How to dramatically reduce costs with community-driven support deflection for businesses and brands

Introduction

As companies grow and their customer base expands, maintaining a high quality of customer service becomes more challenging. This can typically be the result of an increased complexity in their product offering, or simply because their sales volume and therefore number of customers requiring support have increased, or both.

Support deflection is a solution to this problem. It implies finding creative ways to better capture and channel support requests and ultimately enabling customers to find solutions to their questions and challenges independently.

Communities are an extremely efficient tool for support deflection. They empower customers to assist one another and provide answers to frequently asked questions. This results in a reduced number of support tickets and allows customer service representatives to focus on handling the more complicated issues, ultimately leading to improved customer service and higher customer satisfaction.

What are the ways in which communities deflect support tickets?

1. Build an public repository of frequently asked questions and feedback

One of the advantages of creating a space for customers to share feedback and questions publicly is that it allows for common challenges to present themselves organically.

The great thing about this is that these common threads are enriched by multiple customers’ feedback, which give your support and product teams a fuller picture of what’s really happening in your customers’ journey. It also decreases the likelihood that new customers will need to ask those same questions in the future, since their challenges are already listed — and in all probability, already solved by another customer, or someone on your team.

The other advantage is that this repository is available around the clock, and so customers find help on their own time, regardless of whether or not a member of your team is available when customers run into a challenge.

This drastically improves the speed at which your customers find solutions, and therefore improves customer satisfaction and their perception of your quality of service.

In a time where businesses, especially SaaS and E-commerce businesses, are serving a global customer base, this mechanism ensures that you’re always supporting your customers, even if they operate in an entirely different timezone.

2. Enable your customers to answer questions

Communities in their most fundamental forms allow customers to help each other by answering questions, providing feedback, and sharing their experiences with one another. The community collectively determines the best answers and the most useful content through upvoting/downvoting, engaging and responding, thus making the information more accurate and reliable over time.

The key here, is to make sure that the infrastructure is in place to facilitate these types of peer-to-peer interactions:

• Provide your customers with a dedicated space for Q&A
• Provide strong incentives for participating
• Ensure that whatever space you use, it’s easy to navigate, post, search and engage with.
• Lead by example, monitor the community regularly and do your part to share useful information and build a culture of dialogue.
• Appoint community managers, and encourage helpful members to become moderators of the discussion space.
• Encourage repeated engagement by employing gamification, and inviting members to elaborate and follow up on their questions and responses.

With our product PeerBoard we went all the way to provide a full integrated Q&A mechanics experience that includes open/solved questions, best answers, badges to best contributors, leaderboards and a rich insights panel to track community performance in vairous metrics including your savings. Take a look and drop us a note if you like it.

Doing this will eventually lead to a thriving environment that has a high likelihood of containing the crucial information and examples that your current and future customers need.

3. Find and nurture champions from your most engaged customers

Having a community for support deflection allows businesses to cultivate “champions” or “experts” from engaged customers, who assist others by providing answers, feedback, and sharing experiences, leading to a reduction in support tickets. As with any group of people, a subset of your customer community will present themselves as highly engaged and proactive members.

Look for the customers that are taking action, providing feedback and sharing their experiences. These people will be your champions!

Identify and recognize engaged customers, provide them with exclusive access, resources, and support. Provide them with a sense of ownership and investment, and encourage them to advocate the brand in the community.

4. Enable powerful search for community-generated knowledge

When customers ask and answer questions, it generates a wealth of knowledge for everyone involved. If you ensure that this knowledge is well organized, and easily searchable by others, it naturally reduces the need for new and struggling customers to contact your support and customer servicing teams.

Luckily, modern businesses have a wealth of tools at their disposal to make sure that organically generated content is categorized, indexable and searchable. Many tools enable powerful search through keyword & synonym matching, and autocomplete. They can also help you funnel answers into appropriate topic spaces, and overcome ambiguous categorization through hashtags and predictive search.

We believe this is so important that at PeerBoard we’re constantly trying to think of ways to improve what we call the “speed to information” and ways to present available information to community members sooner and more naturally.

If you employ these tools & strategies, you’ll make it easy for customers to find answers, even if they don’t necessarily use the exact same wording to describe their challenges.

A well implemented structure, and powerful search helps customers to find the information they need more quickly and easily.

5. Tailor content to a specific audience by topic

Community-based support can also be tailored to specific audiences. For example, businesses can create separate spaces for different products or services, or for different segments of their customer base.

This allows customers to find the information that is most relevant to them, without needing to sift through irrelevant information. This can be especially useful for businesses that have a wide range of products or services, as it can make it easier for customers to find the information they need.

Intelligent use of segmentation also helps guide your team, and provides you with an understanding of which of your products or customer segments may be in need of more attention, better tooling, or product refinement.

Should you use a community for support deflection?

Online communities can provide a cost-effective and efficient way for businesses to deflect support tickets and improve customer experience. By redirecting support tickets to a community platform, businesses can tap into the collective knowledge and expertise of their customers, allowing them to find answers more efficiently. This leads to cost savings by reducing the need for additional support staff and streamlining the support process.

Additionally, your community can boost customer retention, gratification, and loyalty by providing a sense of community and belonging, allowing for quick and easy customer support, and allowing you to source valuable feedback and product suggestions.

By providing a platform for your customers to share their experiences and provide reviews, you can gain valuable insights into your customer needs, preferences, and pain points, which can be used to improve products, services, and the overall customer experience.

Lastly, a community can also enhance brand awareness and reputation by fostering a sense of camaraderie among customers showcases how deeply your business cares and how closely you work with your customers. Building a community takes effort and dedication, but the compound benefits it yields for your customer retention, satisfaction, and your business’s reputation — are worth it.

That’s it for now

I hope this is helpful! Have any questions or suggestions? Let me know in the comments!

This is a part I in our series on community-powered support deflection. Stay tuned for Part II — A Step-by-Step Process for Implementing a Community for Support Deflection.