By Mark Angel, Chief Technology Officer, Knova Software
You know your company and products are special, and your customers feel that way, too. That’s why they want to participate in collaborative forums. They learn from other expert customers, gain recognition, build their reputation, let their needs be known and become part of a community. With collaborative forums, customer participants are engaging on their own terms and volunteering their support to help others.
A wide range of companies have implemented forums to enhance their KM strategies for supporting complex products. These organizations are taking advantage of all the knowledge available to them—in the contact center, across the enterprise and in customers’ heads.
Leveraging Expert Customers
As good as your support professionals are your users have a breadth of expertise that’s impossible to match. They’re domain experts in using your products to do their jobs or follow their interests in a broad range of environments. Expert users bring unique qualities that can make for better support content and defect submissions, and they’re willing to share this knowledge.
Managing the Knowledge
With forums, you are capturing a great deal of incredible knowledge and it builds daily. Now you need to maximize its use by pulling that knowledge into your KM system. This gives instant access to both support staff and Web self-service users that may not enter via the forums channel.
Collaborative forums tied to the KM system are seamlessly integrated with service delivery. For example:
- Self-service questions return relevant expert answers side-by-side with knowledge base and other enterprise content
- Content developed in forums can be easily submitted to an authoring workflow
- Customer data in a CRM system can personalize and streamline the forums experience
- Entitled forums users can be automatically escalated into the support center if their question isn’t answered in a timely fashion
A knowledge management system pulls together disparate sources of knowledge across the enterprise. Forums are yet another source of knowledge and should be treated the same way. Otherwise, the community will be limited by a lack of connection.
Reaping the Benefits
Collaborative forums are not just a great support channel that customers love; they also lead to lower costs by making service more effective and reducing incidents to the support center. Novell is a great example of a company using forums to improve support. A study done by DB Kay & Associates shows the following benefits for Novell:
- 20,000 issues are handled per quarter supported by only two full-time employees
- Over 10,000 contributors, led by about 35 top contributors, have become part of an extended Novell support team
- Peer support quickly resolves tens of thousands of customer questions
- The forums are a leading source of knowledge base content, product improvement requests, and product feedback
Forums also engage customers to grow brand loyalty and repeat purchases while you capture detailed, candid customer feedback and valuable product knowledge.
Conclusions
Today’s adaptive organization treats its expert user base as a solution, not a problem. By encouraging a collaborative environment, we create an excellent source of knowledge base content, product improvement requests, and product feedback. In addition, incident volumes are reduced through a network of volunteer experts, adding huge value at a low cost.
The Support Center Before and After Collaborative Forums:
Before |
After |
Complex problems require one-on-one support and often escalation in the contact center
|
Many issues (both simple, repetitive issues and complex problems) deflected to peer-supported forums |
Traditional listservs (mailing lists) and other peer support environments treat all contributors the same |
The organization is able to identify, recognize, and empower high-value contributors
|
Solutions content authoring and defect submission are the exclusive tasks of employee groups |
Passionate customers volunteer experience and enthusiasm to build knowledge and improve products while reducing authoring costs
|
Customers were recipients of support |
Customers are trusted “partners” in support and are rewarded for their contributions
|
Customers working in related domains couldn’t easily find fellow experts to discuss thorny issues |
Access to experts and their knowledge is quick and easy to find, self-service is more valuable than ever
|
Finding answers to new or obscure questions is cumbersome and time-consuming |
Solutions are immediately available to engineers and customers, deflecting incidents and increasing resolution time |
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