Let’s give them something to talk about: Introducing Zendesk’s new Community features

Listening to customer feedback is an important step in understanding their needs. But the comments and questions received via email, chat, and phone support are only part of the conversation. The truth is, the conversations you have with customers are few when compared to the conversations they have with each other.

Over social media, online reviews sites, and feedback forums, consumers are increasingly having conversations about products, brands, and services—discussing what works and what doesn’t. Why not harness that engagement by fostering conversations within a customized community forum for your brand?

Introducing an improved Zendesk Community, now with features that allow for:

Better content navigation
Users can filter posts by post status (planned, not planned, completed, or answered), sort comments by date and votes, and view posts across all topics.

More intuitive content creation
When a user begins a post, Community automatically scans existing content for similar posts. If posts exist that address the user’s issue, Community will supply a list of these posts to the user—cutting down on duplicate content and making it easy for users to find a solution. While writing a post, Community members can also easily format content and comments with a built-in WYSIWYG formatting editor.

Better community engagement
Users can stay up-to-date on community news by following “new posts” or “new posts & comments” to receive email alerts whenever there is a post update.

Advanced community management
Community managers have a lot on their plates. We are making it easier to:

• Set a status on any post
• Edit posts or mark as spam
• Feature or pin posts to the top of the discussion
• Close comments on posts
• Create tickets from posts or comments

Community provide a wonderful opportunity to increase customer engagement, collect user insight, and increase brand reach. To get the most out of your Community, use it to:

Extend the brand experience

Think of your community as a clubhouses for customers. A place where they can learn and converse about your product–all while strengthening their connection to your brand. It should be inviting, useful, and a fun place to be an active member.

Customizing your forum with your brand style, voice, and tone will help customers feel they are in a familiar environment. Look at Dropbox as a shining example.

Cultivate useful conversations

Communities draw a variety of users from power users to total newbies. The range in experience levels enables new users to crowdsource support from those who are more knowledgeable. Encourage members of your support team to jump in and help out, or designate a few community managers to moderate comments and keep discussions on topic.

Create clearly labeled sections and navigation menus so users can easily find help. Here is a stellar page from Insightly.

Deliver consistent support across channels

Community is completely integrated with your Zendesk, making it easy to provide customers with seamless support from channel to channel. Community participation automatically syncs with customer history in Zendesk, so if you are responding to a customer email, you can easily have visibility into questions she may have asked in the community. Plus, “create a ticket from a post or comment” makes it easy to transition customer conversations from the community to email, phone or any other channel in Zendesk.

Learn more about Community