Michael MaozPeer-to-peer support communities where customers solve their own support issues have been around for over 20 years, but it has only been recently that Cloud-based packaged business applications have been available, scalable, and feature rich. After a year of diving into four separate support communities made up of contributors from around the world, we’re more positive on these initiatives than ever. The cases we followed were in high tech software, consumer and business software, consumer home entertainment, and business-to-business network gear. The results have been pretty impressive. Such as:
- On average, over 40% of customers resolve their issues in the online community
- Of those 40%, 30 – 50% also solve the problem there – which means an overall reduction of 15%+ of all service cases.
- The average ROI on a peer-to-peer community has been 100% within 15 months. Try that with your ERP or SFA or HCM!
- Overall customer satisfaction grew, while time spent interacting with the Brand went up
If you want to see an in-depth case study and are a Gartner client, you can check out some new research at: http://www.gartner.com/resId=1910415 .
We will have several more of these at our Customer360 Summit this March in Orlando (http://bit.ly/gLhUKZ ).
I had a great call with a client this morning where we were discussing forums and knowledge bases and her company’s next steps. I said that now might not be the best time for her to discuss results because the program was still midstream. She laughed and said, “You know what? I don’t know if we’ll ever be out of midstream.” I am always touched by the IT folks who work hard for companies that can hardly recognize their effort, who look forward at the possible and are not handcuffed by the past.
John F. Kennedy, who was my idol by reasons of proximity temporal and physical, said, “For time and the world do not stand still. Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or the present are certain to miss the future.” And it is truly a mystery and a testament to people’s dedication and commitment that they often work so long and hard for rewards that largely accrue to others. We need all be grateful that they do.
Thank you all, as always, for sharing your stories – successes and challenges.
Category: Applications Cloud CRM Gartner Customer 360 Summit Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
6 responses so far ↓
1 Social CRM for Customer Support – Peer Power. « Serve4Impact February 4, 2012 at 2:08 am
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2 This Week: CXM Acquisitions + Driving Adoption in Social Business | SNS Online February 4, 2012 at 1:41 pm
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3 This Week: CXM Acquisitions + Driving Adoption in Social Business | CMS News Today February 4, 2012 at 2:01 pm
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4 This Week: CXM Acquisitions + Driving Adoption in Social Business | Cms World February 4, 2012 at 11:02 pm
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5 Chuck Van Court February 7, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Hello Michael:
I have been many \online communities\ where almost all questions end up getting answered by staff and the community vendors are still talking about how great their product enables \community powered support.\
What’s more, the same questions are getting asked and answered again and again and the searchable content becomes bogged down with redundant information that only decreases the search engine’s effectiveness in getting users to help themselves.
Do you agree that measuring actual deflection (question answered by user or a non-staff user) for these online support communities is an important success metric? What other metrics do you believe are important when measuring success?
Thanks, Chuck
6 Chuck Van Court February 7, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Yikes…I am not sure how that happened…intended “I have been seeing many online communities…