Page 360 - Social Media Marketing

chapter 12: SOCIAL APPLICATIONS ■Support Communities

If ideation is the “fresh thinking” business application built around the practice of
crowdsourcing that delivers ideas into business and organizations, then support com-
munities—again, these are social applications—are the analogous tools that deliver
needed information and solutions back to customers, based on the combined principles
of crowdsourcing and direct customer empowerment.

When Dell set out to rebuild its customer service program, Dell’s internal teams
noticed something: In its existing online (and offline) support environment, there
existed customers who really wanted to see Dell succeed, customers who often had
some of the answers that were needed in the course of fielding support issues. Inside
Dell, something clicked: If there were customers who had specific knowledge that could
benefit other customers, and if these same customers were also Dell advocates, could
they be directly tapped to help Dell improve and scale its customer service program?

This is the thinking that in part gave rise to the now rebuilt Dell support
338 communities, and it uncovered a basic fact that is common across many industries:

Customers are often experts—at least as regards their use of a product or service—and
as such are in collective possession of a sizeable body of knowledge. Properly applied,
this collective body of knowledge can radically change their experience as customers.
The problem is that this knowledge is largely unstructured, and it’s distributed in ways
that make actual bits of knowledge hard to spot when they are really needed.

Enter the support forum: Organized by topic, and driven by the allure of brand
support and the elevation in personal status (a form of “social capital”) for providing
correct answers—in public, to other customers—support forums make it easy for cus-
tomers to tap the larger collective, to self-serve and quickly solve their own problems.
Customers can subscribe (typically via RSS) to specific topics—mobile applications
or service issues for their particular laptop or TV set—and ask questions and/or offer
answers as they are so moved. Over time, that extensive body of knowledge contained
in the minds of customers is reexpressed in the support forum discussions where it is
curated (“this solution works/this solution doesn’t”), organized, and tagged so that it
can be found and applied by those in need.

GetSatisfaction.com

GetSatisfaction is social application built for use by consumers and stakeholders as they share
the problems and challenges they encounter with products and services so that they can collab-
oratively discover and spread solutions. As a business, GetSatisfaction.com can provide a social
component to your overall customer support program.

http://getsatisfaction.com