Community Management Software FAQs

• What is online community management software?

  Community management software is a tool or platform used to build, host, and manage an online community where people can engage in discussions around a shared interest.

  Many brands use online communities to create digital spaces for customers to discuss their products and services including questions, feedback, and suggestions. Community management tools helps brands streamline their online community operations, enhance community engagement, and improve overall brand-customer relationships. Community management software provides centralized management tools, analytics, and automation features that help brands efficiently monitor, moderate, and communicate with their community members, ultimately fostering a positive and engaging online brand community experience.

• What are the benefits of online community management software?

  Community management tools allow brands to build digital spaces for their customers, which offer a few key benefits:

  • Increase brand awareness and customer loyalty

  • Grow revenue through higher conversion rates

  • Collect customer feedback and ideas to improve offerings

  • Reduce support costs by enabling customers to seek answers from peers

  • Build a knowledge base of information to encourage self-service

  • Gather valuable interaction and engagement data to inform strategies

• Who uses online community management software?

  Customer communities offer benefits to brand employees from several departments, from customer support to marketing and product development. The cross-organizational benefits from customer communities means many departments may look to leverage the community to help drive their own departmental goals, initatives, and KPIs. However, the departments below will likely utilize community management software the most:

  • Community Managers: Community managers are responsible for building, growing and managing a branded online community. This includes engaging with and responding to customers, moderating discussions, and reporting out community performance and insights to other departments.

  • Customer Support: Online communities double as robust, cost-effective, and incredibly scalable customer support platforms. While community members often help each other with standard, simple problems, support agents can also weigh in and service more nuanced, complicated queries.

  • Marketing: An online brand community supports a marketing department by serving as a platform for brand advocates to share positive experiences and user-generated content, amplifying brand visibility and word-of-mouth marketing. It also provides valuable insights into customer preferences, market trends, and competitor analysis, aiding the marketing department in refining their strategies, targeting the right audience, and building stronger customer relationships.

  • Customer success: Helping customers succeed with their product or service post-purchase is the priority for some brands. Therefore, customer success can leverage a community to serve as a resource hub for best practices, case studies, training, and expert advice — all designed to help customers maximize the value of their purchases.

  • Product: An online brand community serves as a valuable platform for gathering feedback and ideas directly from customers or enthusiasts of the brand. This feedback can help the department in understanding customer expectations, identifying product improvements, generating new ideas, and testing and validating new products for product development.

• What are the key features of online community management software?

  Each community management software solution offers a unique mix of features, but the following are the most common and essential that you’ll frequently see:

  • Discussion forums: Discussions are the primary component of an online community, whether it’s through isolated threads or a shared board where users respond to posts in comment sections. All community management software should offer forum capabilities, though some solutions may have more robusts options than others.

  • Knowledge base: A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information and resources that provides a comprehensive and easily accessible source of knowledge for community members. It typically contains articles, FAQs, tutorials, user guides, best practices, and other relevant documentation. The knowledge base helps community members find answers to their questions, learn about product features, troubleshoot issues, and gain a deeper understanding of the brand's offerings.

  • Gamification: Gamification features are designed to introduce game-like elements and mechanics to encourage participation, engagement, and friendly competition within an online brand community. These features may include points, badges, leaderboards, challenges, quests, and rewards. They motivate community members to actively contribute, share knowledge, and interact with others, ultimately fostering a sense of achievement, loyalty, and fun within the community.

  • Moderation and security: After setting up an online community, brands will need to monitor and occasionally step into member discussions. This may include flagging capabilities or automated processes to remove spam, profanity, or other unauthorized content. As part of a complete online community management system, there should be functionality that makes it easy for brands to manage individual discussion threads or even entire sections within the community.

  • Member management: These are tools that help brands manage community member profiles, permissions, roles, and access levels. This feature allows administrators to monitor and control community membership.

  • Analytics and reporting: Customer communities are packed with valuable data, and community management software should compile and organize that information so it’s easy to analyze and share with others through reports or customizable dashboards.

  • Integrations: With people from several departments involved, your community needs to be compatible with your technology stack. Integrations may differ based on the solution, so check for compatibility when choosing a solution.

• What should you look for in online community management software?

  When choosing a community management platform for your brand, important factors to consider include:

  • Essential features: Based on the goals of your community, make sure the tool you’re considering offers all of the features including analytics that you’ll need to achieve those objectives.

  • Scalability: Although your community may start small, it’s size will grow over time in correlation with your brand. Make sure the community management platform you choose can scale as your brand gains increased awareness and has the robust features and integrations to support a more sophisticated community as you grow.

  • Support: With lots of people using the software, there’s likely to be a variety of questions about functionality and how to use it. Choose a solution from a provider with comprehensive support, including around the clock care and priority routing for urgent issues.

  • Coaching and advice: Beyond support for troubleshooting issues, make sure you have a partner that can offer strategic coaching and advice to help you scale your community and get the most out of your solution.