Successful Support Communities
Published by
The Association of
Support Professionals
More than ever, technology companies have embraced the idea that it’s good to encourage communities of customers and other stakeholders. Of course, many of the benefits that communities are supposed to bring—self-service call resolution, enhanced loyalty, early warning about public relations blow-ups—can be tricky to quantify. And plenty of managers still feel that “letting customers talk to each other is just asking for trouble.” But for better or worse, communities exist whenever a company has customers. The only real question is whether these informal communities can be transformed into serious corporate assets.
That’s often a frustrating question even for managers who are strong voice-of-the-customer
advocates. Plenty of communities, both online and live, never get beyond a zombie-like
state, not quite dead, not quite alive. Investments in promotion, new technology, and
community organizing often don’t seem to make a difference—the hoped-for members just don’t show up. Oops.
What does it take to create a successful community? There doesn’t seem to be a set of simple guidelines. The social media experts mostly focus on consumer companies with huge customer bases; the recommendations they emphasize include openness and quick response to complaints about service snafus—good practices, but not much of a formula for much smaller, technically-oriented communities.
In fact, support communities tend to be about: expertise more than anything else. The chief attraction of these communities is likely to be the presence (real or virtual) of exceptionally knowledgeable users and advisors, people with hands-on experience with products and solutions. These experts show up because it’s good for their reputations—or maybe just their egos—to be seen as extra-smart, plugged-in, and influential. And the rest of the community shows up to learn from the experts and perhaps to share an occasional bit
of wisdom themselves. That’s a very different dynamic than you might see on a site for
disgruntled airline passengers or Lady Gaga fans.
It’s also worth noting that successful communities aren’t necessarily Web-based. Our
industry (and the world in general) has a long history of communities that came together
regularly for live events—conferences, user group meetings, trade shows, roundtables,
and the like. Yes, online communities are cheaper to organize and more spontaneous. But
human beings are social animals: We love to get together in crowds and hold near-chaotic
conversations that would make little sense online. (Heck, even social media enthusiasts
hold big conferences all the time…)
The variety of community formats creates its own questions. How do we measure the
relative value of an online forum vs. an annual user group meeting? Should we invest
in a special home for highly influential community members, such as power users, press
and analysts, and third-party resource people (e.g., consultants, resellers, and trainers)?
Is there a risk that community members will air their grievances in public, compete with
our company’s own services, or expose us to legal liabilities?
To help answer questions about best practices for building support communities, the
ASP surveyed a variety of software and technology-based companies about the role
such communities play in each company’s business. We collected useful data from 120
respondents, and we also asked an open-ended question about the “most important lesson
learned” about generating high levels of participation.
Here’s what they told us:
COMMUNITIES • 3
■
TYPES OF COMMUNITIES
As the chart above suggests, technology companies typically support a variety of community
types, ranging from substantial projects like online forums and user group conferences to
simple Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups. These communities serve different functions—
call deflection, revenue generation, brand enhancement, etc.—and it’s not always easy to
tell when investments in community-building have been “successful” in terms of ROI and
performance.
But the common perception is that
growth
is almost always a good way to measure a
community’s relative success. A fast-growing community is clearly delivering significant
value to its participants, while a community with low participation and low growth is almost
certainly in trouble. There may not be industry-standard growth benchmarks, but growth is
a long-term metric: If the trendline is steadily upward (or even better, steeply upward), the
community is on the right track.
What kind of relative growth can be expected for these various types of communities? We
asked our respondents to rate the activity level of each type of community they supported:
• “Online forum (hosted by your company or
independent)”:
Online discussion forums have
become an essential—or nearly essential—
component of Web support sites: 79% of our
respondents said they either host their own
forum, or a company-specific site is independently
operated. But almost two-thirds of these forums
are either “Barely alive” or “Growing slowly”—
not an encouraging sign. Nevertheless, the
potential for active participation certainly exists:
The remaining one-third are either “Growing fast”
or in a “Wow!” state.
“Which of the following types of user communities currently
exist for your company?”
Number of
TYPES OF COMMUNITIES
As the chart above suggests, technology companies typically support a variety of community
types, ranging from substantial projects like online forums and user group conferences to
simple Facebook pages and LinkedIn groups. These communities serve different functions—
call deflection, revenue generation, brand enhancement, etc.—and it’s not always easy to
tell when investments in community-building have been “successful” in terms of ROI and
performance.
But the common perception is that
growth
is almost always a good way to measure a
community’s relative success. A fast-growing community is clearly delivering significant
value to its participants, while a community with low participation and low growth is almost
certainly in trouble. There may not be industry-standard growth benchmarks, but growth is
a long-term metric: If the trendline is steadily upward (or even better, steeply upward), the
community is on the right track.
What kind of relative growth can be expected for these various types of communities? We
asked our respondents to rate the activity level of each type of community they supported:
• “Online forum (hosted by your company or
independent)”:
Online discussion forums have
become an essential—or nearly essential—
component of Web support sites: 79% of our
respondents said they either host their own
forum, or a company-specific site is independently
operated. But almost two-thirds of these forums
are either “Barely alive” or “Growing slowly”—
not an encouraging sign. Nevertheless, the
potential for active participation certainly exists:
The remaining one-third are either “Growing fast”
or in a “Wow!” state.
“Which of the following types of user communities currently
exist for your company?”
Number of respondents: 120
21%
44%
23%
12%
Barely alive Growing
slowly
Growing
fast
Wow!
66%
65%
65%
59%
55%
33%
Online forum
79%
Facebook
User group conference
Press & analyst network
Third-party network
LinkedIn group
Developer network
4 • COMMUNITIES
• “Facebook community”:
Surprisingly, Facebook
pages have become the second most popular type
of support community among our respondents,
which probably reflects Facebook’s popularity
and the minimal effort involved in setting up a
page. But ease of setup doesn’t always translate
into active participation: A third of Facebook
communities are “Barely alive” and only 4% are
growing at a “Wow!” rate. Moreover, Facebook
discussions often seem to be more entertaining
than serious: “Facebook has been growing
slowly,” one respondent reported. “We find we
get the best interactions by sharing ‘fun facts’ about our company, the history of statistics,
and how our products are connected to business and industry.”
• “User group conference (company sponsored or
independent)”:
Organizing a good user group
event is a major undertaking, so it’s remarkable
that this type of forum ranks so highly among
community types. One likely reason: User group
conferences are popular. Almost half of our
respondents report that their events are growing
rapidly, and 19% say the growth is in the “Wow!”
range (the highest rate in our survey). Said one
respondent: “This is the first year we had a user
conference and we have had a overwhelming
success rate with clients wanting to attend.”
• “Network of press, analysts, and bloggers
who follow the company”:
The press and
analyst community typically gets little attention
from support and services groups, but our
respondents at least recognize that there’s a body
of influencers out there who can have a large
impact on the company’s reputation, especially
in enterprise markets.
• “Network of third-party consultants, resellers,
trainers, services providers”:
Support group
members tend to be actively involved with thirdparty
services providers, many of whom have
offerings that either complement or compete with
the company’s own post-sale services offerings.
In this community segment, high growth is
not necessarily a goal: Most companies would
prefer a relatively stable, experienced thirdparty
network, and that’s what about half of our
respondents said they have.
32%
42%
23%
4%
Barely alive Growing
slowly
Growing
fast
Wow!
14%
39%
28%
19%
Barely alive Growing
slowly
Growing
fast
Wow!
18%
50%
22%
10%
Barely alive Growing
slowly
Growing
fast
Wow!
17%
52%
20%
11%
Barely alive Growing
slowly
Growing
fast
Wow!
COMMUNITIES • 5
• “LinkedIn group”:
LinkedIn has a lower profile
than Facebook at this point, though LinkedIn’s focus
on business users may make it a better community
platform in the long run. (The ASP has a very active
forum on LinkedIn, incidentally.) One respondent
reported that “Our LinkedIn group is the most active
and productive channel within our social media
program. We moderate membership and encourage
people to ask best-practices questions so that they can
learn from each other. Our members have been very
responsive and highly professional in their approach.”
Nevertheless, LinkedIn usually seems to be a tough
place to establish a community: 81% of our respondents said their LinkedIn groups are either
“Barely alive” or “Growing slowly.”
• “Network of developers (membership required)”:
For high-end, complex products, many companies
now offer special programs for outside developers
and other power users. These are generally fee-based
programs that require expert-level skills, so this is
another community where “Growing slowly” is
normal (69% of respondents).
■
WHAT’S THE PAYOFF?
Even with low-overhead communities like Facebook and LinkedIn, most companies expect to
see at least some payoff—
preferably more concrete than “the group is growing like crazy” or
“customers love it”. To identify the success factors that are typically most persuasive, we asked
our respondents to select factors that play a “signficant” role in generating internal support for
support communities. Here’s how they ranked our six choices (multiple selections were allowed):
36%
45%
14%
4%
Barely alive Growing
slowly
Growing
fast
Wow!
15%
69%
13%
3%
Barely alive Growing
slowly
Growing
fast
Wow!
“Which of the following factors play a *significant* role in
generating internal support for your support communities?”
Number of respondents: 120
65%
63%
48%
31%
22%
18%
Retention
Call deflection
Competitive edge
Renewal
Resources
Sales channel
6 • COMMUNITIES
• “Improves customer retention”:
It’s somewhat unexpected to find retention as the topranking
success factor for communities, since retention is relatively hard to measure—
especially as distinct from such traditional retention factors as product quality, price, and
customer satisfaction. But if top management typically seems persuaded that investing in
better support communities is a strategy for hanging on to more customers, that’s good
news.
• “Reduces demand for tech support”:
The more conventional argument for support
communities—especially online forums—is that they’re part of a self-service cost
management strategy. In fact, communities usually do reduce a company’s support burden;
the risk is that too often simple call deflection becomes the
only
measure of a community’s
value, to the detriment of investments in other aspects of success.
• “Gives the company a competitive edge”:
Again, this is a factor that’s a little tough to
measure. But robust community activity—online and real-world—is certainly a positive
sign to buyers that a company has an enthusiastic installed base and is unlikely to stonewall
customers with problems. “It helps that customers love our software to begin with,”
one respondent said, “but offering great support and a passionate user community are
differentiators our competitors can’t compete with.”
• “Improves support renewal rates”:
Renewal rates as a factor apply only to companies
that sell fee-based support and maintenance plans, so the total of responses here is smaller
than we see with the more general “customer retention” factor. But maintenance renewal
rates represent large revenue streams and are easily tracked, which makes the community
contribution especially compelling in generating internal backing. As one respondent
noted, “The better the participation, the more likely the customer will renew.”
• “Gives users access to third-party resources”:
One less-mentioned but important value
of communities is that they provide a neutral platform for showcasing developers,
trainers, consultants, authors, and other independent support resources. Many vendors
are sensitive about endorsing third-party resources; by letting community members make
recommendations, the legal exposure is (presumably) reduced.
• “Serves as a major product sales channel”:
Community members tend to be enthusiastic
about discussing a company’s latest products, technology breakthroughs, services
offerings, and the like. An especially good way to give community members a stake in
the product pipeline is to solicit their feedback and suggestions. “Make the participants
feel important and wanted,” one manager recommended. “We found that setting up a
forum for feedback on the site and another for feedback on the product was helpful.” Very
often, these product-related discussions reach more actual customers than the mainstream
trade and business press, and a community’s enthusiasm usually translates directly into
an uptick in sales.
■
TANGIBLE BENEFITS
Since most companies seem to have a reasonable idea of the benefits their communities
generate, a natural follow-on question would be: How do you measure and demonstrate
those benefits? When we asked our respondents this question, however, the results suggest a
surprising lack of hard data: 60% of respondents reported that they have little or no feedback
about the impact of their communities, and only 13% had any “formal metrics.” Support
organizations are ordinarily serious collectors of performance data, so this absence of data
is striking:
COMMUNITIES • 7
But when we look more closely at these groups of respondents, some interesting patterns
emerge. In particular, there are dramatic differences between the 13% of respondents with
formal metrics (best performers) and the 14% whose “customers don’t seem to care” (worst
performers):
• The best performers support many
more total communities
(an average of five different
types of communities per company), vs. an average of 2.7 community types for the
worst performers.
• The best performers have
better growth rates
for their communities (5% “barely alive,
41% “growing slowly”, 37% “growing fast”, and 16% “Wow!”) vs. overall poor growth
for the worst performers (67% “barely alive”, 19% “growing slowly,” 14% “growing
fast,” and none with “Wow!” growth rates).
What do these differences suggest? A reasonable conclusion is that the top performers
manage their communities more aggressively, while the worst performers are more passive.
For example, intensive management means that a “barely alive” community wouldn’t be
left untended: It would either be energized or terminated. And the greater use of formal
metrics by the top performers has two implications—first, that support managers in this
group have real data to use for diagnosing problems, and second, that they have a way to
show a tangible ROI on their investments in community building, and thus a better chance
of getting additional funding.
■
THREE SUCCESS STRATEGIES
As part of our support community survey questionnaire, we asked respondents to describe “the
most important lesson you’ve learned about generating high levels of participation.” Their answers
identified three areas that are likely to be key priorities for any kind of support community:
• Get to critical mass quickly:
Rapid growth isn’t just a symptom of success—it’s almost
always an essential part of making the community
interesting.
Just as people are drawn
to big, lively cities, customers gravitate toward robust online forums, well-attended user
group conferences, and rich third-party networks. “To some extent, communities are
a numbers game,” said community development expert David Kay. “A fraction of the
“Has your company been able to measure these benefits in
tangible ways?”
Number of respondents: 120
13%
27%
46%
14%
Definitely, based on formal
metrics (renewals, sales, call
deflection, etc.)
Somewhat, based mostly on
favorable customer feedback
Little tangible feedback, but we
feel our communities create a
positive impression
Customers don’t seem to care, so
we’re reluctant to commit further
resources
8 • COMMUNITIES
people you invite will join, and a fraction of those who join will participate, and fewer
still will participate on a grand scale. So, along with everything else, make sure you’re
reaching lots of people.”
“The community must be active, when it slows down, traffic dies off fast.”
“Gotta market it like it’s a product. We tried to do a forum just by adding the feature to
our support website, with no success. Now we have Facebook, Twitter and blogs, and
we are highly publicizing it and it is gaining much more momentum.”
“First impressions are key. If a user visits a support forum and finds old, abandoned
threads without people providing answers… the user will move on and typically never
come back. We started with a few communities based on top products (those with
significantly higher repetitive and Tier 1 type issues being reported) and assigned a
number of staff people to those communities to monitor threads, post tips, answer
questions, etc. After a period of time, we ramped down internal participation as external
participation picked up. We continued to have a few people monitoring for frequent
questions/issues, but they remained mainly in the background. We then ramped up
staffing on new communities and repeated the process.”
“Focus on the kickoff process. If you don’t get enough hype around the community at
its launch, it will be difficult to increase usage down the road.”
“Content is king. Customers will use your community if they know they’ll get interaction
from other members and be able to learn and solve issues. The new generation of business
employees expects a community. They’ll look there first and seem to prefer that medium
of communication. Find ways to foster and grow the community!”
• Make sure you attract experts and champions:
Critical mass is more than a straight
numbers game. In fact, the vast majority of participants are likely to be “lurkers”—people
who come to read postings (or who act like wallflowers at live events). The real backbone
of a support community is invariably a core group of experts, mavens, and super-users.
They see the community as a place where they can show off their knowledge, so one
way to attract more experts is to reward their contributions with reputation-enhancing
visibility.
“You need knowledgeable customers actively engaged on the forum and willing to share
with other customers about possible solutions. If customers post questions and no one
answers (except our company staff), it’s not deemed successful. They have other routes
to get to our support; the forum is designed for customer-to-customer relationships.”
“Super-user development and management is a delicate and time-consuming process.
Super-users need to be managed to make sure that they stay on friendly terms with the
company, and that their expectations need to be properly managed so that they do not
become detractors.”
“Make sure the community super-users feel the system is theirs.”
“Building an advocate base is the most important aspect. Users come to speak to other
users, not just us.”
“The contributors must be quickly viewed as technical power users. Thorough responses
are important to adding value—speed is less of an issue if the response is accurate and
reflects a good understanding of the topic.”
COMMUNITIES • 9
“Look for the influencers outside the community, and personally invite them in. Ask
for their help in making design decisions. Ask them to try having their conversations
inside the community and see how it works for them.”
• Define your own role:
One remarkably tough problem, our respondents note, is figuring
out their own position in the community hierarchy. The community can’t be left on autopilot,
but moderators who jump in too quickly can be a turnoff for expert participants
who want to show off their own knowledge.
“We find that even though we have a community (added in 2010), customers would
still rather call or e-mail support for answers. Part of this, I think, is we’re just too quick
to respond.”
“Getting an official response from the company in 17-21 hours helps keep members
coming back for answers, thus reducing phone center support costs.”
“We maintain a 24-hour moderator-response service level for posts that don’t have a
community-generated response. This helps deflect cases from assisted support.”
“The more employees from all over the company participate, the more customers feel
that they are being listened to. Surprisingly, it has required quite substantial efforts to
get our employees to understand the value of the community and to encourage them
to participate.”
“Employee engagement is essential in our community. Roughly 25% of the answers
to customer questions come from employees, and customers appreciate that we’re
involved.”
“If there is a notable staff presence in a role beyond that of a moderator, the forum
basically becomes another support channel, as opposed to something valuable to users
that is differentiated from support via a support contract.”
“Be human! Speak in your own voice—don’t be robotic. Don’t shy away from negative
threads, use them as an opportunity to build relationships and show the world how
your company responds when things go wrong.”
“Fight the urge to ‘police’ and ‘shape’ the community conversation. Allow your customers
a rich forum in terms of features and content and allow them to openly share their
experiences with your company, both good and bad. This will result in a more vibrant
community and offer your company an important feedback channel to improve your
products and services.”
■
SIX SIMPLE METRICS
By David Kay
Not long ago, it seemed like there weren’t any reasonable measures for the health and
effectiveness of communities. Now it seems like there are too many! We often see eSupport
and community leaders trying to grapple with page after page of bar charts, line charts,
and tables, unsure what to pay attention to, and unsure what to report up the management
chain.
10 • COMMUNITIES
When we look at communities, we can simplify matters by cutting things down to six
measures—three activities, and three outcomes. Activities, and trends in activities, will
tell us if the community is healthy. The outcomes let us know if they’re effective—or, more
precisely, part of an effective eSupport strategy.
Activities: Monitoring Community Health
Activity measures in general tell us if the things we’re planning are happening. Good
activity measures don’t guarantee success, but poor measures are a good indicator that
something’s wrong. (A cocktail party with 30 guests isn’t necessarily a good party, but
one with only three guests is likely to be a bust.) Activity measures for communities tell
us if people are participating in the conversations. If enough people are participating, that
suggests they’re finding it valuable.
• Page views:
We’re still not sure whether a tree falling in a forest makes any noise, but
it’s a sure bet that a post that isn’t seen isn’t doing any good. More page views equals
more opportunities for value creation. This is important to trend over time. It’s also
interesting to see where the page views are coming from—your community site? Selfservice
search? Google and other Internet search engines? This metric can help you
refine your marketing strategy, and perhaps help you fend off those colleagues who
want to lock your community behind a paywall.
• Active contributors:
How many people are not only registered and looking, but actively
participating in a discussion (either starting a thread or following up) within the last
thirty days? In the standard 90/9/1 model of community engagement, this measures
the nominal 9%—although in the real world, the number is often significantly less than
9%. Trends are as important as the actual numbers for this measure.
• Posts per day by forum:
This is what communities researcher Dr. Michael Wu refers to
as “liveliness”—is there a good buzz? Are we at critical mass? For a specific forum, it
takes at least five posts a day to be lively; those with fewer might best be merged with
other forums until the topic attains sufficient momentum.
Outcomes: Gauging Community Effectiveness
Outcomes are the business results we are seeking from our community initiatives… and in
fact, from all our eSupport initiatives. If the activities tell us the “what,” outcomes tell us
the “so what.”
A challenge with outcome measures is that no one activity can “take credit” for the outcome.
This is frustrating when trying to justify investment in a specific program, but it makes
sense: Wouldn’t it be odd if a self-service program and a communities program were trying
to accomplish different outcomes? Shared goals encourage teamwork, and are a fact of life
in the enterprise—no one group gets credit for company profitability, either (not that the
sales team won’t try.)
If teasing the value created by communities apart from other efforts becomes a paramount
consideration, the activity measures at least provide a rough order-of-magnitude starting
point. If there are 100 times as many community interactions as there are live chats, it’s
reasonable to argue that the community program is a more significant driver of a Net
Promoter Score, while if there are ten times more page views in the knowledgebase than in
communities, the knowledgebase might be making a bigger impact.
• Deflection:
The most easily quantified financial benefit from communities is contact
COMMUNITIES • 11
(or case) deflection. Deflection in communities is measured just like deflection in selfservice:
It’s the percentage of people who are successful in accomplishing their goal,
times the percentage who are entitled and intending to open a case, times the number of
times people use the communities to resolve an issue. That is, Deflection = Success Rate
x Escalation Rate x Sessions. While calculating success and escalation rate are worthy
of a paper all their own, the quick answer is that you should call your community users
and ask them about their last experience—were they successful? Did they or would they
have escalated? (As you might suspect, escalation rates are lower—often far lower—
than people assume.)
Note that communities deflect call center contacts by having a customer ask a question
and get a helpful response. But it’s far more common that a third person will come along
later, see the exchange, and use it to solve his or her problem. Accordingly, if community
posts are returned by self-service search or by Google, it makes sense to calculate a
blended deflection number across communities and self-service.
• Satisfied demand for support:
Support is in the business of creating value for customers,
not just closing and deflecting cases. So every successful interaction in the communities
provides value. It’s hard to assign a dollar value to satisfying a customer’s need, but
that doesn’t make it less real. Satisfied Demand = Success Rate x Sessions. As with
deflections, this may be a combined number across self-service and communities.
• Loyalty:
However you measure loyalty—typically as a Net Promoter Score, Renewal
Rate, or Repurchase Rate—communities should affect this positively. Look for changes
in loyalty especially when community activity measures have changed significantly
within a given time period.
Six measures, two slides… and a very telling picture of just how well your communities are
going.
David Kay is an independent consultant to customer service and support organizations, and the vendors who serve them.
David’s focus is on knowledge and collaboration as vehicles to deliver radically improved support, cost effectively. He can
be reached via e-mail at david@dbkay.com
.
■
SUPPORT AND THE ONLINE CONVERSATION
By Mikael Blaisdell
Call the technology what you will—Social Media, Support 2.0, Forums—it’s still a conversation
that takes place online among anywhere from two to literally thousands of people. Such
conversations have been of incredible value to many people. They have also been hugely
frustrating, for like all conversations, there is… the Noise Factor.
In the typical trade-show, speed-networking, or post-seminar time, the volume level in the
room can reach deafening levels. If you can even get to the people you really want to engage,
you may not be able to hear them or they you. At the same time, the golden informational
nuggets can be completely obscured by the incorrect or off-topic idle chatter all around.
The online conversation is no different from the crowded, noisy room: Without effective
moderation, the value can quickly be lost.
In many online resources, the topic list of conversations may stretch across dozens or even
hundreds of pages. While inexperienced participants, “newbies,” often routinely create new
threads for questions that have already been answered over and over, even veterans can fall
12 • COMMUNITIES
into the same trap because they simply can’t find an existing discussion that’s relevant. Even
if you happen to stumble upon the “right” discussion, the thread may go on for literally
hundreds of entries before a viable solution emerges.
Today’s online discussion applications offer some powerful tools that can reduce the noise
level considerably if used properly. To discourage the creation of duplicate topic threads,
for instance, the system may first search and display existing threads before creating a new
topic. Unfortunately, even this method may not catch all of the duplicates, so there needs to
be effective pruning and transfer functionality to help moderators merge duplicates into a
single thread. Another feature in some systems allows the moderator or the thread’s creator
to select an individual reply as the primary answer to a search query.
Another feature of new systems is that they can automatically notify members by e-mail about
new posts on a topic of ongoing interest. However, these notifications can also contribute to
the noise factor for individual users if the conversation goes on for too long or if there are
people posting off-topic or irrelevant notes.
Just as a good facilitator in a small group discussion keeps the focus going, a good moderator
will intervene to reduce the level of chatter. A useful feature in this regard is when the
moderator can set a particular user’s profile so that all of their posts have to be approved
before they can be published to the group.
There is a balance to be found between permitting too many individual discussions to
remain in the overall topic list, and having too few. Too many, and it can become increasingly
difficult to find anything worthwhile, and the resource will tend to decline in effectiveness
and participation. At the same time, too few discussions can discourage visitors and set
an impression of overall inactivity. Here is where the role of the moderators is especially
important, for they should be the ones who turn completed conversations into knowledge
articles before archiving the thread and removing it from view. They should also start useful
topics themselves.
Keep in mind that a good online conversation is just that: a conversation. The benefits to
both the participants and the sponsoring company can be enormous. But it isn’t something
that reliably happens by accident, and it won’t maintain itself.
Mikael Blaisdell was the “wizop” of two CompuServe forums in the 80’s and early 90’s, starting when access was via a
300-baud telephone modem and only in the evening hours. He has advised companies for many years about the use of forums
and other technology resources for effective customer support, customer retention and enhancing per-customer profitability
levels. Based in Alameda, California, he may be reached via e-mail at: mikael@mblaisdell.com.
COMMUNITIES • 13
COMPLIMENTS OF THE ASP
This complimentary report is part of an ongoing series of research monographs
published by the Association of Support Professionals (ASP). ASP research reports are
designed to provide relevant benchmarks and actionable “best practices” guidelines
for technical support operations.
Each year, the ASP publishes four or five reports like this one, available to members at
no charge. In addition, the ASP maintains an extensive library of reports from previous
years (a complete list with executive summaries is available on the ASP Web site), along
with various directories, forums, articles, and other resources.
Recent reports have covered topics such as these:
• Tech Support Salary Survey
• Front-Line Support Incentives
• A Guide to 7×24 Support Plans
• Setting Limits on Unlimited Support
• Maintenance & Services Ratios
• A Guide to Better Tech Notes
• The Great Customer Experience
• Trends in Fee-Based Support
• Management Performance Benchmarks
• A Guide to Packaged Services
• Customer Satisfaction Benchmarking
• Web Support Assessment Techniques
• How to Grow Professional Services
• Maintenance Renewal Rates
• Tech Support Reporting Channels
eBroadcasts
eBulletins
