A very clever post by CEO Richard White to differentiate UserVoice from Get Satisfaction - and he is right that the two products are different.
However I don't agree that customer support doesn't work - it depends on the vertical, type of product and price point.
In the UK we have a new mobile phone carrier that is totally customer support driven - you don't get the level of customer service you would normally get but the prices are significantly cheaper (aimed at teens and students who have little money but enjoy hanging out on social platforms).
There will always be exceptions to any rule and GiffGaff seems like quite the exceptional case (They’re even paying customers to do support. This is really cool).
Here’s a checklist for whether your company is an exception to this rule:
- Do you have a HUGE customer base?
- Do you have a very stable product?
- Do your existing customer service channels inflict pain upon all who come in contact? :)
So if you’re Comcast or AT&T then sure give it a shot (but I think you’d be better off just fixing #3). This is also why almost all the vendors of this type of technology target large enterprises.
For the other 99.999% of businesses on the web and pretty much anyone here on HN I’m confident saying that not only does customer-powered support not work but it’s detrimental to your company’s future.
The level of support provided by carriers in the US is typically atrocious, but I do not understand how this works. I generally only calling with billing issues. What kind of support are customers providing?
They provide the SIM only with you providing the device (don't forget outside of North America most countries are all-GSM and so every cell phone sold is SIM-compatible).
Questions asked and solved by the community include: "how do I get this to work with my iPhone", "what are the APN settings to get data access", "how much does it cost to send a text when abroad" that kind of thing.
As a soon to be poor student very likely to be studying in the UK, what carrier might this be? All I can think of on the low end are Tesco and 3, and both those have decent CS.
I am a fairly happy Sprint customer here in the US but when I return to my motherland I put a GiffGaff SIM in my GSM phone as they have the best prices for data access bundles.
Customer powered support might be fine if you don't mind your users getting a high percentage of wrong answers or no answers. Just look at the non-vendor support forums whose business models is to cash in on user-supplied answers. (E.g., google for 'Why is my Mac hot?') If you're willing to go through three or four of these for every question you have, you might find an answer. But you'll also find a number of wrong answers, often in the same thread.
Do they have a competitor whose angle is customer-powered support? I don't know anything about this business, but this sounds like a response to a competitor.
Or we do crowd-sourced support or the company pays for their own user support. This is so white and black.
Why don't we look into a well thought of mix of both options. I would work on a strategy where both are possible.
I would create a support kb where we create content solving common and known problems. The hardest trick is guiding people to the right solution. This can be done by searching, good taxonomy or plain old direct question via phone or forum. The crowd-sourced support can be a part where they help people guide to the right information.
Another part can be that the crowd-sourced support can spot bad formulated articles, wrong articles, out of date articles, ... Just create some tools you can get feedback on your content and involve your customers.
But only go on the crowd-sourced route is not an option and won't be benificial for your company.
Another thing I've noticed is that if I see a support forum where most of the answers are given by customers rather than employees, it gives me the feeling the company is not listening or keeping in touch. I get the feeling of laziness, which paints a poor image in my mind.
However I don't agree that customer support doesn't work - it depends on the vertical, type of product and price point.
In the UK we have a new mobile phone carrier that is totally customer support driven - you don't get the level of customer service you would normally get but the prices are significantly cheaper (aimed at teens and students who have little money but enjoy hanging out on social platforms).