Reduce Support Costs With Customer Communities

a publication of

reduce support costs with customer

communities:Drive Customer self-serviCe

customer communities reduce support costs: Customer Self-Service 1

Contents

Customer Communities reduCe support Costs: Customer self-serviCe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

self-serviCe: the What and the Why . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

faQs that really are freQuently asked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

searCh, the king of self-serviCe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Community as the Best Way to Build a great Customer experienCe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6

extend the shelf-life of soCial Conversations . . . . . . . . . . . . .7

the savings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

self-serviCe support. Quantitatively and Qualitatively impaCting your Bottom line. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9


Customer Communities reduCe support Costs: Customer self-serviCe

Long before customers turned to Facebook to ask questions,

share feedback, and connect with brands, business owners have

been faced with a common problem—how do you scale support,

while keeping company costs low and providing a great customer

experience? Facebook alone has not had a huge impact on that

issue (and isn’t growth the business problem to have?). In the social

era, it’s more important than ever to provide positive customer

experiences. You simply can’t afford not to when people are

relying so heavily on the opinions of their peers to make purchase

decisions, and any perceived misstep on your part is likely to result

in negative word-of-mouth with unprecedented reach.

This can pose a challenge for a business that’s trying to scale

support quickly. Agent salaries are the most expensive aspect

of a support center, so keeping this cost low by understaffing the

team or resorting to static or automated responses is tempting.

Unfortunately, these solutions also have a tendency to result

in lower satisfaction levels, negative word-of-mouth, and poor

customer retention.

This is where support communities come in. When moderated

and curated effectively, customer support communities can result

in serious savings for companies. We worked with Dr. Natalie

Petouhoff to identify three major areas where support communities

can reduce costs and drive revenue by:

• Enabling excellent self-service for common issues,

• Improving agent workflow and efficiency

• Increasing customer retention and acquisition

This eBook is the first in a three-post series explaining how

customer communities can help companies realize significant

savings and revenue, along with the metrics and calculations to

measure the value. This book focuses on the way companies can

leverage community for customer self-service, freeing up agents

to deal with more complicated, technical problems. Stay tuned for

the next two, which will focus on the other ways you can leverage

community to improve agent efficiency and drive revenue.


self-serviCe: the What and the Why

Perhaps you’re familiar with the expression: Customer service is

the new marketing. This doesn’t imply that your support agents will

now be responsible for crafting messaging, producing webinars, or

collecting customer testimonials. Rather, it suggests that providing

consumers with helpful, positive experiences at every touch point

in the customer lifecycle is critical for creating the kind of loyal

relationships that are the foundation of all repeat business and

brand advocacy.

So what does this mean for your company? Obviously you want to

ensure that your support agents are friendly, helpful, and have a

reasonable workload, so they can provide great service to everyone

that needs their help. A customer community may not help much

with those first two requirements (although a number of companies

do hire top support agents by identifying brand advocates in their

community).

A community can, however, greatly reduce the amount of one-off

requests your support agents get by making it easy for customers

to self-service their own answers, especially the ones to simple

questions that get asked over and over again. This frees up

your agents to deal with more complicated requests from other

customers, and prevents your customers from having to wait in a

phone queue or for an email response, when the answer to their

question—“what is the average wait time for delivery,” for example

—is simple and readily available in your community.

Self-service support implies a variety of easy-to-find and

understand resources, so your customers have access to up to

date, accurate information. A solid self-service strategy doesn’t

just benefit your support agents (although they will thank you

for implementing a good system). It’s extremely desirable for

your customers, who are bound to be relieved if they can find the

answers to their questions themselves, instead of having to call or

email. This is especially true if your target market is made up of

Millenials, but more and more it’s true of all generations. People

would rather find the answers to their questions themselves than

wait for a phone or email representative to help. Customers who

have faith that their issues will be dealt with a way that is painless

and effective are much more likely to bring their business back to

you next time they’re making a purchase.


faQs that really are freQuently asked

What’s a better source of FAQs than the real-time questions your customers are asking every day? Odds are these are changing as you release new products and features, the industry and market change, and consumers move through the customer lifecycle. You don’t need to pay someone to constantly be anticipating what the next questions and issues will be. Instead, allow your community to surface the logical questions, issues, and bugs that will inevitably come up.

There are some guiding curation best practices that will help you leverage your community as a dynamic, social place for FAQs. “Social” isn’t just a buzzword here—it’s a key aspect to ensuring that the “frequently” part of FAQ holds true. You want to make sure your self-service is actively covering all the issues and questions your customers are having today, not just the ones you envisioned them having when you launched two years ago.

You’ll want to seed your community with FAQs before you even launch, so that it acts as a self-service resource for your customers from the minute your community goes live. You can make this more dynamic by creating a product category tag for FAQs. When you tag other pieces of content with your FAQ label, they will be added to the attention-grabbing tab on your community home page, in real-time. (See figure 1 to the left)

Employees can also mark the status of questions that have been answered by the community as “answered,” so that other customers know which community responses are company verified. By curating your community this way, your customers and prospects will have access to a great source of real-time questions and answers, with the authority of company sanctioned FAQs.

Use Get Satisfaction’s simple copy and paste code snippets (widgets, for you techies out there) to place FAQs and other community conversations anywhere you want on your website. This means that when people come to your home page, help site, or product pages, they’ll be able to see the topics people are having in real-time about your products and services. If they’re experiencing an issue that others are having as well, they’ll be able to self-serve their own answers right from your site. And you’ll be able to address all of them in one fell swoop as soon as there are updates.

Remember, a key aspect of self-service is that answers are quick and easy to find and understand. If you have all the information your customers could need, but it’s buried in a support ghetto on a difficult-to-find to page on your website, it isn’t likely to improve anyone’s experience or reduce any workloads. Which brings us to our next point about self-service…

Figure 1.


searCh, the king of self-serviCe

Think about it. Where’s the first place you turn when you have a

question or would like more information about something. Your

favorite search engine, right? The same is true for your customers.

You want to make sure that your self-service topics consistently

turns up in top results when your customers turn search.

Easy, effective searchability will perpetuate the success of your

self-service strategy exponentially. As customers search for the

answers to their questions and are brought to your community,

your engagement levels and pageviews will go up. This, in turn,

improves the ranking of these pages, driving even more customers

there to discover them as resources.

A Get Satisfaction customer community is uniquely structured

to rank well in search. The URL of each community conversation

has the company name in it, as well as the topic title phrased in

the words of the person who asked the question. That means

that each link is highly optimized for the company name and the

natural, organic language that customers are using to ask questions

and report problems. That’s important because the internal

language you use to refer to your products, features, and bugs

doesn’t necessarily map to the language your customers use. The

discrepancy between your language and that of your customers

can make it difficult for them to find the answers to their questions

in traditional FAQs and knowledge repositories, which were written

internally by someone drinking your company Koolaide.

Adding more pack to its SEO punch, Get Satisfaction is home to

more than 70,000 communities. Because of the sheer size of the

network, as well as the extent of customer-generated content and

engagement that takes place there, search engines crawl the entire

Get Satisfaction platform constantly. User-generated content is

viewed as authoritative by Google, so it ranks particularly well. Once

a topic is posted, it’s likely to start showing up in search almost

immediately.

Figure 2. When customers search for guidance on connecting their Mint.com account with their bank, Get Satisfaction comes up in the top 3 results


Community as the Best Way to Build a great Customer experienCe

The more people of various

backgrounds, experiences, and

expertise levels you have

interacting in your community, the

more resources your customers

will have. This can work in a

number of ways. Perhaps yours is

a highly technical community,

bringing people together around

bike purchases, for example. By

connecting long-term bikers to

mechanics, to bike salesmen, and

to parents about to purchase

Junior’s first bike, you’re exposing

all of them to the unique

perspectives of the others.

Sometimes the self-service

that occurs in a community

was initially the result of a more

traditional support request. If one

customer has an issue that does

require them to reach out to your

traditional support channels, for

example, she can then act as a resource for the rest of your customers in the community. Once that answer exists in the community, it lives

there for future customers to view as a resource to answer the same question or issue.

Figure 3. Community input provides the well-rounded insight necessary to get to the bottom of issues quickly.


extend the shelf-life of soCial Conversations

When social first came on the scene as a business tool, many

companies jumped on board, without being entirely sure how best

to use it. They treated Twitter and Facebook as support channels,

without appreciating the shortcomings of these sites for that

purpose.

To be fair, there are some great points about Twitter and Facebook

as channels for customer engagement and support. They’re easily

accessible from multiple channels, and most consumers have

profiles on at least one of these sites.

But Facebook and Twitter alone are not sufficient resources for

your customers to self-serve their own answers. For one thing,

posts on these social sites have short shelf lives, so they do nothing

to reduce one-off common requests like FAQs and other simple-

to-solve issues. For another thing, they’re not optimized to connect

your customers to one another, which reduces the amount of

collaboration and social support that can take place.

You can improve self-service by using a customer community

with strong linkages to social networks. In this way, you can push

content from the community out to social networks, and import

questions from those networks into the community where you

can answer them more fully, and they’ll live on for much longer as

a resource for others. By taking fleeting social media content and

bringing the conversation into the community where it will have

a long shelf-life and can continue to evolve, your customers will

be able to self-serve the answers to questions that are commonly

being asked in these social spaces.

Figure 4.


the savings

These benefits are not just anecdotal. We worked with Dr, Natalie

Petouhoff to calculate exactly how much the benefits of self-service

strategy can save a customer. Dr. Pethouoff examined a number of

Get Satisfaction customer case studies* to calculate estimates for

how much money companies can save with a community.

The savings, which can be realized by reducing agent-related

interactions through the enablement of self-service, can be

calculated by multiplying the cost of each interaction by the

volume of interactions each month, then factoring in the percent

the community has reduced it. One example Dr. Petouhoff studied

has 3,000 support instances a month, at a cost of $8 each. That

means the monthly cost these interactions have is $24,000. The

company in question* has reduced support interactions by 20%

through the self-service of their community, so they’re saving

$4,800 a month. Multiple that by 12 to find that they’re saving

$57,600 a year.

3,000 interactions/month x $8/interaction = $24,000

$24,000 reduced by 20% → 24,000 x .2 = $4,800/month

$4,800 x 12 = $57,600.

That’s quite a bit of savings for one company in a year just from

support cost reductions!

Dr. Petouhoff examined another company to find the amount of

money saved by having a community create a social Knowledge

Base (KB), instead of hiring a formal KB author to create a

structured KB. The company in question was creating 10 new KB

articles a month, and they were paying the author of these articles

($25/hour). Assuming that each article took 3 hours to write, they

were spending $750 a month on KB articles. That’s equal to $9,000

a year.

$25 x 10 x 3 = $750/month

$750 x 12 = $9,000/year

With a social, community-based KB, the community writes the

response or best practice, then the community manager certifies

them as “answered” and belonging to the social KB. This process

eliminates the need for a formal KB author, meaning you free up

contractor dollars or employee time to focus on other issues.

*To respect the privacy of the companies analyzed for the study, names and identifying information has been removed.


self-serviCe support. Quantitatively and Qualitatively impaCting your Bottom line.

There you have it. Enabling self-service support drives real value

by freeing up your agents to focus on more technical issues.

It also improves customer experiences and satisfaction by

empowering them to answer their own questions quickly, easily,

and comprehensively. By making the support experience positive

for your customers, you’re giving them a reason to come back to

you again and again.

For self-service support to truly be effective (and reduce agent-

related support costs), it has to provide customers with the

answers they need quickly, easily and consistently. If it doesn’t have

the most current, up-to-date information, your customers will still

be forced to contact an agent.

The good news is you don’t have to provide this alone. By leveraging

a customer community, you’re providing your customers with the

tools they need to find the answers to simple questions all on their

own. This is good for your support team, good for your company,

and (most importantly) satisfying for your customers.

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Reduce Support Costs With Customer Communities