Customer Communities

7Law 3: Community Should Be the Heart of the Customer Journey: Activate and Engage Your Customers at Scale

By Aaron Hatton and Haiko Krumm

In the previous chapters, we have seen how communities can contribute to your organization and that you need to start early with your community efforts. We also learned that the most valuable way to implement an online community is to own the platform. In this chapter, we want to build on that and explain how community is at the heart of any customer journey.

By “at the heart of the customer journey,” we mean delivering valuable content and engagement to the customer at the right time and place. Your community is the strategic platform that centralizes all content and engagement relevant to end users in one single destination. But that doesn't mean you want to move customers toward the community as a destination by itself, with a separate customer journey. Instead, centralized content should be carefully and strategically intertwined with your pre-existing customer journey to help elevate your customer experience. Rather than living alone and in a silo, your community should be embedded with your product or service throughout multiple locations, especially areas where a customer may need additional guidance or support. But before we dive into community and the customer journey, let's first review what a customer journey is.

Customer Life Cycle and Customer Journey Explained

With every customer, their relationship with your organization ...