Customer Service Communities

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Customer Service Community

A community with a support focus is designed to improve customer service by providing help with questions and concerns.

Imagine a customer who needs help with a problem. Instead of immediately calling customer service, he logs into the community forum to search for a solution.

While browsing the online bulletin board, he finds other customers who have experienced a similar issue and posted their solutions. One response has been rated highly by other community members and proves to be the solution the customer needed. Once he has resolved his issue, he posts the details of his own experiences, adding to the knowledge of the community.

Examples like this can quickly translate into significant cost savings. By providing an interactive platform where users can inform and advise one another, you can increase the speed at which users are able to resolve their issues and decrease expenses associated with service inquiries that would have been routed to you’re call center had the online form not existed.

Popular Community Features

Forums
Use the advanced forum functionality to engage your site's members and encourage collaboration.
Corporate and Member Blogs
Dotster supports the following media: video, images, MP3 and ID3. All videos are encoded on the fly and displayed with the custom flash player.
Training Videos
Unset
"Ask the Expert"
Find insight and support on topics.
Online Chat
Utilizing third-party technology, Dotster can provide chat rooms for any online community.
Active Moderation
Manage and moderate the site using a powerful control panel.
Newsletters
Send targeted email newsletters to site members using an advanced newsletter tool.
FAQ
The administrator can post FAQs.
Knowledge Base
Collection of facts and information.

Lower call center costs
Live call center agents can be expensive, while self-service options have little or no ongoing costs. Many companies have found that website knowledge bases and customer forums can dramatically reduce the number of call center calls.
Reduce customer response time
On a well-constructed website, customers can find answers within seconds or minutes. They may also find answers to additional questions. One study by Jupiter Networks showed that, as one result, customers reported good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or email.
Improve communication with customers
Experienced members can become super-users, often answering other members' questions. As well, they can become site mentors or moderators. These users can actually reduce the amount of time the company moderator needs to spend responding to questions.
Reduce research costs
In addition to demographic/psychographic information about your customers, a support community can be used to inexpensively obtain customer feedback. For example, polls and surveys can replace in-person focus groups.