The panel on crowdsourcing support at the SIIA Software Summit had some great discussion on the value of community-based support systems.  Moderator Dan Woods of Evolved Media guided panelists Janjay Dholakia of Lithium, Jamie Grenney of Salesforce, Scott Hirsch of Get Satisfaction, and Mark Yolton of SAP Community Network.

Dan Woods kicked things off by talking about “Tom Sawyer wikis” — the notion that you can build a thing and expect someone else to do the work. The right thinking, it seems, is to “ask not what your community can do for you, but what you can do for your community.”

Q: How do you attract people to the community?

Mark (SAP):

In the broadest sense you have 90% consumers and 10% contributors. 1% are active. These are people who are helping others, colleagues, customers, and peers. You need something that’s going to attract people.

• In our earliest days this was content you could get nowhere else, from SAP product managers and other subject matter experts, so it was a content publishing system.
• After some time, it became the connections with other people, and the focus shifted to tools for establishing connections.
• Eventually it became a point system for ranking and thanks, which led to competition and then the focus was a reputation management system, both individually and as a company.

The evolution took 6 years and now we have an entire real-world awards program (individuals get recognized onstage in front of 5-6K of their peers.) Starting to share the points system and status within the SAP community in people’s LinkedIn profiles, because this is a sign to potential employers of someone’s expertise and ability to work with others.

Scott, Get Satisfaction:

Started as a consumer service. Don’t have to go to the company; you can add the company to the system. There’s an “if you build it, they will come” approach — organically, a community will emerge, and then we’ll provide tools for companies to get involved. We have some communities that exist where the company isn’t involved at all.

We see the same three segments, but there’s also differentiation within the contributors. One is a subject matter expert who’s really passionate/knowledgeable. Then there’s another who’s a facillitator. Both types are really important to building communities. The facilitator wants to move the conversation along and transfer knowledge from one group to another.

We tend to rely upon the company to reward the Subject Matter Expert — companies get champion badges that they can give to SMEs. But we view that GetSatisfaction is responsible for rewarding the facillitators since they span several groups and companies. Facilitators tend to disambiguate (“is the problem related to the phone, the carrier, the website?”)

Sanjay, Lithium:

We power the community itself for companies that want to run their own. We’ve amassed a tremendous amount of data so far on support systems. Need to first identify your goal: Drive down costs; generate new product ideas; generate leads. Depending on your business goal, the 1% varies.

• If you want to drive down costs, your 1% is the folks who have the answers.
• If you want to generate product ideas, your 1% is the people who ask the best questions.
• If you want to generate leads, your 1% is the people who know others.

Lithium was spun out of a gaming company, so it’s tightly integrated into a reputation system on a higher order. People can achieve ranks, but the company gets to specify the algorithm. Could be peer ratings (kudos), number of posts, accepted solutions (that worked for me) and so on. This can also be external data such as CRM and loyalty metrics.

As for rewards, there are several. First is the ability to “make the place mine” is key. A superuser has a significantly different look and feel — they’ve made it their cockpit. Second is permissions: The ability to move a thread. Third, someone’s career is tied to the brand (a Microsoft engineer will be a Microsoft engineer across multiple employers, so credibility and rating is an asset.)

Jamie, Salesforce.com:

Latch on to an existing process and tie it into the rest of the company. Salesforce had an existing Feature Request process for its customers to suggest things. The company had 1,400 requests a month coming in, and product managers were spending time de-duplicating requests, while customers weren’t feeling heard. We created an internal tool to make this better, and customers liked it because they could get instant gratification.

So we built our existing process for crowdsourcing feature requests and turned it into an external process. Starbucks had a similar approach, asking customers what they wanted.

Mark (SAP):

Communities are a balance of art and science. If you build it, they may not come. Striking the right balance is a challenge. The incentives and disincentives to encourage behaviors you want are tough. What causes people to behave in packs? Do you have enough motivation to generate the right behaviors? Do you have too much motivation, leading to over-competitiveness?

Q: What’s the value? And why is money so corrosive? Every community I’ve talked to says it has a negative impact.

Sanjay, Lithium:

It’s got to be about money. Folks like Cisco and Linksys are getting about $10M a year in support savings. Each call that gets fixed by the community instead of the call center saves $5-$10. Another eliminated email. A third had a disruption of email, and all support went to the community — leading to no drop in support satisfaction.

One key is that every problem has so many moving parts — browser, router, carrier — and no one company knows all of the issues. But the community does. Speaks to the testing model:

Also, Barnes & Noble found that people in the community spend 41% more money. They do research and make orders. Roomba noticed people were hacking their robots within the community and as a result introduced a developer model, driving up revenues.

Scott, Get Satisfaction:

Our founding principle was “if you build it, they will come.” It worked. But one of our mantras is “Community is not a tab.” It’s hard to take a walled garden and put a community in it. We’ve used a widget strategy to invite customers into the community and service them within the relationship channel.

We have some companies with their own support, that like to use us as an alternate arena for things; this gives the consumer a sense of “I can be myself over here.” They also feel that on their content won’t be removed. But other companies want deep integration with their embedded websites.

Some of the other companies say, “we’ll moderate when your customers yell at you.” But we say, “let them yell at you; that’s the time you have the chance to change someone’s mentality.”

Jamie, Salesforce:

There’s also the SEO consideration. The content that people generate is tremendously valuable in terms of rating, so

Mark, SAP:

The turnaround is remarkable – going from a dissatisfied user to a strong proponent. I think SAP’s brand happened outside first, then inside. People said, “I had no idea that the company was open enough to let us complain on their own site.” It started as a skunkworks, then moved out to the rest of the world, and then the company noticed and changed it inside.

Sanjay, Lithium:

Companies start to change their business processes. We have customers who no longer launch a product without first consulting their communities.

Mark, SAP:

We do 6,000 forum posts a day. If we see 1,000 of them being a post, that’s a question that didn’t go into support. The ROI adds up.

(Note that I was typing this up furiously as the panelists discussed things, so some of this is paraphrased or summarized, but hopefully I captured the intent of their statements.)