Extending Support with Collaborative Forums

You know your company and products are special, and your customers feel that way, too. That's why they want to participate in collaborative forums. They learn from other expert customers, gain recognition, build their reputation, let their needs be known and become part of a community. With collaborative forums, customer participants are engaging on their own terms and volunteering their support to help others. A wide range of companies, such as Novell and Business Objects, have implemented forums to enhance their KM strategies for supporting complex products. These organizations are taking advantage of all the knowledge available to them—in the contact center, across the enterprise and in customers' heads. In complex support environments, expert users are highly technical and therefore capable of solving problems. Why not treat them as a solution to the problem of increased demands on the contact center and leverage their knowledge to solve the problems of others?

As good as your support professionals are, your users have a breadth of expertise that's impossible to match. They're domain experts in using your products to do their jobs or follow their interests in a broad range of environments. Expert users bring unique qualities that can make for better support content and defect submissions, and they're willing to share this knowledge.

Managing the Knowledge

With forums, you are capturing a great deal of incredible knowledge and it builds daily. Now you need to maximize its use by pulling that knowledge into your KM system. This gives instant access to both support staff and Web self-service users that may not enter via the forums channel.

Collaborative forums tied to the KM system are seamlessly integrated with service delivery. For example:

• Self-service questions return relevant expert answers side-by-side with knowledge-base and other enterprise content;

• Content developed in forums can be easily submitted to an authoring workflow;

• Customer data in a CRM system can personalize and streamline the forums experience; and

• Entitled forums users can be automatically escalated into the support center if their question isn't answered in a timely fashion.

A knowledge management system pulls together disparate sources of knowledge across the enterprise. Forums are yet another source of knowledge and should be treated the same way. Otherwise, the community will be limited by a lack of connection. When forums can be searched in the same user interfaces as the knowledge base, benefits are compounded.

Reaping the Benefits

Collaborative forums are not just a great support channel that customers love; they also lead to lower costs by making service more effective and reducing incidents to the support center. Novell is a great example of a company using forums to improve support. A study done by DB Kay & Associates shows the following benefits for Novell:

• 20,000 issues are handled per quarter supported by only two full-time employees;

• Over 10,000 contributors, led by about 35 top contributors, have become part of an extended Novell support team;

• Peer support quickly resolves tens of thousands of customer questions; and

• The forums are a leading source of knowledge-base content, product improvement requests and product feedback.

Forums also engage customers to grow brand loyalty and repeat purchases while you capture detailed, candid customer feedback and valuable product knowledge.

Today's adaptive organization treats its expert user base as a solution, not a problem. By encouraging a collaborative environment, we create an excellent source of knowledge-base content, product-improvement requests and product feedback. In addition, incident volumes are reduced through a network of volunteer experts, adding huge value at a low cost.

Before Collaborative Forums	After Collaborative Forums
Complex problems require one-on-one support and often escalation in the contact center	Many issues (both simple, repetitive issues and complex problems) deflected to peer-supported forums
Traditional listservs (mailing lists) and other peer support environments treat all contributors the same	The organization is able to identify, recognize, and empower high-value contributors
Solutions content authoring and defect submission are the exclusive tasks of employee groups	Passionate customers volunteer experience and enthusiasm to build knowledge and improve products while reducing authoring costs
Customers were recipients of support	Customers are trusted "partners" in support and are rewarded for their contributions
Customers working in related domains couldn't easily find fellow experts to discuss thorny issues	Access to experts and their knowledge is quick and easy to find, self-service is more valuable than ever
Finding answers to new or obscure questions is cumbersome and time-consuming	Solutions are immediately available to engineers and customers, deflecting incidents and increasing resolution time

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Mark Angel has worked in the fields of knowledge management, search, statistics and software development for more than two decades. As CTO of Knova Software, Angel is responsible for the product and technology vision of the company. Angel founded Kanisa in 1997 and joined Knova through a merger with ServiceWare Technologies in 2005.

Knova Software is a leading provider of service-resolution management applications that reduce service costs, increase revenues and improve customer satisfaction. Built on a next-generation search and knowledge management platform, Knova's suite of knowledge- empowered customer service applications automate the resolution process across multiple channels including contact centers, help desks, e-mail, forums and self-service sites. Industry leaders including Mattel, Microsoft, AOL, H&R Block, Novell, Merrill Lynch, McAfee, Reuters and Cingular rely on Knova's award-winning solutions to deliver world-class customer service. For more information, visit Knova.