Читать книгу The Customer Education Playbook - Daniel Quick - Страница 28

Reducing the impact on the support team is a common business goal, and for good reason. As your company grows, it's natural that the number of tickets you get is going to scale with it, and no, unfortunately it doesn't matter how intuitive and easy your product is to use. What are you going to do to meet this need? Are you going to keep hiring more support agents, indefinitely? Obviously, that doesn't scale. Instead, you must figure out how you can deflect support tickets, and the best way to do that is through customer education.

Scaling your support offerings through customer education comes in the form of self-service resources. Whether that's help centers, online communities, or FAQs, self-service customer education can have a big impact on scaling your support team through documentation and resources.

Let's look in detail at one of these examples – online communities. These are often thought of as a means to build brand enthusiasm and customer advocacy. However, when done right, they can also play a huge role in ticket deflection. Customers can turn to the community with pressing questions, and an active community can often generate answers more quickly than a support team. On top of this, the best communities include experts with knowledge, experience, and best practices that can outweigh your in-house experience 10 to 1.

Of course, a successful community doesn't spring up overnight. You can't just build an online forum and expect it to succeed. This isn't Field of Dreams. Most communities suffer from the tumbleweed effect. The chemistry of a thriving online community takes a lot of work to spark it into lift and requires investment to nurture it from the ground up, from attracting new members to moderating conversations and helping it to scale and grow.