Not a Data Scientist? Not a Problem.
Creating a lively self-service community is often treated like a science project. Many companies are unaware of what it takes to drive self-service success, so they pour in the time, and a dash of dollars, in hopes of seeing engagement rates rise. While time and budget are certainly key components, there is a missing element that is preventing great content from bubbling up to the surface, and keeping it out of the hands of customers: personalised experiences. If this sounds like your organization, you’re not alone. Many companies are facing similar challenges with their communities and don’t know where to begin to enable their customers to find what they need, on their own terms. Personalisation, so simple in theory but entirely overwhelming to execute. Until now.
Luckily, you don’t need to be a data scientist to figure it out–that’s what we’re here for. In partnership with Perficient, expert in Community Cloud deployment, we’ve taken a look at some of our customers’ most innovative, top-performing self-service use cases, and extracted the best practices that are essential to mastering the science behind a booming self-service community.
Following these tips is a sure way to make your customers fall in love with your Salesforce Community. They enable you to deliver on your promise of a valuable and relevant experience, continuously improve the context and findability of your content, and connect your customers together for a seamless and intuitive community experience. :
- Stop hiding your content. Your customers are helpless when they can’t access information they need to solve their problems. Transform your customers into knowledge workers by releasing your content from its lonely silos, into your Community with the help of the cloud.
- Your customers want to search. Given them what they want; don’t let your search bar be an afterthought. You know they’re on your site searching for answers, this is not the time to play hard to get. Your search experience needs to live up to your customers expectations, and should therefore be prominent and inviting.
- Be proactive. Your Community should foster a sense of belonging and trust. Answering your Community’s questions is a good start but that alone won’t differentiate your brand. Based on known behavioral data, you can recommend content, people, experts, training or events, to surpass expectations and develop brand advocates.
- Mobile first applies to service, too! Mobile first often gets framed in the context of sales and product offerings, but customers are wanting to self-serve on mobile devices more and more. Make sure your mobile search is responsive and your don’t sacrifice functionality over form.
- Deliver relevant experiences. If you haven’t the slightest clue how to become relevant to your customer community, don’t worry–machine learning does the thinking for you. By giving your community access to information, machine learning capabilities learn which assets led to positive outcomes and predicts when a customer may need it. It gets smarter with every interaction and continues to deliver more relevant experience. Greater relevance = greater engagement.
- Stop guessing. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. If you want your customers to fall in love with your Salesforce Community, you need to know them and you must offer a personalised experience. Pay attention to what they’re searching for, what they’re clicking on and what cases are being created. Not only are they telling you how to satisfy them, they are creating your content strategy for you by showing you what content performs best and what content is missing.
- Show up. You’ll have to attend our webinar to discover other best practices!
Business has shifted to be community-driven, and in order for your customers to get the most from your Salesforce Community and achieve self-service success, you need to make sure they can find the information they need. Your customer’s digital experience needs to be personalised and intuitive–and search is at the very core of making that happen. Don’t let your search capabilities be an afterthought when designing your Community, it is the gateway to your customers hearts!
To learn more about designing an engaging, value-driven community that will enable you to leverage insights from every member interaction, attend our webinar, Make Customers Fall in Love with Your Salesforce Self-Service Community. Register now!