Continuing from online community strategy.
Let’s imagine your community is to improve customer satisfaction (or customer success).
Your objectives first are to establish what behavior would drive that success. These are the behaviors your entire community is designed to facilitate.
Once you have these behaviors, it becomes easier to establish what to measure (see below):
Those metrics above are the only things you should be reporting internally. Forget number of members, levels of activity, and participation. If your community is designed to encourage these behaviors, these are the only things worth reporting. This ensures you’re only measured by what you actually influence.
Notice also that creating tips is pointless if no-one reads them.
Each objective to increase customer satisfaction needs its own strategy. The strategy is based upon amplifying a specific emotion. This emotion is what will move people to take action.
Any objective can have multiple strategies, as we see below, but you should pick just one. You select this option based upon your ethnographic research into how people feel.
It’s always tempting to pursue multiple strategies, but this doesn’t work. It’s best to double down on the one strategy which will have the biggest impact.
The next step is to identify what tactics will best fulfill that strategy.
Take the strategies for our first objective above.
1) If you’re looking to provoke jealousy, you want leaderboards, interviews with top members, and recognition of the top members. These are the tactics you execute upon.
2) If you’re looking to provoke pride you need to identify areas they are experts in, provide them with metrics to measure themselves (but not compare), and communicate gratitude to them from internal letters etc.
3) If you’re looking to amplify the sense of helping others, encourage gratitude and feedback from people they’ve helped, let them track how many people they helped, give them an inside track on what issues most members are struggling with and provide them with training to help more members.
Everything in a strategy should connect. You should never be engaging in tactics just to drive activity. Everything should be part of a plan to achieve the goal.
This is a simplistic, but essential overview of the kinds of strategies available to increase customer satisfaction within a community. Be aware also there are plenty of different objectives you can focus upon to improve customer satisfaction, we’ve picked just three.
More information at: www.feverbee.com/strategy.
