Remember forums? Of course you do. They might’ve evolved quite a bit since 2001 but they’re still one of the best ways for interacting with customers and allowing them to interact with each other.
A few months ago, we had our primary sights on developing the best possible tool for you to converse with your customers. An integrated app where you can have simple, down-to-earth, email-like conversations with your customers on a variety of channels. You loved it. We brought it together for you. In fact, so many of you loved Reamaze so much that you started brainstorming other channels where Reamaze can also be an integral part to. Community forums.
Of course! It made so much sense. Forums are just much more evolved conversations involving many more people. It made so much sense that we decided to build it for you on top of an already great public portal where your knowledge base is housed under. Here’s an introduction to Community Forums Beta in Reamaze.
Community Forums as a Channel
You can enable your community forum by adding it as another channel in Reamaze. You’ve already taken advantage of email channels, Facebook Page channels, Twitter channels, and YouTube channels. Community forums is just another channel where you can monitor, moderate, and participate in members-initiated conversations. Once this channel is enabled, you’ll be able to see these conversations on your dashboard. Simple as everything else.
To get started, you’ll need to first enable your public site under the “Brands” tab under settings. This will enable the public site URL where your knowledge base and forum will be found.
All you need to do now is go to “Channels” and add a new channel called “Community Forum”. Once you’ve added the channel, you can also assign which agent to receive notifications under this channel.
If you’re familiar with how you used to customize the public site (knowledge base), you’ll see that we’ve made some small changes. Customizing appearances and inserting custom content will now be found under “Brands”. Find the brand you’re looking to customize and click on its name. On this page, you’ll be able to find links to change your public site’s look and feel.
Community forums are threaded beautifully. To get started, we recommend starting some discussions internally to get the momentum going. After that, your customers should do the rest. Feel free to get involved! To start posting discussions comments, customers will have to create a new account.
The best part of community forums is that it is every bit as familiar as the rest of Reamaze. For your customers, this means something that is clean and beautiful to use. For you and your teammate, this means everything happens just as expected. New conversations appear on your dashboard like email conversations so you can interact with your customers without ever leaving the comfort of Reamaze.
Keep in mind that community forums is still in beta and we’re actively looking for your feedback. If you run into any bugs or inconsistencies please feel free to let us know here.