Read Blog Post

Read Blog Post

Contributed on May 18, 2016

2.1K

702

Engaging customers and partners: Jive for external communities

Jive Software is well-known as a provider of online community solutions, and has gained particular profile and market share in the internal social collaboration space with Jive-n. However, the company also has a specific and separate offering for external communities, currently called Jive-x, and has been operating in this space – albeit in a much less high-profile way – for almost a decade. With more than 400 customer and partner communities delivered on Jive-x, Jive Software is now bringing its external communities platform more squarely into the spotlight.

Extending social collaboration beyond corporate boundaries

At its recent customer conference, JiveWorld 2016, Jive Software positioned its technology’s role within its customers’ organisations as a “WorkHub” – a central hub which brings together the people, content, conversations and interactions that underpin the workflows and day-to-day activities of a business. Importantly, this new way of describing itself encompasses not only the collaboration that takes place inside a customer’s own organisation, but also the interactions it has with the external parties that play a crucial role in the organisation’s existence – its customers, partners and prospects. Jive Software wants its technology at the centre of strategic initiatives to create more connected, customer-centric organisations.

Jive has a long history enabling the development of external communities; it first launched its customer/partner community platform – then called Clearspace X – as an on-premise platform in May 2007, building on its background in discussion forums and instant messaging, and bringing the concept of social networking solutions to the business market. In October 2013, the company rebuilt the platform in the cloud, launching a new, SaaS-based platform called Jive-x.

Jive’s approach with Jive-x is to provide a single platform or ‘hub’ that can address individual business goals – such as increasing brand affinity, driving leads and conversions, accelerating buying decisions, reducing the cost of customer/partner support, or improving customer satisfaction – or alternatively can span an organisation’s entire relationship with customers or partners, unifying the organisation’s digital marketing channels and also providing a single place for customers and partners to find information and engage with the organisation in whatever way they need.

A rich, collaborative community environment

Jive-x is based on the same core technology as Jive-n. It shares much of its feature set with its internally-focused sibling, but also adds a range of capabilities and integrations that are more relevant to external community use cases.

The post Engaging customers and partners: Jive for external communities appeared first on The Advisor.