’ve managed to do what we think is a pretty great job at building online communities all over the globe.

Today, we’re excited to share a few handy tips we use when establishing our customer community.

1. Identify your power-users

Before we can start any of our community initiatives (Translation projects, App integrations, programs, etc), we seek out people in specific regions who are using HootSuite.

You can do this easily for your business by using geo-located searches to monitor mentions of specific terms in one region. It’s also smart to scour blogs and target niche social networks if they’re applicable to your brand. What you’re looking for are influential people in your space.

From there, we reach out and make friends with these influencers. This can be as easy as a personalized tweet, comment, like, or a +1. Whatever the method, the point is to let your users know that you are listening and that you are eager to serve.

We encourage these power users to get involved in our communities – whether by helping translate, joining our online communities and programs, or by spreading the word about our service.

GetSat makes this easy by allowing us to bring those conversations into GetSat and moves us past pesky character limits so that we can start to have a more in-depth conversation.

2. Get your customers involved

Sure, it’s great to find and reach out to your customers around the world, but why not get them involved as well? You can easily accomplish this by setting up different programs and sub-communities specifically tailored to your customers.

At HootSuite, we like to find ways to accommodate users at every level, whether through our Diplomat program, HootUp program, or our awesome customer support forum (powered by Get Satisfaction). The great thing about the support forum for us, is the ability to create new forum threads out of Tweets and Facebook updates right  from the HootSuite dash.

Allowing your customers into your culture creates a deeper relationship. This relationship is what you want as it is the basis of any genuine brand affinity.

These are easy ways to build community around your business because you allow your audience self-select and get involved more intimately with your brand.

3. Every mention of your brand is an opportunity

It’s important to treat all of your customers equally regardless of how much they’re paying you. At HootSuite, we treat any social mention the same – and each one gets a response.

With this mandate, we strive to reach out and engage with anybody and everybody who mentions HootSuite. We also track about ten different misspellings of the word HootSuite from ‘Hot Suit’ to ‘Hootsweat’… and everything in between.

#Bonus: If you’re an internationally focused business, you need to think about tracking mentions in different languages of your name. Just because an existing or potential customer doesn’t speak the your language doesn’t mean they don’t deserve at least an attempted response.

Through these continued tracking efforts, and with the help of the handy GetSat integration with HootSuite, we build and maintain relationships at scale. For us, it’s important to show how we’re more than just a corporate Twitter handle.

#TakeHome: You need to value each connection, and make sure you are present and actively engaged with your existing and potential customers.

Hope you learned a thing or two. Using these simple tactics, we’ve managed to build sustainable and meaningful communities around HootSuite both locally and around the world.

Next up, we’ll discuss more community building secrets, including events, localization, visual flavour, and perhaps our biggest secret to turning customers into community advocates. Look out for the next installment in the coming weeks.

-Connor from HootSuite

So how do you get customers to want to help out?

Give them a Reason to be Champions:

Let your customers know what a champion is (according to your definition), what a champion does, why they should want to be a champion (incentives), and how they can become one. We wrapped it up in one graphic. People often participate for two reasons – they either want to impress or help other members – and both reasons can produce great champions.

Keep Them Posted on Their Progress

Now that they know what you’re looking for, let them know publicly who is in the lead. We posted community updates and blogs to identify champion-esque behavior and stats. It created a little competition among our customers to see who could get the most stars, answer the most questions, and participate overall in the community.

It won’t take long to see who is interested. And once you see who is interested, you can find the ones who are qualified.

About Kristen Gastaldo

Kristen Gastaldo joined the Altru team in March 2012, leaving behind the late nights of the music business. For the past eight years she’s been lucky enough to work in the music industry, managing venues in North and South Carolina. In 2010, she founded the Lowcountry Artist Market, a seasonal market that features local vendors selling handmade and vintage goods. Her background in event management, marketing and ticketing in the arts and cultural community led her to pursue a career with Blackbaud, as Altru’s Community Manager. She  connects users with information, each other, and helps foster a sense of community.

We’ve noticed too. The adoption of mobile everything has been so sudden and all-encompassing that mobile visits to our communities have almost doubled over the past year!  So, with your mobile experience in mind, we have given our mobile app a complete overhaul.

Now, everyone who comes to one of our communities (yes, even free communities) on an iPhone, iPod, or Android device will arrive at a mobile optimized website, so it’s still just as easy for them to find the content they’re looking for. For more information on the responsive design and other features we’ve implemented, check out our Product Blog. Otherwise, just head over to your favorite community on your cell phone to check out all the cool features!

*Image courtesy of BigStockPhoto.com