Company: HP Consumer Support
Entry Submitted by: Dani Weinstein Social Media Support Manager (Dani)
Community: HP Consumer Support Forum (http://h30434.www3.hp.com)
Lithy Categories: Best Business ROI
HP’s Consumer Support Forums have saved the company multi-millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of man-hours and – most importantly – has helped millions of customers get the most out of their HP technology. Now that’s ROI.
With more than 10 million technology support solutions recorded annually and more than 500 million page views since its launch, the HP Consumer Support Forums are a key resource for customers and HP alike. When more customers find the help and solutions they need, when and where they want and expect it, the more HP delivers best-in-class support. Community members also help HP engineers uncover product issues and improve HP technologies and products.
In 2011, three main factors led to unprecedented performance, expanded community engagement and overall vibrancy for the forums:
Global Usability Testing: HP talked with customers around the world and observed how they used the forums. With this info in hand, HP was able to better understand and make the forums more intuitive and useful for both first-time and seasoned users across the seven language forums
HP launched ForumVille, an online community enhancement program with the specific goal of optimizing the forum experience for all users. Forumville significantly increased overall response rates to questions and issues, resulting in improved community interactions, Accepted Solutions and goodwill.
After applying rigorous six sigma methodology, ForumVille deployed 13 new enhancements which have been adopted and incorporated into HP’s forums experience. Highlights include:
- The HP Expert Campaign introduced a fun gaming challenge for top contributors to respond to posted threads on our least active forum boards. This game resulted in a 75% answer rate and 50% response time reduction for the low performing boards during the 2 week period.
This was an amazing way to motivate our top posters:
- “Yay! I'm excited! It's nice to see something like this being done after all this time”... (Kalt)
- “Great numbers! Lot of nice efforts there, guys. I am gonna have to give up my 'day job' to compete with all of you...” (CherylG)
- The ‘Fall Cleaning’ Campaign for HP Community Managers – The goal of the event was to make many posts easier to find either by adding more keywords so it appears in the search results or by making the title of the post so self explanatory that customers can better identify it being a possible match for their issue.
- The community managers introduced a new board specifically for forum first-timers. The board includes video tutorials as well as other tips and tricks. It continues to be one of the most widely visited boards on the forums.
- HP developed a new widget displaying unanswered posts throughout the forum. The widget allows HP Experts fast and easy access to posts that need their attention most, resulting in faster response times and more satisfied customers. HP Experts responded enthusiastically :
- “Having access to the posts with no replies will also be very good. It will save those of us helping from having to check every forum”. – Old Geekster
- “I believe it is very useful for other member in here as well in order to monitor many forums within our expertise area more easily”. - SlomiL
- “Maybe it has been there a long time but I have just noticed the "Threads with no replies" on the right side of each board and I have been using that tool regularly. This started in late September. Don't tell me the feature has been there since the beginning of time :)”
- “... the single best improvement on the forum”
A new and cleaner look for the HP Support Forums: Aligning with HP company-wide web and graphics standards, the HP Consumer Support Forums pages took on a more streamlined and colorful community look and feel.
The HP Consumer Support Forums have proven to be an unmitigated success. In 2011, the forums reached 685 million net page views, including:
- 5.5M visits a month globally
- 40M customer solutions delivered
- 31,000 Accepted Solutions
- 100,000 Kudos
- 15M searches
- 650,000 registered customers
Among Lithium's top 250 communities, HP’s English Consumer Support Community ranks:
- 7th among 250 top communities overall
- 3rd among 110 high tech hardware and software
- 4th out of 150 support-oriented communities
- 7th among 164 B2C oriented communities
- Lithium’s Consumer Health Index scores consistently rate the HP English Forum above 700
At the current growth rate, the forums will reach one billion page views around November 2012!
Thanks to savings the forums have enabled, HP is reinvesting those dollars in efforts to broaden and grow our social media experience across the world. It’s HP’s commitment to our customers to be there anytime, anywhere - to listen, engage, and help.