An online customer community enables continuous interaction with and between (potential) customers on an online platform facilitated by the organization. Think of it as the online kitchen table of the organization. By inviting customers to your kitchen table, you offer transparency in the organization and you enter into a personal conversation with the customer.
Customer communities facilitated on a proprietary platform
More and more Dutch companies are now focusing, in addition to social channels such as Facebook , Twitter and LinkedIn , on customer communities facilitated list to data on their own platform. Recently, community experts from large corporate enterprises such as T-Mobile, Pon Automotive, Zilveren Kruis Achmea, Telfort and FBTO came together at the same kitchen table to discuss the greatest opportunities and challenges of online customer communities. The most important developments for customer communities that emerged from this conversation can be found in this article.
Fulfilling expectations
In this way, customer interaction creates expectations and transparency and fulfilling these expectations are seen as one of the most important developments for organizations. In addition, the community experts see many opportunities in organization-wide involvement in the community and offering customer-specific content through segmentation .
“You can see a community as a kitchen table, everyone can join you and talk to you as a company. As a company it is important to really open up when you invite people into your kitchen” – Ruud Groeliken, Manager Market Management Pon Automotive
Imagine, you invite someone for dinner at your kitchen table. That person indicates that they would like to come, clean email but he or she is a vegetarian. Are you going to serve an extensive meat dish? The same applies to organizations, interaction with customers creates expectations. Customer interaction provides to promote sustainability in society the organization with a lot of information. All customer signals are transparently online for both (potential) customers and the internal organization.