While the concept and outcomes of customer knowledge sharing are straightforward, existing workflows and technology can limit its impact.

Zapnito’s Customer Knowledge Sharing Model provides a framework to empower your customers to achieve their personal goals with access to the right knowledge, experts, and collaborators at the right time. Throughout their lifecycle, customers occupy different mindsets depending on their immediate priorities and level of engagement. To truly leverage your customer community and build a powerful knowledge base with them, it’s important to meet the demands of each mindset.

Zapnito’s Customer Knowledge Sharing Model™ covers four distinct mindsets that develop across the customer lifecycle:

Researcher

Mindset: A new customer looking for specific information to resolve an immediate challenge.

Challenge: Irrelevant or slow search results can limit engagement. About 70% of customers are in this mindset, seeking to resolve challenges with minimal effort and distraction.

Solution — Search: Allow customers to search all existing knowledge (articles, videos, documents) and community profiles. This helps them quickly identify relevant information or start a discussion with an expert. This approach ensures challenges are solved quickly and new knowledge demand is captured at the point of need.

Example: A customer experiencing a technical issue can search for a troubleshooting guide or find a peer with a similar use case to start a discussion.

Learner

Mindset: A customer open to learning more to support their goals.

Challenge: Individuals and groups have unique objectives. About 15% of customers are in this curious mindset, offering a brief opportunity to engage them in an educational journey. Understanding their interests and intent is critical to providing accurate, personalized recommendations.

Solution — Suggestions: Organize existing knowledge into courses or learning journeys to help customers discover valuable insights. Enable customers to create a profile, providing essential zero-party data to inform relevant events, courses, profiles, or content that will keep them engaged.

Example: A potential customer wants to learn key skills to elevate their career. By providing personalized suggestions based on their unique goals, you can build brand trust and infer their use case and intent to buy based on behaviors and interests.

Collaborator

Mindset: A customer wanting to improve the depth and quality of shared knowledge.

Challenge: The quality and quantity of knowledge your business can offer are limited without customer participation. About 10% of customers are in this supportive mindset, so making participation through likes, replies, and follows frictionless is essential.

Solution — Discussions: Facilitate deeper customer participation through peer-to-peer conversation and networking. This enriches knowledge and highlights what individuals and groups find most helpful and valuable. This feedback is critical for understanding customer needs and identifying knowledge gaps.

Example: A new customer being onboarded can ask questions directly to other customers, provide feedback on resources, and follow topics of interest. This interaction helps support teams gauge customer engagement and provide proactive support for less engaged customers.

Creator

Mindset: A customer wanting to contribute knowledge to support others.

Challenge: Customers are often the best experts to meet peers’ knowledge needs. About 5% of customers want to contribute in this way but need the right tools and incentives. Empowering these vital community members can significantly increase your business’s value.

Solution — Authoring: Provide customers with simple tools for creating and sharing articles, videos, and documents. Offer access to exclusive content or groups as low-cost incentives for user-generated content.

Example: A customer who has been with your business for a year wants to share their achievements with the community. Allowing them to create, edit, and publish their insights in one place removes all blockers from the process.

By adopting Zapnito’s Customer Knowledge Sharing Model™, businesses can create a dynamic and engaged customer community, driving growth and enhancing customer satisfaction.

Ready to leverage the power of customer knowledge sharing? Continue to get a step-by-step plan for moving away from fragmented, unpersonalized customer experiences to launching your ideal customer knowledge sharing platform.