How to Build & Scale a B2B Online Community Platform

Just as industries and economies evolve and change over time, so too do the partnerships businesses and their customers. Before, the focus of these relationships was face-to-face interaction. Now that focus has shifted to digital interactions, like customer reviews and recommendations. And now, more than ever, long-term customer loyalty is based on trust, customer engagement, and customer feedback — and the way companies handle that feedback.

A similar shift has occurred in the realm of customer service. Where once the focus was on personal contact between the customer and the service agent, today digitalization, constant cost pressure, and society’s call for quick, simple answers are making it necessary to rethink service. Companies are continuing to bring digital service solutions to the fore as we operate in the age of self-service. Enter the online community.

Today we’ll dive into the value that online communities bring to companies and their customers, and how we’ve built and scaled Personio’s over the last 3 years. And, for the purposes of this article, we’ll define “online community” as an online forum that enables a company to bring their customers together to communicate with each other.

Online Communities: The Swiss Army Knife of Customer Experience Tools

Introducing self-service offers to your service landscape empowers your customers to find the solutions themselves. It enables them to solve their own problems faster, without needing to wait for a customer service agent to get back to them. And, in cases where customers can actually add their own knowledge to the self-service solution, the solution only gets more informative — and therefore more valuable — over time.

Online communities like this are multi-use tools — truly, the Swiss Army Knife of customer service teams. Deployed correctly, they can have a large impact on customer acquisition and retention, unite and bond customers within a single experience, and overall play a significant role in shaping the long term success of a company.

The Benefits of Providing an Online Community

Offering an online community to your B2B customers brings benefits for both your customers and your company.

For Your Customers

Service
With an online community, a company can expand its already existing service offering. Your customers can get their problems solved much more quickly, giving them more time to focus on other aspects of their jobs. It is not only important to train experienced service agents to become community moderators in order to solve customers’ concerns, but above all to address the topic of user-generated content and users helping users.

On the one hand, it is about motivating customers to make their service concerns public or to discuss them and exchange ideas. On the other hand, it is above all about customers passing on their knowledge and thus helping other customers. This gives the customer the opportunity to access an enormous amount of knowledge about tools and expertise 24/7.

Networking
Humans are social beings, and we often rely on cooperation to succeed. When it comes to succeeding in their daily work, especially when your product is involved, an online community is the best place for your customers to find each other, connect, and cooperate. Your community gives them a digital opportunity to build important relationships with each other.

But it shouldn’t be all about your product. Your community should have dedicated spaces where they can discuss topics that are close to their hearts, or at least their minds. Try to think: which particular interest or trait does the majority of your customers have in common? What is a topic, somewhat linked to your product, that particularly connects them? Aim to build on that, so that the exchange becomes extremely valuable to the community members on a personal level too.

Using our own example: Personio sells HR software, so we opened a space in our community where members can talk freely about HR strategy, challenges, trending topics, etc. We let the conversation go beyond just our product — that is where the magic happens!

Content
If your community generates interesting and valuable content, your users can use that to learn more about your product and how to make the best out of it. Ideally, most of the content will be user-generated questions, discussions, and valuable comments — which means you’re providing value for your customers without needing to create the content yourselves (That said, the best online communities will feature both user-generated and company-generated content.)

However, featured content from your own teams can be very useful too, in order to foster discussions and highlight some specific topics and lessons you want your users to know. A healthy mix of educational, insightful and fun content being created in consistent cadences is key to keeping your users coming back for more.

For Your Company

Reducing Service Costs
Customer self-service is not only quicker for the customer, it is also a considerably cheaper way for you to enable your customer to find a solution. Instead of solving each and every one of your customer’s problems on an individual basis, an online forum allows you to slash those costs. A written response can be consumed and used not only by one person, but by several.

The one-to-one ration suddenly becomes one-to-many, and scalability is no longer just a theory. In communities where customers add in their own answers and ideas, this scalability is taken another step further, freeing up your team’s capacities to new opportunities: peer-to-peer support is born.

Driving Customer Loyalty
Community makes your customers feel like they are part of something bigger. Active members are not only happy consumers of your product, they are also indirect brand ambassadors. In fact, studies have shown that customers who actively engage in online communities develop more connection to your brand and your product.

This can not only increase your product adoption, but also your sales and growth pipeline. At Personio, for example, we’ve seen that customers who have a community account are twice as likely to stay with Personio than a customer without one.

Customer Voices
An online community is like an open forum where your users can share their questions, ideas, views, and discussions around your product, but also about what it means to be a user of your product. Don’t let these voices go to waste! Listen to this feedback and make sure it gets to the right teams within your company, so that they can use it to guide product strategy.

The Pillars of a Healthy B2B Community

In order to realise these benefits, your focus should be on building a healthy and functioning online community. To do so, you’ll need these three key building blocks:

User Base
Without a user base, there is no community. In the early stages, it’s important to get your customers to the online community and reach critical mass, at which point your online community user growth will start growing more organically. But reaching critical mass can take some serious investment in growth activities, including employee capacity for internal and external community marketing efforts. At Personio, we hit critical mass at about 1,000 registered members. Since then, we’ve seen steady registration growth at about 200 per month. While working on these building blocks, it’s also important to keep in mind:

• A community’s user base is more than just its registered members. There is also a group of ‘shadow users’ — customers who consume content without ever registering. At Personio, this group of shadow users is five times larger than our number of logged-in members. In the graphic below, you can see them represented in the yellow “Visitors” box.
• The value of a community is determined not only by the quantity and quality of its user base, but by how well its users are connected with each other. In an ideal community, your users feel like they are part of something bigger.

Engagement
An engaged community is a healthy community. Engagement can be understood as user activity in the form of posts, likes, comments, and event attendance. If some or all of those actions happen with increasing frequency, that’s a sign that the community is valuable to the user. User engagement will generate valuable content, drive adoption, increase brand awareness, and, ultimately, bind your customer for the long term.

Generating this engagement can be the greatest challenge, especially at the early stages. In these cases, it’s vest to start small and validate your case before scaling up your efforts. Try starting a little trial or with just a few dozen of your most engaged and communicative customers who are keen to help you shape it. The connections will be fewer, but tighter. This is the foundation — from there you can amplify your efforts.

Content
The value of an online community lies not only within the people that constitute it, but also from the content that can be found there. After all, it should be a place where users can learn, share, and maximize their skills. For a community to be actually useful, it needs a content strategy.

In the long term most of the content, whatever the format, should be generated by users:questions, ideas, and discussions. Their role shifts from merely being consumers of your product into a more active role. However, you cannot expect your users to just start writing and producing content — you need to first publish your own.

Publishing your own content will deliver value to your customers from day one, as well as set an example for them of what types of formats and topics can be discussed. This is especially crucial in the beginning, though of course it’s advisable to publish content on a regular basis throughout the lifetime of your community. Keeping a steady cadence is key here: you want your users to expect it so they keep coming back for more.

Scaling Up Your Community

Now that you have set the foundation for a healthy online community, it’s time to start scaling your efforts.

Peer-to-Peer Support: Users Helping Users

There is a common adage in the Community world: “Your users will come for the value, and stay for the community.”

In the early stages, it’s very likely that your moderators will have to answer most of the customer questions in the Community. Here it is very important to delight your users and prove your value. As the membership numbers increase, your own team may have a lot on their plate, making it even more important to harness the power of community by establishing a culture of peer support. In other words, encourage your users to help each other out and answer each other’s questions.

Users should be intrinsically motivated to help each other out, although it is advisable to boost that motivation through gamification, rewards, or other engagement programs as explained in the next paragraph.

Engagement Programs

As already we’ve already mentioned, engagement is one key to a healthy community. But how can you drive engagement within your online community?

Gamification
Gamification is an excellent tactic to keep your users motivated.How can you make use of it for your online community? Think about your end users: make sure that using your community does not feel like a chore, but rather a fun and delightful activity. Think about what behaviors you would like your members to display, and find a way to reward them. For example:

• a user collects points when they reply to other users.
• a user earns a dedicated badge when they reach a special achievement, like solving another user’s problem, starting a helpful discussion, cracking a good joke, or sharing a groundbreaking idea.

These rewards can be baked into your community (most community platforms provide such functionality), but can also take the form of physical rewards like personalized goodies or company swag. Even a hand-written thank you note can go a long way.

You can even take it a step further and launch lotteries or challenges. (Just be careful not to generate too much competition, but rather to inspire collaboration.)

Superuser Programs
After your community has established itself, if everything goes well, you will begin to identify a few users who are particularly engaged and have a high participation rate. They are knowledgeable, communicative, and helpful to other users. They are an ambassador of your product and keep the conversations running. If this sounds familiar, congratulations: you’ve found yourself some potential superusers. Now make sure to keep them as close to you as possible by launching a Superuser Program.

A program like this is important because it’s a way to reward their past behavior and make them feel valued and important — because they are! Make sure they are recognized (e.g. with a special rank in their profile), and reward them with special opportunities: the chance to have a coffee chat with important people from your company, sneak-peeks into your operations, early access to not-yet-released products, or VIP access to your events. (It’s also fine to start with a simple program and ramp it up over time.

Focus
Don’t rush or try to do everything at the same time. Take the time to test out different initiatives, ramping them up step-by-step. This enables you to test each one, and then focus on the initiatives that bring the most value to you and your community. .

Don’t get discouraged if most of your users remain passive. Especially when getting started, this is perfectly normal and only to be expected. To increase activity, try identifying the users who are the main drivers of engagement, and focus on supercharging them while catering to their needs.

Furthermore, it is important to set quarterly or half-yearly goals for your Community teams to focus on. It can be easy to get lost in the day-to-day community administration tasks, therefore it is important to make some time and plan your strategies in advance.

Measuring Success

Of course, measuring the success and impact of your online community is always the key!

Community Success

As we have learned above, an engaged community is a successful community. To measure its success, start with determining what kind of metrics are most important to you. Don’t try to generate engagement just for the sake of it. Try to set a clear goal and purpose for the community, thinking about your own goals as well as your members’ goals, and how to measure them.

• Does your focus lie on collecting as much user-generated-content as possible, or is it more about the connections between your members?
• Do you aim to generate upsell leads through the community?
• Does your member base need to continue growing, or is it fine if it remains stable and active?
• Do you want to make sure that the majority of the member base actively creates content, or does it suffice if the vast majority just passively consumes it?

Every case is different, so here are some of the most important KPIs for the Personio Community:

Community Growth

• Newly registered members per month (we want our member base to grow steadily)
• Attach rate of your customers (the percentage of your customers that have at least one account in your community)
• Sessions per month (we want to make sure the community is visited on a regular basis)
• Amount of new content per month (to make sure the knowledge base keeps growing and covering more topics)

Community Engagement

• Monthly Active Logins: the percentage of registered members (or companies) that logged in within a given month
• Monthly Active Contributors: the percentage of registered members or companies that submitted a post within a given monthNewly generated content: the amount of content that has been posted by users in a given month
• Posts per user per month: The number of posts per user created in that month
• Peer-to-Peer Ratio
• The percentage of questions that have been answered by other customers (instead of your own moderators)

Performance
Numbers will only tell you part of the story. To measure your success, it’s important to also get feedback from your users. Therefore we set up qualitative KPIs that are determined by how our users respond to the following questions in a survey:

• Customer Satisfaction: “How satisfied are you with our Community overall?”
• Customer Effort Score: ”How easy or difficult was it to accomplish your goal using our Community today?”

To know how well your scores are faring, you can find some benchmarks online. But every community is different, so they don’t necessarily have to apply to you: it’s fine to take them with a grain of salt. Set your own goals and standards, then look at historic data to ensure that you are constantly improving.

Company Impact

Having successful Community metrics is one thing, but being able to actually prove how it positively affects your company is your winning ticket. That said, it can be tricky one because it’s not always as easy to quantify as some other metrics. However, there are some proxy calculations that can point you in the right direction:

Deflection of Customer Service Tickets
Community as a source of self-service can save your business tons of time, money, and effort. If you know how much time and costs are involved with processing an average service ticket, you can find out how much the community is saving you. To do that, calculate how many times a customer is able to answer their question through the community (whether they asked in the forum or, ideally by finding the answer on a previously answered thread).

Retention
Are customers who are active in the community more likely to spend more on your product? Are they less likely to churn? It is difficult to directly measure the impact of community on retention, but you can check if there is a correlation between community membership and some success rates like retention, unlikelihood to churn, lifetime value, etc.

While it is difficult to determine causation here, a high correlation in this aspect will definitely hand you some good cards.

Upsell / New Customer Leads
The way you and your customers engage with each other in your online community can be a great advertising for leads. By calculating how much of the new business comes through the community (in terms of traffic to your sales website, members who sign up and become a customer afterwards) you can estimate how much new business your community program has brought in, or at least contributed to.

Conclusion

Launching an online community for your B2B customers is no piece of cake, but once established, it can provide many advantages. For your customers, it is a value add as it can be a platform to expand their knowledge, a fast and efficient way to get support, and a communications hub where they are able to network with their peers. On the other end, a community can benefit your business in terms of efficiency, driving customer loyalty, and the valuable feedback it can provide.

A healthy community will not develop on its own: it needs a purpose, a base of active and engaged members, and some content to be consumed. Your team’s nurturing efforts will have to be concentrated, especially in the beginning. Then, when a critical mass of members is reached, your community can scale with the help of targeted engagement programs, which will ideally establish a sense of belonging among members and a culture of peer support.

Once you have your goals set in place and you find a solid way to track them, you will be able to measure the impact on your business.

Community is a team effort and so we also wanna say thank you to our amazing team! If you’d like to join us as we continue building our own online community, check out our careers page today.

Written by Thomas Goepfert and Daniele Bozzi