Customer Communities

4A Community for Customer Success, Support, Marketing, and Product Teams: How Every Department Can Benefit from a Next-Generation Community

As we've already touched on, the use case for support organizations to leverage communities is well established—it was the primary driver of the first wave of enterprise communities. Even in today's leading customer success communities, support is often still one of the most important drivers of community value.

How Support Teams Benefit from Community

Consider a customer's options when looking for an answer to a question. For questions about a product or service, it's usually possible to reach out to a support team via a one-to-one channel, and for urgent questions that will likely be the best thing to do. However, many questions are less urgent, and the one-to-one channels can be inconvenient when you have to deal with opening hours, waiting times, or even the risk of encountering a dreaded chatbot or interactive voice response (IVR) menu. Instead, many will choose to first look online. Research firm Forrester already concluded several years ago that the preference for self-service channels has long overtaken the preference to ask for one-to-one support.

A self-service experience usually starts by browsing through available resources or simply searching via Google. This latter option is, in fact, the most likely first step a customer will take in many situations. With as many as 8.5 billion daily searches (Marmon, 2023), Google has ...