Making Support Social
Putting the Pieces Together

Social media is fundamentally changing how businesses and their customers interact.

Nowhere will the impact of the social Web be stronger, or more beneficial, than in service and support. Customers have always helped each other, and social technologies give them new, more scalable platforms for helping even more. There’s a proliferation of social technologies, but a small number of integrated features can help make support social.

Communities: Support forums are the most popular social technology for service and support. Unfortunately, most communities are not well integrated into other pieces of the service website. As a result, they’re used less than they should be. Without integration, users wonder, “Should I search the know-ledgebase? Open a support incident? Or go to the community?”—a sign that something is broken in the customer experience.

Integration of support communities means:

• A single search can return results from a knowledgebase, from community discussions and from any other relevant resource;
• A single log-in provides access to communities and all other support services;
• Users can move easily among channels—for example, using a search query as the start of a new community question, or allowing a question in the community to escalate into a support incident automatically if it’s not resolved quickly;
• Community content can be easily structured and added to the knowledgebase; and
• Community questions and support incident submissions can automatically trigger a knowledgebase search.

Reputation for users and content—such as star ratings, user levels or “resolved” flags—motivates quality participation. Trusted community members should be recognized and designated with a special title, such as Novell’s “Novell Knowledge Partner.” These high-reputation individuals should be provided with special access to product teams, pre-release products and back-line support. Knowledge inside the communities should be harvested for the knowledgebase as support professionals use it to solve customer problems. And enterprise employees should have a lightweight, respectful, but visible presence in the community: letting customers shine, never being defensive, but adding their voice to the conversation when it can bring clarity or closure to topics.

Support blogs: Blogging is another easy way for service and support organizations to deliver information while building relationships. Most support content is impersonal; knowledgebase articles, FAQs and technical documentation are deliberately corporate in their feel. Blogs, on the other hand, reflect the voice and style of an individual, generally an executive or subject-matter expert. As such, they humanize the support experience for customers, making support less transactional and more conversational. Blogs allow and encourage responses.

Blogs are also great for addressing high-priority emerging issues. Blog postings can be easily shared so others can spread the word on their own blogs, status updates or forum postings. Popular blogs score high in search-engine results, giving them much more prominence than a knowledgebase article. They’re also excellent for addressing how-to or value-added topics: “did you know you could do this?”

Social networks: Status feeds integrated into knowledge management and incident management applications can turbocharge productivity. Sure, it’s nice to hear from your friend on Facebook that “Snuffles had a great day at the dog park,” but wouldn’t it be better if a colleague’s status is “I just figured out how to work around the data dump bug in version 3.3”? No offense to Snuffles, but we think the answer is an unequivocal “yes.”

People are people first, and employees second. The integration of social networking into enterprise applications—”social in the workflow”—provides an informal communication channel that is crucial to real team building. This is especially true with global teams and work from home staff—social in the workflow is replacing the disappearing water cooler.

Ideation: Most support organizations already have a process for performing problem analysis to provide product feedback to development teams. By hosting ideation sites, or “idea storms,” they have a new, broader source of input for that process. And because ideation feedback comes directly from customers, in their own words, they’re seen as authentic by product development teams, making those teams eager to respond.

Customer-generated media: Most knowledge management teams we talk with would like to create multimedia such as how-to videos. But budget pressures and a lack of appropriate skills often make it hard for them to do as much as they’d like. This is where customers can jump in.

Support organizations should make it easy for customers to contribute:

• Tips and tricks;
• Code samples, sample configurations or other aids to implementing the product;
• Knowledge articles and documentation; and
• Multimedia “how-to”s and training.

There can be as much or more know-ledge outside of service and support than inside. By using an integrated suite of social capabilities integrated with each other, with knowledge management and incident management, enterprises can channel the passion of customers to drive more customer satisfaction and success.  

---

Consona offers the only combined knowledge management and incident management product that is KCS Verified v4 by the Consortium for Service Innovation. More than 1,000 customers worldwideuse Consona CRM solutions to manage process efficiencies, drive revenue and enable extraordinary customer experiences.

This article has been excerpted from a larger article by Tim Hines, which may be accessed by logging onto www.consona.com/crm