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Discussion Boards: Critical Customer Service Piece
Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends | September 12th, 2008 - 02:17 PM
(18) found this useful. Do you? 
It’s becoming a standard piece of advice for small tech companies to set up what I call the Web triumvirate:
- website
- blog
- support discussion board or forums
The reason for the website is obvious: it serves as your online presence for your product offering.
The reasons for a blog are many — among them: more content means better search engine results; discussing your product with customers and the public in a conversational voice leads to deeper engagement; and a blog gives you a means to announce useful information that does not rise to the level of a press release.
The reason for the support discussion forums is to help with technical issues. Customers experiencing issues or having questions can present them on the technical support forums. Other customers or company representatives come by and answer questions or help troubleshoot issues. Other customers may also offer tips for how best to use the products.
Growing Use of Customer Support Forums
The idea of using public support forums has been around for years, but is increasingly becoming a standard part of the online presence package. Businesses large and small now offer them. Often the discussion forums are the most vibrant, human and active parts of a company’s Web presence.
In their book Groundswell, Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff write extensively about customer support forums. But as they point out, customer support forums do not replace the need for customer support staff. In fact, you must staff your support forums properly if you don’t want customers to become completely aggravated. (See this post by Museum 2.0 for a good summary of key Groundswell points about discussion forums.)
Two Examples
I think it’s instructive to look at two different support forums for some quick “best practices”:
Support Forums for XYZ Product (anonymous to protect the guilty) — when you go to the company’s website, you are urged to visit the support discussion forums. Every effort is made to make it difficult to call or email support because they keep redirecting you to the support forums from every screen. Questions in the forums go unanswered for weeks and months — and sometimes never get answered — while the user’s frustrations boil over.
Occasionally you get lucky and a company employee happens by and gives a response. However, usually it is members of the community who answer questions. Their level of knowledge is all over the place.
As one person said to me, “80% of XYZ’s community members are full of c**p and give flat out wrong answers.” Even more disturbing, the tone of responses by community members sometimes borders on abusive. As my same source says: “You seem to have 3 choices: you don’t get your questions answered; or you get wrong answers; or you get wrong answers and are reamed out for not knowing the answer by someone who doesn’t know the answer, either.” Talk about abusing your customers!!!
Contrast the XYZ Product forums with those of Dell. When you go to the Dell product forums you are directed to a forum specifically for that product. Questions are answered quickly. Dell employees have a visible and active presence in the site. Even more user friendly is the little green “solved!” check mark designation that is placed next to each discussion thread where the question has been answered (see screenshot above).
Dell received special recognition for its handling of support forums by the authors of Groundswell.
Your business, being smaller, may not be able to afford all the staff resources and technology of a Dell. You also may not need all of that due to the smaller scale of your business. For instance, a small company or startup may start out with an open source or inexpensive forum software such as VBulletin (see a matrix of forum software here).
3 Best Practices Tips for Discussion Forums
My point is to consider what it is like for your customers to get support from you. Support discussion forums can be helpful things, and I recommend them for technology startups and small businesses in particular. Just make sure that:
(1) you have employees manning the support forums regularly to answer questions;
(2) employees are visible and set the tone with community members — abusive community behavior needs to be nipped in the bud and a good example set by company employees;
(3) you give contact alternatives for those who have a low tolerance for support forums: a phone number, live chat or email support. Or all of the above.
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Discussion Boards
Marc Dangeard | September 13th, 2008 at 1:45 am
Once you have your Web Triumvirate figured out, there is a fourth piece you should consider:
Proactive Customer Service in the form of blog monitoring and bloggers engagement.
This piece applies to your Brand and Marketing as a effort rather than to your products/services, but can make a huge difference in how the business is perceived by your customers.
One tool I use for this (and as a disclaimer you should know that I have a relationship with them) is eCairn (www.ecairn.com). The tool is a blog reader that can be used collaboratively, so that you can have a whole team monitoring a lot of blogs that are relevant to you and/or your customers. And beyond this simple functionality, it allows you to build a real practice around measuring the impact of marketing campaigns, launches. And then it can help you be proactive by engaging efficiently (as a coordinated team) with bloggers.
I use it for myself and it really makes a difference over time…
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Ivana Taylor | September 13th, 2008 at 10:33 am
This is terrific information. Can I second the need for live chat or phone contact!
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Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends | September 13th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Hi Marc, thanks for bringing up the ecairns solution for monitoring discussions on third party blogs. I haven’t used it myself. Looks like it might be especially good for larger companies whose products and services are being widely discussed across the Web.
– Anita
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Rose Anderson | September 14th, 2008 at 10:42 pm
This article is very true.
Entrepreneurs should not forget their main objective aside from getting tons of profit- and that is to provide our customers with the maximum satisfaction on whatever service or product that we sell to them. Thus, customer service is critical factor for success and shouldn’t be taken for granted by anyone.
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Mary Grace Ignacio | September 14th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
In addition to the online presence that a blog, website can give us-it is also the most inexpensive way to communicate and advertise our products and services to the whole world.
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Amanda | September 15th, 2008 at 9:43 am
When I need tech help, I turn to the internet to search for quick answers and fixes. I would much rather find it online than have to speak to someone on the phone. Not to mention there is no time wasted on hold. I was on the phone this morning for broadband help for 62 minutes before my problem was solved. I agree with the “live help” section too. I have used that feature on several sites and it’s helpful & quick.
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Marc Dangeard | September 15th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Another great place to get quick answers, which can also a great resource for companies trying to use their customer audience to help them with customer support is Muchobene.com. What is better than a forum there is that it is live answers through chat, rather than a forum where you may have to wait a few hours before getting an answer.
The theory (I have not verified) is that since it is live, people who will bother to reply are the ones who know the answer without having to do any research, so you should get quality answers there.
Something that is worth considering…
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Jay | September 15th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
I, too, second the notion of making yourself available via the telephone line. This can be costly of your time but really does ensure your customers some peace of mind. For me, it can literally make or break the sale. No human - no sale.
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dominic | September 15th, 2008 at 7:29 pm
@anita. Agreed that major brands are mentioned the most in blogs.
However, monitoring is only the visible part of the iceberg. Small biz develop products that solve a customer problem/ address a potential opportunity for a specific target market and THIS problem and opportunity is what one can find in social media, waiting to be discovered, discussed & refined.
I believe small business have an opportunity to tap directly to prospective customer feedback, fine tune their solution and their marketing message.
This can be viewed as proactive customer support. And as one said, pb that you fix in design is 10 (100?) x savings comparing to solving it when the product is shipped.
As far as pricing, we offer very “small business friendly” subscriptions ($70 per month).
Thanks for your article
Dominique
eCairn ceo.
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Arthur Bland | September 16th, 2008 at 1:51 am
“No human - no sale.”
What do you exactly mean by that Jay?
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Shawn | September 16th, 2008 at 8:59 am
One thing I find very critical in customer serviceis that most people can’t handle rejection properly when deling with the word “NO” from customers. In that situation, I see hidden opportunity in that, because perhaps customers are not properly informed or just don’t know the specifics on what they are about to lose out on…
http://www.ShawnDrewry.com
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Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends | September 16th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Dominique, thank you for the information aout monitoring discussions on the Web about your company, and about tapping into market needs.
Anita
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Bianca Aquino | September 17th, 2008 at 12:06 am
“Amanda | September 15th, 2008 at 9:43 am
When I need tech help, I turn to the internet to search for quick answers and fixes. I would much rather find it online than have to speak to someone on the phone. Not to mention there is no time wasted on hold. I was on the phone this morning for broadband help for 62 minutes before my problem was solved. I agree with the “live help” section too. I have used that feature on several sites and it’s helpful & quick.”
I used to prefer before phone support for my networking device so I can determine the technical know-how of the technician. They will sound pretty obvious if they know nothing about the product they are supporting. Unfortunately, I experienced a lot of these and the long holds that was disgusting.
Well now, there are a lot of live support like Chat support, though it’s quite time consuming sometimes to type all your thoughts but the point it was written we can have a reference on the whole chat session which I find it really useful.
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Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends | September 17th, 2008 at 7:42 am
What your comments indicate to me is that different people have different preferences for how to get support. Some of you prefer the telephone, some prefer live chat, some prefer Web information.
That suggests the need to provide multiple ways of supporting your customers. And why it would be silly to try to rely SOLELY on a support discussion forum, because you WILL turn some people off with it. Even if you handle your support forums exceptionally well.
– Anita
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