We announced that Eloqua, a marketing automation leader, has selected Helpstream's customer service community platform for their Customer Central portal. Here we chat with Jim Leitch, Global Director of Product Support, about Eloqua’s deployment of Helpstream, their use of community, its benefits and how it’s impacted their customer relationships.

What sparked the interest at Eloqua for a customer service community?

Eloqua has the largest marketing automation community in the world. We have more than 25,000 Eloqua users in 33 countries. Creating a centralized location where users can connect, access valuable information and share ideas was important to help ensure they are getting the most out of their marketing programs. This portal is a critical component in providing our customers with the level of support and industry insight they expect from Eloqua.

There are so many mediums out there companies can use as vehicles to engage their customers. How does community factor in for Eloqua?

Customer community is one of the most powerful tools to allow customers to share ideas and best practices as well as answer support questions. The host of new features and functionality we now offer in a central portal enables us to quickly collect direct customer feedback and enhance the way our community leverages each others’ strengths and expertise in order to achieve maximum results. Helpstream offered a smart way to tie our features and resources together with a powerful search engine that easily fit with our system.

What are some of the benefits you’re seeing from the customer community?

Given the fact that all our support resources reside within a single portal, customers readily switch from participating in a discussion thread, searching the knowledge base, reviewing training videos or submitting/reviewing a support request. We have also found that customers ask a lot of support questions in the community so the entire Eloqua community can respond. Our Product Specialists also participate in the community so they are answering questions as well. Once the question has been answered, it is automatically another valuable piece of information that customers can use when they search for answers. We have also received a lot of great new product ideas from our customers using the Ideas Exchange and have already implemented a few of them.

What’s your take on how communities can impact other SaaS companies?

All SAAS applications are customizable. Every customer uses the tool to meet the particular needs of their business so a community is a great place for customers to share best practices, tips and tricks as well as innovative ways that they are using the application. Eloqua is a SAAS application, as is Helpstream, so it made perfect sense to link them together using single sign-on from our application.

Any advice you would give your peers on investing in customer service communities?

Customers want a community to share and exchange... just build it and participate in it, and customers will readily join and share their ideas.

About Jim Leitch

Prior to joining Eloqua, Jim was the Global Director of Blackberry support at RIM from 2001 to 2006 where he helped build the global support infrastructure and direct a global technical support team in Waterloo, Singapore, London and Halifax. Prior to RIM, he was a regional manager for Bell Canada responsible for managing a DSL technical support team.