Last week I sat down with John Ragsdale at the TSW Conference in Santa Clara and we talked about the value of customer support communities. John is head of research for the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA), a former Forrester analyst and someone who spent a long time as a customer service practitioner. I was ecstatic to talk with John about the tremendous response we were getting to our recently published ROI study and, knowing what a fan John is of customer support communities, to hear his unbridled enthusiasm for our findings. While John acknowledged that he wholeheartedly believes in the value of community, he was quite critical of studies that solely highlight the cost reductions associated with reduced service requests. He strongly believes that the true value of customer service communities is far greater than call deflection, and believes the industry needs to do more to help customers understand that value.

I think John is right. In a blog post on the conference, John highlighted a presentation by Tara Bunch, VP of Global Support Operations for the Imaging and Printing group at HP. (For the record, HP does not use Helpstream, but they do use customer service communities in a very powerful way to monitor what customers are saying and to quickly engage when needed to provide assistance.) An excerpt from John’s post does much to support his point on communities:

Her example was how when a consumer complains about a product in an open community that allows anonymous postings, people tend to “pile on” a negative post complaining about any and all things related to the vendor or product. Rather than ignore these forums, HP tracks these external conversations and takes part when lots of activity occurs around an HP topic. Reaching out to frustrated customers in the forum with an offer of assistance usually stops the "piling on" immediately, and typically there is a rush of customer posts afterwards complimenting HP for caring enough to monitor what people say about them.

In this economy, companies are looking for hard dollar cost savings anywhere they can find them. And customer service operations are a place that is often tasked with becoming more lean in tough times. But it's also true that companies rely on business from their existing customers to pull them through recessions, and losing customers to poor service is terribly risky. In an era where disgruntled customers can quickly jump on Twitter and Facebook and complain about each and every poor customer service experience – valid or not – it would seem critical that companies take a proactive approach to customer support communities as HP has, and not simply think of them as ways to reduce costs. Keeping customers from piling on and turning complaints into compliments simply has to be much more valuable than we as an industry have been able to quantify.