7 reasons to build a customer support community

A customer support community is an online space where customers can engage with both your brand and other customers for support. Customers can ask and answer questions, share their experiences and tips about your product, and access certain resources in these dedicated forums.

These online communities can help resolve common questions and challenges without requiring customers to contact your service team directly. By empowering users to find solutions independently, these communities not only enhance the customer experience but also free up your agents to focus on more strategic tasks or complicated tickets.

A customer support community typically includes several key elements:

Think of your knowledge base as the foundation of self-service support. It’s stocked with in-depth articles, how-to guides, and FAQs covering everything from basic setup to advanced troubleshooting. This centralized hub empowers customers to find answers at their own pace, reducing the need for direct support intervention. A user-friendly search function helps customers quickly find relevant articles, posts, and tips, saving time for both them and your support teams.

A discussion forum is the central hub of a customer support community, serving as the primary space for customers to troubleshoot questions, collaborate, and share experiences. As the core of the community, this dedicated area fosters peer-to-peer support, enabling customers to resolve issues together and reducing the burden on support teams. By encouraging interaction and knowledge sharing, the discussion forum drives engagement and strengthens the overall customer experience.

Guidance is a critical component of any online support community. Resources such as how-to guides, interactive tutorials, videos, and downloadable templates proactively address common customer challenges. A well-maintained and continually updated resource section enhances customer satisfaction by offering reliable expertise, and empowering users to troubleshoot their support needs independently.

Hosting live events and webinars offers customers opportunities for real-time learning and engagement. Topics such as product updates, training sessions, and Q&As with internal experts keep users informed while encouraging participation.

Moderators play a vital role in maintaining a positive and active environment, guiding discussions, enforcing community guidelines, and recognizing top contributors through badges or rewards to motivate engagement.

While an online support community is designed to help customers resolve issues independently, it should also provide easy access to direct support options for escalation. Links to call center agents, live chat, and email support ensure customers can quickly address more complex or urgent problems.

A customer support community offers numerous benefits, especially when integrated into your omnichannel strategy. Here’s why your brand should consider building one:

Customer support communities ensure resources are available around the clock. Customers can search for solutions, access FAQs, and engage with peers at their convenience — all without relying on live agent availability. This helps ensure a more seamless experience with faster resolutions.

By providing a space for common questions — via FAQs, tutorials, or discussion forums — you can significantly reduce the volume of repetitive inquiries that would normally reach agents. This allows your support teams to focus on more complex, high-priority issues.

With a customer support community, fewer tickets are escalated to live agents, reducing the overall workload. A support community also provides a scalable solution, accommodating growing customer demand without requiring additional hires or infrastructure changes. Over time, this approach streamlines support operations and ensures resources are allocated to more complex customer needs.

Customer support communities foster an environment where users share unique insights, tips, and creative solutions related to your products or services. This collective knowledge can help other customers discover advanced use cases or troubleshoot uncommon issues. Additionally, feedback from community discussions provides valuable insights that inform product development, ensuring your offerings evolve to meet customer needs. By leveraging the community’s collaborative nature, both customers and your organization benefit from continuous learning and improvement.

Communities offer a wealth of data on customer pain points, preferences, and challenges. Monitoring discussions, fielding surveys, and analyzing usage data can help shape product development, improve support strategies, and enhance the customer service experience.

Support communities create opportunities for customers to exchange ideas, share expertise, and solve problems together. By leveraging the collective knowledge of the community, customers can often find solutions faster, reducing the need for direct agent involvement. This dynamic interaction not only lightens the load on support teams but also strengthens customer engagement and loyalty.

Communities provide an important opportunity for companies to gather real-time feedback from their customers. Monitoring discussions and encouraging users to share opinions can help brands identify product gaps, troubleshoot ongoing issues, and prioritize future features. This continuous feedback loop allows brands to improve their offering, increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.

An omnichannel customer service strategy focuses on delivering a seamless, cohesive experience across touchpoints. A support community can elevate this approach, enhancing consistency, efficiency, and customer engagement across channels. Here’s how:

• Seamless integration across channels: A support community acts as a centralized knowledge hub for resources, connecting effortlessly with other channels like live chat, email, and social media. This ensures customers receive consistent and accurate information, regardless of how they interact with your brand.

• Enhanced self-service capabilities: Support communities empower customers to resolve issues independently, offering FAQs, tutorials, and peer advice. These self-service options complement live and automated support, providing a unified experience that reduces dependency on agents.

• Optimized resource allocation: By deflecting repetitive inquiries, a support community frees up agents to handle more complex, high-priority tasks. This balance not only streamlines operations but also ensures quality interactions across all channels in your omnichannel strategy.

• Increased customer engagement: Active participation in a support community builds stronger connections to your brand. Recognizing and rewarding top contributors fosters engagement and loyalty, creating brand advocates who amplify the effectiveness of your omnichannel efforts.

Now that you understand the numerous benefits, here is how you can build an online community:

1. Identify your audience: Use tools like customer surveys, market research, and website analytics to understand who will engage with your customer service-focused community. Tailor the community’s design and resources to their preferences, behaviors, and support needs.

2. Define your community’s purpose: Ensure the community’s purpose is centered on providing customer support by answering the question: “How will this community help solve customer challenges?” A clear purpose helps attract and retain engaged members.

3. Set goals and KPIs: Track the effectiveness of your community with metrics like reduced support tickets, increased customer satisfaction, and engagement volume. These KPIs ensure your community aligns with your customer service objectives.

4. Determine community features: Choose components that enhance customer support, such as discussion forums, knowledge bases, and direct support pathways for escalation when necessary.

5. Select the right management platform: Select a community platform that supports customer service needs, including tools like ticket integration, real-time analytics, and moderation capabilities.

6. Implement community guidelines: Develop clear guidelines that promote a safe, respectful environment, focusing on constructive problem-solving and engagement.

7. Establish a consistent engagement cadence: Regularly post helpful resources, moderate discussions, and interact with members to keep the community active and focused on customer support.

Samsung Electronics America prioritized creating robust self-help content through its Samsung Member Community. This online hub was designed to provide customers with expert support and answers to all their questions. By fostering organic conversations, Samsung empowered users to find the information they need — whether through peer-to-peer support, self-service options, or assistance from Samsung support and brand ambassadors.

In this example, a highlighted Samsung Ambassador assists new users with common phone problems, providing a quick resolution without the need for intervention from Samsung's support team.

This strategic shift to community-driven support allowed Samsung to deflect phone inquiries to their online platform, resulting in over $1 million in monthly support cost savings while delivering a seamless and efficient customer experience.

Cisco’s digital community is a trusted customer support platform, bringing together over 1.3 million members across seven languages. Beyond peer-to-peer interactions in its Q&A portal, the community offers self-paced guided resources designed to help users confidently address complex challenges. Customers can filter these resources to find those rated “most helpful” by peers, such as the highly-rated Cisco CX Cloud Guided Resources, shown above.

These resources play a critical role in proactive customer support, providing step-by-step guidance on key topics. With self-paced tasks, detailed guides, and instructional videos, Cisco ensures users are empowered to troubleshoot independently while building their expertise. Cisco’s mission to “spend less time managing your IT and more time on innovation” highlights the value of these resources in reducing reliance on direct support, enabling users to resolve issues faster and with greater confidence.

Dropbox’s Community allows customers to browse over 20,000 posts or create new ones to find answers to their questions. Topics range from app installations and file sharing to managing storage space, providing a comprehensive hub for customer-driven solutions and issue resolution.

For more complex problems that cannot be solved within the forum, Dropbox ensures seamless access to direct support pathways. In the example above, customers can easily contact Dropbox’s support team, complete with proactive ETAs for email and ticket responses, helping to set clear expectations and deliver timely assistance.

With Khoros, you can create a community that serves your customers, support teams, C-suite, and more. Khoros Communities helps businesses reduce service and support costs, increase customer lifetime value, and drive innovation.

Our community management software is built for enterprise-class engagement. With features like community content management and moderation, which can be automated, you can easily connect with your highly engaged consumers, fuel user-generated content, and reduce the strain on your traditional customer service teams. To help your online community scale, we also provide community analytics and listening capabilities.

Take a tour of Khoros Communities or request a demo today.