6 ways to help you build a conversation with your user community

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It is important to listen to other people's advice when you are in contact with a new opportunity or are ready for a new adventure. For businesses that make products and services, others can help us better understand our weaknesses, vulnerabilities, or unique ways of using our products. And the most valuable opportunities come from the consumers themselves-the people who use your products every day.

For those who are just starting a business and who are just aware of the importance of the user community, here are 6 ways to build a conversation between your entire team and the user community, and make your brand more familiar to people.

1. Establish user community before product launch, guide your business strategy or product path (before and after product release)

Many companies do not start building user communities before the product is released, which gives them a lot of opportunities to lose. Because the construction of the user community before the release of the product can bring you great benefits. First, you can get a lot of user insights from the user community that will let you know if your product meets the needs of the market.

Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover has talked about corporate transparency and the benefits of creating new products under public gaze, such as increasing product purchases, gaining early feedback on how easy it is to measure the product's ease of use, and raising public expectations about your product.

Another benefit of building a user community before a product is launched is to allow you to gain recognition before the product goes public. After you have built a user community around your product or service, if these users like your product concept, they will spontaneously start to help you spread and disseminate.

You need to give your user community a good enough reason to share your product with the people around you. After you have received some constructive user feedback, you need to focus on these feedback and use them in the improvement of the product, and let the person who makes the comments and everyone else know that your user community has helped you improve your product. The advantage of this is that users get a sense of participation, and people are always more interested in the products they've been involved in.

The following illustration shows many businesses that have relied on the benefits of the user community and the channels they have used to establish their own user communities:

How to build a user community before and after a product is released:

Find your users and know where they are. You can use monitoring tools such as Mentuon to track keywords to your product, brand, or service, as well as keywords about your competitors. A careful analysis of the discussion of these keywords takes place.

Find people who have more say in these users because they may become your product ambassadors in the future. As you monitor these discussions, you should pay attention to who is leading the discussions, who is sharing new ideas or products.

Contact a potential early recipient. You can look at the influential users, find the common interests between you and then start a conversation with them. If he is interested in your product, you can give them a free trial (many people like to be the first to try new products).

Encourage users to communicate with each other. You can involve your early adopters in a group-forums, Facebook discussion groups, LinkedIn discussion groups, and so on. Then ask some questions about your product in these user groups and encourage them to discuss it.

2. Quick location Vulnerabilities and problems

Our data shows that in all tweets that refer to the name of a company, about 31% of tweets are not controlled by the enterprise itself. If you can listen carefully to the consumer's questions about your product-whether they are directly or not-you will be able to answer these questions more effectively and nip the potential crisis in the cradle.

More importantly, you can also understand what your customers have to say about your product, so that you can make corresponding changes and adjustments to the product to make the consumer more satisfied. Some companies also use the issues raised by these consumers to improve their customer assistance processes, such as adding these issues to the FAQ (FAQs).

The advantage of this is that customers are able to support themselves faster, while reducing the workload of the customer service team and improving their productivity.

Such a process is a good thing in many companies, but there are companies that have taken another approach. For example, they will listen to each user's problem, but they will not respond until they find a specific solution to the problem. This seems to be inefficient, but it also has a certain advantage, that is, let the enterprise at any time to grasp the problems encountered by users, but also to enable enterprises to develop new product ideas.

However, whichever approach you adopt, you should be as fast as possible to provide support to customers, reduce the user's waiting time.

How to reduce user latency:

Build a listening program to proactively find out what users are complaining about your product and respond to them on social networking sites.

Let someone or a team manage and respond to the requirements of the user community.

When the user takes the initiative to ask you a question, you have to respond within 1-2 hours (our goal now is to respond in 5 minutes). Don't test the user's patience, and if they don't get a response in a short time, they'll turn around and walk away.

3. Stay ahead of the competition

You can also monitor how people think about your competitors and how people think about your industry. In this way, you will always be ahead of others in the competition (especially if your competitors don't pay attention to users on social networking sites). At this point, you can brainstorm with the entire team-from the technical team to the marketing team to the leadership team-you can try to make up for the market gap.

How to stay ahead of the competition:

Let a person monitor and analyze the competitor and the industry, and make an analysis every two weeks or every month.

When new opportunities arise, analyze them carefully and designate the relevant teams to explore.

If you like me as well as standing meetings, you can bring together all the people in the company, share your information with the entire team, and everyone can understand the current situation and then carry out their respective responsibilities.

4. Listening = better support = user Stickiness = more revenue

When developing a listening program and a customer support strategy, you need to consider the following data:

Gartner Group says 80% of the future revenue comes from 20% of existing customers.

Lee Resource Inc. says the cost of attracting a new customer is more than 5 times times that of retaining an existing customer.

Cmo.com said that if a customer is dissatisfied with a product, he and others around the possibility of sharing their own product experience, than a satisfied customer 59% higher. Just what he's sharing is about how bad your product is.

The stickiness of the user is closely related to the way it is transmitted, which is critical to any start-up. Jamie Quint, who wrote a blog post on the subject, says that user stickiness is important for sustainable growth. If an enterprise does not establish the user stickiness, the consequence is the enterprise growth rapid decline, finally fell into the abyss.

If your users are not around, you don't have to expect them to introduce your product to others in the future. Keep in mind that creating a user stickiness is a long term job that is far from being a problem.

How to increase customer stickiness:

Listen to customer needs and respond! You need to be aware of the customer's needs on the social platform and use media monitoring tools to capture what customers have posted on other platforms, such as forums, blogs, etc.

Make it easy for users to find and use your FAQ and help Center.

Take the initiative to contact the customer and ask them to advise you.

5. Translating negative reports into good relationships

You can monitor your comments online and you will find a lot of reviews, articles, and reviews of your products. Every article you find is an opportunity for you to build rapport with bloggers, journalists and potential content partners.

Whether positive or negative, you should get in touch with each other, express gratitude to each other, or eliminate misunderstandings. These people will have the opportunity to be your partner in the future and don't hesitate to contact him or her directly.

How to establish a relationship with the author of the article:

Find articles about your product by monitoring keywords online.

Get in touch with the author via Twitter or email. The wording should be easy and friendly, and most importantly, the content you send should help to establish a good relationship with the other person.

After getting in touch with the other person, send the useful information to them regularly, and make yourself a reliable source of information for each other.

6. When the change does not work, let you know the first time

After months of hard work, adding new features to the product, or making a change, the last thing an entrepreneur wants to hear is that this change is not about adapting to the needs of the market. But that's one of the most important things you can hear. To be aware, product changes do not adapt to the market, most of the reason for this phenomenon is that in the early days of change the enterprise did not hear the user's voice. Therefore, before you decide to change the product, you must first listen to what the user said. If the change you want to make is just what you want, not what the user needs, then don't hesitate to give it up.

Also, if you have no plans to change, but all users feel that you need to change, you have to respond. While the transition is painful, you have to listen to the community and be prepared for the transition (or even change the enterprise's development plan). Only in this way can you make customers satisfied or find a new market.

How to stay flexible and make rapid changes:

In addition to paying attention to what the user community is saying, pay attention to when they start to stop speaking. If your communication with the user community suddenly breaks down, it usually means something goes wrong.

Give users feedback before they change-if they are satisfied with your existing product, you can also use the feedback to optimize the product.

Always ready to adjust. If your team is used to testing and tweaking, they won't feel too miserable when the transition comes.

Cheer for Victory

After a staged victory, you should invite the whole team to look at the results of their work. Encourage your team to share the ideas they hear from the user community and encourage them to focus on improving their products, working methods, and productivity.

Without consumers, businesses cannot talk. We have to communicate with the user community. It's not enough to just hire someone to sit in the office and analyze the market.

The core of communication with the user community is to establish and maintain a long-term, healthy relationship. Most importantly, it can bring you growth, innovation, and learning from mistakes. All the answers we need can be found in the user community, and the key to finding these answers is whether we can hear the voice of the user community.

(via TNW/fast carp)