Surfing 2.0

what is casium

Casium \ka-zē-əm\
Noun
Company that provides content on management topics to business schools, publications and corporations. Focuses on salient facts and potential management lessons, as in business school cases. Emphasizes clarity through tight writing and concise charting.

Marketing  -> Surfing 2.0

Helping the groundswell support itself

Rather than maintain your own costly support centers, you can implement support forums where customers assist each other

Supporting customers is a burden. Call centers are expensive; Forrester estimates that technical support calls cost between $10 and $20 per call; non–technical calls cost half of that. One method to reduce the cost of support centres was to outsource them. India profited greatly from this switch. Now, thanks to Web 2.0 tools, people are beginning toseek help from each other rather than from call centres. Customer support is coming less from the companies through call centres  than from the customers themselves.

Support at Dell is a prime example of this. Dell has implemented a support forum (www.dellcommunity.com) driven largely by some very committed and knowledgeable customers. Li and Bernoff cite the example of one of the main contributors, an electrical engineer who does not work for Dell, named Jeff Stenski. Since 1999, Jeff has been logged on to the forum for nearly 500,000 minutes or the equivalent of 123 working days a year. Over that time he has posted 20,000 items which have been read 2 million times. Every week about 7,000 Dell customers log in to the support site generating some 9,000 posts (the site has accumulated 4 million posts over its lifespan). If you are a technical company and know of a few Jeff Stenskis out there, let them work for you… (See Box: ROI of a support forum)

BearingPoint is a large systems integration consulting firm that competes with companies like IBM and Accenture. They needed a way to pull together all the information from white papers and client communications in a productive manner. So they developed MIKE2.0 (Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment) and then built a wiki around it: www.openmethodology.org. Since May 2007 the wiki is open to everybody; it now functions as a sort of Wikipedia for information management. BearingPoint’s bookings have increased significantly and management feels that the wiki is the main reason.

South Korea provides another interesting example. Lack of Korean-language content meant that Koreans could not use Web searches to find what they were looking for. A gaming company NHN created a question and answer site, Naver, which took off in a big way. Every day Koreans pose 40,0000 questions and receive 110,000 answers on the site. Naver contributed half of NHN’s profits in 2006. A classic example of people helping each other through the web.