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Last year, University of Michigan published a report stating that firms who don't have their own virtual brand community are leaving money on the table -- in fact, the researchers estimate that customers who belong in such a community spend 19% more than customers who don't.
Enabling your customers to communicate openly with you and with each other has huge benefits across all parts of the business:
Just check out the amazing report from University of Michigan above.
And you sell as a team! Companies along with their partners, suppliers and distributors, can create custom communities to drive more sales through seamless deal registration, access to proven sales tools and collaboration with the right experts.
Communities create engaged customers, and engaged customers are more willing to be brand advocates. Companies can collaborate with their customers and partners to plan campaign rollouts, gain insight into new product introductions, and create event experiences, among other uses. What if your customers got together to innovate on products and marketing with you? Wouldn't it be incredible to market with, and not to your customers?
Of course, creating brand advocates isn't about marketing alone -- it's about creating customer experiences that are worth sharing. Communities improve customer satisfaction by providing better and faster answers through agent and peer interaction.
When customers work with their peers, they become productive more quickly, find new uses for the product and thus are more likely to ultimately repurchase your product or service.
There's clearly a lot you can do with your customers by working with them in communities; however, an even bigger opportunity lies in unlocking the power of collaboration across your entire ecosystem -- inside and outside company walls. In fact, McKinsey estimates that there's a $1.3 trillion opportunity in social collaboration. The report states that social collaboration technologies create value by improving productivity across the entire value chain. More specifically:
"Two-thirds of this potential value lies in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises. The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. "
Communities enable people and businesses to communicate and work together much more effectively in so many ways -- your imagination is the limit! Imagine your customers working together to share and create best practices and innovate alongside employees and partners, high-end retailers delivering custom shopping experiences, universities creating alumni networks to connect with students, manufacturers interacting regularly with their entire channel -- from suppliers to retailers. This kind of radical transparency accelerates your business and creates raving fans and advocates from across your entire ecosystem.
Salesforce Communities creates rich online collaborative forums that connect the Customer Company to its customers and partners in a whole new way. They provide highly engaging and customized experiences that scale to millions of employees and external users. Salesforce Communities is the only community platform that combines the power of social with business processes for breakthrough collaboration and productivity.
Salesforce Communities offer:
To learn more, please visit us online or contact your sales rep.
And don’t forget to tune in to our webinar on June 27th, to discuss best practices around building communities that delight and drive business value.
