Do clients use your forums?

[Anjay]

My company does not have a Company Forum for current clients, or even pre-clients to post in. When I started - I had one, however it wasn't used much and then I decided to drop it, as clients preferred to have quick and efficient support via the helpdesk and e-mail.

What is more, it also depends on your company image. The larger, and the more "corporate" the company, the less likely you are to find a support forum. Dell doesn't have one, nor do many other very large companies - only one company I know of is SonyEricsson there is only one staff member, who barely ever replies. Today it would seem that the better the image of the company, the less likely it'll have a forum board - while unfortunately the lower the image, the more likely.

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with a forum board - as long as it's active, and very active at that, and also as along as the staff actually post and reply to all questions. However something difficult about having support forums is to make sure that people do not post their account information such as passwords and so on; which is why support via a Help Desk or e-mail is much better.


In regards to what boards allow guest posting, I'm afraid to say I have not found one forum board that does not allow guest posting - and I know of over 40 different forum boards.

 

[Vovex Technology]

The larger, and the more "corporate" the company, the less likely you are to find a support forum. Dell doesn't have one

Dell actually does have a forum... its fun to read it sometimes because as usual all dell moderators say is "Please insert your recovery cd into your cdrom and restart your computer". Its funny that they say this to people who are having spyware/virus problems. They always seem to take the easy way out. Nor do they ever notify their clients that when restoring they are going to lose their files.

Sorry to call you out on that one Anjay... but Its fun to rip on the Dell Reps

 

[alpha]

And here's the link:

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums

 

[Freckled]

I got a kick out of seeing this one today, I tried to get my forum kick started and they would visit it and not sign up and use it. So I basically quit pushing it, Now though I have a customer that wants to use it for basic support and guess who keeps forgetting to check the forum, UGH!!! yep me. I will have to either get better at that or upgrade forums to one that alerts me on every single post, which for some reason phpBB doesn't.

 

[BlackStorm]

You could probably set that in the admin options Freckled.
You might need to set it to alert an email address by each forum.
Haven't used phpbb in years though so can't remember from using it.
I have my forums set as one of my homepages on firefox so I check it everyday, normally check a few times
I used to promote my forum a lot but nearly everyone prefers email/helpdesk now intead so the forum is very inactive.

Our members have made a total of 2162 posts
We have 366 registered members

 

[turnkey]

I started a forum for my customers, network status and pre-sales about 2 months ago or so. At first, it was bare but now there is a lot of activity. A couple posts a day now.

 

[Lesli]

Now though I have a customer that wants to use it for basic support and guess who keeps forgetting to check the forum, UGH!!! yep me.

*raises hand* Been there. Done that.

What you can do with just about any forum is simply subscribe to all your individual forums, so that you get notified when someone posts a new thread. Then, those threads with "open" issues - subscribe to those individual threads.

Won't catch everything, but it will catch most of them.

 

[Vovex Technology]

Now though I have a customer that wants to use it for basic support and guess who keeps forgetting to check the forum, UGH!!! yep me.

I have done this on many ocassions. I simply resolved it by setting my web browsers default page to it. That way I was forced to see the forum on my browers startup.

 

[BlackStorm]

That's what I do at the minute but I think Lesli's idea is even better.
Think I will do that on my own forum, going to do some work on the site soon but I will be doing that once the work is complete

 

[dasp]

It took a little while, but our customers are starting to use the forum. Make sure that your customers can find it easily.

DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

 

[imported_Stephen]

What did you do to get your customers using it dasp?
Did you just make it more prominent on your site or did you offer anything to customers to try get it going?

 

[wsac]

I use my forms of my customer who buy thing like toolbars, Monitoring, etc..

 

[FatalSw1tch]

I really don't have a fourm but when I start up my new thing it will be used for clients

 

[imported_Alex]

I had a forum many moons ago for technical support but it really never got off the ground. The threads/topics were too little & far apart (I guess since I had few customers back then).

I let the customers vote on the issue and they preferred a kb; they were not shy in letting me know. I had almost instant ROI and have not look back since...

 

[imported_Waterlogged]

My clients dont use the forums that often either.

 

[RobAPI]

I had almost instant ROI and have not look back since... /quote]

What way did you have ROI with changing to a KB?

 

[imported_Waterlogged]

what is a kb?

 

[BlackStorm]

Knowledgebase.
I think what Alex is talking about owuld be a knowledgebase plus a ticket desk so people could ask questions and the most common questions would be added to the KB.

 

[imported_Alex]

I basically had an average amount of tickets a day, calculated that by my time (in relation to a tech. charging on a per ticket basis) in answering them during a two month span. Then added the kb and saw the difference between opened tickets for the same amount of time. Suprisingly, even though I had some new clients, I still had less open tickets then when I had no kb.

I also had a new customer because of the kb. They basicaly wrote to me stating that they had decided on two other companies besides mine and what made their decision easier was that I had a kb and the other two companies didn't (which is essentially another support channel). So just on this sale, I received more than compensation on the purchase of the kb.

I get many customers that are not computer and/or Internet savvy; you would be suprised in the amount of tickets I had for simple (adding email's in cPanel, etc.) questions. Even though I still get some of these tickets, the change is almost a 70% drop. For this, the kb works wonders..

 

[RobAPI]

*Think about looking into a KB*

Seems like it really helped you.
What KB do you use?
Why did customers rather the KB over the forum by the way?
Did you not want to let customers support customers on the forums? That is one of the best benefits of using a forum.