The ROI of Community-based Support
Yes Virginia, There Really is an ROI in Community
John Ragsdale in a recent post entitled And the Phone Keeps Ringing, presents some very interesting data that suggests that despite the emergence of self-service and various online channels for customer service, people are returning to the plain old telephone to get help. In his post, John presents a few potential reasons why there might be a trend back to telephone-based support, including an overall increase in product complexity and a potential desire by companies to strengthen customer relationships by adding human resources in support. Certainly for anyone who has struggled with navigating a company’s knowledge base or been mired in an endless string of emails looking for help, listening to pleasant music on hold while waiting to speak with a live agent might seem like a good alternative.
Our customer data tells a different story
At Helpstream we are realizing firsthand the trend towards on-line customer self service, and we have customer data that tells a very different story than John’s data would suggest. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Helpstream has tightly integrated community-based support with traditional knowledge base and case management functionality. Simply stated, this allows our customers to actually track where incidents get resolved. If all of your customer support data is stored in disparate silos – a case management system that is separate from a knowledge base that is separate from a forum - it is really not possible to know how a customer incident is resolved, it’s really more of a guess. John eludes to the fact that traditional self-service and forum solutions do a poor job of tracking incident resolution. Not so with Helpstream.
The Community Effect is compelling
Over the last few weeks we have been discussing with many analysts the ROI our customers are realizing with our integrated community-based customer service solution. Our data indicates that deploying Helpstream helps companies reduce the number of incidents requiring involvement by a customer support representative by 50%, regardless if this is via email or the phone. This is due in large measure to the “community effect”, or the impact of offering customers a way to post a question and get answers from other customers as an integrated part of the company’s web support portal.
Further driving down a company’s overall support burden is the fact that the community contributes roughly half of the content to the company’s support knowledge base as community-generated solutions become indexed and searchable by other customers. Our data indicates that the Helpstream communities contribute roughly half of a company’s knowledge base content. For more information on the ROI of Helpstream take a look at Phil Wainewright’s recent post on the Social Dynamics of Help.
ROI is about more than saving money
It’s hard to argue the value of helping customer support organizations get lean in the current economic climate. Who hasn’t been asked to cut costs? But while cutting costs is a necessity today, so is keeping customers happy. Companies know that acquiring new customers in tough economic times is difficult at best and that keeping customer satisfaction high will have a positive impact on top line performance. When recently asking an executive to describe the impact Helpstream has had on her business, she said, “It’s simple, tickets have been cut in half, and customer satisfaction is up.” Is there any better way to describe ROI?
Bill Odell
10 Comments
Reader Comments (10)
Bill:
Your assertions sounded very promising. But when I followed up on your press release about Marketo's success with HelpStream, I found that almost all the answers in the Marketo community were provided by the company moderator and not non-staff community members. I also found that HelpStream and Marketo have the same VC investor.
Maybe you can point to some better examples to support your assertions of ROI achieved by Helpstream customers?
Thanks.
Hi Bill...
The new customer is all about a different medium.. and i quite agree with the notes on your blog..
Times are changing… things that we already witness..
• Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency
• Lance Armstrong loses his cycle and looks at Social media to help him finding...
• An average teenager today spends a cool 31 hours per week online.
• One in four teenagers of the 1,000 polled said they regularly spoke to strangers online but thought it harmless
Times of news being read have already changed to news reaching you
And slowly the times of the 'phone still ringing' would change too
People today are more open from the days of someone calling a Ford help desk in late 60's to the generation of today seeking answers to all their queries using the net... the new customer is the one who would still use the Handheld Device called a Blackberry and iPhone but would also call it a Phone then the other way around...
Wow. isn't this a big eh-hem moment in the comments? (A) Kudos for publishing the comment, (B) Where's the answer :)
I'd very much like to see the data points on this as well, as it is not an "insignificant meme" to debunk. Personally, I'd love to see the Helpstream vision permeate..... So in a way I am rooting for you.
Regarding the comment about Helpstream and Marketo having the same investor, that is incorrect. Helpstream's investors are Foundation Capital and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Marketo's investors are Interwest Partners and Storm Ventures. So while both companies have great, long-term investors with a track record of success, they are in fact completely different investors.
I also want to point out that the press release referenced above was made by Marketo, not Helpstream. Marketo announced the launch of their new online community to their customers. Before you newly launch a community you will want to pre-populate it with some content, so of course most of the initial content will come from internal community managers and the like. That's why all of the content available at launch was sourced by Marketo. I'm not sure why anyone would expect otherwise.
Marketo also did not have a legacy process in place, so there was no baseline from which to gauge the immediate impact of community on case workload. But in a few months there will be solid data showing where the content was sourced, what problems got solved, how, and by whom. The fact, you MUST have a tightly integrated system like Helpstream just to get that data, let alone the beneficial results.
Helpstream has a number of other customers that had legacy processes in place before adding the Helpstream community, and the results have been dramatic: half the previous workload on service reps, much happier customers, and an ROI of 4 months. We have had many analysts, reporters, and prospects speak with those customers directly to validate these results.
All of the data to prove these results are captured directly within Helpstream and show up on a dashboard inside Helpstream. The customer can see exactly where that data is coming from and dig down deeper to both validate the reported results and analyze how to further improve those results. Again, the key is that customers now have real data by which to validate and improve results. Without a tightly integrated system it is very hard to do that.
Because we have been connecting customers with press and analysts, you can expect to be able to read a lot more on this topic in the weeks and months ahead. One of he major analysts firms will be publishing a paper on this specific topic in the next couple of months.
I doubt it will be long before most people shift their focus away from doubting the effect of community and toward figuring out how to maximize those beneficial effects. We look forward to contributing to those discussions.
Anthony Nemelka
Chief Exective Officer
Helpstream
Now isn't that a great answer. Well done to all, and kudos.
Sorry to be a skeptic, but there is way too much unfounded hype out there, which makes it difficult to get to real value offered by various software.
I look forward to seeing the specifics the CEO said will be coming out soon, although I wish he would have called out other examples.
How many of HelpStream's 100 plus customers are paying customers? This would help provide a better assessment of real traction with this concept.
I also checked out the marketo site and even 1 month after their promo,I could not find one answer provided by non-staff. So, how are they saving any mopney when it appears all support is still done by staff?
Thanks for your candor. You certainly have an interesting offering.
geez fred, if it doesn't cost anything why don't you just use it and find out for yourself?
Walter: It is just not that simple to "find out for yourself." A significant amount of time would be required to get a working and used model in place.
HelpStream has been around long enough where they should be able to point to good examples of real ROI and proudly claim their number of paying customers. Free customers do not carry much weight in my book.
The only example helpstream has called out is Marketo and I don't see how Marketo is saving anything when they answer everything themselves and their volumes are pretty low.
I am not saying that HelpSteam does not have interesting technology -- because they do -- I am just saying they need to put out proven indications of traction and success with this new hybrid model of customer care.
It's unclear whether Fred is skeptical about the value of communities, the value of integrating communities with business processes, or the value of Helpstream in creating communities and integrating those with business processes.
The following links illuminate a couple of expert points of view on the latter:
http://the56group.typepad.com/pgreenblog/2009/03/crm-20-social-crm-do-we-have-it-yet.html
http://solutions.oracle.com/partners/helpstream
Please note that Helpstream currently has far more than 100 customers. We currently service over 350,000 active users, the vast majority of which are paid subscribers. As noted in Fred's post, however, we do have a standard service offering that is available completely free of charge. I'm not sure why that is a bad thing, except maybe to a competitor. Customers of the standard service offering are delighted that advertisers are willing to pay for their use of the service. I think Google has done a good job of educating the market for all of us on this. Please see my previous blog post about why Help Desk software should be free.
In regards to specific customer examples used in Bill’s blog entry, please note that Helpstream did not introduce Marketo as an example here. Marketo was introduced into this discussion by Mary. In fact Marketo's data was not included in the ROI analysis referenced by Bill.
It should also be noted that visiting a public customer service portal powered by Helpstream may not reveal much about the effectiveness of the community. Most of our customers choose to require their customers to login to the system before gaining access to most community discussions and information. Furthermore, even end users with login credentials will only have a limited view of all the activity going on in the community since Helpstream's group permissions capabilities allow a company to create sub-communities within the overall community--most of which are not exposed to the general community even after login. I do not know whether or not any of this is true for Marketo, but it may explain why they may not have much community-contributed content in their publicly accessible portal.
When using specific customer examples, we therefore let customers speak for themselves. It's their data, and we don't have access to it without their permission. When a prospect, analyst, or member of the press seeks specific customer examples we let them talk directly with our customers. If you are a prospect, analyst, or member of the press and want to speak with one of our customers on this topic we would be delighted to make that introduction.
Anthony Nemelka
Hello !Oh hubba hubba! Forget the sportscar, been there, done that, got the T shirt, wore it out, gave it to goodwill.
http://cstatman.blogspot.com/2004_07_01_archive.html