Best Articles on Customer & Community Happiness

Caring for your customers and nurturing real relationships is crucial to growing a successful business. Here are 6 ways to bring support to a whole new level.

I've been thinking about building online and offline communities for the past few years. Community is at the center of what I do, from planning in-person events (rap cyphers, book clubs, happy hours) to creating online and scalable communities ( rapt.fm, Product Hunt).

When analyzing one billion mentions earlier this year, we discovered that at 67%, the majority of company mentions online are delivered via Twitter. Wanting to know more about how people interact with companies on Twitter, we crunched the numbers again, this time analyzing about 36 million mentions delivered to 23,000 companies on Twitter alone.

The infographic highlighted five surprising statistics about Twitter and offered up different insights about each data point that are really beneficial to community managers. I loved the idea so much that I thought I would contribute five more statistics and offer up an expanded look at each one with insights on how these facts can help you be a better community manager.

It often takes an outsider's perspective to learn about new opportunities, whether they take the form of flaws, bugs, or unique use cases. The most valuable opportunities often come from customers themselves - the people who are hands on with your product every day.

This is a guest post by Jelena Woehr, Director of Community at GOOD, in continuation of a discussion begun in the comments section of her recent guest post, "Where Does Community Sit on the Org Chart?" Thanks, Carrie Jones, for the insightful question!

Community management goes way beyond customer service and crisis management. Making human connections is absolutely crucial to the success of your business. Th...

Our approach to researching a target audience has evolved over the years. It now works like this: Step 1: The Interviews We will interview 10 to 20 prospective members of the target audience. This number changes if we have more time, but it's roughly accurate. Our goal is three-fold.

Last week I created mockups of an improved comment system for Product Hunt. The design certainly wasn't perfect. It wasn't even complete. But I shared them anyway and am glad I did. Within 24 hours I received over 50 annotated pieces of feedback from the community.

In the day-to-day of community management, competing priorities, too many hats and always being "on" make it easy to lose sight of the larger business and community goals you've set out to accomplish. This is true for any community professional, regardless of experience.

Creating something that we can be proud of is hard work. It means making a constant, conscious effort to communicate well with everyone so that we can collaborate better. Now that MailChimp has 200+ employees who work on multiple floors across two different buildings, we're finding this more challenging than when the company was just a handful of people working together in one room.

posted by Alice Default | Business | 0 comment This is a guest post by Danny Olinsky. Danny is one of the 4 co-founders of the great Statuspage.io. You'll find him on Twitter at @dannyolinsky. It's fairly cliché at this point in the SaaS industry for companies to say they champion customer support without giving it a second thought.

Consumers are now turning to social media for their support needs. Interactions on Twitter alone rival other customer service vehicles such as support tickets, email, or help centers. Accepting this shift requires you to both adopt the mindset of a social business and to invest in the right tools that will allow you to always be there for your customers with better (and faster) customer support.

With the rise of the app economy and the shift to subscription-based (often freemium) models that come with it, there's been an increasing focus on retaining customers. In this new world, customer retention is the new customer acquisition. Unfortunately, improving retention is especially challenging because it often involves making changes to your product that you cannot track instantly.

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4 Ways to Build Community On Your Blog by Gini Dietrich on Aug 11, 2014 In the early days of social media, everyone talked about community. Build your community. Talk to your community. Community is the bee's knees. Everyone should have a community.

Welcome to Zappos, one of United States' leading online shoe and clothes shop. Congratulations, you've just been hired as their next big thing! Maybe you're a kickass designer. Maybe you code faster than you think. Or maybe you're a really senior executive guy.