6 Customer Convenience Hacks To Maintain Community Engagement

April 27, 2021

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6 Customer Convenience Hacks To Maintain Community Engagement

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Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

Customer convenience is one of the most important elements of community engagement, but can too often be treated as an afterthought.

The fact of the matter is that convenience dictates the ratio of pleasure to pain in any given customer journey.

Convenience can have a major influence on a customer’s desire to engage with your business and participate in your community.

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re honing in on 6 customer convenience hacks you should be looking to incorporate into your business to keep customers coming back for more.

Put accessibility first

You wouldn’t deliberately ignore an entire segment of your audience – this is How Not To Build A Brand Community 101.

But if you’ve failed to make your business digitally accessible, that’s exactly what you’re doing. 

Remember: the internet is for everyone.

Inclusivity has rightly been pushed up the digital agenda in recent years. Recognising your business’s built-in biases and working to remove these is paramount in order to avoid excluding any customers from your community.

While the exact steps you should look to take will vary depending on your product or service, some staple examples include audio integration for written content and sufficient use of colour contrasts to accommodate visual impairments.

Offer flexibility 

In today’s digital age, online capability is growing rapidly. 

On one hand, this is great news: businesses now have more options than ever before in terms of tailoring their products and services to customer demands.

On the other hand, this can have its drawbacks – in particular, it can lead to increased customer expectations. 

In a world where customers expect everything, how do you accommodate? Flexibility! 

This doesn’t mean remaining versatile enough to cover each and every avenue – we daresay this is all but impossible.

Instead, look to remain flexible in terms of reacting to customer trends and behaviours.

To do this, dive head-first into any customer engagement data at your disposal. The trick is to identify any hurdles your customers are currently facing when interacting with your business, and making the necessary adjustments to overcome these hurdles.

For example, if you can see customers are utilising your search function for extended periods, this may indicate that your search functionality is too broad.

In the name of convenience, adding filter options to help customers narrow their search will help to streamline navigation and create happier customers. This is exactly what we did on our own community engagement platform recently!

Don’t do too much 

As we’ve touched on already, you simply can’t do it all. 

If you ignore your data and take a more generalised approach to customer convenience, you may, in fact, be responsible for the opposite: creating an inconvenient customer experience that hinders your chances of retention.

How? By overcomplicating their journey.

Sure, that new chatbot integration ensures your business’s website is keeping up the times, but is it serving any real purpose? If your data tells you that customers are already sourcing the customer service they need, the addition hasn’t improved convenience in any real way. 

On the contrary, it may have actually created inconvenience for your customers by slowing down your webpage, for example.

Keep it simple

Ensuring any content can be easily understood by your audience is crucial to a convenient user experience.  

The logic here speaks for itself: by communicating in a style your audience can easily understand, you’re ensuring they absorb maximum value each and every time. 

Why is this convenient? Well, user-friendly content should leave customers with fewer questions and more information than when they started. This creates a more efficient experience that helps to form a stronger bond between customer and brand.

To make your content as user-friendly as possible, place your focus on readability, tone and style. Again, this requires you to know your audience, so don’t phone in that data dive. Instead, immerse yourself in your average user to understand their reading ability, common syntax and the like.

After all, how do you expect your community to engage unless you’re speaking directly to them?

Don’t skip the detail 

It’s important not to mistake simplicity for a lack of detail.

User-friendly content is all about communicating all of the information needed – and no more – in the simplest way possible.

Never omit important information your customers will need – this will only create further inconvenience by leaving questions unanswered (or even provoking more).

For example, perhaps you’re an ecommerce retailer fresh off the back of a new product launch. You upload a high-quality product image and, in the name of convenience, kept the accompanying product description short and sweet. After all, the customer can get a pretty good impression of your product from the picture, and it saves them the effort of having to read a block of text, right?

Wrong. 

The best practice for customer convenience in this example would be to include a detailed, easy-to-understand description. Why? Your content will inevitably tell a story the picture can’t.

This makes your product description a valuable tool in preempting and addressing customer queries, delivering convenience for all involved.

Provide solutions 

Convenience is defined as ‘the state of being able to proceed with something without difficulty’.

With this in mind, the best way to maximise customer convenience is to position your brand as problem solvers.

What problems are you solving? Well, that depends!

Analyse how your community is engaging with your brand at present, and identify common pain points, queries and hurdles. These can take many forms, from direct questions about your business’s operations to broader queries around your industry as a whole. 

From there, look to provide the solution. Again, this will vary depending on your business and audience, but common examples include everything from regularly updated FAQs to how-to guides in the form of blog posts.

When it comes to customer convenience, it pays to know your audience inside and out. Familiarise yourself with customer habits and behaviours, then adapt to ensure you’re prioritising their needs at every stage in their journey.

Get this right, and you’ll be well on your way to building an engaged brand community. To learn more about how to nurture and grow your community, get in touch with Six Circles and find out more about our community engagement platform.

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