How Do You Effectively Manage Customers & Fans Online?

from the service-is-everything dept

Post sponsored by


The #1 CRM for Small Business

Last week, we talked about the customer management challenge faced by successful crowdfunding projects. That's just one aspect of a broader issue that affects every online business and every creator trying to monetize their work: the more success you find, the harder it gets to manage and maintain that success. Connecting with fans and customers has always been the first half of our philosophy of success on the web, and it needs to be baked in to every business plan from day one.

As part of our sponsorship program with the CRM tool Insightly, we want to get feedback from our audience about the challenge of customer service and management online. We're looking for perspectives from both the business/creative side and the customer/fan side, plus stories of good and bad service experiences (everyone's got a few). Here are a few key questions to consider:

• What changes someone from a first-time customer into a long-term one?
How do you scale personal service (something that makes a lot of startups stand out) with a growing customer base? How do you balance the retention of loyal customers with the acquisition of new ones? Same goes for entrepreneurial artists and their fans.
• What's the best way to communicate with customers across the wide variety of channels that they use, from social media to email to good old fashioned phone calls?
• What are the most important features for a CRM tool, and what kinds of other tools do businesses and creators need to manage their customer bases? In the previous sponsored posts, we discussed the lack of CRM features in the backer management tools included with Kickstarter - on what other platforms are creators and businesses going underserved?

Submit your thoughts, stories and responses in the comments below!

This post is sponsored by Insightly. Grow your business and your customers with Insightly, the #1 CRM for small business. Sign up for a free account today »

Filed Under: connect with fans, crm, sponsored post

More Money, More Problems: The Challenge Of Managing Crowdfunding Success

from the it-takes-more-than-just-a-kickstart dept

Post sponsored by

A lot of the attention given to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms these days has been spurred by the big runaway success stories — the Pebble smartwatch, the Double Fine Adventure, Amanda Palmer's project, and many others that exceeded their fundraising goals in the first few days and kept on climbing. The phenomenon is not limited to these multi-million dollar examples: countless smaller projects have shot past their more modest goals multiple times over.

Whether it's a $500 project that raises $10,000 or a $100,000 project that raises millions, the result for the creator is the same: a stunning success that has the potential to turn into a crisis or an even bigger opportunity, depending on how they handle it.

That's the other side of the double-edged sword that is success on Kickstarter, and it often gets ignored. If you're a creator with a product in the pipeline — whether it's software, hardware, an album, a film or anything else that takes time and work — and your plan is to raise some money while piloting it out to a few hundred people, suddenly having hundreds of thousands of paying customers on your hands can be more daunting than exciting.

Not only does the challenge of order fulfillment become much bigger and more complex (this is where a lot of campaigns fall down), there's also the issue of managing so many expectations. Hundreds of wall comments and private messages (some less polite and more demanding than others) start arriving, all while you're trying to finish the actual work. And that starts the moment the campaign picks up steam — meaning the actual money often won't be arriving for weeks.

Some creators have talked about the problem. Palmer Lucky, who kickstarted the Oculus Rift headset, faced the issue of excited backers drawn in by the popularity of the campaign who hadn't fully read the details, and were anticipating a more complete product than was actually promised. A 2012 study found higher rates of late delivery among overfunded projects.

A big part of the problem is the relatively lackluster backer management tools found on Kickstarter and similar services. Communication is a huge part of running a successful campaign, since things are bound to go wrong, but backers are almost always understanding as long as they aren't left in the dark. Runaway success projects — or at least the ones that still deliver — tend to move beyond Kickstarter for the hard work of customer management: they take the discussion to their own forums, they set up their own mailing lists and customer request systems, and they move more and more communication to more robust platforms (Kickstarter only offers blog-esque updates and an inflexible survey system). Apart from ensuring that a project delivers its goals on time, there's the fact that most crowdfunding campaigns are also about starting a business, which means hopefully converting lots of backers into repeat customers.

Ultimately, the success of crowdfunding campaigns seems to come down to how well the creators build and manage a community — and currently the crowdfunding platforms themselves can only play a small part in that.

This post is sponsored by Insightly. Grow your business and your customers with Insightly, the #1 CRM for small business. Sign up for a free account today »

Filed Under: crowdfunding, sponsored post
Companies: kickstarter