What is a customer community and should you build one?

A customer community is a dedicated online space where a brand’s customers can connect with both the brand and each other. These online communities allow brands to share exclusive content, provide support forums, and gather product feedback. They enhance the customer experience by providing timely product updates, helpful tutorials, peer assistance for troubleshooting or best practices, and opportunities for customers to connect with like-minded individuals, fostering a sense of community. For businesses, customer communities promote loyalty, create avenues for self-service that can alleviate high support demands, and strengthen customer relationships.

Customer communities differ from general social media groups, which bring people together around common interests or objectives for discussion, support, or collaboration. Websites like Reddit and Facebook facilitate these communities based on hobbies, causes, or professional pursuits. On the other hand, customer communities provide businesses with more focused opportunities to enhance engagement, foster loyalty, and gather valuable insights that are specifically related to their products or services and are private.

Creating a customer community offers multiple advantages that go beyond engagement and support. From building loyalty to generating referrals, each benefit contributes to long-term business growth and customer satisfaction. Below are six key ways customer communities can benefit your business.

Building a customer community fosters stronger connections — both with your brand and among like-minded individuals. Research indicates that 67.4% of consumers feel more connected through community than via social media. By establishing a space for customers to engage, you enhance satisfaction, deepen relationships, and increase their lifetime value. A well-managed customer community makes individuals feel heard, appreciated, and supported — bolstering their emotional ties to your business.

Moreover, an engaged customer community serves as a reliable platform for customers to ask questions, share insights, and discuss your brand. As they interact and help one another, trust and loyalty grow — not just towards the community but also towards your business.

In today’s digital-first world, customers prefer to solve issues on their own. Customer communities empower them to do just that by offering quick access to answers and solutions. According to CXM Today, 81% of consumers want more self-service options, highlighting the growing demand for easy, independent support.

A well-curated, moderated community fosters peer-to-peer support and knowledge sharing, giving customers the tools they need to troubleshoot common challenges. Brands can also provide a space for FAQs, product tutorials, or a knowledge base of helpful articles to serve customers. This not only enhances the customer experience but also eases the pressure on service teams, allowing them to focus on more complex inquiries.

A thriving customer community directly benefits other areas of your business, including customer support. By encouraging customers to seek self-service in your community, you can help deflect repetitive inquiries that would otherwise burden your support team. This also helps to save costs by expanding support capabilities without the need to expand headcount. Even as you scale, you can rely on a small team to handle unique support requests while leaning on self-service to handle the more common and basic issues.

Customer communities provide a direct channel for gathering valuable insights into preferences, challenges, and future needs. Analyzing prevalent questions and issues allows businesses to pinpoint pain points, improve products, and influence future strategies. These insights further inform marketing efforts and help prioritize bug fixes and new features based on actual customer experiences.

In addition, offering customers a platform for feedback is essential in fostering trust. Research by Microsoft indicated that while 90% of customers desire to give feedback, only 24% feel they have consistent opportunities to do so. A customer community gives businesses ongoing, real-time feedback, allowing for more responsive adjustments and deeper customer engagement.

A customer community nurtures relationships beyond the traditional sales funnel, creating natural opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and product expansion. Engaging with existing customers in a community-first environment allows businesses to share updates, introduce new products, and provide early access to offerings. This approach increases the likelihood of customers adopting future products or services, contributing to higher revenue and product adoption rates. The sense of exclusivity and ongoing engagement strengthens relationships, making customers more receptive to new opportunities and deepening their connection to your brand.

Customer communities provide a platform for members to share positive experiences and user-generated content (UGC), which businesses can leverage across marketing channels. As UGC is often seen as the most trustworthy content, it helps build credibility and trust. This advocacy can lead to valuable assets such as referrals, testimonials, case studies, and co-marketing opportunities. A well-managed community allows businesses to identify and nurture these brand advocates, turning their success stories into powerful tools for driving new customer acquisition and reinforcing the brand's reputation.

Here are some examples of great online customer communities to take inspiration from:

Adobe uses its customer-based community to keep customers informed with timely product updates. With nearly 40 million members and more than 925,000 conversations, the company ensures each product has a dedicated space for relevant discussions. The Photoshop community, with over 122,000 conversations, exemplifies how Adobe engages users effectively.

In the rapidly changing AI landscape, Adobe employees leverage these communities to introduce new test versions of their software. The post above features bullet-pointed updates, including bug fixes and feature enhancements, ensuring users stay in the loop. Adobe also encourages members to provide feedback and share their latest creations, fostering a collaborative space where users and the brand shape product development together.

In 2020, Airbnb received the Khoros Kudos award for “Best-in-Class: Community,” recognizing their exceptional use of customer engagement. After utilizing Khoros Communities to improve their community platform, Airbnb saw remarkable results — hosts who participated in the community earned 2.5 times more revenue than those who didn’t.

Within Airbnb’s Community Center, both moderators and hosts actively share insights and best practices. In the post above, one host presented tips for increasing bookings, sparking over 164 replies from other hosts. An Airbnb community manager later acknowledged her contribution by incorporating the insights into their Community Help Guide, amplifying the feedback and reinforcing a culture of collaboration and appreciation.

In 2018, Cisco revamped its Cisco Community to create a more cohesive experience for both customers and engineers. This dynamic community thrives on contributions from both internal experts and external users, with Cisco reporting that 96% of responses come from non-employees.

To further encourage participation, Cisco has implemented creative strategies to recognize and reward member contributions. A recent initiative introduced new badges to boost engagement, rewarding members for activities like writing articles, publishing blogs, and participating in technical events. Some badges offer special recognition for long-time contributors and subject matter experts, helping to foster a culture of active participation. These incentives aim to motivate both new and veteran members, driving ongoing involvement and strengthening the community’s collaborative environment.

Verizon’s customer community boasts over 3.2 million members and 267,000 discussions, serving as a key component of its customer experience strategy. By partnering with a customer community platform, Khoros, Verizon optimized its online community to deflect service inquiries, ultimately reducing operational costs.

In the example above, another community member answered a customer’s question, with multiple users liking and marking the response as helpful. This peer-to-peer support reduces the need for direct service intervention, improving efficiency while enhancing the customer experience. Verizon’s use of community-driven solutions ensures quicker answers and promotes collaboration among users.

If you want to build a customer community, follow these steps for success:

1. Identify your ideal customer community

Building an online community for your customers begins by deeply understanding who they are. Start by identifying key demographics, interests, behaviors, and needs of your customer base. Creating data-driven personas using insights from customer surveys, market research, and existing social media channels will help guide your efforts.

Don’t hesitate to ask your customers directly: What type of community would they engage with? Gathering this feedback early ensures the community you build will resonate with your audience and align with their expectations.

2. Ensure your customer community supports business goals

Next, take time to clarify the purpose and mission of the community. While the focus should remain customer-centric, it’s essential that the community aligns with your broader business goals. Identify the specific value your community will offer to members — such as peer support, exclusive resources, or product updates — and communicate this clearly with members

3. Select the right customer community software

Choosing the right community platform is critical for building and sustaining an online community. It’s essential to find not just a vendor but a partner you can trust to help you create a dynamic, evolving space. Choose software that meets your community's requirements and supports your ability to build and expand as it grows. Tools such as community automation, moderation, gamification, and analytics facilitate easier management and growth.

Khoros Communities can provide everything needed to build an enterprise-class online community and scale engagement with fewer resources, complexity, and cost.

4. Create and share community guidelines

Clear community guidelines are essential for fostering a thriving online space. These guidelines set expectations for behavior and provide transparency to members. They should be easy to access and cover key areas like safety, inclusivity, and member contributions.

To ensure the community remains welcoming, assign and train moderators, both from your internal team and external brand advocates. Moderators play a vital role in enforcing guidelines, encouraging engagement, and maintaining a positive atmosphere. With clear rules and trained moderators, your community will feel inclusive, respectful, and engaging for all participants.

5. Host a kickoff event and invite your community

When your community is ready to launch, put it in the spotlight by inviting customers to join and explore the new space. Clearly communicate the benefits for members such as exclusive content, peer support, or early product access to build excitement.

Consider hosting a kickoff event — either online or in-person — to generate buzz and encourage early participation. Events like these create momentum and offer an engaging way for customers to connect with each other and your brand. Additionally, word of mouth from excited early adopters can organically expand your community and attract new members quickly.

6. Track engagement metrics and continue to iterate

Once your community is live, it’s essential to track key metrics aligned with your team’s goals. Regularly review these metrics and adjust your strategy to ensure continuous growth and engagement. For online communities, useful metrics include unique logins, new members, engagement volume, and time spent on-site.

To keep the community vibrant, consistently share updates, ask engaging questions, and follow up with users. Iterating based on feedback and performance ensures the space remains valuable for members. When members see the value of the community, they are more likely to stay engaged — driving positive outcomes for both your users and your business.

Customers remain loyal to brands that engage authentically with them — and 76.6% of consumers wish their favorite brand had a community. Building an online community may seem daunting, but Khoros equips enterprise companies to create and scale online communities quickly.

With Khoros Communities you can build a customer community without the need for custom coding. Host a two-way dialogue with your members, leveraging built-in capability for blogs, discussion forums, private messages, and more. Our community management software allows you to tag, review, edit, and archive content. Additionally, you can track sentiment, and our intuitive dashboards and reports provide the critical data you need to measure the health of your community. If you’re ready to build a lasting customer community, request a demo today.