Q and A Versus Forums: Selecting a Support 2.0 Format
But when it comes to social networks, what is the best format for engaging customers seeking online support?
Anyone familiar with Yahoo! Answers or Microsoft Live’s beta knows that the Q&A format is a popular tool for customers who have random questions -- from the common to the arcane and from the specialized to the non-technical. But can it stand up to the demands of a seasoned or even a novice enterprise customer?
The simplicity of Q&A drives customers to Yahoo’s site which makes Yahoo! happy. The wide open Q&A format also gives a high degree of flexibility to customers seeking quick answers to questions posed to a larger community.
What about forums? Forums like those for Intuit and Dell are extremely useful for those who want sustained, highly focused conversations. Unlike a Q&A format that uses tagging to organize information, forums are more structured. Users need to know which forum best addresses their questions. Sometimes it is not obvious, and other times a question can be asked in multiple forums. For the novice, that process may be daunting at first. The challenge with Q&A is that once the question is answered, it generally disappears. Forums are more permanent, and participants can initiate discussions and side bars that don’t require specific answers. What forums lack in flexibility, they make up for in depth.
As one colleague put it, it is the difference between a quick answer from advice columnist Dear Abby and an extended conversation as in My Dinner with Abby.
Choosing the right format or combination thereof for your company will depend on the purpose of the site, who your customers are, what kind of experience they want, and how much flexibility you want to provide. Regardless of the approach you take, the goals are the same – using customer engagement to reduce call center costs and build brand loyalty.
Lithium Technologies is one company with plenty of experience building communities. They have designed enterprise software platforms for companies like Salesforce.com and Dell. And Joe Cothrel, vice president of community management has extensive knowledge of online community dynamics.
He believes that successful communities require sufficient scale. A Q&A format requires tremendous scale, i.e. a high volume of traffic – to make the experience robust for both those who ask questions and those who answer them. Based on Cothrel’s extensive experience, an active community generally requires 5-10 new posts per board per day. Fewer post don’t give users enough incentive to participate.
What does it take produce sufficient scale? On average, Cothrel has found that approximately 10 percent of visitors to a site in a given month will notice an invitation to join a forum, and 10 percent of those are likely post.
So if a site has 5,000 visitors, 500 will visit and maybe 50 will actually engage. Is that success? Is this company doing enough to draw customers to a site? It all depends on a company’s objectives.
Elements for Success
Regardless of your company’s online strategy, Cothrel believes the following elements must be in place to a build a successful forum.
- A business owner who sets direction.
- A community manager who provides planning leadership and day-to-day decision-making.
- A moderator who sets the tone, enforces rules, and helps users.
- Defined roles for staff and users, and software that supports those roles.
- A set of comprehensive user guidelines. Some rules for action when violations or other issues arise.
- High visibility to potential users.
- The proper structure and atmosphere to engage users.
- A well-managed group of “superusers.”
- Strong measurement processes focused on business value.
Companies are only beginning to understand the dynamics of online communities. We certainly can’t ignore their growing importance in attracting, engaging and retaining customers.
As John Ragsdale, director of research at the Service and Support Professionals Association wrote to me about the future of online communities:
“You have an increasing percentage of customers looking to forums to get problems solved, and more external experts offering opinions and advice in public forums. If companies don’t act quickly to establish online communities to corral and leverage customer expertise, that expertise will just get documented in a forum not sponsored by the company, and companies will lose credibility as the experts on their own technology.”
Working with customer and employee communications as well as product managers, corporate communications can not only spread the word; they can identify pitfalls as well as incentives for employees and customers. Through this collaboration, corporate communications can help define the strategy needed to make that community useful and sustainable.
Let me get back to you.
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