Today’s customers desire two things: a sense of individuality and a consistent message. A whopping 76% of customers expect synchronized interactions across departments. Yet, the same survey found that 54% generally feel like sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share information, leading to a painfully disjointed customer experience.
When every click, comment, and share carries substantial weight in sculpting one’s brand perception, it is critical that community and advocacy platforms are not merely touchpoints but integrated experiences that gracefully blend with all the other channels customers visit to interact with you.
Recognizing the need for a technology-enabled solution and taking advantage of our deep expertise in customer marketing, advocacy, and community, we’re proud to announce two revolutionary products – Influitive Embed for Khoros Communities and Influitive Embed for Salesforce Communities. These products mark the beginning of a slew of new products we plan to bring to market designed to stitch the customer experience together more tightly and to supercharge customer engagement. We believe the future of customer experience (CX), loyalty, and brand advocacy lies in offering the right nudge at the right time, wherever your customers are.
This in-depth article will delve into the potential of these two offerings. We want to illustrate the power of this new technology and how this approach to embedded advocacy will change the way you manage your community and advocacy programs.
Influitive Embed for Khoros Communities: Tailoring Customer Engagements
The relationship between a brand and its community is a tapestry of interconnected interactions, experiences, and engagement. Recognizing this, Influitive Embed for Khoros Communities is not merely an integration but a strategic tool designed to supercharge customer communities running on Khoros.
The feature introduces “Embedded Challenges” and “Bounties,” incentivizing community activities that catalyze engagement, support peer-to-peer interactions, and boost ROI.
Influitive Embedded Challenges
Showcase a tailored set of Influitive activities inside your Khoros Community and meet customers where they are
Communities are where customers gather together. Sometimes, they are looking for answers, and sometimes, they provide them. Many businesses have large, robust communities that play host to thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of members.
But, there’s a problem. Communities often struggle to activate their members. They falter when trying to drive interactions with the lesser-known areas, recruiting for user groups, driving event attendance, and eliciting product feedback.
With this new integration, you can embed intelligent calls-to-action that activate members of your Khoros community. You can guide them to the areas they’ve never visited, instantly promote user groups that are relevant to them, drive event registrations, and survey customers to collect zero-party data. Yet, even that is just scratching the surface. With this integration, you can promote new products and services, increase the size of your reference program, generate reviews and referrals, capture video testimonials, and so much more!
Embedded activities automatically respect the careful and detailed segmentation you already have in your Influitive program, meaning you decide who sees which activity and when.
What does this mean for program managers?
- Putting activities in your Khoros community will increase the visibility of your calls to action
- Meeting the customer where they are means higher completion rates
- Higher completion rates mean your programs drive more value for the business
Bounties
Use Bounties to turbocharge engagement and encourage meaningful participation, branded to match your community’s look and feel
One of Influitive’s strengths has always been our approach to customer engagement. We provide a unique combination of engagement mechanics, incentives, and best practices to help you drive your desired outcomes.
We knew it was time to take our unique approach and start putting it to work in other systems, and the first place we wanted to start was customer communities. Further, many of our customers wanted to create more unified customer journeys and brought this request directly to us to solve. These are key channels for support, customer success, enablement, marketing, and product teams to interact with customers and for them to interact with each other. Communities often struggle to close the loop on important topics. Questions can go unanswered for weeks, and great product ideas may never be shared. We think we have a way to change that.
Bounties are an automated way to boost the value of your community by increasing the likelihood that questions are answered quickly and thoroughly.
For example, let’s say you want more people asking and answering questions in a Support Forum. Bounties enable you to create and display an embedded call-to-action (CTA) to earn extra points right next to the topic you want answered. These CTAs automatically appear where you want them and where community members already are.
Naturally, you might ask: “Can’t this system be gamed? What if the answers to questions aren’t good?” Luckily, Bounties solve this problem. Points are only given for the correct answer, not just providing an answer.
We’re confident that Bounties will drive higher levels of engagement, help deflect support queries, and increase the power of your self-serve community. Just set up the rules, and the system will create them automatically.
Incorporating Influitive within Khoros allows businesses to scout, recruit, and mobilize top community contributors, transforming them into brand advocates at scale.
Influitive Embed for Salesforce Communities: Streamlined Advocacy and Engagement
In an effort to bring innovative customer engagement solutions to more platforms, we’re pleased to announce that Influitive Embed will also work seamlessly with Salesforce Experience Cloud (formerly Communities).
Showcase a tailored set of Influitive activities inside your Salesforce community
Mirroring the features and utilities found in the Khoros app, Influitive Embed for Salesforce Communities is conveniently available for download from the AppExchange marketplace, ensuring a straightforward, secure, and user-friendly deployment process.
By embedding Influitive into Salesforce, businesses can strategically place tailored sets of activities within their communities. These tailored activities not only amplify engagement by meeting customers where they are but also help to accelerate the construction of a unified customer experience. Bounties drive re-engagement and ensure questions are answered quickly and thoughtfully.
Influitive Bounties inside your Salesforce community
Engaging, Recognizing, and Rewarding Members Everywhere
Community managers are often confronted with the challenge of sustaining engagement, ensuring forums and discussions remain vibrant, and answers within the community are accurate and beneficial. Bounties offer a new mechanism to amplify engagement in Q&A forums and are structured to reward contributors for providing valuable and precise answers.
Additionally, Influitive’s intelligent system allows the creation of automated rules to apply Bounties to specific topics and customize visibility, determining who can see and claim them. This strategic placement ensures that dormant posts are revitalized and that engagement is injected where it’s most needed within the community. Both this and the recruitment widget, which allows you to recruit community members to your Influitive program, can be made visible to all community members, just your Influitive program members, or specific groups that you’ve created inside your Influitive program. Tailor it to best fit your needs and watch the actions pour in!
Create automated rules to intelligently apply Bounties to topics, and customize visibility to determine who can see and claim them.
Influitive’s robust recognition and rewards features let your members exchange points earned from completing activities and bounties for great gift cards, educational books, fun swag, and carefully curated experiences. In addition to redeeming rewards from the catalog, program managers can also surprise and delight members with personal notes, one-off activities, and extra points as a way of saying “thank you.”
Members can redeem their hard-earned points from Influitive’s rewards catalog
The intrinsic reward system not only recognizes and honors the advocacy efforts of community members but also creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where customers feel valued and engaged. This ensures a continuous cycle of positive experiences, fortified customer loyalty, and subsequently, heightened brand advocacy.
Pioneering Embedding Advocacy: A Game-Changer for CX
Influitive is revolutionizing the advocacy landscape by seamlessly integrating with community platforms like Khoros and Salesforce. This isn’t just an advancement; it’s a game-changer. The first of its kind and it’s only the beginning.
By unifying brand advocacy and community engagement, we’re breaking down traditional barriers and laying the groundwork for an omnipresent customer marketing and loyalty experience, regardless of platform.
Influitive embeddables will soon be available for any application you control where customers engage. We can’t wait for you to try these new products out for yourself and if you have the desire to embed in a different community platform, learning management system (LMS), or even your own product, book a demo and let’s talk!
