FAQs: Build & Activate Your Community

A brand community is a group of engaged customers who actively use, recommend, and advocate for your products.

These customers share their experiences, influence others’ decisions, and often contribute to repeat purchases and organic growth.

Guurus are passionate customers qualified to give other consumers live product advice directly on an online store.

To become a Guuru, a customer has to pass a relatively difficult brand knowledge test. Guurus usually draw their knowledge from firsthand experience with your brand's products and the topic your brand relates to. For example, a Guuru for Canyon Bikes, like Domenico, is both a Canyon user and an experienced cyclist.

You can invite loyal customers to the program via:

• email campaigns
• on-site invitation box
• dedicated landing pages
• social media

The platform provides assets to support this process out-of-the-box like branded invitation pages or a costumizable invitation box, you can activate on your shop with one click.

High-performing placements include logged-in areas and post-purchase touchpoints where engaged customers are most active.

While Guurus are carefully selected, quality is ensured through multiple safeguards:

• qualification through knowledge and communication tests
• smart routing to match questions with relevant expertise
• ongoing monitoring and feedback

• incentives aligned with helpful, high-quality answers

   

This ensures that advice remains relevant, trustworthy, and helpful for shoppers.

Guurus enjoy sharing their passion for the products, services or brands they're passionate about. Guurus can also choose when they want to accept incoming requests via the GUURU app.

They get incentivised for the time they take to offer support-seeking consumers advice in a fast, authentic way. Our customers incentivise their Guurus for conversations using reward programs or monetary compensation.

By using the experts in your community you can build fully scalable product advice that is authentic, passionate, available 24/7 and instantly accessible.

You turn happy customers into brand advocates by activating them as trusted contributors within your online store.

With GUURU, this means:

• Identifying your most engaged and knowledgeable customers (repeat buyers, high NPS, strong reviews, active community members, social media followers)
• Inviting them to your advocacy program (email, on-site invitation box, social media posts, newsletter posts)
• Qualifying them with a brand knowledge + communication skills test so advice stays high-quality and trustworthy. (We make the testing easy to execute for you with our solution)
• Incentivizing participation (rewards or monetary compensation) to keep response rates high.
• Reusing their best insights as on-page content

Generative AI can support conversations, but it cannot replace the authenticity and credibility of real customer experience.

For a strong community, real people are essential. They bring:

• firsthand product knowledge
• relatable perspectives
• genuine engagement

AI works best as a complement — not a replacement — helping scale interactions while your community provides the trust and expertise.

A GUURU community brings real, authentic customer expertise directly into your online store.

Brands typically see:

• high customer satisfaction ratesand NPS Scores for community interactions,
• deeper page engagement,
• improved sales conversions through real customer input.
• Uplift in visibility in classic and AI Search

Instead of sending shoppers off-platform to find opinions, you bring trusted advice directly to where decisions happen.

Combining generative AI, like ChatGPT, with input from a community of loyal customers in your live chat for an online store offers numerous benefits.

While AI provides instant, conversational responses to standard queries, advice from relatable fellow consumers has a greater impact on purchasing decisions.

Shoppers seek nuanced guidance from those who share their interests or values. By integrating AI tools with community input, you can deliver instant answers while also providing trustworthy human experiences, addressing concerns about synthetic or bot-generated content.

This approach enhances the shopping journey, fostering connections between shoppers and your brand community, ultimately boosting sales conversions and customer retention.

Most brands already have a community — it’s just not activated.

Your existing customers, repeat buyers, and brand enthusiasts already have valuable knowledge and opinions. GUURU helps you identify, recruit, and activate these customers so they can contribute directly to your online store.

You build your GUURU community by inviting your most engaged customers to join your Community Advice program.

GUURU provides ready-to-use assets to make this easy, including:

• a customizable invitation box for your website
• a branded landing page introducing the program and guiding applications

• campaign templates for email, newsletters, and social media

   

The most effective approach is to activate multiple channels:

• email campaigns or newsletters to reach existing customers
• on-site placements (e.g. login or account areas) to capture engaged users
• social media to promote your community and drive traffic to your landing page

As a benchmark, around 2% of newsletter recipients convert into applicants, so follow-up campaigns are recommended to build a strong base of contributors.

By combining these channels and GUURU’s built-in tools, you can efficiently grow a qualified and active community.

A loyal customer needs an invitation (and a unique code) from a brand to apply for its Community Advice program. Next, the customer must take and pass the brand's knowledge and communication skill test before becoming a Guuru.

No. They are real and passionate customers who share their first-hand knowledge and experience with your shoppers via the GUURU mobile or desktop app.

They are rewarded for sharing relevant advice either through rewards or cash remuneration and they can opt in or out of offering advice as they please.

In legal terms, they are freelancers, not employees.

Guurus are real customers who voluntarily share their firsthand knowledge and experiences with your shoppers through the GUURU mobile or desktop app.

They receive rewards or cash remuneration for their advice and have the autonomy to choose when they have conversations with inquiring shoppers.

Legally, they are considered freelancers, not employees. You can view and manage all Guuru conversations from your Partner Portal.