ASVZ Community – Successfully Engage Your Customers

The “ASVZ” (Akademischer Sportverband Zürich) is a Non-Profit Organization functioning on behalf of the ETH Zürich, University of Zurich, and the Zurich universities of applied sciences (ZHAW) to provide a diverse sports program for all students and employees. It offers over 120 different modalities and courses, supervised by a team of university sport coaches and supported by 900 professional instructors. It is frequented by over 60,000 customers every year.

By adding two simple lines of code to the website and the mobile application, we could create a customer community for the ASVZ which serves as reference point for each customer, where they can ask questions and obtain quick replies.

Furthermore, it has a networking effect that induces customers to interact and ask questions, saving ASVZ employees’ time and effort in customer support.

The web community also serves as customer tier. Providing a place of discussion on their favorite topics, it gives the users reasons to keep coming back and thus increases their involvement with the ASVZ and makes them more likely to use the services.

With an intact community the ASVZ can now obtain regular customer feedback; by just analyzing the conversations their users have on the public discussion board, they find out more quickly what their target group is looking for in the provided services. In addition, they have the matching social program for their events, as they can project the streams during the events, thus creating a second-screen like atmosphere, allowing participants and spectators of events to share impressions and discuss, ultimately connecting the offline and the online-community.

ASVZ Community Now and a Glimpse Into the Future

“Beekeeper helped us find the right solution to engage with our sportsmen and –women and to connect them with each other … in a hip, simple, and noncommittal way,” Nike Panitsas, head of communication at ASVZ says.

Since September 2013, the community has reached almost 29,000 users. It is growing fast, especially through the mobile application, reaching many whenever and wherever they are.

In terms of sales, there have also been impressive results. The ASVZ held a campaign to promote the sales of its “ASVZ Rookie”-Towels in the fall. Using the Campaigning Tools on the ASVZ Community, the Community Manager transformed only a few clicks into a message reaching 7’214 customers and selling 64 towels directly off the campaign.

Both the ASVZ and its customers are excited with the development of the community and are looking forward to some new features Beekeeper is developing like the creation of group chats, enhanced profile personalisation and a leader board, ranking the activities of the users within the community.

For the ASVZ itself, the possibilities will also increase, as Beekeeper is working on numerous solutions to widen the specific analysing tools, the crowd sourcing and customer knowledge generating tools and the campaigning section, enabling community managers to target and contact users with very specific characteristics, thus automating the most complex and challenging part of community building.

Visit the ASVZ Community and see for yourself.

If you’re interested in how a customer community for your business might work, request a demo on our website today.