Advantages and disadvantages of using a forum?

[BlackStorm]

What do you think are the advantage and disadvantages of having a forum on your hosting website?
Considering the advantages and disadvantages, do you think its best to have, or not to have, a forum on a hosts site?

I think the advantages are that it can greatly help cut down on support tickets, customers can help each other if you have a strong community and they can search past posts from other members which may help them finding the answer, meaning they don’t have to contact support.
This can also mean they get the answers they need quicker than if they were contacting your support, considering it would at most, take a few minutes to find something by searching on a forum.
Having a community reflects well on your company, if you interact with your customers (I think) people are more likely to go with you over a host that doesn’t have an active community based forum.

The disadvantages are that if someone is not happy with your service, everyone, including someone that could be a prospective client, will see a post about this, making them think twice about hosting with your company.
Other disadvantages are that you have to moderate forums quite a lot, meaning you might have to have others on the forum to help you moderate the members.
If your support takes a while to reply to an urgent issue, everyone will be able to see this, although you could get around it by stating not to use the forum for urgent matters.

These are just a very few of my thoughts on the subject, it is something I have thought about a lot about in the past, and still am.
Hoping some others will have some informative, detailed and opinionated comments to add
John

 

[GordyMac]

Could be good or could be bad.. bad if you are not around alot and some clients questions go unanswered for days, also not good when you get a client that is upset with you and makes a real bad post towards you though. It can be good if the clients that like your hosting use it and put in good testimonlials, but often what happens is only the negative customers find time to post on it ;/

 

[glyphdot]

I like the idea of having a forum. We just started one, however, my biggest concern is making sure it gets enough traffic to be worth while. I don't want a prospect to go to the forum and see that there is not a lot of traffic. Does that make sense?

 

[BlackStorm]

Yes.
A good thing for that is to open it only to your current customers until it gets a bit bigger and they use it on a regular basis, once it has enough posts you can open it to the public and they will see its active
Thats if you have any clients..
Im sure there are other people you can get to use it before you open to the public, thats normally the best thing i do i think.

 

[wsac]

<!--QuoteBegin-glyphdot+Nov 7 2003, 11:19 PM--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (glyphdot @ Nov 7 2003, 11:19 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> I like the idea of having a forum. We just started one, however, my biggest concern is making sure it gets enough traffic to be worth while. I don't want a prospect to go to the forum and see that there is not a lot of traffic. Does that make sense? [/b][/quote]
That true what you said