7 signs your community platform is hindering growth

Imagine hosting a gathering at your house where guests are dispersed across different rooms, engaging in various conversations. Unable to communicate with everyone simultaneously, you find yourself missing out on meaningful interactions and rushing from one room to another in an attempt to engage with everyone.

Community managers needing integrations to essential business systems encounter a similar challenge. Fragmented data, a disjointed user experience, and complex community maintenance become inevitable without integrations into CRM systems, analytic tools, ticketing and support platforms, and marketing systems. To efficiently scale a community, integrations are crucial for gaining a comprehensive view of customer data, centralizing and streamlining community operations, extending the impact of community efforts across the customer journey, and creating personalized, connected experiences that foster loyalty and engagement. Moreover, integrations with emerging technologies, like ChatGPT, are essential for staying relevant in a complex tech environment.

Scalable community platforms should offer an expansive list of pre-baked integrations or an API-first architecture for developers to build custom integrations to key business systems. These integration capabilities are necessary for communities to continue to grow, instead of becoming isolated islands that are time-consuming to manage, limited in their reach and impact, and lead to frustrating, disjointed user experiences. In essence, prioritizing integrations today unlocks your community's full potential tomorrow.

Customizing the community experience is paramount for driving engagement and standing out from competitors. If you're held back by customization limitations in your current platform and are unable to modify experiences without investing considerable time and external resources, it might be time to consider switching to a more flexible and accommodating solution.

A community needing more customization can feel bland, unwelcoming, and generic, failing to differentiate the experience from competitors and discouraging members from returning. Additionally, adjustments requiring IT resources to manipulate complex code, can lead to bottlenecks and delays. This makes enhancing the community space unnecessarily difficult and hampers timely responses to community feedback and trends – an issue that will only worsen as the community scales.

Platforms offering efficient, robust customization capabilities via drag-and-drop design, pre-configured templates, and widgets enable quick and effortless changes without relying on specialized coding knowledge or extensive IT resources. With the freedom to adapt to evolving consumer needs, community managers can foster vibrant experiences that drive customer engagement and loyalty.

Identifying improvement areas and measuring community ROI is often hampered by inadequate analytics and reporting tools. With granular insights into user behavior, engagement, and content, making data-driven decisions and proving the value of your efforts to stakeholders becomes possible. If your current platform leaves you grappling with data, struggling to extract meaningful insights, or manually tracking metrics that should be readily available, it’s time for a change.

Your community platform should provide a comprehensive analytics dashboard that features key, on-demand metrics for assessing the health of a community against factors like traffic, content, members, liveliness, interaction, and responsiveness. Advanced platforms go a step further by offering customizable analytics dashboards, drill-down reports, and a bulk-data API that feeds data to analytics engines like Microsoft Power BI for deeper analysis and efficient data-sharing across the business.

The right community platform will not only offer the tools needed to measure success but it will also empower you to make informed decisions that enhance the user experience, foster growth, and ultimatelyimprove your community's ROI.

Observing a fall or plateau in engagement should prompt community managers to review their platform's usability, content discovery, gamification, and engagement features. Upgrading to a better platform can spark renewed interest and activity by removing barriers to engagement and adding features that improve overall user experience.

The first red flag is when members find the community challenging and frustrating to use, making them less likely to stick around. An ideal platform should offer an intuitive layout, a mobile-responsive UI, and accessibility enhancements such as multi-language support that quickly encourages exploration and participation.

This also extends to content findability in a community, too. A robust search function and well-organized categories and tags can drastically improve how quickly and easily members find relevant discussions, articles, or resources. Without these features, members are lost in a sea of information, overwhelmed rather than engaged.

A lack of advanced gamification and engagement features can significantly hinder member engagement. If your community's gamification is limited to a basic points system, you likely need to do more to incentivize ongoing participation from your most loyal contributors. Robust platforms like Khoros offer sophisticated gamification engines that score user actions across 80+ activities. Key engagement features like badges, ranks, group permissions, and diverse interaction types such as forums, blogs, private messages, events, and ideas encourage ongoing interaction and boost user-generated content.

When the task of community moderation becomes overly time-consuming and manual, it signals a need for a more sophisticated community platform.

In a world where automation can significantly reduce human workload, sticking to manual moderation processes indicate that the platform is lagging. Thankfully, modern community platforms have advanced moderation tools that automatically filter, tag, prioritize, route, and remove offensive content. This automation not only lightens the load for community managers, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives and community growth, but also ensures swift responses to issues as they arise.

Excessive manual moderation also hints at a platform's lack of scalability, especially for enterprise businesses. The sheer volume of content generated as communities grow can overwhelm manual moderation efforts. Upgrading to a more advanced platform with comprehensive moderation features, including discussion intent and sentiment analysis, high-volume agent response tools, and customizable dashboards, can significantly improve the ability to maintain order as a community continues to grow.

Modern community platforms offer sophisticated tools that streamline moderation, enhance overall community management, and maintain the health of online communities as they scale.

The success and growth of an online community are intricately tied to the quality of customer support, strategic guidance, and innovation provided by a community vendor. If a vendor falls short in these areas, it may be time for a switch.

Poor customer support can significantly damage the user experience. When a vendor fails to promptly address technical issues or inquiries, it frustrates users and undermines the community's trust and reliability, potentially leading to decreased activity or even abandonment of the platform.

Furthermore, a true community partner should offer ongoing strategic guidance and best practices to maximize a community's potential and achieve long-term success. With this invaluable support, community managers might utilize platform capabilities effectively and avoid making strategic missteps, ultimately impacting long-term outcomes.

Lastly, a community vendor that is not continuously improving and evolving may quickly become obsolete, especially in fast-moving industries. Community managers should closely observe their vendor's commitment to innovation and ensure the roadmap aligns with critical business needs, as a stagnant platform can significantly limit a community's ability to adapt to new trends, maintain user engagement, and attract new members.

Continuing with a vendor that doesn’t fulfill the short-term support needs and long-term strategic guidance and innovation requirements can harm the community's health and growth. Switching to a vendor that excels in these areas will rejuvenate your community and set the stage for future success.

As online communities grow and require change, an unexpected and often overlooked factor is the escalating costs associated with some community platforms. Understanding the hidden costs, such as unforeseen implementation expenses, the need for IT resources or developers for customizations, and the financial burden of pay-per-seat models, is critical for ensuring the sustainability and growth of an online community.

First, some community platforms require costly implementation services to migrate to the new platform. These hidden expenses strain budgets and divert funds from other crucial areas of community development. Similarly, IT expertise or development resources may be necessary for making community customizations or integrating key enterprise systems, leading to a significant ongoing expense. As most community-driven platforms require some customization to serve their purpose, this becomes an inescapable hurdle.

Moreover, the pay-per-seat model, a common pricing strategy among many vendors, can severely restrict a community's growth. As the community expands and more cross-functional roles become involved in its maintenance and development, community managers must add more seats, mounting costs. This pricing strategy directly ties a community's growth to increasing expenditure, making it challenging for managers to plan long-term without worrying about ballooning costs.

For these reasons, it may be wise for community managers to consider migrating to a different platform better suited to their evolving needs. Opting for a platform that offers transparent pricing, pre-packaged set-up, pre-configured templates, scalable features without hidden costs, and drag-and-drop design for customization without developer resources can provide more financial predictability and ensure that the focus remains on cultivating a vibrant, engaged community rather than managing expenses.

As demonstrated in this blog, the choice of community platform significantly impacts a community's long-term success. While many platforms are suitable for initial phases, they may not effectively scale to support growth and innovation.

The seven telltale signs discussed provide a guide for community managers as they navigate the challenge of selecting or migrating to a new platform that meets current requirements and paves the way for future growth. From a lack of integrations to manual moderation processes, each sign underscores the importance of finding an adaptable, customizable platform aligned with modern technological advancements.

While transitioning to a new community platform may seem daunting, it presents an exciting opportunity to overcome challenges and unlock new potential. By selecting a vendor that prioritizes integration capabilities, efficient customization, actionable analytics, best-in-class engagement and gamification features, AI-assisted moderation tools, exceptional support, continuous innovation, and lower total cost of ownership, community managers can set their communities on a path to sustained growth and success.

To see how an alternative community platform can help you create a sustainable community that exceeds long-term goals, request a demo of Khoros next-gen community platform or take a real-time tour of our community solution today.