Talk Amoungst Yourselves: Better Customer Service & Support (And Some Other Benefits, Too)

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Monday, 27 April 2009

Its odd that task that seems like it is expensive and unenjoyable for many organizations, would attract volunteers. Communities can add value to service and support tasks. We wanted to understand the growing importance of communities in customer service and support and how organizations can help their communities to support themselves, more. So we take a look at communities that offer support and then compare them within a framework we are developing to understand the effectiveness of communities in achieving different types of tasks.

What is the impact of poor service on brands?

A 2008 survey by the Society for New Communication Research explores the link between customer service and brands. In particular search was rated as the most useful research tool. Particularly noteworthy, the impact of people’s service experience on one another.
- almost 60% “vent” online about customer care experiences

- 74% choose companies based on others experiences shared online

In other words, people see other people venting when they aren’t happy and make decisions using this information. Which is why customer service might be the new PR. So aside from the damage from an unhappy customer, today, their can be additional impacts beyond the family and friends they may have told in the past.

So then the next question is, how and where do people get service?

How do you get service?

Our question on fluther, revealed, the following approaches to getting support:

1. friends or known experts
2. search engines – increasingly the assumption is that someone else may already have had the same problem, so start by searching
3. manufacturer or service provider resources – opinions are mixed about what to expect
4. other forums where users are contributing support content  – blogs, communities, answer products

This matches our informal survey of friends and family pretty well and it is echoed in some of the research below. Whats interesting, is that the people in 1 are can be more  easily reached via 4 and maybe 3. And search engines, are enabling 3 and 4 to be found increasing the value of their content.

Whats interesting in the responses is the mix of communities that exist at brand managed sites versus an increasing numbers that exist elsewhere. But can any of these communities support themselves?

Can Communities Support Themselves?

A number of organizations have seen the benefit of enabling their customers or users to help one another. However, what is the value of this help? Some recent research from Helpstream points to the impact communities can have – all things being equal in terms of quality, community participation can reduce support costs by at least 30%.

According to Helpstream, a best case scenario has the community generating about half of the content used as part of the support process. And then responding to a small fraction (under 5%) of issues not addressed in existing content (or often just pointing to existing resources). But as we will see in other areas, infrastructure (search, content management, monitoring)  and experience design matter – for example, it must be easy for community members to contribute content and ideally there is a way to measure and reward participation. And without comprehensive search across company and community results, its harder to find what you are looking for and so more likely that you will need to call someone (at much greater cost to the organization fielding that call).

Looking at this another way – what is the value of the unique, original support content, if it is easily findable? SEOMoz puts a price on contributed content for their knowledge base, for example (so I expect they have calculated this). If you allow your question to be made public, it costs you half of what a private question does. The message below shows the offer, as it appears at the end of the question submission form.

The following examples look at manufacturer or service providers sites and some emerging approaches to getting support. And then we compare how they work with communities to achieve their objectives.

Dell – we want your help, but we still do most of the lifting

Dell’s embrace of the social web has garnered it awards, such as the 2007 Award for Company Transformation from Forrester’s Groundswell. In 2005 De

ll was synonymous with Dell Hell which demonstrated clearly what happens when people vent online. To Dell’s credit, they have responded by embracing all manner of approaches to working with their community.

Dell has discussed a number of aspects of their approach to engaging their community including their monitoring of 3rd party sites like Twitter, Yahoo Answers and Blogs. In fact, beyond just support conversations, they track 5000 conversations and have found a 30% decline in negative comments, as a result of these efforts.

But how well are they working with their community for support issues? They have almost every type of support tool available from wikis, to blogs and forums. And its clear people are participating at different levels via a sample of comments we looked at. It still feels like community and Dell support areas are very separate spaces, coming together mainly in search results. And the start pages of each can be a little overwhelming. That said, search seems to work quite well and we found mostly user generated content – but in some cases questions were left unanswered despite conversations between users such as this heat related question.  In other cases, we found useful answers like this dual boot question. Google seemed to find better options on NotebookReview for both, but we’ll get back to that.

We talk about Twitter and this is an interesting example of not waiting for people to come to you or giving them different options to engage. For example, because Dell is monitoring and participating on Twitter (here is Lionel at Dell, for example) and it enables them to do a variety of things, from checking on service tags, to trying to understand an issue someone is having using Dell support. Dell is doing great things with their community, but it feels like their community could be doing more for Dell.  Lets see what happens.

(CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us.

WordPress – easily findable answers and high community participation

WordPress.com is home to more than 5m blogs and visited by about 250m users per month, according their Analytics. That makes them one of the largest online destinations. WordPress is interesting because the business makes extensive use of (and significant contributions to) the WordPress.org software but WordPress.com is a for profit enterprise.

So how do they support all these bloggers, designers and developers?

We had an opportunity to talk with Raanan Bar Cohen about how Automattic (the people behind WordPress.com) work with their community. One area we talked about was support – which takes the form of a Automattic managed support area and Forums where WordPress users interact (and Automattic periodically participates).

Its really easy to search and find answers – in fact, for many searches using Google or the WordPress.org or WordPress.com search will get you to the same content (Thats significant in that this community is likely producing the best content, then). Other people quickly respond (if not Automattic employees are watching to make sure nothing goes unanswered). In fact we did a rough estimate of about 400 or so new posts per day in the community. WordPress Support fields about 300 requests per day (that employees respond to).  So, in simple terms the community outperforms in terms of responses and although we dont have specific numbers, the support forum content seems to dwarf the support content (and likely informs it), suggesting that users who search and find content, are finding mainly community generated content.

The end result? WordPress, has Happiness Engineers, who play a very important roll in making their service work, but this team can remain small, because the community plays a significant roll, too.

Fluther – a small community generating lots of good answers to just about any question

Fluther is small, but very active and growing community. We had an opportunity to talk with Ben Finkel, one of the founders. They are not

focused on support, per se, but do enable questions and answers, some of which are support related. They have invested a great deal of time in a number of areas such as design (you can see who is reading and typing responses adding a real-time feel to the environment), but mostly creating an environment where smart people would be happy to ask and answer questions.

Although there are other places where this happens, like Yahoo Answers or LinkedIn, for example, Fluther has a unique community for a few reasons. For one thing, responses happen in near real-time. But beyond this, questions are targeted based on likely areas of interest, similar to LinkedIn, so members can stay involved with their specific interests (and continue relationships with their  similar sub-group of people).  And beyond the enjoyment of sharing, points (Lurve) are earned for participation including things like +5 for a great answer or +1 for showing up 2 days in a row. And finally people seem to be able to answer a wide range of subjects (often, while being entertaining, too).

As proof of the quality of their answers, like WordPress, Fluther increasingly generates traffic from Google. Since answers on Fluther are regarded as good, the have been rising up the Google search result pages and so more people are finding answers generated by the community. In fact search traffic now enables Fluther to serve ads to people who arrive this way (readers versus contributors). Its not easy to figure out which specific questions are doing best, but people finding the site are the main source of Fluther’s revenue, which has been steadily increasing according to Ben.

Interestingly, in some areas then, the Fluther community is outperforming manufacturers and other communities in helping customers solve problems. This might be a function of response time or quality of the content generated, but good ranking in Google indicates that others like the content and aside from a few employees, nobody is being paid. Interestingly, we often reference the 90-9-1 rule for different types of participation – Fluther’s usage statistics below show this nicely (from Quantcast).

GetSatisfaction – customers and companies meet for support

GetSatisfaction has been growing steadily. The service enables customers and companies to interact to resolve specific issues. Customers can start interacting independent of the brands (as they can anywhere, really) and then brands can easily join in. A detailed description of the how and why can be found in this GetSatisfaction 101.

The approach seems to work quite well as a way to connect employees and customers directly. There are some design approaches that make this an easier-to-use service than many company managed support sites.  Its like an answer site in some ways, but its more geared to specific suppore issues and making it possible to clearly identify employees versus customers. It may actually be easier for employees to get involved thought this platform, too.

Some of their well known clients include Zappos.com, Microsoft (Live Labs) and Whole Foods. And there are some case studies that explain how the service has benefited the more than 9000 companies that use Get Satisfaction. Its easy to see why, when you look at the complexity of making it easy for people to contribute, find and receive timely responses to content.

One issues we encountered – the company has some unusual ways of designating official versus unofficial support areas, which may be a source of confusion for some customers but this is covered well by “Get Satisfaction or Else“, so we wont take this further. Its looks like GetSatisfaction responded to the criticisms, but we understand some of the tension that may exist between companies who have established their own community tools, already and now have to deal with another location. Lets just say, conversations about your company can happen anywhere which makes online  monitoring a requirement, which brings us to our next forum – Twitter (who happen to be a GetSatisfaction customer).

Twitter  – real-time support

Imagine being frustrated with your [insert device or service provider here] and just yelling out your problem.

And then receiving a response from nobody in particular saying – how can I help you? No phone calls. No search. No waiting.

Today, people are and something like Dell Hell can play out much faster – people are able to use Twitter to mobilize much more quickly and perhaps with much more serious consequences. In April 2009, the latest big brand to discover this, was Amazon in Amazon Fail, as it has become known. It has become so easy for customers to share their frustration, that it prompted Steve Rubel to state “Customer Service is the New PR“.

Today, no doubt, Dell can and would respond, quickly.

Twitter’s growth is contested as is its potential to be a mainstream service. But it is alread home to some pretty influential bloggers and media folks. So at a minimum, its should be considered a wire feed into the broader media landscape. So, what is said or unsaid here, will have consequences. Businessweek just a great job covering how some brands are Tweeting as a new way to be of service. But small brands are not to be outdone. For example, if you are in NYC and feeling unwell, posting this on Twitter, will likely get you a response from ZocDoc, a firm which specializes in finding and scheduling doctor and dentists.

But is goes further than this, as I found out when I complained about what I thought was poor service from Zipcar.

I tweeted “zipcar may need some help scaling. recent disappointments culminated today in being accused of damaging a car! cost of repair vs goodwill?”

Then I received 2 responses – one from a friend, who commented on his poor experience in dealing with Zipcar support. And then. A message from Hertz Connect, a new ZipCar competitor in New York.

I didnt hear from Zipcar, but I did receive an e-mail explaining that the issue had been resolved. Were they monitoring the conversation? I’m still not sure, but Hertz was.  I also had a similar experience with Google, who contacted me to ensure that everything was ok when I commented about their website optimizer tool.

What happens as more people realize that they can get a better hearing if they have the discussion in public? Choices used to be one click away, now you need not go anywhere, they may just come to you.  For organizations, this means a new focus from having people come to you and engage on your terms, to actively seeking people out to ensure you are not out of the loop on service and support-related issues. But it doesnt reduce the need to have great reference content, it just expands the ways to make this content findable.

How do they stack up?

We are still wrapping up GetSatisfaction and trying to figure out how best to treat Twitter, in this context. However, this is how we think things stack up for now according to our emerging evaluation framework. A quick review of evaluation categories.

Outcome - how effective is the result produced by the community.

Rewards & Alignment - how are people acknowledged? Do the organizational and community goals seem aligned?

Community Health – how active is the community and how well do they work together to achieve the outcome? How responsive is the community?

User Experience - how easily can people participate whether they are searching for an answer, contributing ro trying to organize or moderate.  This extends beyond the site, to other places the user might encounter the experience (Twitter, Facebook, Search Engines, etc)

Organization - this includes processes and formal roles such as moderators or administrators. This also includes informal leadership roles such as experienced community members and enforcement of community guidelines.

Note: its not clear to us how community is responding to one another in support roles in Twitter – we see active brands, certainly. So

Posted in: Crowdsourcing, Leadership, Service & Support | Tagged: business, community, Crowdsourcing, customer service, dell, fluther, getsatisfaction, knowledge management, support, wordpress | No Comments