COMMUNITY FORUM SOFTWARE
Engage customers, improve self-serve and drive meaningful relationships with communities
Build and manage a customizable forum for customers to easily interact with each other, share solutions and recommend product improvements.
Enable customers to help each other
Collaborate with other users to find solutions
Enable customers to ask and answer questions, participate in discussions and provide product-related feedback. Allow moderators to monitor and respond to unanswered queries.
Browse company-curated self-serve content for answers
Leverage an SEO-optimized portal to help your customers explore and find solutions through knowledge base articles, pre-approved community responses, and step-by-step troubleshooting guides.
Allow customers to interact with a chatbot or live agent
Provide a chat option on your community forum and make it easier for customers to contact your support teams whenever they need help .
Maximize business impact and customer loyalty
Make your customers feel heard
Provide the required tools and a safe space for your customers to easily interact with peers and your brand.
Incentivize advocates and reward top users
Encourage active participation and turn customers into advocates by acknowledging their work through leaderboards, points and coveted badges.
Increase the total lifetime value of your customers
Increase your upsell and cross-sell opportunities with loyalty rewards and coupons based on user activity and behavior in the community.
Analyze interactions and innovate with intelligence
Analyze conversations using AI
Use AI to analyze every conversation in the community and gather insights on your products and services.
Use surveys and proactive feedback prompts
Leverage communities to collect more diverse feedback through surveys or contextual, proactive prompts.
Run polls and contests to co-innovate with customers
Collaborate with your customers in the community and branstorm ideas to identify gaps and improve your products and services.
Frequently asked questions
Community forum software is a platform to manage and build customer communities, providing a safe space for customers to ask questions, seek resolutions and connect with each other. For companies, the software enables 24/7 self-serve support and helps gather first-hand feedback, upsell and cross-sell products and innovate on the back of real insights.
Robust community forum software offers key capabilities for:
- Discussion threads: Users can create and participate in discussion threads around specific topics, questions, or issues.
- Categorization and tagging: Topics can be organized into categories or tagged with relevant keywords for easy navigation and search.
- User profiles: Users can create profiles that showcase their activity, expertise and contributions within the community.
- Moderation tools: Admins and moderators can manage content, ensure adherence to guidelines and resolve disputes.
- Self-serve resources: Provides quick answers to commonly asked questions via a discoverable knowledge base portal, tutorials, FAQs and troubleshooting information.
- Badges and rewards: Incentivizes participation and nurtures advocates through leaderboards and rewards.
- Integrated live chat: Allows customers to interact with bots and live agents seamlessly.
- Community analytics: Admins can track engagement metrics, user activity, and popular topics to assess community health.
- Feedback mechanisms: Allowing users to provide feedback about the community and its functionality.
- Polls and contests: Collaborate with customers to co-innovate new products, services and functionalities.
Community forum software enables you to provide 24/7 self-serve support at scale and with a human touch. It provides insights into the top themes and topics that customers are talking about, provides a space for customers to collaborate, exchange ideas & feedback and helps support teams to close the feedback loop quickly efficiently.
Yes, many community forum software solutions offer integration options to seamlessly connect with existing systems. Integration capabilities vary, but commonly supported integration points include:
- Single sign-on
- CRM integration
- Helpdesk integration
- Knowledge base integration
- Analytics integration
- E-commerce integration
- Social media integration
Community forum solutions offer varied benefits to businesses, ranging from enhanced customer engagement to lowered support costs. They also help crowd-source ideas, do trendspotting and gather early feedback on new products/processes. Nurturing a tight-knit customer community has been found to breed positive sentiment and loyalty towards the business — enhancing customer retention rates to the tune of 20%.
Not convinced?
Sprinklr resources
Customer communities help brands to track changing customer expectations, get feedback, and strengthen their relationship with customers. Learn more.
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