Cultivating Fun and Trust: How Online Communities Enhance Customer Experience
In a recent episode of Talk About Your Community, I had the pleasure of speaking with Christina Persson, a seasoned product and customer experience leader, about how fostering cultures of fun and trust can directly impact revenue, customer loyalty, and retention. Our conversation touched on a key question for business leaders: How can online communities enhance customer experience (CX) and align with broader business goals?
Building Cultures of Fun and Trust
As community professionals, we know that a positive culture drives customer engagement. According to a recent study by Forrester, organizations that focus on creating customer-obsessed cultures experience:
41% faster revenue growth,
49% faster profit growth, and
51% better customer retention than those that don’t.
These figures are clear indicators of the powerful link between customer experience and business outcomes. Online communities, by fostering trust and fun, serve as a critical tool in building these connections. Forrester goes on to note that only 3% of companies are currently categorized as customer-obsessed, indicating a substantial opportunity for improvement across industries.
Online Communities as the Secret Ingredient
Throughout our discussion, Christina and I emphasized that customer experience is about much more than just the product. It’s the entire ecosystem surrounding the product—support services, warranties, communications, and most importantly, customer communities.
An online community functions as a 24/7 focus group, where customers share insights, provide feedback, and build relationships not just with the brand but with each other. Leaders who tap into these organic, omnidirectional conversations can better understand customer needs, resulting in improved loyalty and long-term engagement.
Emotions Drive Decisions, Even in Business
One key takeaway from our conversation is that customer decisions are often emotionally driven. While advertising used to be king, we’re now in a subscription-driven world where customers constantly reevaluate the value of the services they subscribe to. Investing in post-purchase experiences—especially community-driven ones—creates more satisfying, deeper emotional connections and boosts retention.
Steps for Leaders to Integrate Community Into CX
If you’re considering how to weave online community into your customer experience strategy, here are a few practical steps:
Foster trust and fun: Make your community a place where customers feel safe, valued, and encouraged to contribute.
Start small: Begin with a core group of engaged users who can help set the tone for your community.
Prioritize emotional connection: Focus on creating an emotional bond between your customers and your brand, extending beyond just product features.
Make it cross-functional: Involve teams from across your organization—customer support, product development, marketing—in community conversations to foster collaboration and understanding.
By embedding online communities into your CX strategy you’re improving your product experience and creating a richer, more meaningful relationship with your customers that will pay dividends in loyalty, retention, and revenue growth.
If you’d like to explore these ideas further, I’m always open for a conversation about how your organization can leverage community to drive customer success.
About Christina Persson
Christina Persson is a product and customer experience leader with 20+ years of expertise in driving global digital initiatives across the full software life cycle, SaaS, apps, platforms, and omnichannel services. With her experience at multinationals, and the founder of TurboXD and several startups, Christina champions that true business value is rooted in customer value, and understanding customers and their ecosystem is just the beginning.
To deliver exceptional products and services – and to make the projects fun – it’s all about the people. Across project teams, users, and stakeholders, Christina sees first-hand that success hinges on collaboration. A dedicated lifelong learner, starting Carnegie Mellon, Christina is passionate about mentoring and inspiring organizations to achieve what once seemed impossible.
ChristinaPersson.com
Show Notes
Culture of Trust and Fun (0:00): Building a culture of trust and fun can result in a 41% increase in revenue, a 49% profit growth, and a 51% customer retention growth. Community then provides a solution to creating the culture, leading to increased retention, growth, and revenue.
Defining Customer Experience (13:24): A common challenge is the need to build the bridges between the benefits of community and communicating that value to other parts of the organization. The clock model and product levels are two facets of consideration in looking at customer experience. Todd and Christina pause to take viewer questions.
Emotions in Decision Making (31:00): Todd and Christina answer a question around the culture versus the tech of communities. A running theme of the discussion continues to relate back to emotions driving human decisions. Another question around internal communities is discussed.
Legal Considerations (42:41): Christina mentions a giveaway for live viewers. In closing remarks, Christina mentions her role in helping more combative individuals that have an aversion to change. Taking a look at shared goals and metrics are a great place to start for organizations, as well as inviting diverse viewpoints and trust in the team pursuing their projects.