Online Communities and Economies of Scale?

After computerising every customer touchpoint that we can lay our hands on over recent decades - a return to treating customers individually in online communities doesn’t always sit well.

“Surely this can’t be an efficient use of resources; where’s the economy of scale in answering an individual blog comment …?!”

Well, fear not - there is light at the end of the tunnel and some great case studies emerging now that demonstrate the efficiencies and scale that can be delivered through online communities.

An example retold in Groundswell is that of Dell:

“When started their most recent support forum in 1999, they knew they’d need moderators. They pulled 30 support reps off the phones and converted them into forum moderators. Those support reps answered questions online, just as they had been on the phone.

Already, Dell was getting more efficiencies, since each answer could be read by dozens or hundreds of other people searching for it on their support forum.

Now, five years later, the support forum is many times larger than it was then. And the number of moderators is no longer 30. Its five. And that’s because the members of the community are moderating it themselves.”

We are seeing the same in marketing forums as they mature. The more embedded the members, the more likely you will see self-moderation, and a genuine desire to assist members.

Marketing with your best customers - now that’s a different kind of scale economy!

And compared with that IVR system or that CRM application - I dont think it is just a quantitative issue, I suspect the qualitative (customer experience!) outcomes might also be instructive.