Online customer support has been around since the advent of the web. When social media came around, it placed a megaphone into the hands of customers. Now, you could tweet your displeasure over that uncooked steak and the restaurant (and many others) would know about it.

Savvy brands caught on to this trend and began to proactively listen to what customers were saying on social media. After hearing their issues, they’d follow up promptly and seek resolution of these issues. Then came branded, online support communities, which allowed organizations to complement their social media interactions with an environment that they managed and maintained.

Learn more about: How Evoq helps with customer support

Online support communities have a number of benefits, not the least of which is the ability to own and manage the underlying data. Now, you can track customer service trends (e.g. which product models are causing the most bug reports) and have a much richer understanding of your customers (e.g. Joe Smith has frequent issues with your latest product feature, so the next time he calls, make sure you’re sensitive to whether he’s having the same issue).

23 Benefits of Online Support Communities

My childhood hero is Don Mattingly, former New York Yankee first baseman. Also known as Donnie Baseball, Mattingly wore #23 for the Yankees (although the number has since been retired ). So in honor of #23 from my favorite baseball team, I give you 23 benefits of online support communities.

1. Data in your privately branded online support community is your’s. A third party social network does not own and control that data. You do.
2. Resolutions in your online support community are there for everyone to see.
3. It’s easy for customers to search for issues and find documented resolutions. Try doing this on social media.
4. Issues NOT resolved in your support community stick out like a sore thumb. This helps motivate your Customer Success Team to find a resolution.
5. Search engines love the user generated content in your online support community. They’ll add it to their search index hours (or minutes) after the content is published.
6. As customers find their issues resolved and their questions answered, they’ll become happier. Some will return to the community, for the express purpose of helping others.
7. As prospects research your organization’s products and services, content from your customer community will appear in search results. This helps to advance the sales cycle.
8. Customers prefer to hear from their peers. Your online support community enables this peer exchange.
9. When product questions (and issues) are resolved among the customer community (without the involvement of the brand), customers and prospects notice.
10. Online support communities are a real-time, constantly updated FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) document.
11. As customers support each other, your Customer Success Team has more time to spot trends and provide feedback to your Product Team to help inform the product roadmap.
12. As customers interact with members of the Customer Success Team, you’re able to build and maintain a rich profile of their product usage and challenges faced. This provides a comprehensive view of the customer to inform future support calls into your team.
13. You get to discover customers you didn’t even know you had.
14. Your Marketing team loves customer case studies. Your customer community helps you discover customer stories that the Marketing team can tell to the world.
15. Your Marketing team does a lot of content marketing. Your customer community seeds their content marketing editorial schedule with ideas and topics. If a topic concerns your customers, then use this insight to hit the bullseye with your content.
16. Product management loves to hear input about their products. Invite them to listen (and participate!) in your customer community. They’ll love it.
17. Your customer community gives your brand advocates vehicles for intrinsic rewards: authority and reputation among their peers. And of course, they also receive long-standing love and admiration from you.
18. Online support communities never close.
19. The easiest customer question to resolve is the one that’s never asked. The content in your customer community is a self-answering machine. That’s right, your customer community should be named Watson.
20. As users do research on the web, your customer community content may appear in search results. You can generate sales leads that you otherwise would never have seen.
21. Your online support community enables you to turn complaints into compliments.
22. The quicker customers have their issues resolved, the greater their long term value to your organization.
23. Your online support community gives customers the tools they need to find the right answers to their questions.

Learn more about: How Evoq helps with customer support