Q&A with the Helpstream folks on the importance of Customer Communities to the Enterprise.
Earlier this week, I did a Q&A with the folks at Helpstream on the need and importance of customer communities to the enterprise.
We covered the following topics:
- the importance of building customer communities as part of an Enterprise 2.0 design
- the role of a community manager and skills
- which functional areas will get the most value from communities in the enterprise
- important questions you need to think about when building a community
- have we reached the ‘social tipping point’ wrt the need for a community
Here’s an except:
Helpstream: What’s your general feeling on the importance of building customer communities for companies today?
Me: A customer community is one of the more promising components of the emerging enterprise design that’s powered by social computing technology. In a world before online communities existed, insight into customer intent and sentiment was limited to the few people on the organizational front lines. In contrast, most community initiatives today offer an open format that enables everyone in the organization to see what customers expect from you. But that only signals the very beginning of the promise of the open enterprise. Eventually the best minds across your organizations’ supply chain, employee and customer base, and distribution partners will be able to truly rally around the needs of your prospects and customers – often in real time, to accelerate business performance. A critical initial step to realizing such a work model is a well-conceived customer community.
The rest of the Q&A is over on the Helpstream blog, here.
Thanks to the folks at Helpstream for reaching out.
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