Developing online communities encourages return visitors. Over the life of a customer relationship, this increases our margins on online customer acquisition costs. Community encourages loyalty. What we are selling can become less of a commodity. Also, often these customers become our knights against consumers who flame the community with complaints about us and respond in ways far more inspiring than anything we can do.
Community addresses increasingly higher customer expectations.
In this age of cell phones and e-mail, all customers can be more exacting in quality and value in a purchase situation. Community can actually reduce our cost of interacting with our customers. Now customers can complain and other customers can become engaged at helping us resolve the issues. Communities bring out the shyness of crowds and become a learning experience for the sponsor. Listening to the customer is difficult even in very organized focus groups.