Engaging Customer Communities for Insights to Drive Marketing Tech Procurement

Enterprise products are going through many transformations in the way they are visualized, built, deployed, and marketed.

The marketing component is very important mainly because, historically, this industry was using a very traditional approach to marketing. There were personal, one-to-one tools that were used to approach leads and nurture them to the next level before formal communication could be made.

Today’s market dynamics have made this traditional process pretty useless. People are not willing to listen to marketers directly or indirectly. Instead, they prefer to speak to peers (in their own organization or outside) and understand what tools they use, what their experience is, and what they would recommend for someone with similar requirements. These conversations drive the purchasing process.

But where can they have these communications?

This is where leading enterprise companies are transforming the way products are marketed. They use customer communities as a marketing tech procurement tool. This means they create a community of buyers (or prospects), give them solid content coming from their internal as well as external experts, and build the critical mass whereby the community starts creating content on their own. At that time, it became an expert forum where more people came and participated by listening, commenting, liking, and sharing.

These trends can be observed by the organization to understand how their potential customers think. For example, what are the pain points for which they come to this community? What do they search for? Which links do they click? Is there a pattern in terms of whom they listen to? Am I providing a forum where they can get unbiased comments from fellow users instead of pushing my marketing message every day? Do I have the right people in the community? Am I having a good mix of community members? How do I handle haters and those who misuse the forum? How do I award people who regularly contribute to the community? How do I translate conversations into a knowledge base? How do I inform the sales team about potential mature leads? How can I give them the option to try my product before buying? If they are buying or not buying, how do I collect feedback?… These are the questions leaders in this space. They are asking themselves.

CRMIT’s CRM++ Self-Service Portal is a great solution that uses the patent-pending Social Knowledgebase concept to enable a community-based conversation centered around a product. The company can decide who can be in this forum and who can’t be. They can start with some high-quality content and then, based on the business rules, control the discussions which are happening. They can present official answers, convert conversations to knowledge base and effectively create an environment where prospects feel good about decision making. The recommendation engine in this knowledgebase dynamically determines which articles this user is likely to read by using various factors and algorithms and accordingly creates a feed that motivates people to click, even before they have a problem. This makes them knowledgeable about the product resulting in overall satisfaction, reduced support cost, and enhanced marketing opportunities.

About CRMIT Solutions:

CRMIT Solutions is a leader in transforming businesses with cloud-based Customer Experience (CX) solutions on sales, service, marketing & social cloud.

CRMIT Solutions is committed to providing customers with the best service in the industry. Everything we do – every order, every delivery, every service, every offering – centers on the satisfaction of our customers and making them more efficient at what they do.

Inputs from

Naga Chokkanathan
Sr. Director – Innovations
CRMIT Solutions