The Forum Formula: Building Businesses Through Community Forums
Why should a company invest in creating a company-branded community forum? In this second part on community forums, I use my experience to summarize the key benefits for an enterprise to launch forums
Summary
In the previous article, I discussed the history of community forums. When forums became browser-based, enterprises sensed an opportunity: They created company-owned and branded community support forums to build businesses. This article focuses on the critical advantages for enterprises to create customer support community forums and provides evidence from academia and industry.
Benefits of a Company-Branded Community Forum
The benefits of company-owned and branded community forums are the following:
Better customer support
Increased revenue with lower costs
Ideation, customer insights, and feedback
Marketing and brand enhancement
Let us look closer at these in the subsections below.
Customer Support
A company-branded community forum can provide personalized support in a question-answer style. It enables a direct, unmediated connection between customers and company experts. This results in a high-quality and authentic conversation, which leads to higher customer satisfaction and engagement. Satisfied customers reduce churn.
Furthermore, the user-generated public content is searchable, reusable, and indexed by search engines. This body of content enables customers to solve their problems without calling call centers.
Using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP), forum platform software can dynamically translate content into other languages on demand and do sentiment analysis, thus enhancing customer experience.
Customer-to-customer interaction encourages learning, bonding, sharing solutions, and word-of-mouth advertisement. Customers, at the end of the day, are still people. Humans desire connection, empathy, and attention, which this technology-mediated forum provides.
Increased Revenue with Lower Costs
A community forum drives revenue growth by exposing customers to a broader cross-section of products. Sales can expand the customer’s BOM (bill of materials), cross-sell more products, and sell solutions, not just products.
Since customers are typically required to register to participate in the forums, companies get high-quality marketing leads and analytical data.
Support through forums is scalable: Answers to issues reside in the public domain, available to be reused and perused by others with the same questions. This taps into the customer expectation of self-solve and self-serve. The crowdsourced nature of forums enables customer-to-customer, or c2c support, which results in cost savings.
Forums deflect cases from the traditional and more expensive central support and applications teams, lowering the customer support cost.
By leveraging support forums, companies can reach customers in the long tail of the mass market, something that may not be financially feasible otherwise.
Ideation, Customer Insights, and Feedback
Direct contact with customers gives unprecedented access to new ideas, insights, and valuable feedback. Ideation systems can solicit ideas directly and publicly from customers.
Observing inquiry patterns gives feedback to the company on its products, services, and collateral. It can also identify bugs and issues earlier and faster, giving a company a valuable and cheaper way to improve offerings.
The forum generates massive amounts of analytics data that can be analyzed with the latest data science, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques. Using large language models (LLM) and natural language processing (NLP), data scientists can gauge sentiment by extracting frequently asked questions (FAQ) and knowledge base (KB) articles from the forum content. This provides an up-close understanding of the customer and their behaviors.
Marketing and Brand Enhancement
A community forum is a marketing avenue that improves brand awareness and trust. By having forums on a company-hosted platform, companies keep control and ownership of the discussion with the ability to shape the discourse.
The communication side of marketing has another avenue: It can be used to inform customers, put out announcements, promote events, highlight products, and share press releases. Additionally, companies can set up polls, webinars, online events, blogs with comments, KB, and FAQs on communities.
Community forums boost search engine optimization (SEO). Forum software can “cook the post” to automatically link mentions of specific product names and phrases to pages on the website, boosting SEO. Boosted search ranking drives traffic to the main site as well as the community forums. Federated search creates a pathway to the main website.
Forum syndication can place forum content in other parts of the website, notably product pages.
Case Studies
The Texas Instruments, Inc.’s E2E Forums
Texas Instruments, Inc., a Dallas-based semiconductor company, noticed a problem in the early 2000s in their customer support: As a B2B company, its end customers were still engineers who designed the complex products but needed technical support. However, the existing customer support system could have been more efficient. Web 2.0 was coming around that time. In 2008, Devashish Saxena, Texas Instruments (TI) brilliant director of global Internet marketing, launched a support forum called E2E™, engineer-to-engineer. This was the first customer support forum in the semiconductor industry. E2E forums revolutionized customer support in semiconductors.
E2E growth was phenomenal: After the first year, there were 10,000 registered users. By the third year, in 2011, the number was 70,000 and grew to 100,000 in 2012 [see also this video]. By 2015, seven years after the launch, registered users doubled to 200,000.
With these encouraging numbers, an internal E2E version was also launched to connect employees with other employees, especially sales engineers and application engineers in the factory. TI also launched E2E forums in other languages, notably Chinese.
These numbers don’t tell the whole story. Devashish Saxena, the visionary marketer, conducted an in-depth study and reported that E2E forum members requested six times more samples spanning three times more product categories than non-members [see more here]. In semiconductors, requesting more product samples is correlated with increased sales.
Full disclosure: My interest in the community forums started when I joined the advisory board of Texas Instruments, Inc.’s E2E forums. Please note that all the data I share in this article is based on publicly available sources.
Built on the Telligent (now Verint) platform, TI’s staff interacts with engineering customers in this external-facing public community. When customers search for TI part numbers or issues, E2E forums show up as search results, thanks to SEO.
Other semiconductor companies followed suit: Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI), a Boston-based semiconductor company, launched EngineerZone® forums in 2009. Nordic Semiconductor started a very successful forum called DevZone around 2009. Nordic’s DevZone subsite gets 40% of the traffic of the main site.
TI, ADI, and Monolithic Power Systems, Inc. (MPS) syndicate the user-generated content (UGC) on the product folder page.
Dell Ideation
Dell Technologies Inc. launched IdeaStorm in 2007 as a crowdsourced idea collection community. “Dell’s IdeaStorm represents the gold standard for new product idea crowdsourcing,” says this paper.
In the first year, from February 2007–February 2009, 4,425 people gave 8,801 ideas, out of which 348 (4%) were implemented. By 2010, within 3.5 years of launch, 14,500 ideas were submitted, and 417 were implemented (3%). Dell’s IdeaStorm received several public acknowledgments from news magazines and organizations for “embracing crowdsourcing and adopting a user-driven innovation process.” See also these slides and this article.
As a side note, Dell also noted that “SEO drives a ton of traffic, with customers often Googling ‘Dell’ and a question about their product and being directed to the Forum.”
Prof. Manchanda’s Study on Forums
Professor P. Manchanda of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business quantified the return on investment (ROI) of communities. Using data from the community of an unnamed “North American multi-channel entertainment products retailer,” they showed through statistical analysis that 19% of total customer expenditure was linked to their joining the online community [Article]. Prof. Manchanda called this “social dollars.”
The paper concludes that online customer communities can lead to “social dollars,” which represent an economically significant increase in customer expenditures. These social dollars more than cover the fixed cost of setting up the community and the variable cost of operating it.
Conclusion
Company-owned and company-branded community forums provide tangible benefits for the enterprise. Forums are scalable, high-quality, and lower-cost customer support. The return on investment pays off in increased revenue, lower customer churn, and enhanced brand equity.
The article provided case studies from industry and academia on forums' myriad of advantages.
The recommendation to enterprises is to consider using community forums for support, promotion, and sales of their products.
Contact Me
Do you have any insight to share or have a comment, please comment on this article here or email me at surinder.www (at) outlook.com.
Further Reading
Mantymaki, Maria and Tuula Mittilä. “Attraction of Company Online Communities: A Multiple Case Study,” PhD Thesis, Tampere University, (2004). [Thesis]
Bayus, Barry L., “Crowdsourcing New Product Ideas over Time: An Analysis of the Dell IdeaStorm Community.” Manag. Sci. 59 (2013): 226–244. [https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.1120.1599]
Di Gangi, Paul & Wasko, Molly & Hooker, Robert. (2010). Getting Customers’ Ideas to Work for You: Learning from Dell how to Succeed with Online User Innovation Communities. MIS Quarterly Executive. 9. [Article PDF]
Manchanda, P., Packard, G., & Pattabhiramaiah, A. (2015). Social dollars: The economic impact of customer participation in a firm-sponsored online customer community. Marketing Science, 34(3), 367–387. [https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2014.0890]