Anyone who follows my movements online will have noticed that I’ve been rather quiet recently. This is because I have, for the past month or so, been part of a Headshift team, which at various times drew upon the experience and skills of more than ten people, working to deliver a piece of strategic consultancy on creating successful customer communities for a client. It has been one of the most interesting pieces of social business design I’ve ever played a role in delivering.

The project made use of Headshift’s existing framework for conducting extensive reviews of user behaviour, staff workflows and technical infrastructure, as described in the case study of a similar piece of work we did for the BBC.

The project included extensive research and analysis of existing customer community building activities already undertaken by the client, including:

• a thorough document gathering and review
• interviews with over a dozen members of staff, ranging from those engaged in day-to-day community management activities to senior stakeholders in a range of business areas
• observation of staff workflows
• interviews with current users
• analysis of usage data and creation of visualisations that help understand a range of user activities
• analysis of costs and cost reductions
• analysis of existing data collection, measurement, KPIs and analysis

We then conducted a gap analysis, comparing the insights gained in our qualitative and quantitative analysis with examples of best practice, documentation, research and other information gathered more widely.

The resulting output included a client specific handbook for building online communities (70+ pages) containing over twenty recommendations, various visualisations, sample documentation and more; around a dozen visual workflows; a high level executive report; and a community platform evaluation matrix with recommendations.

With regards to the community platform technical reviews, we found a number of recent studies that might be of interest:

• The Online Community Platform and Services Satisfaction Report
• Gartner, Inc’s 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace (free version)
• Forrester Wave Community Platforms (free version)
• ROI Found Here: Online Customer Service Communities (FASTForward Blog)

There’s also a useful tool, specifically for a quick and dirty comparison of discussion forum platforms, at http://www.forummatrix.org/

Our key recommendation, which combined both business strategy and technical considerations, was to move away from customer community building being a specialist activity undertaken solely by a small group of staff working in a silo of expertise, towards involving the whole company in both learning from customer engagements online and contributing, where practical and relevant, to customer focused community engagement activities.

Creating a customer community online is something that many consumer focused organisations are exploring or experimenting with. It’s important to have a comprehensive strategy in place to ensure that these efforts are sustainable, meet core business objectives, and effectively engage users.

If you’d like to learn more about how Headshift can help your business create and implement a best of breed customer community, have a look at our Quick Start packages or contact us.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.