Self-service is a popular and preferred mode of customer support adopted by many businesses. A support community can be effective in this space since it can help with the following:
- Peer-to-peer customer support
- Up-to-date knowledge base building
- Seamless escalation to helpdesk
The brand communities for supporting customers could broadly have the following structure:
1. Dedicated support group inside a customer community
2. An online community fully dedicated to customer support
In the first case, you can consider the following options:
1. Create a group in your community and add topics inside the group to categorize the discussions. And finally, the members would be able to ask questions inside the group by attaching a topic.
Here is the structure - Support Group > Different topics > Questions.
2. Create a topic dedicated to customer support and ask the members to post the support queries inside the topic.
When building a community that is completely dedicated to customer support, you need to create different topics to categorize the support questions.
Here is the structure - Different topics > Questions.
Apart from the above-mentioned structure here are some useful tips for your support community:
- Create a dedicated section inside the community to share useful documents and resources.
- Answer all the questions by at least acknowledging within 24 hours.
- Reward and encourage people to answer via gamification and virtual currencies.
- Let the asker decide if the solution works.
- If your internal team is answering ensure that it is clearly marked that an employee has answered.
- Empower your customers to take the initiatives.
- Showcase that question is resolved by adding a special flair (or emoji/text label).
- Check the searches queries made in the community and create content on highly searched terms.
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