Most people who have scrolled through the websites of social media agencies or marketing agencies have come across the term “community management”. While many associate this term with traditional customer service, the two are not synonyms.
Customer support and community management can seem like the same thing, but when taking a closer look, they are quite different. Both positions require you to interact with customers and those interested in your brand but that is where the similarities end. Both jobs require specialised skill sets and approaches in order to be done successfully.
First, it is important to understand what customer service is. We all know the word but to understand how it differentiates from community management, we must dig a little bit deeper. Customer service or support is all about individual interactions between the company and the customer. People come to the business with a problem or concern, and it is the customer service representative’s job to resolve these issues. This action is one-to-one and it centres around offering value to the customer who has not been satisfied in that specific situation.
Community management, on the other hand, focuses on large groups – communities – at once. In community management, these groups of people are brought together around a single product or service. While customer support professionals answer questions or complaints to solve problems in an efficient manner, community managers try to create buzz and engagement by, for example, attending to conversations, asking questions, and actively reaching out to the community or desired new members of the community. Both of these actions may happen in the same channel, for example on Facebook. A community manager provides management to an organisation’s social media presence. By supporting communications on various social platforms, a community manager will ensure that content published meets brand guidelines and overall communication style.
This is where community management greatly overlaps with content creation, and the two can never be separated from each other, even if various people or teams may work within content. Community manager is, and always should be, consulted when it comes to engaging with the community by the content as they have the best knowledge about the community and their needs.
To give a good example of the difference between community management and customer service; it is customer service that takes care of direct complaints, while community management makes sure the brand is publishing content that engages with the audience, as well as starting new conversations, searching for these conversations the brand can attend to, and actively engages with people.
