1. Cost Deflection Case Study

2. Mission:
Improve customer experience of Microsoft Office Live Support
Community and decrease cost of product support
Strategy:
• Develop an interoperable community platform that consolidates existing
content repositories into a single portal.
ComBlu’s
Role:
• Integrate “spaghetti bowl” of support and product sites into single gateway for content and
conversation
• Activate customer advocates as product mentors and a word-of-mouth engine
• Drive preference and stimulate product subscriptions
Results:
• Decreased cost of support by > 60%
• Exceeded community answer rate (Goal: 50%;
Actual: 77%)
• Increased support page views by 77% for
Office Live Small Business and 359% for Office
Live Workspace
2

3. Case Study: Microsoft Office Live
Support Costs
per Minute
$0.70
$0.60
$0.50
$0.40
$0.68
$0.56
$0.30
$0.20
$0.24
$0.10
$0.00
Telephone
Email
3
Community

4. Case Study: Microsoft Office Live
What
happened
to cause
this drop?
4

5. Case Study: Microsoft Office Live
• Support agents failed to answer questions.
• The root cause turned out to be a technical problem that prevented agents from
responding to forum posts.
5

6. Microsoft Office Live Results: Exceeding Expectations
Office Live Small Business
Support Page View Increase Post ICSE:
Office Live Workspace
Support Page View Increase Post ICSE:
77%
359%
Percentage of Active Users Who Regularly Use the Community:
34%
Community Answer Rate Goal:
Actual Community Answer Rate:
50%
76.5%
Decrease in Per-incident Hard Dollar Customer Support Costs:
283%