Community management is the best tool you have to humanize your brand. It’s not merely a customer complaint management tool. It gives your brand a personality that sticks in the customer’s mind. Leveraging this will help your brand maintain customer loyalty, build a community and boost your trustworthiness as a brand.

Part of crisis communication is about empathizing through emotional responses. It lets your audience know that you care about their pain points, their worries and concerns. This creates a deeper emotional attachment with your brand while cultivating an audience that cares about your product. The bottom line: handle your customer feedback properly to ensure that you’re able to innovate as need be, without alienating any of your following.

It can only help your image to be involved in that conversation between customer and your brand. Keeping the channel open for dialogue doesn’t only create lifelong fans but also has the potential to turn conversations around – turn negatives into positives. There’s always an opportunity to convert sentiment. Sometimes, all it takes is listening to an unhappy customer to make her/him change views and opinions.

Social media is a vast landscape, full of avenues and channels to find conversations about your brand outside of your own channels. You have the golden opportunity to take control of those conversations and be part of the narrative.

“It’s very very important for brands to be there for those messages, to be there for those audiences, and to have a chance to win or regain those conversations… and to turn it from positive to negative.”

Customers respond to human conversations; they don’t want to talk to a bot. So caring about the customer with a professional and branded voice is essential for great community management. Sensitivity, humanness, uniqueness, make for meaningful interactions that help brands better understand their customers. 

Let’s review our experts’ tips on what makes great community management:

1. Be part of the conversation. Drive it. Lead it.
2. Be the human voice. Bots can only take the customer so far.
3. Build up a strong CM team for high-volume situations (volume during COVID has increased for some threefold as we go digital and online CM is now the only way).
4. Be compassionate but strong. No matter how irate the customer is, be in the mindset of wanting to help. You are a mitigator and a problem solver, first and foremost.
5. Get to know your audience. They can be your best allies when the storm comes.

At this day and age it’s almost impossible as a brand to exist as a passive bystander online. The customer is much savvier, more discerning, quick on the keyboard and has high expectations. Community management has not only proven to be the most effective first response to direct online feedback, but also a great tool in knowing the pulse of your followers/audience/customers. Harness that feedback into reshaping your business and helping it grow.