A customer community is a great connection among customers, experts, partners, related people, and products/services. This is the place where the above parties can join and discuss everything about the market and products. Besides, it provides a platform to post reviews or evaluations of any service. Thereby, the customer community builds up cohesion through brands, products, services among people in it.  The online customer community has grown rapidly in the last few years. The proliferation of social networking sites, mobile enhancement, and global internet penetration have made communication interaction easier and smoother.   This is considered as an era of customers because they play an important role in empowering businesses and brands. Their voice has a certain value in determining the price of a service or product. Not over yet, the development of this community has promoted the democratization of online information. Customer reviews and suggestions from social media have become a reputable piece of information source alongside the experts'    Statistics have shown that a 5% increase in customer retention rate can yield a 25% to 95% profit growth rate.    Reach out to your customer  So how to exactly satisfy the customers and achieve the results? Building a customer community is the very significant way to engage your customer that many businesses tend to ignore. A brand just can be close to its customers if there's a place for connection.   Increase Up-sell & Cross-sell Even after the transaction is over, make the customer feel that they are always on top of your mind. This encourages them to choose you over and over again. And this continued relationship will bring you different opportunities. Whenever you come across your customers' post/topic/question that can be solved by up-selling or cross-selling, make sure you reach out to them and let them know that you have a wide range of offers they can choose. Let them be shared and talked whenever possible. The customer community should be a place where customers can get information about benefits when upgrading their current items, or adding some new services or functions.   Motivate customers to connect, share, and support each other.   Sometimes, your customers are the most reliable and accurate source. Therefore, the space for the customer community is the most convenient means to share their feelings about a product/service. It is also the place to give customers exactly what they need or want. They will not need to call the customer support team in a panic mode when having problems. Instead, they can find all the information they are looking for and interact with people who have encountered similar cases in the community.   Customers are your best ambassadors without any payment. Your customer community is the place where the customers talk about your great things. There is not any ambassador out there better than your current customers. What they spread is what the world knows about your brand. Engage with them and create a successful story to gain more leads and customer retention.   Customer communities will improve your customer support. Give participants the support they deserve and the benefits of creating a community will not be hard to reap.   Start to create your customer community with phpFox today to take great advantage of this platform for your business. Along with free consultancy, we offer an optimal package while setting up and other services for your ideal customer community. Do not hesitate to contact us for further discussion or drop us a message to hello@phpfox.com

At the heart of the business, success is the human element. It has been essential for companies to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the most effective way to reach and communicate with customers. While there are several ways to boost customer engagement, we are going to look at building an online community for a business that provides one of the best channels for marketers to gain invaluable growth hacking.  An online community is a collective group of people regardless of geographical features having the same interests, backgrounds, and knowledge. An online bonding community plays an essential role in online business presence as well as amplifies a company's reach and credibility. Read what particular benefits an online community significantly contributes to the company. Heightening brand awareness It's a challenging game of industry players that offer similar products or services. And being online has been growing high in the list of priorities for any organization. Therefore, a robust social community will position the company brand ahead of the pack and help the company become more influential across the media. Quickly tap into customers' needs and interest Listening to your customers is the primary goal of a business to improve the user-friendly level of its products and fulfil the customers' needs. An online community with user-generated content, such as sharing product experience or reviews is the most realistic and authentic data asset for businesses. By leveraging valuable feedback from social users across the globe, companies can seamlessly adjust their business strategy accordingly. Fostering customer success When users have trouble using a company's services or have some uncertainties about products, they are likely to come to the community where their friends, followers or community managers are ready to help. Impactful communities add value when they can act as a source of advice and tips for educating the companies' offerings. Enhancing brand loyalty A sense of belonging and connectivity will encourage the engagement and enthusiasm of users in communities. Enjoying the meaningful company-customer interaction, members in online communities will invest more time and effort into products or services. So that, stressing the role of the community paves the way for retaining customers long term.   To sum up, a thriving online community is a tangible asset to a business. Businesses should build a generation of content that connects with the community and beyond which in turn make the brand more successful. Start building your Customer Community now with phpFox, you get a free consultancy and optimal package offering while setting up, a professional maintenance service and a long-term cooperation from our experts of technical, marketings and social. Please feel free to contact us for further discussion or drop us a message to hello@phpfox.com  

Nowaday Marketing, building Customer Community is the Key to Create Value. That's the statement written by Bill Lee - president of the Customer Reference Forum, on HBR Blog. Let's check that out: What are your customers telling their friends and colleagues about your business? Your prospective customers and buyers increasingly learn about you from their peers — including your current customers — while tending more and more to ignore traditional sales and marketing communications from corporate. Companies are now taking advantage of this new marketing reality, becoming more skilled at getting their customers to advocate for them, create peer influence in their markets, and make important contributions in areas like product development and services. Creating and capturing such value from customer relationships doesn’t just happen, no matter how stellar your products and services are. It requires an enhanced value proposition, what I call a Level 4 customer value proposition. At Level 1, buyers perceive you as the supplier of a commodity. They’re entirely price sensitive. And more companies are at this level than think they are. Think PC makers, who load their computers with features and functionality believing they’re adding value and creating differentiation. In fact, the vast majority of their customers not only don’t care about such features, but find that all the clutter detracts from the user experience. At Level 2, Buyers perceive you as helping them get a job done. They associate your product or service with their desired outcome and the fact that you help them achieve that in some way that makes you stand out. Significantly (and ironically) companies that reach Level 2 often remove features or functionality that competitors provide. Think Apple, or Southwest Airlines, or for a more recent example, Zipcar. At Level 3, You engage the customer emotionally, which strengthens loyalty and retention. And here’s where it gets interesting. Some firms have such great offerings (at least, great compared to the competition) that their products or services alone are enough to create significant emotional attachment, again, such as Apple and Southwest (when I fly Southwest, I can actually feel my blood pressure drop as I interact with their friendly people.) But not everyone can create such awesome products or services — and even when you do, maintaining that emotional connection through your products and services may be fleeting. (With TiVo, for instance, customers have come to rely on the service so much, they don’t even think about it.) Firms that excel in the new world are discovering that they can create strong emotional attachment by moving to the next level… At Level 4, You’re helping customers build their social capital — that is, helping them to build and expand valuable support groups and communities. Helping customers build social capital may seem far removed from the concerns a competitive business should occupy itself with. But think about it: These days, buyers and prospects are open to receiving and are even seeking, information from your customers &#8212 their peers. Helping your customers build social capital is the way to make it attractive to them to provide this information.   This is an area of tremendous creativity. Here are some specific ways that companies are doing this:   Help customers build their reputation When Jeff Bezos made the controversial decision to allow customers to post reviews of the books they bought on Amazon’s site — a seminal event ushering customer-based marketing into the online world — he reasoned simply that ordinary reader reviews were what buyers wanted. To encourage more of this, Amazon now designates top reviewers on the site and a reviewer Hall of Fame (based in part on ratings from readers), lets reviewers set up their own pages showing their reviews of other books, provides them with a distinctive badge for their pen names, and more — all of which builds their reputation in the book buying community. Top Amazon reviewers are often more powerful than traditional media reviewers.   Help customers build their affiliation networks Customer advisory boards — in which a firm’s customers provide input and guidance on products and strategy — have been around for years and are often an effective way to gain “buy-in” from customers. Firms like Microsoft are taking this up a notch, with industry councils. These are groups that focus not on Microsoft’s products, services, and strategy, but rather on a compelling industry issue that is top-of-mind with people in the industry — a significant difference with great appeal to buyers. In particular, Microsoft formed a council that focused on one of the most vexing of all business technology issues: interoperability (the council is called the Interoperability Executive Council or IEC). Once people were convinced that this was a serious attempt to address the issue (and not a vehicle to push marketing), Microsoft was able to attract a marquee list of senior technology executives from around the world. At times, the IEC will address issues that Microsoft can’t help with — and the firm will go so far as to bring competitors into the discussion who can. What’s in it for Microsoft? Over time, the discussions and work performed by the IEC have given the firm insider access to the best thinking on this issue, which informs its product decisions, helps it establish thought leadership, and burnishes its standing as a constructive force for the industry.   Help customers build status in the community When marketing services and software firm, Eloqua, for example, decided to start recognizing outstanding work and results achieved by firms in its industry with awards, it decided to go the whole hog. And for good reason: helping customers build status is an exceptionally valued aspect of one’s social capital. Eloqua patterned the awards ceremony after the Emmy awards (it even hired the firm that designs the Emmy statues — calling it the “Markie“). They’re awarded at a lavish black-tie ceremony at a posh location, where some 20 awards are handed out over the course of the evening. The event attracts substantial media attention, in part because the firm is very careful to make sure that winners really are the best. And note — awards are not limited to Eloqua clients. They go the best in the industry, as determined by an independent industry council.   Give them a say High glamour isn’t the only way to help customers build social capital. CSC, which creates financial services software, has built a tier of for-customer communities that allow customers to exchange ideas and best practices, and have a say in new releases. As products or updates are being developed, customers can subscribe to RSS feeds keeping them apprised of new release progress, and provide input — which CSC takes seriously. This can slow the process down, but it creates enthusiasm, as borne out by the numbers. After implementing the process, request rates for new software releases increased by 50%. What do all of these efforts have in common? They build communities that exert positive peer influence across all the relevant companies’ markets. The ability to create this kind of Level 4 customer value proposition is the key skill set that companies will need in the new world of marketing.   Bottom line: Customer Community powered by phpFox is your right choice of building your own Customer Community in days, not weeks. Our Marketing and Technical experts is ready to help at your click http://biz.phpfox.com or email biz@phpfox.com   

How to start building your Customer Community is the critical question for marketers in digital transformation age. This is the opinion of David Taber, the expert in Customer Relationship, posted on CIO: Lead generation means user education. Channel management means a partner portal. Case management means a knowledge base, customer discussion groups, and a support forum. Customer loyalty means a customer portal.  It’s all about building a community site. Depending on where you start, you’ll hear about dozens of product offerings and see some extraordinary demos. The best of the demos will live up to Sybase founder Bob Epstein’s famous quote about benchmarks: “they are what the vendor can guarantee you will never achieve.” Before you get dazzled by bright shiny objects, you really have to go off and do some thinking: that’s right, dull homework. Because any of the community-building products could be the right one for you, but all of them will result in a failure if you haven’t answered most of these questions in advance: What's the fundamental value of building/maintaining the community? Getting more prospects or partners sooner? Improving the quality of your decisions? Making your company look better / more visible? Accelerating your prospects evolution? Increasing customer or channel loyalty? Helping you catch up to Competitors’ sites? Making management feel better? How many people will be in the community? Will this be a "public community," where users can spontaneously register themselves?  Or is this by invitation (and pre-setup) only? Will there be sub-groups? How many active threads do you expect at any one time? Will users be allowed to start their own threads? What are the users’ job titles (both the company and the role)? What is their level of knowledge about your company and its products? How will you manage excluding users from certain countries? How will you get to full GPDR compliance? What are the usage patterns? Will users come in via single sign-on (SSO) or direct login? Will they come in from a mobile device? How often do you expect them to log in? How long will they stay on the site? Are there any things about their user session that we’ll need to know/report on / get alerted about? What do they come to the community for? What are they trying to achieve any time they log in? With whom are they trying to communicate? What information do they seek or share? What information are they allowed to download? What things can they report on (if any)? What do they need to be able to hide from others? About themselves and About the information they post How much information will there be in a given year? Number of topics Number of posts and attachments from you and users Number of leads, deals Number of ideas/suggestions, cases/resolutions What of this information is transactional in nature (i.e., not just a content posting)? What of this information needs to be integrated with other systems (e.g., CRM)? Will the "information architecture" (read: navigation) need to change on a regular basis? What's the "memory horizon" of the community? What will be your content archiving strategy? Do some things get hidden from users after a few months? Can this be automatic? Do we actually want a human always involved in the "sunsetting" of information? Do you want to have the community moderated? If so, can it be done "by exception" or does every moderation action have to be done manually? What are the legal terms of use you are expecting? What analytics do you need? Real-time alerts regarding usage patterns, DOS attacks? Social media monitoring? Daily reports, executive dashboards? What's your internal constituency? Worker bees by a department? PR, marketing, sales, support, operations, and legal executives? Board? What's your willingness to spend on? User licenses? Development? Ongoing moderation? This is just internal hours, but you want to have some sort of threshold like "no more than 50 hours/week". Who’s going to own the project and budget? For project management and deployment For community membership growth For moderation and legal policing For ongoing maintenance and technical expansion I know, this is quite the laundry list!  But if you don’t bring up these issues early, you won’t really know what your requirements are, so your product evaluation criteria will be foggy at best.  Save yourself some time and money by starting at the beginning. Bottomline Get those questions answered and ready to kick-start your Customer Community now with the advantages of phpFox 4Biz experts, just email biz@phpfox.com or demo: biz.phpfox.com

Follow up with the introduction to Customer Community powered by phpFox, we fully aware that there is an uprising needs and demands to establish a successful Customer Community. In this blog, we will go over some steps and look at some aspects which surprisingly assist you to build up a powerful Customer Community with phpFox. Go Beyond The Common Traits of Your Products/Services   Knowing what you are lacking while maintaining a connection to your customers decides how your Customer Community will be built up and expanding. Keep in mind that your community shouldn't be limited to certain common standards. In other words, the community doesn't have to only focus on areas which your products/service are offering, but you can identify and nurture an inspiring brand purpose beyond your products and services.   For instance, companies like Patagonia, Harley-Davidson, and Nike stand out as customers on their community share their passion not only for clothing, motorcycles, and shoes, but also for the outdoors, adventure, and fitness. Figure out what your customers are interested, keep up with their paces, feed them up with contents, it's more likely your community will be a success. Go with Customer-Oriented Direction   The keys to a successful customer community are to put users in control, go light on marketing content, and remember above all that the community exists to serve customers—not the brand. As explained in the Harvard Business Review:   “Managers often forget that consumers are actually people, with many different needs, interests, and responsibilities. A community-based brand builds loyalty not by driving sales transactions but by helping people meet their needs…For members, brand communities are a means to an end, not an end in themselves…Putting the brand second is tough for a marketer to do, but it’s essential if a strong community is the goal.” Allow prospects and customers to see your corporate values   Increasingly, prospects will turn into customers, and customers will become loyal, because they’re attracted to what your company stands for, which is evident in the values you demonstrate, including online. In a world where everything you sell is a commodity, value – product, price, service – is the threshold of a customer community, but values are the foundation. Value is easy to find these days. But when community members are attracted to your values, they keep coming back and bring their friends. Bottomline Start building your Customer Community now with the phpFox 4Biz solution, you get a free consultancy and optimal package offering while setting up, a professional maintenance service and a long-term cooperation from our experts of technical, marketings and social. Just check out biz.phpfox.com or email biz@phpfox.com

So, what is the phpFox Customer Community? Do we really need that? It is just like the question of "Why do I need an email when I already have a phone number?" Nowadays, Social media strategy is a critical part of any marketing strategy. Yet marketers still facing the boring of website content, low interactive in the social, quiet support forum, wrong immediate answer with live chat or stuck support phone line...There come to the online Customer Community. Customer Community infographic [caption id="attachment_6358" align="aligncenter" width="832"] Customer Community powered by the phpFox infographic[/caption] As you can see, Customer Community allows you to follow your customers home! When customers bought your product/service, they get lazy to get back to your website or social channels. It is regardless of your interesting information, it is just because they are busy with something else. They only need to go back when they need support! So are you ready to impress and harness their experience that builds your customer loyalty? Customer Community gathers your clients to meet up with others, discussing in a group and social networking style, they can also express and share their experience with your brand. On this all-in-one, your staff can easily get in to support, your marketers and sales can target the right audiences and expose the power of viral. Then, what does a Customer Community need? Customer Care Center In our latest solution, based on phpFox platform, we provide the Customer Community that comes first with Customer Care center. With Customer Community powered by phpFox, your customers' voices are loudly taking care of easily by your staff. More than that, it is the crowdsource support, they always get fulfilled their inquiries by other members. Or your influencers can do a persuasive one-on-one consultancy. This also helps you reduces customer support via phone effort and or other traditional methods. Your customers are now get cared by a vibrant and social support Social Sales In phpFox Customer Community, your sales and marketing staff have the ability to segment your customers. Enough data to direct sales nicely by the social approach. Which means, every sales marketing program they are offering will be well targeted, feedback and follow up closely and conveniently on your own system. This is truly your differentiation from your competitors, making sales pitch becomes social networking. Brand Social Advocacy It is always hard and costly to get your customers to advocate your brand. With Customer Community by phpFox, your customers now have the quick, fun and easy way to share their love of your brand. That connects with other popular social channels and rival their voices. Moreover, your customers have the incentive to stay interactive through our intensive Gamification program which is really cost effective in your marketing ROI. Bottomline Building your Customer Community is not a nice to have any more because of its wonderful benefits. Thank the advance social tech platform phpFox, it is now easy to build, admin and maintain.   Build your own Customer Community now by visiting the built-in solution powered by phpFox: biz.phpfox.com or email biz@phpfox.com