Customer Support Communities – Knowledge Sharing + Efficiency

“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”

- John Russell, President, Harley Davidson

So far in this blog series on Community Purpose we’ve discussed Employee Communities and External Social Networks. Today we’re going to focus on Communities for Customer Support.

What is a Support Community?

The purpose of a support community is efficient facilitation of knowledge sharing. A Support Community socializes the support process by creating/ allowing collaboration around issues and feedback. Customers can help customers, and support people can interact in an open and conversational style while providing necessary support. Best of all the knowledge is searchable and sharable for future customer self-help. 

The Avectra Community:

MemberFuse, Avectra’s online community product, allows organizations to control the look, content, advertising and access based on the member data stored in netFORUM or another CRM system.

We are in the process of rolling out our own community platform to allow our customers to connect to each other and our support staff.

While it won’t replace traditional support outlets, the Avectra Community can increase knowledge sharing, problem solving, and a sense of belonging with customers as they rally around issues and ideas to improve their experience. The need to contact Avectra support through traditional channels has the potential to decrease dramatically as customers will be able to find answers to common questions posted by their peers.




Another good example of support in a very social way, is GetSatisfaction, a simple feedback button that turns a comment or question into a knowledge base of users helping each other with the product or service.  Benjamin Gauthey, Digital Marketing, Microsoft Corp comments, “In our opinion, Get Satisfaction is one of the best social media feedback tools available today. Our customers love it because it creates a dedicated place where they can be heard and have a direct connection with our engineering team.”

Also, at AvectraLabs we’re experimenting with integrating GoToAssist  into our community platform. GoToAssist isn’t a Support Community, but is complementary to one. With GoToAssist you can easily view and control your customers’ computers online to quickly resolve their technical issues.  It also provides you with secure live-support capability. They offer free trials for individuals and for teams.

Ideally, your support ecosystem would include Community, CRM, Ticketing and Live-Support Capabilities.

Every support community platform has unique benefits. Let’s take a look at just a few of the many …

Benefits of a Support Community

• Improves Customer Experience by giving on-demand access to knowledge
• Knowledge Sharing – If you help a customer in a ticket or a phone call, that content is lost and not searchable
• Lowers Support Costs – It’s more efficient for support staff to interact with customers in a community, then in a situation where something is resolved on a phone call
• Lets customers feel they’re a part of a bigger community, not a lone customer with a lone problem

Keys to Setting up and Maintaining Your Support Community 

• Integrate them with your CRM – It’s powerful if you track your customer feedback to their relationship with your company.
• Integrate with Ticketing System – Any support desk software you have, such as NetSuite.com  or zendesk.com will allow for integration with their API’s. Make sure your online community can take a discussion or comment and create or track tickets with these systems.
• Monitor and Integrate Social – Your customers are talking about your products and services regardless of if they do it within your community. You need to listen, monitor and respond to customer conversations as it relates to support.
• Allow your staff to be social with support. Zappos.com is a groundbreaking organization in many ways, but are infamous with how they handle support calls. Their support staff are allowed to be personable and social. It’s this unique approach to support that creates a culture at Zappos that attracts loyal and passionate customers.

As previously stated, when you tie together all your support tools, including Community, CRM, Live-Support, Ticketing System, and even external social networks… you create the ultimate support ecosystem.

I really like what Dion Hinchcliffe writes in his article on 12 best practices for online communities:

“Connect the community with the other CRM-related aspects of the organization. Customer communities have been used successfully for customer service, the generation of innovation, trend spotting, marketing, lead generation and many other activities. In the future, it’s likely that many customer communities will blur extensively with the organizations they are associated with and become more and more closely involved with their customers in a wide variety of activities. Those organizations that can do this successfully will likely reap rewards of efficiency, innovation, productivity increases and others, while assuming some of the risks involved in any sort of crowdsourcing activity.”

We are at the point where “Social” Business is now JUST BUSINESS. Your customers expect to be part of your community. Help them do so.

One final thought. At Avectra we have many years of experience with associations, who create communities for their industry. The association business model needs to change to keep the associations relavant and funded. Avectra has tools that help with that. My point is… I find it interesting that we’re helping associations become more like for-profit corporations with their business model. But at the same time, we need to help for-profit corporations become more like associations by creating communities. A Customer Community is a step in the right direction.