Using GigCX to empower your Community Forums

Did you know 92% of consumers around the world said they trust word-of-mouth, or recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising?

A community forum can be an effective way to help customers resolve the myriad of usage issues and opportunities that are often beyond the scope of initial product testing.

Despite its potential, community forums can be difficult to launch and sustain. They can take an enormous effort to get up and running and are fraught with challenges that can lead to failure, such as lack of engagement, failed moderation, poor user experience, and more.

We live in a connected world, where consumers have many channels and locations with which they can get information and communicate.

The voice of fellow customers has become a critical, reliable source of truth.

Forrester’s report, How branded content will unlock the key to consumer trust, revealed that:

• 70% of U.S. adults online trust recommendations from each other far more than statements from brands.
• 46% of U.S. adults trust consumer-written online reviews.
• Just 10% of U.S. adults trust ads on websites.

Gig-based customer experience, or GigCX, can play a positive role in supporting a healthy community forum.

By using GigCX, you gain access to a crowd of experts, gathered from amongst your own customers, and reward them for answering customer questions within the forum.

It can help when customers need help, when you want to influence the discussion, or when there is low community support or engagement.

When posts go unanswered, customers often turn to more traditional support channels (e.g., a contact center), which increases support costs and decreases the value of the community investment.

By leveraging the power of a crowd of GigCX Experts, you can:

• Increase resolution rates of customer issues within the forum
• Increase customer usage of products
• Increase customer satisfaction
• Improve the quality of issue resolutions
• Reduce costs by avoiding more expensive support channels

At Microsoft, support in its community forums was historically provided by part-time staff and volunteers. The quality of engagement was high, but sporadic, and numerous threads went unanswered or did not get timely follow-up responses.

Supporting forums using staff wasn’t a viable alternative due to its expense, given the broad nature of technical and product inquiries and languages supported, And the asynchronous nature of forums meant long thread lifecycle.

Microsoft engaged a crowd of GigCX Experts, who now support a broad set of Windows and Office consumer and commercial technical support inquiries through a direct connection from the Limitless GigCX platform into the Microsoft consumer and commercial forums. Language support is provided either natively in country or through translation.

Microsoft unlocked the power of its community of knowledgeable product users to produce amazing results.

Community trust continues to rise. For this reason, community forums are more necessary now than ever to ensure strong, vibrant customer relationships.

GigCX offers a new way to optimize the use of forums and customer communities and increase the quality of those interactions, while still leveraging the benefits of a customer-led support model.

Want to learn more about how GigCX can help you leverage peer communication to improve customer service and decrease costs? Contact us to set up a time to chat about how GigCX can help you revitalize your customer community.