It’s in our nature to want to feel part of something. Football supporters wear their team’s colors, fans wear their favorite bands t-shirts. It is no different when it comes to your business. Building a community of customers, making them feel special and getting them excited about your brand, can be a great way to reduce churn. If you are looking for an addition to your customer retention strategy, this could be a smart move.

Here are some ideas to help build your community:

Pick Your Platform

Before you start building a community you need to think about where it will be based. Facebook groups are becoming increasingly popular. ProdPad report that 99% of customer cancellations come from outside of their Slack-based community. It’s important to think about what will work for your business and its customers.

Give them the Inside Scoop

Letting your community know about things first can be a great way to make your customers feel special. You could show them behind the scenes snapshots of company life or let them be the first to know about new products. Churn Buster recommends: “Share advice and tips your customers wouldn’t get elsewhere, offer exclusive deals or discounts, or even create a space where users can interact with each other and share ideas”.

Encourage Discussion

You don’t have to be online all the time but helping to get discussion going between community members can be a good way to get them interacting.

Engage

React and engage to what members are talking about. It depends on your chosen platform, but this can include likes, comments and replies.

Let Them Have Their Say

Asking for customers’ opinions is a great way to foster community, formulate new ideas and optimize your current strategy. In fact, ProdPad cite the fact that their community members get to influence their products, as one of the reasons why the churn rate for them is so low.

Community and Xeno

• Xeno live support software has integrations for Facebook, Messenger and Twitter. This means that community members can contact you with queries or suggestions without having to change apps. Making life easy for them and allowing a quick resolution to their problems.
• You could invite customers to join your community during support conversations.
• Sometimes it can be hard to be very responsive on social media. However, with Xeno you are notified immediately when someone tries to connect with you on Facebook or Twitter and you can reply to them without having to switch platforms.

Connection is Key

Helping customers to feel part of something, connecting with like-minded people and giving them exclusive benefits, could help to keep customers on your side. Connection is increasingly important in this digital world. Live support compliments activity in your community with 1-on-1 conversations and can help to drive its growth. A quality live support software such as Xeno makes this easy with its social integrations. What’s more, it has a host of analytics and metrics to help optimize your customer retention strategy.