Article

• Send to a colleague

Customers: The New Tech Support

Written in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit

Companies are recognizing that there is a large community with expertise in their products: their customers. How can companies collaborate with them to share their knowledge and use it to fix problems?

As products become more complex, customer support gets more and more complicated to manage. Mobile phone makers provide a good example: they now have to deal with support calls that are no longer just about phones, but also about cameras, radios and music players. Manufacturers now receive an average of three to five calls per new phone, while margins get ever tighter.

Firms are recognizing that active customers represent a resource to be tapped and are learning how to collaborate with their customers to solve problems; or rather, get their customers to collaborate with each other to sort out difficulties. According to John Ragsdale, Vice President of Research at the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA), "Historically, technical support agents have been quite solitary people. Now it is getting impossible for a single support person to have all the answers." He adds that 30 percent of support calls are about other suppliers' technology. Forward-looking companies recognize that outsiders can give input that even surpasses what its own employees can provide.

Customer community support

An executive of one business software producer relates that his firm has started to supply customers with a self-diagnosing support tool. This will be extended to feed into a Web forum where customers can collaborate with each other in real-time, along with systems integrators, resellers or anyone with a vested interest in solving problems relating to the software.

IP networks are helping to remove the restrictions, and other inventive ideas are starting to be applied to lift the burden from the internal support function. Businesses are adapting support ideas that have worked elsewhere with consumers on the Web. For instance, firms are borrowing an eBay-type confidence ranking to highlight how well particular customers solve other customers' problems. Customers who need support advice rate these volunteers according to how effective their fixes have been - just as eBay sellers and buyers are rated according to their reliability.

Ragsdale calls this the "customer reputation model." The named volunteers accumulate points and begin to build kudos, which helps their career prospects in the industry. Once support communities are established, other IP-enabled tools, such as wikis, can be deployed, bypassing the need for weighty knowledge bases and allowing current best-practice libraries to appear.

However, what happens if a well-intended posting on a supplier's portal turns out to cause damage? Ragsdale says that supplier disclaimers can be used to minimize any liability. Also, what is there to stop a disgruntled customer (or a competitor posing as one) from spreading malicious information about the company? One safeguard is that the participants are not anonymous, and this minimizes troublemakers.

Ragsdale believes that if suppliers are slow to accommodate customer support forums themselves, they will find that customers will create their own support communities. "Then the supplier will have no influence," he warns. A change in mindset is required.