Customers & Peers Speak: Who Should Support an Online Community?
“For a community, customers are a necessary ingredient. It’s not a community if only staff answers. The staff knows the product as it’s intended to be used. Customers know the same product as it’s used.”
Jan Cumps, Customer of Online Support Communities
I went out and asked several customers and peers about online support community balance
There are many different models and types of online support communities. I was curious to hear what both customers and my peers thought about online support community support balance instead of just writing a one-way article where it was only my thoughts alone. This article represents the diverse voice of customers and peers from all over the world.
Customers speak
How much of an online support community should be supported by customers helping each other?
“I would say (it should be) 30–40% support by customers (helping) each other.”
YK Chen, Director of New Business Development at Climax Technology Co., LTD.
“An online support community lives through the participation of the community members in the process of problem-solving. Otherwise, it would just be an extended company FAQ with customer-provided questions.”
Jens-Michael Gross, Engineer
“The more the better. Customers and volunteers supporting on the company’s support forums is a sign that the customers care about the product. A healthy mix is ideal. It’s a way for the company to learn how products are used, what parts are difficult to use. And to learn from the customer directly.”
Jan Cumps, @JanLCumps
“There is a balance between what scales and what feels that you’re being taken care of. With that I mean that having only company staff helping out those in needs, doesn’t scale very well. While having customers help out each other, scales very well. So obviously, from an economic perspective, it makes a lot of sense having only customers help each others.
However, this tends to alienate the actual company, that should act to some extent as the hub of the wheel. Even though I in general terms feel that the best is to have something that scales.
I also believe that the company itself must, at least to some extent, take some support — If not for any other reasons, than the fact that communities tends to becomes “hardened” after a while, making it difficult for new comers to join, due to the culture that tends to develop inside these exclusively ‘community driven ecosystem’ types of forums and support mechanisms.
The latter is for instance very visible at WikiPedia, which would have benefited from (some) more central control. Not to control, but rather to welcome aboard newcomers.”
Thomas Hansen, Senior Software Developer
“If products were perfectly designed, built and documented, Online Support Communities wouldn’t be needed.
Now, if customers are providing support, there is a real problem with the silicon vendor or solution provider.
The « release first — fix other » strategy goes too fast to polish the products and collaterals, hence the need of a fast-track support through forums and communities.”
Rei Vilo, Embedded Systems Developer
Do you feel an online support community shouldn’t have any customers helping each other and only be supported by company staff?
“No, it’s never enough to get support only by company staff.”
YK Chen, Director of New Business Development at Climax Technology Co., LTD.
“The staff alone can’t answer all the questions. It is, however, important that questions regarding specifications of the product will be answered by the staff, as this is usually information that cannot come from users. How much additional information/help can come from users or is required at all, depends on the product itself. Some products have a specific use (like a drill), and as soon as the specs are known, no more questions can come up. Others (like a book) will profit from additional user information (e.g., author’s writing history, fandom, etc.). And finally, components or tools that are meant to be used in a creative process (like a 3D printer or a microcontroller) heavily depend on user experience (why reinvent the wheel?) as well as on part-specific information that is not covered in the provided datasheet (because the datasheet writer didn’t imagine this information could be of any importance).”
Jens-Michael Gross, Engineer
“If it’s a formal helpdesk, then it is OK that it’s staffed by company staff only.
For a community, customers are a necessary ingredient. It’s not a community if only staff answers. Staff knows the product as it’s intended to be used. Customers know the same product as it’s used.
Customers helping each other is an asset.
Building a community type of relationship with staff and other customers is a great place to be in. And a hard one to achieve and keep.”
Jan Cumps, @JanLCumps
“Most customers have direct contact with a FAE.
When a customer posts a question on a forum, he/she may give clues on what projects and technologies they are working on, and competitors would be delighted to get that intelligence.
If a customer is doing the job of the silicon vendor or solution provider, it shouldn’t be rewarded!”
Rei Vilo, Embedded Systems Developer
In your opinion, what makes for a healthy online support community that you would turn to for help and be willing to recommend to others needing help?
“When both community members and company staff commit to share knowledge and help each other, I would willing recommend it.”
YK Chen, Director of New Business Development at Climax Technology Co., LTD.
“The bootstrap process is always the most challenging part. Building a base content by infusing support questions (coming in by mail or phone) and their answers into the community space will help to attract people (e.g., by Google hits). Getting a quick answer by the staff (initially) will keep them until enough additional content-providers have been attracted. If the product gains enough attention to justify an online support community at all, they will eventually find their way in. Then the staff activity can be reduced to the point where only those questions are answered where internal knowledge is required or where no community-provided help was given within a specific time limit.
But maybe the question shouldn’t be ‘what makes for a healthy’ but rather ‘what makes for a dead online support community?’. IMHO the biggest killer is when people don’t get any reaction and feel left alone. So a “sorry, we don’t have an answer but will continue to look for one” is much better than not answering at all because there is no answer to give (yet). It’s like package tracking — it won’t arrive faster if you check the tracking status every minute. But merely seeing that there is progress (even if not giving an arrival date at all) keeps people content.”
Jens-Michael Gross, Engineer
“Clear indication who’s staff and who isn’t.
Healthy communications.
Allow a critique censor and redact as little as possible.
Avoid Alpha behaviour — there is a risk that a community member scares a way newcomers.
Keep threads open.
Allow likes.
Little appreciations (a thank you, not a gift).
Share early news in the community.”
Jan Cumps, @JanLCumps
“I’m relying on customer-supported Online Support Communities as a Level 0 help desk, both posting questions and reading answers. Most of the time, silicon vendors provide Level 1 help on those communities. Here, the search engine is critical to find the right solution among many, and fast.
But for critical issues, I’m reaching the FAE directly, with NDA, full confidentiality and due diligence.
As a solution provider (IDE-related software, namely embedXcode), I’ve opted not to launch an Online Support Communities.
Because there are too many different parameters and thus issues to consider, raising a ticket goes through a strict procedure, mostly to get the relevant information I need to investigate and provide a fix.
Once a fix for a given issue has been found, I’m adding it into the product and/or I’m enriching the solution section of the Help Desk with it, on a continuous basis.”
Rei Vilo, Embedded Systems Developer
Peers speak
What should the balance of an online support community be? How much should customers be helping each other versus company staff?
“The majority should be customers helping customers. It’s one thing to hear from the company that ‘xyz’ should work. It’s an entirely different thing to hear from a peer that they’ve implemented it and it does work.
An active community, (is) where I hear from customers like myself who found a way to do what I/they needed to do, without being told I need to upgrade or buy something new.”
Shelly Sessoms, Community Manager of http://communities.sas.com/
“I was thinking about a narrative about communities starting from one of ends of the spectrum and working toward some point in the middle. Some start purely peer to peer, but community members can be frustrated when they don’t know under what conditions the company will participate. They may feel the company is deliberately ignoring issues that are super obvious, effectively pinned to the top of the boards for weeks or even months by the flood of comments.
On the other end, a community that the company is too heavy handed in answering and moderating may stiffle user engagement, sets the expectation of company answering everything which can be difficult to unwind. Working toward the middle.”
Mark Hopkins, Director of Customer Success at Devada
“First, Branding is important. If labelled ‘Support Community,’ it creates expectations for Customers that Support team members are accountable+responsible for the answers.
In that case, it’s not really a Community, but a Social Experience to interact with Support people.
If labelled ‘Product XYZ Community,’ it sets the expectation that everybody is here to help each other, everybody can create value. In that case, some Customers or Partners will seamlessly help each other, and it will create a Community, aka a set of people who have a shared purpose (succeeding with a product), and who care about each other so much that they will help each other for free, seamlessly.
It obviously doesn’t prevent Support (or R&D engineers) colleagues to be engaged, making sure to help key Community Members to learn the ropes so that they can scale things up.”
Matthieu Laurenceau, Sr Manager, Online Communities at BMC Software
“If it is hosted by a vendor, then the vendor should not rely on the good graces of the knowledgeable members alone. They should have active participation (more than a few posts a day) to help people solve their problems.
It should not be, submit a help ticket unless it gets to a very serious issue, and even then a summary should be posted back in the thread I have seen a lot of commercial sites that are like that they will tell the people to just submit a help ticket.
If you are a small hobbyist then they might get back to you, but often not if they were to just post for all to see the solution then it could help all while also reducing their needs to support the issues.”
Adam, @Aeroengineer1
Summary
Find balance. Without balance, the only thing you will find is that you are ultimately doomed to a quicksand of your creation. A healthy ecosystem has the involvement of everyone sharing their expertise and knowledge.
Hiding or not encouraging expertise and knowledge sharing only increases support gaps and makes for a miserable customer journey and staff so burned out they have LinkedIn on speed dial.
Jan Cumps noted in his response, “The staff knows the product as it’s intended to be used. Customers know the same product as it’s used.” I think this is critical when thinking about the balance between customers helping each other to staff support for an online support community.
If you leave customers out of the mix, you are left with a giant gap in your efforts. No matter a companies headcount or call centers, they’ll never be able to scale and be competitive. The only thing they will be accomplishing is a new form of a walled garden where solutions on how products are used are nowhere to be found and have to get asked again and again.
Who should support an online community?
Everyone in the community that can help share expertise and knowledge. Without the sharing of everyone, we create walled gardens and allow our competition a major opportunity to steal away disenchanted customers.
A healthy support community takes Jurassic Park pictures together (mic drop)
