Consona Communities
Integrating customers communities into an intelligent experience

Why are forums critical to your customer experience strategy?

In today’s highly-connected society, forums are emerging as the first step toward gaining insight and solving problems. However, forums remain a disconnected silo from the enterprise’s information and communication channels.

Consona has elevated the value of forums by incorporating them into the overall enterprise customer experience. Deeply integrated into the complete suite of applications, Consona Communities delivers increased brand loyalty, reduced support calls and improved knowledge.

Expert customers enable a collaborative forum experience

Some of your best and most reliable subject matter experts aren’t located within your contact center or even within your company — they are your customers who spend day in and day out using the product.

In complex support environments, expert users are highly-technical and often capable of solving problems for themselves as well as other users. Why not leverage their knowledge as a valuable part of your knowledge base?

Your users are domain experts who bring unique qualities and knowledge about your product that can make for better support content and defect submissions, and they’re willing to share this knowledge.

Consona Communities provides a simple way to identify the most knowledgeable group of experts. The system identifies and tracks the value that comes from each user.

Increase brand loyalty and gain insight into your customers

Consona Communities is a key resource in bringing together users, capturing their insights and leveraging it across the enterprise. Analytics provides a view into emerging issues and questions as well as unmet needs to drive product improvements. Forums are a powerful marketing tool to provide early insights into trends such as changing opinions and attitudes. This allows a company to gain a deeper understanding of how customers perceive the enterprise and its products.

Integrating forums with service delivery

Consona Communities seamlessly integrates with other support channels, providing one view into all of a company’s collective knowledge. Sometimes customers call support looking for answers. If provided the opportunity, however, many will opt to find answers themselves via user forums OR self-service. Most forums today are highly stand-alone, but by integrating forums content with the service resolution process, Consona CRM offers a unique opportunity to add third party expertise and knowledge to the self-service experience.

Forums are integrated into the suite at the level of content, reputation, business process and customer experience. The insights, posts and responses from the user community can be leveraged as answers for customers on the self-service site. The same reputation engine that tracks and identifies the best users pushes the best content from the forums for resolution. Questions from users that are asked on the self-service site can be escalated to experts in the forums as well as escalated to the contact center and managed through business process.

Manage the experience not the discussion

Embedding forums within a web site allows companies to offer a rich and dynamic customer experience. Consona Communities has the comprehensive functionality to build, moderate and manage forums. Moderators can promote users to various expert customer designations across the site, or at a skill or forum level. Consona Communities tightly integrates with Consona Self-Service and Consona Agent Advisor for a customer experience that can be optimized around users, search, business process and overall site experience and management.