Reducing Support Costs by Turning to the Community (Keynote)
by Get Satisfaction on Apr 20, 2009
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What are all those numbers cited in customer satisfaction surveys? Are they on the level, or just enthusiasm gone wild? What's the best way to measure the success (or failure) of community, anyhow? Wha...
What are all those numbers cited in customer satisfaction surveys? Are they on the level, or just enthusiasm gone wild? What's the best way to measure the success (or failure) of community, anyhow? What can you accomplish? What's realistic? How do you measure community involvement with numbers? Our second Webcast will deal with the benefits of crowdsourcing and how they might be more successfully measured. We'll talk about how others have done it and how you can do it for your own organization. Come and play the numbers game with us, get your community mobilized, and get them helping out with the help.
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jascerbo
I'm Amy Muller, co-founder & Chief Community Officer of Get Satisfaction and we're broadcasting live from Get Satisfaction headquarters in San Francisco.
Once again, I've got our community manager, Eric Suesz here with me, behind the scenes manning the chatroom. Feel free to post questions to Eric. He'll forward them to me and I may answer some along the way as they relate to the content. We'll also have a Q&A session at the end.
And please remember to stay on topic and play nice.
What we're talking about here is really the life cycle of a thriving community that actually saves you time and money -- as well as what it takes to get there.
These systems have their place, however, if you start with a premise of customer avoidance not only will you not be building a community, you'll also potentially decay long term savings because you'll lose some of those customers.
[Want to know more about NPS? Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter_Score ]
[A great book about NPS called \"The Ultimate Question\": http://www.theultimatequestion.com/theultimatequestion/measuring_netpromoter.asp?groupCode=2]
Thinking about time & cost savings with community requires having a combination of metrics that will absolutely include a decrease in repetitive support but by virtue of actually increasing customer engagement. The traditional metric of number of customer touch points is not a valid one. So how do you measure success with a community?
What are some real basic ways you save time & money with a public customer support community?
For instance, this one for the Humbolt Transit Authority asking whether riders can take a dog on the bus. There's an answer from an employee, but it's followed by several nuanced answers by other bus riders.
Some other types of longtail issues might be:
How do you use your product in this very particular circumstance?
I have this unique idea for you.
I have this problem with using your product in my unique set up.
These are the ways that a support community can really shine because your customers will use your products a million different ways and it's unlikely that you'll know every iteration of every application of your product or service. An engaged customer community can really save you time and money with this long-tail of issues.
So how do you start experiencing the benefits of community customer support? You can't measure something until you have a thing to measure. And how do you get that thing?
We've broken it down to the four C's.
Don't put your community in a box. It needs to be pervasive. Weave it through the user experience. Initially, there's no community. Let's be frank about that. When you start these efforts, there may be a latent community -- it's there but it's currently unexpressed.
The first thing you need to do is bring it to life. Get your customers where they're most engaged.... if they always go straight to email it's a lost opportunity.
Additionally, we often see companies set up a support community on Get Satisfaction and then post a welcome topic, soliciting feedback. Then they wait. And wait. Thinking the community is just going to appear out of thin air. Well, unfortunately, you can't just add water. You actually have to tell your customers about it.
You need to connect your customers with your community.
How do you do this?
With feedback widgets...
You can build your own widgets on this page: http://getsatisfaction.com/widgets
On your blog: Such as Boxee did by announcing their customer community so their customers know where to go to share ideas and keep tabs on Boxee's development.
A useful measure in the connection portion of building the support community is to track how effective you are at converting traffic from one channel to another. The goal is to increase the proportion from your email or trouble ticket system to your community. Of course there is some portion that needs to stay in the email channel but the idea is to move some portion out.
How you measure this: Track touches from each channel, analytics (Google analytics or built-in tracking) for community, tickets, call logs or emails for other. Web \"issues\" will be inferred, since people won't post already-posted issues as much, so there are some soft numbers there.
We've had customers who have put their community widget in front of their email form or trouble ticket system and have reported a significant reduction in the amount of traffic flowing into those more traditional channels. Here's a sample of the kind of graph you might create to visualize these measurements.
So, initially you're directing customers to your community and perhaps even encouraging them to participate in the community before directing them to other support channels.
Secondly, you're responding publicly. There won't be a bunch of users sitting around waiting to answer questions because, initially, there's nothing going on.
What you want is to have people posting their questions, problems, ideas publicly so you can respond and this then becomes the basis for conversation. And it's at this stage that you want to be as quick to respond as possible. As I mentioned in my talk about the 10 Commandments of community management, in the early stages, your customers will be more likely to stay engaged with your community if they see that you are engaged and that they'll get a rapid response.
When you're first starting out, the issues will be a range of the obvious bread & butter questions you've always gotten. For us - how do I add employees to my company account? Are you going to make an international version? You know what yours are and once you've answered them, they become part of your dynamic knowledgebase. You get the savings there by doing it in public and in a way that people can find it.
Unlike, in a more traditional trouble ticket system - your job isn't merely to answer the question and close the issue, but to compel ongoing conversation.
Having said that, you do want to give people the results they want as quickly as possible. And remember that when you're answering for one customer, you're also answering that same question for countless others.
So the steps to cultivating conversation?
1. Get the person a result
2. Do it in a way that is useful for other people
3. At this stage, don't worry about closing conversations.
There are a couple interesting reasons for this
1. more engagement is better for cultivating community -- it gives you the crowdsourcing benefits down the road
2. there may actually be more than one answer to the question or solution to the problem. For instance, someone may ask UPS \"How long does it take to ship to canada?\" UPS will have their official answer, but then you may have anecdotal answers from customers around the globe.
Repetitive questions reduction - Having a sense of what percentage of your issues were repetitive before gives you a baseline for measuring the drop in this percentage over time as your customers turn to your community support.
So you've got the conversations going and now you want to surface these customer conversations in places that are likely to pull in other customers. So where as in the first part, we're trying to redirect people w/ issues to a public place to post them. Here, we're exposing the conversations to people who are likely to participate, to chime in. Use this raw activity to reach out to people who are your subject matter experts - your natural champions to enhance engagement.
We do this by organizing the content into more meaningful chunks. There is an internal view of your interactions and content--how does what people are saying map to the way your team views the product or the market. We'll be talking about that in an upcoming webcast about how to use community for product development and innovation. What we care about here is organizing content in a way that your customers will find more meaningful.
One way to do this is to gather your team together and look at the feedback and issues as a whole, and pattern-match them into groups. You might find that many people are having trouble with logging-in, or figuring out how to use that new feature. You can tag these ...
We also tag any topics we get with suggestions for a user dashboard with the tag \"user dashboard\". When the product team is ready to start redesigning this piece of our site, they can easily aggregate all that valuable feedback from our customers to inform their design decisions and reach out to the already engaged community members in those conversations for more insight and feedback.
I can even create a widget based off a particular tag. You post that widget in an applicable place on your web site where your customers are engaged and you pull them into the conversations.
We've even got a new version of our Feedback Widget coming where you can pre-populate it with a tag. If you want feedback on a particular feature, you can tag it with the feature name and then keep that content organized.
And if you have multiple products you can of course organize the content around each product both on the web site and in our forthcoming update to the Feedback Widget.
Engagement & Volume - How many topics were created. How many replies on average to you get per topic? Return visits. Total number of visitors -- at this stage, volume does start to play into it because you want to expand and grow the community on it's own merits.
Which brings us to our fourth \"C\"....
So how do you care for your community? Well, everything you've done to connect, cultivate and curate has given you a good start. Now you want your community to feel cared for, to feel effective and to stay engaged.
You want to find creative ways to connect with your customers -- whether it's brainstorming ideas, connecting customers with each other, pulling in experts to answer their questions, soliciting feedback and countless other ways to foster and thus reap benefits from your customer community.
Share your road map or feature plans with your community and let them weigh in. Your community is like one big, free focus group. Use it -- they want to be involved in the evolution of your products and services.
And you can actually ask specific questions of your community.
And as I talked about in our last web cast -- assemble your Justice League. Identify the champions in your community; the users who are helping you by helping others. These are people who are naturally invested in being a part of your community. They could be regular blog readers, subscribers to your RSS feed, Twitter followers, even people looking for a job at your company, or just customers you've identified through their interactions in your community. Whoever they are, identify them and reward them.
Through recognition on the site.
Reaching out - staying in communication with them.
Make sure they feel appreciated. Send them t-shirts. Have them come to your office and meet the team.
Give them access to new products - make them beta testers.
Give them a special ear.
These people don't do it for that reason and may be bashful about accepting gifts, but making the gesture speaks volumes about how you value their role in your community.
Getting to this part - where you've got a vibrant & engaged community with natural leaders who have risen to the top and who you can tap for additional support - is kind of the holy grail. It's not easy to do and at Get Satisfaction we'll be continuing to evolve to better support this kind of participation and engagement.
We think sentiment is really important which is why we built in different ways to capture that.
At the topic level with our \"satisfactometer\" which asks the customer to tell you how they're feeling by selecting an emoticon and even expressing a unique feeling in words as they're posting their topic.
And our Net Promoter Score which I mentioned earlier which helps you collect that same kind of sentiment but at a company level.
Both of these are key ways to understand how people are feeling about your company and to gauge trends in the community -- are you doing better? is your customer satisfaction up or down?
One may be reducing cost and time:
You do this through harnessing the value of public interactions for managing crises; for responding to common questions once for the benefit of many; and through customers helping each other - particularly with longtail issues.
But just as important, if not more important, is actually breeding customer engagement which, in turn breeds customer retention.
So remember your four \"C\"s: Connect to bring people to your community; Cultivate by answering publicly; Curate the content to make it meaningful and findable; and Care to help nurture the natural dynamics of your customer community.
There should be a registration link here on http://getsatisfaction.tv.
Thanks for your time!