Offri ai tuoi clienti il miglior software per forum

Il miglior software per forum è quello che meglio soddisfa le esigenze della community di utenti della tua azienda. Lo scopo di un forum è offrire a clienti e utenti la possibilità di incontrarsi online, pubblicare domande e ottenere risposte. Il miglior forum possibile è una piattaforma di discussione semplice e di qualità.

Community, in Zendesk, sviluppa il coinvolgimento dei clienti in modo organico consentendo agli utenti di coltivare i propri contatti in una piattaforma personalizzata in base al brand e alle esigenze dell'azienda.

Le organizzazioni intelligenti permettono a clienti e utenti di entrare in contatto. Le community che ne nascono supportano il brand, danno vita all'organizzazione al di fuori del relativo sito web e, soprattutto, offrono assistenza su prodotti e servizi ai membri.

Il software per forum è progettato come una bacheca su Internet, in cui i visitatori sono liberi di creare e pubblicare commenti, domande e risposte. Include un'opzione per moderare i post prima della pubblicazione, per eliminare eventuali tracce di linguaggio offensivo o spam.

I clienti vogliono poter ottenere assistenza e risposte anche quando l'help desk dell'azienda è chiuso. Sviluppa e ospita la tua community online con il miglior software per forum disponibile.

La maggior parte delle aziende rileva che l'uso di un software per forum riduce il carico di lavoro per il personale dell'assistenza. Man mano che la community aggiunge ulteriori discussioni e informazioni, il forum diventa una risorsa di assistenza alternativa. Propaga il brand e offre opzioni preziose a utenti altrimenti in difficoltà.

Il software agevola la consultazione della conoscenza collettiva che i clienti pubblicano nel forum. I loro commenti evidenziano i problemi principali con l'azienda e i prodotti riscontrati dai clienti. Puoi creare nuovi contenuti in base alle loro soluzioni pubblicarli sul tuo sito web.

È consigliabile utilizzare il software per forum e creare direttamente la tua community, piuttosto che vederla nascere spontaneamente nei social media, dove sarà più difficile da moderare.

Molte aziende iniziano con un software per forum open source e gratuito. È un buon punto di partenza, ma ben pochi progetti open source hanno la capacità di resistenza di una soluzione supportata dal brand. Ospitando il pacchetto software per community in locale, il reparto IT dovrà probabilmente gestire il database e tutte le interfacce e i plug-in. Avviare una semplice implementazione cloud, invece, richiede poco più di una carta di credito.

Spesso, il software su cui si basano i forum è scritto in PHP. Con un po' di tempo e di esperienza in PHP, potrai creare una piattaforma di discussione su misura per il tuo brand e le tue preferenze.

Incentivize employee and customer engagement with gamification

Whether it’s an internal community for employees or external for customers, the hardest part of community building is creating engagement. Your customers and employees are busy and they may not think it’s worth their time to ask or answer a question on your community forum. They need a reason to engage, and forum software provides that reason.

Through gamification features, like badges, user scores, leader boards, and likes, forum software makes engaging in your community fun and rewarding. People who successfully answer questions earn points for doing so, and in some cases, may acquire greater permission levels as their score increases. For your company, the result is a more vibrant, engaged community.

Discover what customers and employees really want

Every company in the world wants to be customer and employee-centric. After all, knowing what your customers want helps you sell more and provide better service. And knowing what employees want enables you to find ideas to make them happier, more productive, and engaged. Feedback is certainly crucial to understanding customer needs, but interactions between your business and your customers don’t tell the whole story.

On forum software, customers talk to each other about what works and what doesn’t, which provides a distinct perspective. By facilitating genuine conversations about your company, product, and service, forum software creates a new, unique source of feedback for your organization to mine for insights.

Better service at lower cost

Online communities aren’t just a scalable way to facilitate conversations among employees, customers, and your organizations. They’re also a great way to support people when they have problems or questions. In addition to your support agents, an online community gives your users a new source of help: other users.

With community forum software, you can reduce ticket volumes by increasing ticket deflections, thus keeping support costs down. Plus a community forum can double as a de-facto knowledge base—with previous resolved posts in your community, questions answered once can be used forever for all who enter. In some cases, Google indexes the answers so others can view them, too.

Content moderation

Drumming up participation and engagement in your community forum will be your first challenge. But once you’ve got the momentum going, you’ll need help from content moderators and content moderation tools to scale your community. So forum software that includes content moderation features is essential.

These capabilities should enable agents to track questions, bring in support agents when necessary, and remove rule-breaking users. You’ll also want moderation tools that help you clean up your community forum. For instance, the ability to automatically remove duplicate threads and consolidate repeat questions will make it easier to stop your community from becoming overwhelmed with content.

Gamification

It might seem silly but gamification capabilities like reputation-scoring features can massively improve community engagement. Badges, advanced permission levels, and other rewards enable community members to feel as if they’ve achieved something. And for your organization, that means a greater incentive to contribute and answer questions in the community.

Without gamification features, your forum software will be missing a key ingredient in helping facilitate community growth. And while it may be possible to build a thriving community without gamification, it will require more resources and time. Plus, badges and user scores help people establish themselves as trusted resources, which helps other users feel as if they’re getting an answer they can trust to work.

Help desk integrations

On its own, community engagement software is certainly powerful. But when it's connected to a help desk, your community can become a game-changer for your internal or external service department. An effective help desk integration means agents can view a customer’s profile and have complete visibility into their online community activity when responding to their email or Facebook message. Service agents can also turn a community post into a ticket to continue the conversation when complex issues arise.

In short, integrated with your help desk, community software can supercharge the employee and customer experience.

Fit for purpose

The best forum software for your online community depends on what you need to do. And while that might sound obvious, it’s worth thinking about because of just how many different types of forums there are. While some forum software might cater to, for instance, entertainment sites that need a forum for fan discussions, others are better suited for employee or customer discussions.

All that said, you can also find forum software that you can use to create forums for employees and customers. Zendesk, for example, provides features for both internal and external forums.

Licensing, implementation, and maintenance costs

In any purchasing decision, cost matters. But often, software buyers are deceived about the true cost of their software. To make the best choice of forum software, you need to consider the whole cost, not just licensing fees. For instance, the best free forum software is available with no licensing costs but that doesn’t mean it’s free. Deploying and hosting open-source software may require outside help, which will come at an additional cost.

This means you need to consider what it might cost to implement and maintain the forum software you choose. Otherwise, you won’t be able to make an apples-to-apples comparison between the solutions you're considering.

Time to value

Anytime you purchase software for your organization, it’s a race against the clock to demonstrate that software’s value. With forum software, the situation is not different. The more quickly you can get your forum up and running and your employees or customers engaged with it, the better your purchasing experience will be.

This is why it’s critical to get into the details of implementation, maintenance, and customization before you commit long-term. So as you’re going through the forum software research process, make sure you’re asking questions about what’s required to implement the type of capabilities you’ll be looking for in your discussion board.