How Telcos can increase profitability by building online communities?

Today many telecom companies are building their online communities for many different reasons. Online communities are used as a support system to hear customers’ voice, a helpful marketing tool, and a platform for doing surveys and co-creation with the customers.

Whatever the community’s goal is, you need to know that it takes time for a customer community to get mature. It is like wine that gets better as it ages.

By having a successful customer community, you can improve your marketing and customer services enormously. What guarantees a successful implementation of a customer community is, firstly having a top-rated online community software and secondly having the right community strategy. Once the right technology and strategy are there, the rest is the planning and execution.

How do telco communities drive long-term business value?

Content generation and traffic synergy
Telco communities focus on content, traffic, and activation to leverage their success faster.

All the shared information on a community is considered as content. The very first content should be generated by the community moderators. This is important to demonstrate that the community is really engaging. it encourages users to participate in the conversations. Over time user-generated content keeps your community alive.

Traffic refers to the number of visits you get from Google and other search engines. The content created in your community drives traffic to your community. Unique and high-quality contents in a community can drive millions of traffic on search engines each month and introduce your brand worldwide.

Activation means how to encourage a user to be active in the community after the first visit. The level of activation depends on how good is the relationship built in the community. The community management team is responsible for giving a warm welcome to the members and motivating them to participate more. Therefore, considering the content, traffic, and activation to drive business value for your brand.

Enhancing customer experience

Telco communities are involved in every stage of customer experience. Questions and answers posted on the community give lots of information to the potential customers. Authentic peer-to-peer recommendations and advice help your potential customers to make their decision faster and convert to paid customers.

Also, contents in the communities help in driving potential customers from search engines to your shopping pages. We shed some light on how a well-integrated community can drive more leads and higher conversions, as well as accelerating the buying cycle. But it does not end here; communities have a very important role to play in the after-sale stage too.

Once a community gets high traffic and encourages the members to be active, it would be your best scalable service channel of all; more and more people will use your community to ask their questions about the products or services.

Big savings = increased profitability

Having a community as a support channel has impressive results on deflecting support calls and tickets. We have many examples of our very successful communities who could leverage the peer-to-peer support and reduce support requests by 20%. We also noticed that nearly 70% of customers’ questions were asked by peer customers in the community.

Telecom companies are spending around $4-10 per support request and the bigger their customer base, the more money they can save by building their online community. Otherwise, tens of support agents need to be hired to answer these questions.

In the companies such as Telcos that supporting is a constant challenge, a branded community can achieve millions of dollars in annual savings.

And these results carry over to different kinds of branded communities (i.e., industries other than Telecom). When organizations commit to community success, the results will snowball; success begets success.