Leveraging Web 2.0 for Margin Improvements
Effectively Incorporating Forums into Web Self-Service
Author: John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research, SSPA

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Creating a Cohesive Online Community For Customers

There is a lot included in the world of Web 2.0, and while blogs, Wikis, mashups and other online interactive features have their place, the most common Web 2.0 feature deployed within customer self-service is the forum.  Forums offer a number of advantages for both companies and customers, including:

• Building a sense of community. Facilitating communication between customers and partners to share ideas builds a sense of community. Forums are useful for engaging customers in a dialog, providing them with new information, as well as building reliance on your website—if they like what they find, and if they participate, they are likely to return frequently.
• Identifying ‘power’ users.  Expert or power users are the stars of a forum, and identifying these important customers is a great opportunity to recruit knowledgeable users for focus groups, beta tests, usability labs, etc. 

Forum Risks: Liability and Message Control

Judging from conversations with SSPA members and webcast poll results, the main concerns regarding forums fall into two categories:  liability and message control.  What if a forum user posts a recovery procedure or shortcut for an application that causes an error, or even worse, a loss of data?  If the content is within the company’s self-service website, even warning statements and liability disclaimers don’t help repair customer goodwill.  On the message control side, many companies express concerns that an irate customer will blast their products in the forum, or discussion threads will focus on the shortcomings of a product or service, spreading inaccurate or inflammatory information across the user community.
There is of course risk involved in giving easy access to customers to post messages to the entire customer base, and precautions are necessary to limit the company’s liability and exposure from disgruntled (or let’s face it, unbalanced) customers.  Companies interviewed about their forums say “flame” postings do happen, and moderation is required to keep forum threads on track.  Think twice, however, before removing a flame posting, as the appearance of squashing criticism can further incite customers.  To limit liability, the SSPA recommends that technical support forums:

• Require participant registration.  Limiting who has access to view and participate in the forum is the first step.  According to forum vendors, having too much control over access can hurt participation, and typically anyone authorized to use the website can view forum postings, though users must submit an application in order to post to the forum.  On the consumer side this may be all or partially an automated process, but for enterprise companies, it is important to verify who the customer is, are they authorized on the account, do they have the expertise to participate, etc. 

  Requiring registration is also helpful in avoiding flame postings, as waiting 48 hours for access approval tends to provide a cool down period.  Resources must be allocated for reviewing and approving participant applications, even on the consumer side where less verification may take place.

• Contain multiple disclaimer statements. Include a disclaimer or a link to usage rules on every page of the forum explaining that the content is not authored or sanctioned by the company and the company is not responsible for problems caused by using advice found in forum postings. As an example, the Palm Support Help Forum uses the following: “The help forum contains facts, views, opinions, statements, and recommendations of third-party individuals or organizations. Palm does not represent or endorse the accuracy, currentness, or reliability of any advice, opinion, statement, or other information displayed, uploaded, or distributed through the help forum. You acknowledge that any reliance on any such opinion, advice, statement, or information will be at your sole risk.”
  
  
• Define and staff the role of moderator. Moderators can be employees or external users. As an example, Novell uses 35 expert users (called Sys Ops) to monitor forum areas and deal with any inappropriate postings. Canon uses employees to remove postings when necessary (there has only been one abuse in the past year), though they rely on forum users to bring inappropriate posts to their attention. The sense of community found among forum users makes them a self-policing group, interested in maintaining the integrity of forum conversations.

Maximizing Forum Effectiveness

Knowing that many customers may think of forums as the place to go to vent about a problem, not solve it, it is important to plan the placement and positioning of your forum carefully to orient users to the new tool with the right perspective.  When planning a forum implementation, or evaluating the effectiveness of an existing forum, keep these things in mind:

• Include forum within the self-service site.  If the forum is intended as a place to ask product or service questions and receive answers, it should be located within the self-service portal, not on a consumer affairs site or elsewhere on a corporate website.  Companies with successful forums even suggested locating the tool on the main customer support page to build visibility and encourage adoption.
  
  
• Incorporate forum threads into knowledge base searches.  This is probably the single biggest thing you can do to make the forum part of self-service and to maximize effectiveness.  When searching the knowledgebase, customers should receive matches not only for knowledgebase content, but from forum discussion threads as well.  Matching content should be labeled as forum text, with a link to the thread.  Over time, useful forum content should be migrated to the knowledgebase.
  
• Incorporate knowledge base search into forum posting process.  Introducing a forum without proper integration to other self-service tools will only lead to duplicate content, and customers creating forum postings for questions already covered in the knowledgebase. When submitting a new forum posting, the system should search the knowledgebase for any matches to the submitted posting, and prompt the customer to review the knowledgebase entries before proceeding with the post.

Vendors Embrace Forums as Part of eService

Forward looking eService and CRM vendors are beginning to include moderated forum software in their suites, sometimes via partnerships.  These offerings are oriented toward self-service, with pre-integration to knowledgebase tools and search.  Leading vendors are:

• ATG.  Building on their market leading commerce server, ATG has embedded their forum capabilities into their service offering.  ATG Forum, billed as ‘peer to peer support,’ supports managing multiple forums, moderating ongoing discussion topics, monitoring of "hot" issues, editing and archiving discussions, and creating user communities on your Web site. ATG Forum is full integrated with knowledgebase and search tools.
  
  
• KANA.  Instead of bringing forums in-house, KANA choose to form a strategic partnership with Jive, a leading Web 2.0 platform provider.  Announced last year, KANA has created a tight integration with Jive Forums Expert Edition, including content sharing between Jive Forums and the KANA knowledgebase, and leveraging the KANA IQ workflow engine to create customizable processes for submitting forum postings.
  
  
• KNOVA.  KNOVA Forums is robust, with registration, publishing processes, user profiles, user ratings, and feedback scores, etc. Using the search capabilities in KNOVA, self-service questions return relevant expert answers from the forum side-by-side with knowledge base and other enterprise content, with the display results clearly indicating the source of the content. KNOVA’s embracement of Web 2.0 means that the forum tools are well integrated into the product suite as well as the vendor’s vision.
  
  
• RightNow Technologies. Also going with the partner route, RightNow formed a strategic relationship with Lithium Technologies in 2006, and now offer a Lithium forum preintegrated to RightNow’s search and customer interaction history.
  
  
• Talisma. One of the earlier entrants, Talisma introduced a forum offering in 2004 and has continually added functionality in subsequent releases.  The KB Discussion Forum is fully integrated with Talisma’s knowledge and search tools.

The SSPA Recommends

Forums are a great way to foster a customer community and bring a web self-service site into the new millennium.  But don’t overlook the ROI aspects of a moderated forum. To encourage customer adoption and realize benefits such as agent interaction deflection, be sure to:

• Let Expert customers do the work for you.  Forum contributors that consistently receive high feedback on postings should be given special designation, such as the “Expert” logo found in the Palm help forums.  These users are even given permissions to close out forum threads when they answer a question.
  
• Dedicate resources for forum moderation.  If questions go unanswered for days, customers abandon the forum because the company isn’t paying attention.  Assign personnel to monitor the forum each day, answering questions that haven’t been taken care of by expert users. This is particularly important in the early days of the community when customer involvement has not reached critical mass.
  
  
• Leverage content in both directions.  Be certain to add links to knowledgebase content in the forum thread when existing content answers a customer question.  And, when a forum thread asks a new question, be sure to create new content in the knowledgebase to represent the question/answer scenario for future users.

If you have any questions about this article, please contact Shawn Santos at ssantos@thesspa.com or 858.674.5491.