Forum Software

It is rightly said that communication can make or break your relationships, be it personal or professional. Effective communication draws the line between confusion and clarity. For businesses, this means not only boosting employee engagement but also interacting with your customers regularly. Now, this is where forum software platforms become a staple in stitching together the audience and every other stakeholder in your business. Your online community is your asset, and any forum software will help you build a thriving community, thus empowering your community.      

Types of forum

In a forum environment, there’s content, and there are discussions, debates, questions, etc. A forum may be used as a discussion forum, the most common option. Here, you can let your customers start discussions with each other and enable them to solve several issues on their own, just from knowing the experiences of other fellow customers. A good addition to this standard discussion forum is the question and answer forum where you basically follow the Q&A pattern to answer customer queries. You can choose the user-generated content as the suggested answers or dive in yourself to answer a question as a member of the company, thereby promoting brand awareness. Both these are meant for the public open-to-all discussions. But what if you need to pass on an update to a particular employee or customer. Do you take the hassle of finding out the person’s email id and sending them an email? Gladly, you won’t if your forum software also has a private messaging feature.      

Encourage communication and engagement

The boost to employee and customer engagement is undeniable for forum software tools, even in the age of social media. Forums facilitate discussions like no other platform. Shared experiences lead to a sense of belongingness, thus leading to the formation of an engaged community. People can head over to topics that interest them and choose to take part in discussions wherever they find their inputs to be suitable. More often than not, email conversations are impractical and delayed. Searching through emails for that one desired answer can easily be replaced with a forum software’s answer threads on that particular topic. Some platforms would also allow you to pin the essential points so that you can come at a later date and have issues in finding the answer.  When you don’t have the opportunity to present your project query to your manager or colleague, you can turn to the forum in search of answers. In the FAQs there, there’s a high possibility that someone has already answered your question.    

Driving collaboration with the forum software

Productivity and proficiency are the primary benefits of collaborative initiatives. When all the heads come together with their ideas, the best output ensues. Someone’s strength will complement your shortcomings while their troubles can be solved by you or yet another third person. Teamwork introduces an environment of healthy competition and high-spirited work. They bring out the best in the person, and the best tool that initiates it all is the forum software. Here, you can unleash your creativity, get feedback, and, together, deliver a successful project, possibly ahead of the deadline. A forum software, therefore, works both ways, in creating an internal knowledge base for your organization’s employees as well as an open-source knowledge base for the community of customers.      

Finding the best forum software for your enterprise

Now that you know your enterprise needs a forum software. It is irrespective of your organization’s employee strength, its size and outreach, and the industry of your products and services. The forum software will depend on your planned community project requirements, and that includes finding out what exactly your customers and/or employees are interested in sharing. You can start with the likes of MyBB, SMF, phpBB, etc. and then once your organization starts expanding, you can shift to a more advanced community-building platform. Most of them would transfer all your data from your previous software so that you do not have to start afresh and leave behind all past discussions. You can also go for professional hosting with forum support if you want the forum to be a part of your contact channels on your web store.