Koodo Mobile online community-energizing your customers

One of impressive chapters in the groundswell is energizing the groundswell. This chapter describes how to use groundswell to energize the sales potential of your best customers.

"To take advantage of the passion of most enthusiastic customers, there are three basic techniques for connecting with your band’s enthusiasts.

1 Tap into customers’ enthusiasm with ratings and reviews

2 Create a community to energize your customers

3 Participate in and energize online communities of your brand"

Today's customers expect a different type of relationship with companies, and customers will reward brands that create friendly ways for them to engage. So customers can get faster answers to questions, providing feedback to companies or  making purchase decisions. Koodo Mobile is a good example to examine how to energize their customers by creating a online community.

Koodo Mobile is a Canadian mobile brand started by Telus in 2008 and mostly oriented toward younger customers.What koodo mobile does for their customers? They create a koodo community for customers to ask questions and share ideas. Visitors signed up to become members to ask questions and look for answers. Community boasted a dynamic search function, which was smart enough to find what you were typing and show results for similar queries. This method of asking questions became very popular. Fellow peers began answering questions posted by members of the Community.

One of the benefits of the Social Revolution, explains Nathan Roth, Sr Manager of Digital and Social at Koodo, is that "people and companies both have reasons to be excited about engaging online. People like being publishers, having a voice. And companies appreciate having these conversations with their customers especially when they can tap them for peer-to-peer support and word-of-mouth advocacy."


 How to energize customers' enthusiasm

In the community, they use badges and points to encourage productive participation.Within two months, they saw impressive results-self-help increased by 15%, active users rose 72%, and peer-to-peer support rate increased 21%.To capture the passion of the top 1% memberships they created a customer champions program, called Mobile Masters, to further incentivize customers with special perks, information, and badges in the community.This was the push Koodo needed to close the gap on self-service support. They’ve now reached a 99.9% self-service rate. Koodo’s community is the most active and visited support forum among Canadian tele-companies!

The Community Effect

Koodo has proven that customer community is a powerful tool to create a scalable self-service model. Their customers have spoken. Koodo Mobile is Canada’s favorite and fastest growing telecom, with the highest satisfaction rates and word-of-mouth recommendation.

As the author said in the groundswell : "Energizing is a powerful way to use the groundswell to boost your business". Company should encourage their customers to keep talking products and being enthusiastic. People are easy to engage in activities that can give people meaningful achievements. Also for company, they can take advantage of their smart customers who  naturally desire things that are perceived as exclusive. Koodo Mobile did a good job because they use badges and points to energize people to participate in their community and share their ideas, help users solve problems and review products and services. Their customers are truly passionate for those activities and they have a strong affinity for each other, which is the most essential to be successful. 
Here is a good video to show how to build a good online community