Improve Your Top and Bottom Line With Customer Self-Service Via a Customer Community

February 27, 2013

Calling all support and marketing professionals! Want to learn how you can reduce support costs, while improving customer acquisition and retention? www.GetSatisfaction.com VP of Product Marketing, Scott Hirsch, interviewed yours truly about how you can leverage customer communities to do just that. Here’s the slides:

Improving Customer Service with Communities And Gaining Social Media ROI from Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

And if you want to listen to the presentation: Using Social Technology to Reduce Support Costs and Improve Agent Efficiency

In this interactive session, Scott and I cover how social, online communities:

Fit into your customer experience strategy
Deflect support email and phone calls to agents, while improving customer satisfaction
Generate content that will increase the efficiency of your marketing and PR organizations
Increases customer acquisition, retention and upsell…

Here’s the ebook based on based on my research on how Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service if you want to dive deeper into how you can reduce support costs by leveraging communities for your business.

Dr. Natalie’s Research On Reducing The Costs of Customer Self-Service With GetSatisfaction.com from Dr. Natalie Petouhoff

A community is an online platform that facilitates conversations between companies and their customers across digital channels. The content and connections in the community can be leveraged by businesses for marketing, service/support, sales, brand awareness, and R&D.

Community ROI comes from reducing support costs by reducing the number of customer interactions. How?

–Curate user-generated content for one-to-many support (especially good for “long-tail” content)

–Search engine optimization (SEO)

–Identify and activate super-users for peer-to-peer support

Mint.com was able to:

• See a 75% reduction in support tickets in the first 60 days

• Use the Community as primary support channel

Community ROI comes from reducing support costs by improving support efficiency with multi-channel, real-time, and integrated into business workflows. How?

–Offers multi-channel community (web, mobile, social)

–Integrates with business systems

–Improves knowledgebase efficiency

Restaurants on the Run found they were able to: