Beyond the Hype: Communities and the Payoff for Customer Service
by Chris Hall, Vice President, Product Marketing, InQuira -
July 23, 2010
Beyond the Hype: Communities and the Payoff for Customer Service
By Chris Hall, Vice President, Product Marketing, InQuira
No one likes to reinvent the wheel. That’s why, when we as consumers run into questions or issues, it’s our natural inclination to see if others have run into the same issue and what they did to resolve it. Given this, a company-sponsored customer forum, or what is now being coined a “gated community”, can be a great focal point for customers as they seek to get questions answered.
If you create a vibrant customer forum, your organization will gain a lot of near-term and long-term benefits. For example, one telecommunications firm developed a customer forum that delivered these significant benefits:
• Call and email deflection. Forums are where a lot of customers would start when they need answers. The better experience they have there, the more likely they are to repeatedly engage with your organization in that venue. Consequently, fewer emails and calls come into the contact center. Through email deflection alone, this telecommunications company saw direct savings of hundreds of thousands of dollars in just a few months.
• Improved staff productivity. Because of the customer participation and collaboration the forum engenders, customers can get their questions answered in the forum without sending an email or calling into the contact center. Consequently, this telecommunications firm has seen that three forum moderators now handle the inquiry volume of what would have previously been handled by 22 full-time agents.
• Improved customer loyalty and advocacy. While a little more difficult to quantify, the benefits to customer loyalty are also significant. Both through direct feedback and through other measures, the company has seen that when customers become engaged with other customers and get the answers they need, customer satisfaction and loyalty improve—which is particularly vital in an industry where battling churn is such a challenge.
• Improved service insight. Social communities are the new front line for service operations to spot patterns and listen for future service spikes. This telecommunications firm has found that spotting such forum posts early and responding to these posts responsibly can deflect up to 50% of unnecessary cases. For issues that would cause unwarranted service spikes, this adds up to a savings of $40,000 - $75,000 for every critical incident.
What are some of the keys to setting up an effective customer forum? Following are a few:
• Moderate by exception. Forums need to be a place where customers can quickly post inquiries and search for answers. Rather than acting as a gatekeeper to the conversation, forum moderators need to facilitate this open dialog. Rather than being in a position to approve each post, moderators simply need to monitor the activity, and enable users to report abuse.
• Establish reputations. Finding high-value contributors, recognizing their efforts, and encouraging continued participation is essential in building valuable forums. To do so, you should leverage reputation models and rating systems that allow community participants, including company moderators, to rate or otherwise identify high-value content and translate those ratings into a points program that builds a reputation for each contributor.
• Promote community conversations. Give moderators and those users who establish expertise an easy way to promote conversations that will be useful to others.
• Give users control. Make it easy for users stay up to date on areas that matter most to them. Offer subscription capabilities so users can get RSS feeds or email alerts when new posts on a topic of interest appear. Suggest topics to users based on past interactions and highlight content that has been posted or updated since their last visit.
• Monitor forum quality. Moderators should actively monitor the quality of forums by monitoring sample discussion threads, tracking system analytics, and doing periodic surveys.
About the Author
Chris Hall is Vice President of Product Marketing for InQuira, a leading provider of intelligent knowledge solutions that connect people to the answers they need. To learn more about InQuira, please visit www.inquira.com.
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