In a recent #cmgrchat on twitter, we compared support and brand communities.
Support can be a support forum, a customer service system or any other method of helping users that come to you with help.
A brand community just means the place where customers are connecting with each other around the brand and can be a forum, group, events, or any other conversation platform.
Support and community are very closely tied because they both share similar goals:
1. Listen to members
2. Gather feedback and apply it to the product
3. Improve users’ experience with your product/brand
4. Help people who have problems
For this reason, it’s very common for Community Managers to be asked to manage customer service. But it’s important to remember that they are different. The most fundamental differences are:
Support is reactive. Community is proactive.
In support, users are coming to you. Your measure of success is how quickly you can respond and how efficiently you can make them happy by solving their problem.
In community, you’ll learn about their problems and needs both by listening to their conversations and by reaching out to members of the community with surveys and interviews to gather feedback.
As a result of this difference, some of the metrics, the tactics, the skills and the tools used to do each of these roles are also different.
Support looks something like this:
Metrics: Response time, customer satisfaction, rate of successfully solving problems, time to solve problem.
Tactics: Set up support forum or help desk, place links in website where users need help, hire support reps,
Skills: Operations minded, organized, patient, positive attitude, problem solver, good communicator…
Tools: CRM (Salesforce, Highrise), support forums/help desks (Get Satisfaction, UserVoice, Helpscout, Zendesk)
Community looks more like this:
Metrics: User activity, customer retention, user happiness (NPS: Net Promoter Score or some similar score), network density
Tactics: Create a conversation platform, host events,
Skills: Good conversation starter, leader, mediator, connector, networker, listener, communicator, event organizer…
Tools: Forums (Discourse, Vanilla Forums), groups (Facebook groups, Google groups, G+ communities)
So you can see while there is some overlap, the aspects of each role are really quite different.
Can one person do both? Sure. Just remember they’re doing two different roles and that’s pretty difficult.
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Photo Credit: Nicholas Scarpinato via Compfight cc
David Spinks, Co-Founder TheCommunityManager.com was a part of the TCM team from the site’s inception through 2014. He utilized TCM to create the first CMX conference in San Francisco in February 2014, and then ultimately severed ties with TCM and its co-founders.
TheCommunityManager.com, CMXSummit and LetsFeast.com. Lifelong student, community builder and writer.
Great article David. As a CM that heads up our Customer Support and Community efforts I can absolutely relate to this post. It is a tough act to balance but I have found that involving members from the “support team” to be more proactive instead of reactive has helped us provide even better support and build community along the way.
I enjoyed reading your article, however I would disagree on one point.  “Support is reactive, community is proactive”.  The new model for support works closely with marketing and community management to anticipate users needs and become proactive in order to solve problems.  The ways in which we predict customers future needs can happen in a variety of ways.  This includes market research, user feedback reports, and customer service questionnaires.  One fundamental proactive support mechanism is self help portals.  Customers can go to these portals if they want to find solutions or recommendations for a wide dearth of things. This may include content for a specific issue they are facing.  Users also enjoy looking at articles on features they may not have known about.  This is proactive support at its best.  We are educating the customer as well as teaching them how to support themselves when we may not be available.  I am working on integrating programming languages to auto arrange support articles by relevance.  The users previous searches will help to auto-recommend new content that may be relative to the user.  To have a seamless customer experience we need to move from customer service to customer experience.  This of course will make it more difficult to differentiate between community management and customer service, but the benefits far outweigh the easy classification of job categories.