Customer communities can drive customer service costs down. This looks at how the reduction in costs are created and provide some case studies.

1. a publication of
reduce support
costs with customer
communities:
Drive Customer Self-Service

2. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 1
Contents
Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs:
Customer Self-Service. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Self-Service: The What and the Why. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
FAQs that really are Frequently Asked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Search, the King of Self-Service. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Community as the Best Way to Build a Great
Customer Experience. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Extend the Shelf-Life of Social Conversations. . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
The Savings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Self-Service Support. Quantitatively and
Qualitatively Impacting your Bottom Line.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

3. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 2
Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service
Long before customers turned to Facebook to ask questions,
share feedback, and connect with brands, business owners have
been faced with a common problem—how do you scale support,
while keeping company costs low and providing a great customer
experience? Facebook alone has not had a huge impact on that
issue (and isn’t growth the business problem to have?). In the social
era, it’s more important than ever to provide positive customer
experiences. You simply can’t afford not to when people are
relying so heavily on the opinions of their peers to make purchase
decisions, and any perceived misstep on your part is likely to result
in negative word-of-mouth with unprecedented reach.
This can pose a challenge for a business that’s trying to scale
support quickly. Agent salaries are the most expensive aspect
of a support center, so keeping this cost low by understaffing the
team or resorting to static or automated responses is tempting.
Unfortunately, these solutions also have a tendency to result
in lower satisfaction levels, negative word-of-mouth, and poor
customer retention.
This is where support communities come in. When moderated
and curated effectively, customer support communities can result
in serious savings for companies. We worked with Dr. Natalie
Petouhoff to identify three major areas where support communities
can reduce costs and drive revenue by:
• Enabling excellent self-service for common issues,
• Improving agent workflow and efficiency
• Increasing customer retention and acquisition
This eBook is the first in a three-post series explaining how
customer communities can help companies realize significant
savings and revenue, along with the metrics and calculations to
measure the value. This book focuses on the way companies can
leverage community for customer self-service, freeing up agents
to deal with more complicated, technical problems. Stay tuned for
the next two, which will focus on the other ways you can leverage
community to improve agent efficiency and drive revenue.

4. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 3
Self-Service: The What and the Why
Perhaps you’re familiar with the expression: Customer service is
the new marketing. This doesn’t imply that your support agents will
now be responsible for crafting messaging, producing webinars, or
collecting customer testimonials. Rather, it suggests that providing
consumers with helpful, positive experiences at every touch point
in the customer lifecycle is critical for creating the kind of loyal
relationships that are the foundation of all repeat business and
brand advocacy.
So what does this mean for your company? Obviously you want to
ensure that your support agents are friendly, helpful, and have a
reasonable workload, so they can provide great service to everyone
that needs their help. A customer community may not help much
with those first two requirements (although a number of companies
do hire top support agents by identifying brand advocates in their
community).
A community can, however, greatly reduce the amount of one-off
requests your support agents get by making it easy for customers
to self-service their own answers, especially the ones to simple
questions that get asked over and over again. This frees up
your agents to deal with more complicated requests from other
customers, and prevents your customers from having to wait in a
phone queue or for an email response, when the answer to their
question—“what is the average wait time for delivery,” for example
—is simple and readily available in your community.
Self-service support implies a variety of easy-to-find and
understand resources, so your customers have access to up to
date, accurate information. A solid self-service strategy doesn’t
just benefit your support agents (although they will thank you
for implementing a good system). It’s extremely desirable for
your customers, who are bound to be relieved if they can find the
answers to their questions themselves, instead of having to call or
email. This is especially true if your target market is made up of
Millenials, but more and more it’s true of all generations. People
would rather find the answers to their questions themselves than
wait for a phone or email representative to help. Customers who
have faith that their issues will be dealt with a way that is painless
and effective are much more likely to bring their business back to
you next time they’re making a purchase.

5. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 4
FAQs that really are Frequently Asked
What’s a better source of FAQs than the real-time questions your
customers are asking every day? Odds are these are changing as
you release new products and features, the industry and market
change, and consumers move through the customer lifecycle. You
don’t need to pay someone to constantly be anticipating what the
next questions and issues will be. Instead, allow your community to
surface the logical questions, issues, and bugs that will inevitably
come up.
There are some guiding curation best practices that will help you
leverage your community as a dynamic, social place for FAQs.
“Social” isn’t just a buzzword here—it’s a key aspect to ensuring
that the “frequently” part of FAQ holds true. You want to make sure
your self-service is actively covering all the issues and questions
your customers are having today, not just the ones you envisioned
them having when you launched two years ago.
You’ll want to seed your community with FAQs before you even
launch, so that it acts as a self-service resource for your customers
from the minute your community goes live. You can make this more
dynamic by creating a product category tag for FAQs. When you tag
other pieces of content with your FAQ label, they will be added to
the attention-grabbing tab on your community home page, in real-
time. (See figure 1 to the left)
Employees can also mark the status of questions that have
been answered by the community as “answered,” so that other
customers know which community responses are company
verified. By curating your community this way, your customers and
prospects will have access to a great source of real-time questions
and answers, with the authority of company sanctioned FAQs.
Use Get Satisfaction’s simple copy and paste code snippets
(widgets, for you techies out there) to place FAQs and other
community conversations anywhere you want on your website.
This means that when people come to your home page, help site, or
product pages, they’ll be able to see the topics people are having in
real-time about your products and services. If they’re experiencing
an issue that others are having as well, they’ll be able to self-serve
their own answers right from your site. And you’ll be able to address
all of them in one fell swoop as soon as there are updates.
Remember, a key aspect of self-service is that answers are quick
and easy to find and understand. If you have all the information
your customers could need, but it’s buried in a support ghetto on
a difficult-to-find to page on your website, it isn’t likely to improve
anyone’s experience or reduce any workloads. Which brings us to
our next point about self-service…
Figure 1.

6. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 5
Search, the King of Self-Service
Think about it. Where’s the first place you turn when you have a
question or would like more information about something. Your
favorite search engine, right? The same is true for your customers.
You want to make sure that your self-service topics consistently
turns up in top results when your customers turn search.
Easy, effective searchability will perpetuate the success of your
self-service strategy exponentially. As customers search for the
answers to their questions and are brought to your community,
your engagement levels and pageviews will go up. This, in turn,
improves the ranking of these pages, driving even more customers
there to discover them as resources.
A Get Satisfaction customer community is uniquely structured
to rank well in search. The URL of each community conversation
has the company name in it, as well as the topic title phrased in
the words of the person who asked the question. That means
that each link is highly optimized for the company name and the
natural, organic language that customers are using to ask questions
and report problems. That’s important because the internal
language you use to refer to your products, features, and bugs
doesn’t necessarily map to the language your customers use. The
discrepancy between your language and that of your customers
can make it difficult for them to find the answers to their questions
in traditional FAQs and knowledge repositories, which were written
internally by someone drinking your company Koolaide.
Adding more pack to its SEO punch, Get Satisfaction is home to
more than 70,000 communities. Because of the sheer size of the
network, as well as the extent of customer-generated content and
engagement that takes place there, search engines crawl the entire
Get Satisfaction platform constantly. User-generated content is
viewed as authoritative by Google, so it ranks particularly well. Once
a topic is posted, it’s likely to start showing up in search almost
immediately.
Figure 2. When customers search for guidance on connecting their Mint.com account
with their bank, Get Satisfaction comes up in the top 3 results

7. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 6
Community as the Best Way to Build a Great Customer Experience
The more people of various
backgrounds, experiences, and
expertise levels you have
interacting in your community, the
more resources your customers
will have. This can work in a
number of ways. Perhaps yours is
a highly technical community,
bringing people together around
bike purchases, for example. By
connecting long-term bikers to
mechanics, to bike salesmen, and
to parents about to purchase
Junior’s first bike, you’re exposing
all of them to the unique
perspectives of the others.
Sometimes the self-service
that occurs in a community
was initially the result of a more
traditional support request. If one
customer has an issue that does
require them to reach out to your
traditional support channels, for
example, she can then act as a resource for the rest of your customers in the community. Once that answer exists in the community, it lives
there for future customers to view as a resource to answer the same question or issue.
Figure 3. Community input provides the well-rounded insight necessary to get to the bottom of issues quickly.

8. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 7
Extend the Shelf-Life of Social Conversations
When social first came on the scene as a business tool, many
companies jumped on board, without being entirely sure how best
to use it. They treated Twitter and Facebook as support channels,
without appreciating the shortcomings of these sites for that
purpose.
To be fair, there are some great points about Twitter and Facebook
as channels for customer engagement and support. They’re easily
accessible from multiple channels, and most consumers have
profiles on at least one of these sites.
But Facebook and Twitter alone are not sufficient resources for
your customers to self-serve their own answers. For one thing,
posts on these social sites have short shelf lives, so they do nothing
to reduce one-off common requests like FAQs and other simple-
to-solve issues. For another thing, they’re not optimized to connect
your customers to one another, which reduces the amount of
collaboration and social support that can take place.
You can improve self-service by using a customer community
with strong linkages to social networks. In this way, you can push
content from the community out to social networks, and import
questions from those networks into the community where you
can answer them more fully, and they’ll live on for much longer as
a resource for others. By taking fleeting social media content and
bringing the conversation into the community where it will have
a long shelf-life and can continue to evolve, your customers will
be able to self-serve the answers to questions that are commonly
being asked in these social spaces.
Figure 4.

9. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 8
The Savings
These benefits are not just anecdotal. We worked with Dr, Natalie
Petouhoff to calculate exactly how much the benefits of self-service
strategy can save a customer. Dr. Pethouoff examined a number of
Get Satisfaction customer case studies* to calculate estimates for
how much money companies can save with a community.
The savings, which can be realized by reducing agent-related
interactions through the enablement of self-service, can be
calculated by multiplying the cost of each interaction by the
volume of interactions each month, then factoring in the percent
the community has reduced it. One example Dr. Petouhoff studied
has 3,000 support instances a month, at a cost of $8 each. That
means the monthly cost these interactions have is $24,000. The
company in question* has reduced support interactions by 20%
through the self-service of their community, so they’re saving
$4,800 a month. Multiple that by 12 to find that they’re saving
$57,600 a year.
3,000 interactions/month x $8/interaction = $24,000
$24,000 reduced by 20% → 24,000 x .2 = $4,800/month
$4,800 x 12 = $57,600.
That’s quite a bit of savings for one company in a year just from
support cost reductions!
Dr. Petouhoff examined another company to find the amount of
money saved by having a community create a social Knowledge
Base (KB), instead of hiring a formal KB author to create a
structured KB. The company in question was creating 10 new KB
articles a month, and they were paying the author of these articles
($25/hour). Assuming that each article took 3 hours to write, they
were spending $750 a month on KB articles. That’s equal to $9,000
a year.
$25 x 10 x 3 = $750/month
$750 x 12 = $9,000/year
With a social, community-based KB, the community writes the
response or best practice, then the community manager certifies
them as “answered” and belonging to the social KB. This process
eliminates the need for a formal KB author, meaning you free up
contractor dollars or employee time to focus on other issues.
*To respect the privacy of the companies analyzed for the study, names and identifying information has been removed.

10. Customer Communities Reduce Support Costs: Customer Self-Service 9
Self-Service Support. Quantitatively and Qualitatively Impacting your Bottom Line.
There you have it. Enabling self-service support drives real value
by freeing up your agents to focus on more technical issues.
It also improves customer experiences and satisfaction by
empowering them to answer their own questions quickly, easily,
and comprehensively. By making the support experience positive
for your customers, you’re giving them a reason to come back to
you again and again.
For self-service support to truly be effective (and reduce agent-
related support costs), it has to provide customers with the
answers they need quickly, easily and consistently. If it doesn’t have
the most current, up-to-date information, your customers will still
be forced to contact an agent.
The good news is you don’t have to provide this alone. By leveraging
a customer community, you’re providing your customers with the
tools they need to find the answers to simple questions all on their
own. This is good for your support team, good for your company,
and (most importantly) satisfying for your customers.
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