User community: Building a competitive advantage
Connecting customers, partners and employees can be difficult. Elements, such as, real-time insight, meaningful feedback and a collaborative work process, can combine to create a culture capable of thriving during difficult times. The active involvement of a user community can have significant benefits to any business. A well-functioning user community can increase business success by providing new insights regarding products, services or operations, by strengthening marketplace relationships and by generating new revenue streams.
A user community can strengthen ties with your most valued customers so that real-time insight can be used to drive innovation. By integrating a user community into your business strategy, you can tap into the power of all parties involved with your company, in a highly scalable and secure way. When you implement an efficient process for your customers, partners and employees to work collaboratively, you are building a strong competitive advantage.
User community programs: OneDesk’s customer portal
OneDesk’s customer portal is a great example of a powerful user community program that helps you build competitive edge. This very user community-friendly portal allows you to gain real-time actionable insight to drive product innovation and improve the development of products and services.
With OneDesk, you can successfully:
- Build a user community on your website that allows you to engage with your customer base and keep them actively involved in the product development process.
- Open up the conversation to your customers, and have them discuss their suggestions and ideas with each other.
- Connect your customers with employees so that they can collaborate fully in the product development process and make improvements as required.
- Use a voting upwards or downwards tool so that the best customer ideas can be selected and integrated into your product launch strategy and overall business plan.
User Community: Three BIG benefits of using
1. Product and service innovations increase
The customer portal allows your marketing, product development and operational teams to easily access relevant and usable data. This real-time business intelligence is an extremely powerful way to generate revenues and reduce costs, because it comes from your most loyal and engaged customers, in a forum that is scalable, private and secure from your competitors.
2. Customer loyalty and business value increase
The customer portal allows you to directly link your most valued customers to your organization. This process of giving customers a voice has a direct powerful impact on making customers feel connected and involved in the business. Customers, feeling like ‘business partners’, are more loyal and want your business to succeed. The business value that this increased customer loyalty creates is priceless.
3. Marketing and operational costs decrease
The customer portal has a direct contribution to lowered costs. When customers are connected with each other, they can discuss issues and share solutions. In this way problems are identified and resolved quickly and at almost no cost to you. Teams can then use that information to improve products, operational processes and make better overall decisions—all elements that increase business profitability by reducing risk and improvement costs.
More information on building a user community using ’s customer portal can be found here.