Joe works out of Michigan and his team
provides community management and moderation services to customers using Lithium’s on-demand
software.  Based in Emeryville, California, Lithium was founded in 2001, has about 50 employees and supports more
than 50 customers including Dell, Cingular, Comcast, Linksys, Sony,
Salesforce.com. Lithium
provides a hosted solution for community and
prices its product on a monthly
basis based on page views. They also charge a one–time setup
fee. Software fees start at $1300/month. Joe’s team provides ongoing services in moderation and
management as well as one-time assessment and
strategy projects.

Since Joe has a good background on support communities, we discussed a
particular issue that consistently comes up with Support
executives:

“I am concerned that if I start a support community,
I’ll need a very large
staff to manage and
support it“

This is an understandable concern: the goal of support is
to keep customer satisfaction levels high and do it at the lowest possible
cost, and the number one cost of support organizations is
headcount.  However, the truth is that support
communities typically don’t require a large staff.  

Here
are three best practices that I learned from Joe to leverage the power
of the community and keep your support costs low:

1. Define your
interfaces.  
Effective and efficient support communities are well integrated with existing processes in customer care, technical
support, marketing, product development, corporate
communications, and
legal.  One of the first questions Joe asks in his
community management working sessions is “Who in your
organization will touch this community in any way?”  You can then begin
to think about whether
the interfaces are routine (i.e.,
escalating unanswered questions to support
specialists), periodic (reports or notifications on topics being discussed
in the community), or ad hoc (i.e., product managers participating in
discussions as their interest and time allows).  Needless to say,
when communities are isolated from other processes they take more effort to
manage, because everything falls to the community manager.

2.
Develop
your users.   Joe made the
interesting observation that while we all talk
about companies needing to learn and change (Cluetrain
Manifesto, etc.), we forget that customers are learning and
changing too.  Community management
is, in part, a process by which we help customers develop their competencies in collaborating
with us and with their peers.  If we don’t help them learn and grow,
they’ll simply create the
same problems for us to contend with over and over again.

3.
Develop your leaders.  According to Joe,
every community is, at a minimum, two communities:  the community of the
average user, who may come once a week, once a month, or even
just plain once, and the much
smaller community of superusers or hyperaffiliates, who are 10 times or
100 times more active than the average user.  It’s not uncommon to see communities
where 0.5% of users provide 60% or 70% of the
answers.  Are these people important in making
customers happy and reducing your costs?  You bet they
are.  The economics of communities ONLY work if you let the community help
itself.  The temptation to have support specialists answering questions
in the community is strong. But you have to be
careful not to set a pattern in the community that this is the place to get answers directly from the
company.  You may never fully benefit from the knowledge and experience of your
customers.