November / December 2007
How can companies leverage collaboration technologies to increase customer satisfaction with online help?
(Congratulations to the reader from E*TRADE who submitted this month's topic!)

In this issue:

• The Key to Collaboration: Empower Customers to Help Each Other
• Eye on the Industry: Collaboration a Hot Top at the SSPA and Consortium for Service Innovation
• Customer Connection: InQuira Collaborates with Customers at Inaugural Meeting of the New InQuira Customer Advisory Board

Collaboration happens all the time. But what comes of the decisions, solutions, and ideas that result from that collaboration? Whether collaboration occurs in person, via email, in meetings, or over the phone, the results of this interaction are often not captured in any formal way.

Company-sponsored discussion forums represent a huge advancement in this regard. Not only do they offer customers a new venue in which to interact with your company—but they offer a way to fully leverage the knowledge that comes from this dialog.

Through forums, organizations can foster a collaborative environment in which customers are encouraged to answer each others’ questions and learn from each other. In addition, forums offer the ability to capture the information generated and convert it into managed knowledge content. This information can then be augmented and refined, distributed through all communication channels, and maintained. Further, the information collection enables useful analysis, for example enabling reporting on the most recent or most popular documents created, which is feedback that can be invaluable in guiding content, services, and product development.

Contributions to problem resolution can come from the community

Within your company, there are a number of product experts. However, it is not possible for them to capture and document all of the information that may be needed about your company’s products and services. Through forums, your user community can start to be a valuable asset in augmenting the product experts on your staff, contributing to problem resolution and providing information about the use of your products and services that aids in your ability to support customers. Plus, users solve each others’ questions in forums, which leads to less calls into the contact center and faster ways to disseminate information as users subscribe to issues posted. Ultimately, the information provided by your user community can be made available to your agents and your entire customer base.

Learning about your customers from the community

By enabling collaboration, forums deliver information about customers that you may not otherwise receive. Sponsoring a way for users to ask each other questions results in users raising topics beyond what they would normally report to a support center. Users will not report a case for every issue that they encounter, yet they may post these questions about these issues in a discussion forum, which gives a company further insight into the customer experience. For instance, through discussion forums, you company may see that customers are becoming frustrated trying to use a new feature. You can then use this information in the near term to deliver support content that clarifies how to use the new feature, and longer term use that input to make the product feature easier to use.

Integration with knowledge management, search, and analytics adds to the power of community contributions

InQuira offers a customer experience platform that features integrated capabilities for discussion forums, knowledge management, search, and analytics. With InQuira solutions,your organization can harness the power of all these tools to fully leverage the benefits of customer collaboration on forums.

For example, a user may skip search and go directly to a discussion forum to get a question answered. Without InQuira’s platform powering the forum, the user will miss out on formal solutions that are available and instead end up waiting for users to respond and post a link to a solution document. Instead, with InQuira, if a user asks a question in a discussion forum, the useful solutions that are available will be displayed immediately. [Back to top]

SSPA - Services Leadership 2007 Conference: Enabling Breakthrough Customer Success through Content - Collaboration – Community

Almost 200 strong, the participants at this year’s conference made one thing very clear: The support industry is on the brink of a major transformation. We’re moving from break/fix support models to value-added support structures that will boost customer satisfaction and increase support revenue.

The growth of online communities and shifting generational preferences for support access was another key topic of discussion. Investing in and learning about online customer communities was a top 2008 priority for most of the conference attendees. The value of giving your customers a voice in product and service development will be a key success factor for the next five years. New technologies are making it possible to collaborate with customers like never before. Those companies that leverage this opportunity to involve customers in product and service development will enjoy a significant competitive advantage.

With the realization that well stocked and relevant knowledge bases, and world-class self-service channels are now such a core part of customer support today, a new corporate executive role is beginning to appear in best-in-class Fortune 500 companies: CEXO - Chief Customer Experience Officer. Companies are now realizing that understanding and focusing on the customer experience is a key success factor in our on-demand, pay-as-you-go, no-contract, multi-vendor world. Ensuring that all avenues of customer contact are focused and harmonized to ensure a top-notch, consistent customer experience is a massive challenge and is sure to be a primary focus of the men and women that assume this new role. Focusing on the individual customer experience during each and every transaction has never been a more vital topic to master.

13th Annual Consortium for Service Innovation Summit: Embracing the Economic Advantages of Collaboration

The Consortium for Service Innovation, a non profit alliance of support organizations, held their 13th annual Member Summit in Orlando this past month. The focus of this year’s summit was Wikinomics and Wikiemotion, the economics and social elements of mass collaboration.

Two speakers stood out with their views on collaboration: Dan Tapscott, co-author of the book “Wikinomics,” and Sean O’Driscoll, the GM of the Community Support Service at Microsoft.

Dan Tapscott, whose talk was entitled “The Economics of Collaboration”, maintained that social networking is being transformed into social production. He suggested that social networks are making a significant impact of the ways companies engage with customers and employees and, more fundamentally, the way work gets done. Tapscott concluded that now is the time to rethink knowledge management and understand that knowledge is an infinite, rather than finite, resource. More importantly, he stressed that most of the knowledge of a company, actually lives outside of the organization, not inside of it in nice tightly contained corporate repositories.

Sean O’Driscoll, whose talk was titled “Enhancing customer service and support through social media,” posed the question of how to apply all of the energy and investment in social media into improving customer support and growing business value. When it comes to deciding whether or not to embrace online experience communities, O’Driscoll asserted that folks are talking about your organization using these channels already—whether your organization chooses to participate in that dialog or not. The only decision you get to make is how and when you will enter the discussion. You will participate eventually or your competition will eat your customers away. So do you want to be a leader, a fast follower, or the last to market? Those that delay in deciding, will have the decision made for them. [Back to top]

Nearly a dozen executives from a select group of InQuira customers convened in Half Moon Bay on October 16th to participate in a full day Customer Advisory Board meeting. This inaugural meeting had three primary objectives: to solicit input from a representative group of customers on InQuira's product direction; to provide a forum for customers to share best practices from their respective implementations; and to connect customers with one another for networking.

The meeting included a lively product roadmap discussion with the InQuira Product Management team, and several customer presentations highlighting the different applications of InQuira technology and solutions for knowledge management, support site publishing, website marketing and web self-service. Feedback has been positive, and participants requested that we repeat the session with a larger user community audience. We've not figured out the timing or structure of that event, but will soon, so keep an eye on your Inbox for details!

Read Press Release: InQuira Announces Inaugural Customer Advisory Board. [Back to top]