A brief dive into the world of community management: What, Why, How
We all know that people love to communicate. For us, communication is a source of information, feeling of social comfort and pleasure of being heard. Some may say that there are a lot of introverts among us, that is true as well, but being introverted doesn’t mean there is no need for you to communicate with others. This means communication has ascended to the more trustful levels, and borderline that needs to be cross is a bit rougher, but that only amplifies the comfort of communication
Companies use that, and they do well. The field of this business-to-customer communication is called community management. How it is applicable? There are several cases that I’ll try to elaborate on:
First, active customer support. This sounds simple, right? Manually guiding the person through the problems they encounter incredibly smoothens user experience, but there are a lot of nuances that should be considered:
- Answer time. In the Digital Era, where the switch between two competitive enterprises take sno longer than a day (sometimes even a few minutes), quick response is a must. As I wrote earlier, people love being heard.
- Support training. Poorly trained and unsupervised support staff, that is pretty usual experience nowadays, is a disaster. This makes the user think about project as of something chaotic and inefficient, even if your overall performance is outstanding
Second case that I would like to mention is direct communication between brand and customer. This makes thing a lot easier.
In my experience, there were pretty heated up situations in which brands have made public dumpster dive because they weren’t addressing the real problems as soon as possible. One exchange platform site has been turned down two times in one week. There were no attempts to contact and explain the situation to the community. This has left a lot of negative in the space and weakened a long-earned trust. Was it worth it? Of course not.
And last but not the least thing that I’d like to mention is a direct feedback mechanism. Again, people like being heard, and there is no better way to make sure that all feedback is revised and stored than well organized and trained community management team that has a good connection with core team and developers
That is the message that team Connect (https://www.cnnct.pw/) is trying to deliver and implement. Of course, good community management team won’t solve all your project problems, but there are no successful projects with badly managed community. Project are made for people, without community, there is no Project.
