BDI 9/16/09 B2B Social Communications Case Studies - Pitney Bowes

Pitney Bowes User Forum
forums.pb.com

Conversation “Threads”

Message posts and replies

Users are rewarded by their peers for useful answers through “Kudos” and “Accepted Solution” tags.
Users build reputation through a system of ranks and roles.
Reputation and Feedback encourage participation

ROI
2008 Rate Change: A Case Study
We launched the Forum in April 2008 with an initial goal of Rate Change Support call deflection
In 2007, we had had 417,000 phone support calls just related to rate change.
Typical support call costs $10 or more
Pitney Bowes staffs up temporary call centers to support Rate Change.

Drove traffic to forum from all rate change related pages on PB.com and from email
Volume on May 12, the day RC took effect was > 10 times our average daily volume.
Moderators from Rate Change group and CSR handled questions
Customers answered many questions
ROI: 2008 Rate Change

Specific answer posting
20% deflection*
General info posting
5% deflection*
39,065 views
7,817 saved calls
$78K savings
500,000 total views
25,000 saved calls
$250K savings
* Groundswell, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, Forrester Research, 2008

Call deflection savings for Rate Change issues during May 2008 alone were more than $300K, or 2-3 times our annual cost for the forum.
This was one month after the Forum was launched.

“Ask the Expert” events
Think Tank pilot program

Goal of Special Events
Rate change
Ask Expert
Keeping users engaged between rate changes

Community Drives Success
And “Superusers” drive the community…
The 90-9-1 Rule:
90% only browse
9% post rarely
1% provide most of the content
Dell has more than 100 users who each spend more than 40 hours a week on the forum!

“Karios” – our rising superuser

Online longer than 6 mos.
“Karios” – our rising superuser
Each post continues to collect views over time:
Posts that have been online longer than 6 months have been viewed, on average, more than 2,000 times.
Call deflection value to PB of each post is ~$2,000
Total value of Karios’ 53 posts so far: $106,000
A user who posted one answer a day would be worth $520,000 in call deflection each year

How Do We Get There?
Build Traffic
Nurture Superusers
Repeat

ZDNet Article, 6/25/09

PR-Customer Interaction

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BDI 9/16/09 B2B Social Communications Case Studies - Pitney Bowes

by Business Development Institute on Sep 18, 2009

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BDI 9/16/09 B2B Social Communications Case Studies - Pitney Bowes — Presentation Transcript