It’s essential for businesses to understand the benefits of building an online customer community. However, making a website and utilizing social media and email marketing will no longer be sufficient for businesses to interact with their customers.
The use case for Discord to facilitate two-way customer interactions is vastly underrated. The platform is extremely flexible and may be used by a variety of customer- and creator-based businesses, including educators, content creators, and agencies. Businesses may encounter services that promote options to buy discord accounts, but building an authentic audience is generally more aligned with the goal of creating meaningful customer relationships.
Of course, the best way to use Discord for customer engagement is to create a community lounge. This allows customers to communicate with the business and engages them in various ways, including through games, giveaways, and special events.
What is a Discord Community Lounge?
A Discord community lounge is a dedicated server that organizes customer interactions. Traditionally, people use Discord to create a single chat room. However, you can arrange a Discord server with several chat rooms and other activities to engage customers in various ways.
Organizing Customer Interactions
An example of an organized Discord server would be an e-commerce server with chat rooms for:
- Upcoming product releases
- New product releases
- Customer reviews and feedback
- Special promotions
- Product suggestions
- Community Meet and Greets
- Frequently sold out items
- Chats about unrelated topics
This type of Discord server engages and provides customers with an opportunity to support the business and other customers.
For one, Discord is a powerful tool for building customer communities for a variety of reasons. It provides a number of different ways to communicate within a single platform. Text and voice channels are the foundation for organized group discussions and group chats, respectively. In addition, Discord offers other features such as group announcements and event coordination. Meanwhile, Discord is very flexible and offers many ways to create a unique group experience.
Creating Exclusive Customer Experiences
An added benefit of using Discord for your customer communities is that it provides many ways to create special, customers-only, group experiences. You can create special customer communities for members of your loyalty or other special programs, and you can create special customer communities for members of your product launch or other special event groups. Each of these special customer communities can have exclusive, special group experiences and engage in special activities such as product previews and Q and A’s, and provide customers with special educational group experiences, and other special, exclusive group experiences.
Collecting Customer Feedback
Furthermore, the importance of customer communities goes beyond special group experiences. Discord offers other many ways to engage your customers. You can create special customer communities for product beta testing, and other special customer communities for customer services, and other special customer communities for idea generation. You can create customer feedback channels where community members share their thoughts, suggestions and ideas about your products and services.
For example, one idea is for a software company to develop an internal channel on their platform that is solely for recommending features. This channel allows users to express thoughts and opinions on different elements of the platform that they believe need improvement.
Creating this type of channel allows users to provide qualitative feedback. As a result, users will feel like they have a platform to express their thoughts on ways to improve the product.
Using Discord for Product Launches
Discord has the potential to revolutionize how companies communicate with and engage their customers. One way Discord can be useful is during the launch of a new product.
Discord allows companies to go beyond the standard methods of product launch communication like a simple blog post. In addition, it gives companies the ability to create a product launch experience and engagement channel like no other platform. It can also extend a company’s sales and engagement channel beyond its online store.
Meanwhile, customers can also engage with a company through Discord to get information on new product releases, and even make purchases on launch day.
For companies interested in improving their engagement and sales channels through Discord, there are several Discord marketplaces that can provide access to high level Discord accounts. Further, in an effort to increase engagement on their company Discord page, companies may purchase aged Discord accounts to help simulate engagement and give the appearance of an active community.
Navigating Discord Server Channels
Therefore, a well-organized Discord server can lead to a successful experience for the company and its customers. Creating several channels that reflect and cover various topics the company engages in can help with organizing the Discord page. You can edit the pages to reflect and cover the community welcome and announcement channels.
Area of Interest
We know that the larger a community is, the more it will break down into smaller, more focused channels. Until that happens, members are free to discuss whatever they want in the general channels.
Area of Support
Frequently Asked Questions, support tickets and help forums can all be housed in a support section of a server.
Area of Events
Meetups, classes, and contests are just a few ideas for events that can be hosted by the members of the server.
Personalizing the Server with Roles
Discord servers can use roles to create a personalized experience. This can help members of the server feel more connected to the brand or business.
Roles can also be used to target information to members based on their interests. Members can control the information they receive by selecting the topics that are most relevant to them.
This can help a server stay organized as it continues to expand.
Encouraged to Engage
To keep members engaged, content on the server should always be current and relevant. Posts, contests, and other events should foster interaction.
Recognizing Server Members
Recognize members who help engage the community. Highlight community members who go above and beyond.
Community members should also plan and host events.
A live workshop, for example, could be to teach members how to do something related to the product.
Empower community members to plan events and promote the brand.
Develop a culture that is community-centric and promotes the brand.
These may include:
- Total number of active users
- Users’ posts and comments
- Users’ presence at virtual meetings
- Users’ presence at community functions
- Growth of sub-interest groups
- Users’ suggestions and recommendations
- Users’ involvement in discussion about product and service offerings
Identifying the previously mentioned will allow organizations to gain insight into the areas that are most appealing and/or important to the community as well as areas that require more community engagement.
The Future of Discord-Based Customer Communities
As business interactions with customers focus on real time, two way communications, Discord and other similar platforms will offer businesses opportunities to engage customers in a variety of ways.
In order to provide the highest level of customer engagement, business communities should focus on providing valuable content to customers. Engaging communities offer informational content and foster interactive communications among members.
For content and services businesses, Discord communities offer opportunities to engage customers and build loyalty.
Through Discord’s customizable structure and rules, businesses can provide a variety of interactive, virtual activities and engage customers in conversations and other activities that develop a sense of community among customers and heighten customers’ awareness of business products and services.
Finally, Discord can help business shift its focus from product promotions to customers. The key is to provide customers opportunities to participate in rewarding and enriching experiences the first time they visit.
A business’s Discord community is a valuable virtual touchpoint that reinforces the business’s commitment to interact with customers in the digital space.
