Most Brands Want An Online Customer Service Channel, Not A Genuine Community

Do you want a genuine community or a customer service channel?

Neither is bad, but each is unique. A genuine community effort involves bringing together a group of people who share a strong common interest and building relationships between them. All efforts are focused on building those relationships between members. An online customer service channel helps customers who have questions about your products/services. 

You need to be clear about which you want. 

It's confusing. Both communities and customer service channels share many of the same tools (forums, blogs, member profiles). Many of the successful brand communities right now are customer service channels.

The difference is relationships. If you don't want members to build relationships with each other, then you probably want a customer service channel. There is nothing wrong with a genuine community, nor a customer service channel. The problem arises when organizations aren't sure which they and want pick an approach between the two.

Comments

[David Stern, MD]

This is very interesting. Companies can use social media to create communities or customer service channels. I assume that communities will allow customers to interact and help each other, but it may create a common place to criticize the company. Creating a customer service channel, however, will lose the camaraderie of interactivity of a community. Next questions are: 1) How to decide what is best for your company and 2) How to create a community vs. a customer service channel. In our industry, urgent care, we already have a robust community, so it may make sense to augment the community with our social media. Thoughts?

[Tari Akpodiete]

then there are companies which firmly believe that a community manager is first and foremost an arm of marketing. that's not to say that a community manager might not sometimes do some marketing, but i don't believe that should be a primary function. and i suspect that when it does so end up as such, there's a lack of trust and even some suspicion from the community in the community manager's role.