Customer Support communities are gaining tremendous traction among enterprises and other organizations.  Traditional customer support has often resulted in delayed response to queries by customers on how to use, install, obtain, or get the most out of products and services.  An online customer support community can accomplish a number of significant goals:

• Speed up the process by which customers get the information they need
• Leverage the extended customer base's knowledge to reduce customer support staff load
• Provide a mechanism to obtain feedback from customers
• Quickly identify critical problems
• Create greater satisfaction and brand loyalty among customers

Speedy help.  Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than to have a question about or problem with a product or service, and not be able to get help right then.  A customer community operates 24/7, even when your customer support staff are no longer working.  Many questions about utilization of a product or service can be and will be answered promptly by other customers who are participants in the community.  That can often speed up the effective response time by hours and even days.  And, as the questions are often very specific use cases, these searchable questions and responses give a much deeper pool of information than a company-created set of FAQs.

Leverage customers to lighten customer support staff load.  Any customer question or concern that is answered appropriately by another customer is one less question that your support staff has to deal with.  As each customer support call or email can be a very expensive cost item for a company, leveraging customers willingness to help one another can be a tremendous cost savings for the company.

Use Customer Feedback.  Customers may be reluctant or unwilling to contact support with feedback, and yet be eager to share their experiences and thoughts with other customers by participating in an online community.  Not only can the company benefit by monitoring such postings, the online community itself is the perfect venue to conduct polls and surveys and to test ideas.  By providing an online customer support community the company can tap the knowledge and experience of a potentially huge number of customers at very low cost.

Identify critical problems.  Critical problems can range from system outages to product design flaws.  If you have an online community, you can use it to post updates, and customers can quickly determine that a problem they're experiencing is recognized (and being addressed), without feeling compelled to contact your support staff.  You may also learn about such a problem more quickly from postings on the customer community than you would by waiting for reports through more traditional channels.

Customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.  A customer who feels he or she has a voice that will be heard by the company is much more likely to remain loyal to the brand.  The customer community can also be used imaginatively to provide services and content around the brand that the customer can participate in with other customers.

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