Cisco Home Community

[davo]

Linksys by Cisco Community Background
Linksys by Cisco is a leading provider of home networking and networked entertainment products and services. Linksys by Cisco has long held a reputation for excellent technical support and has developed a number of innovative approaches – including use of social technologies – to contain support costs while still offering responsive service. One key initiative was the introduction of an online customer support community,powered by Lithium Technologies. Linksys by Cisco maintains its community in six languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

An online community is one part of the Linksys by Cisco comprehensive set of support offerings that include: selfsupport knowledge base “Ask Linksys;” online automatic setup and diagnostic tools for selected products;and online chat for assisted support. Integration of the various support channels gives unique power and success to selfservice.  For instance, live feeds community are accessible to customers on product-specific pages of the support site, enhancing the support experience. Linksys by Cisco has received a number of industry awards for its support including Best Customer Commitment from the SSPA in May, 2008.

How Does Linksys by Cisco Run Its Support Community?

The enormous size of the Linksys by Cisco customer base is evident when you take a look at its community statistics: over 4 million user-sessions each month with over 3,000 new threads. Linksys by Cisco encourages community use through a hands-on strategy. While it hopes that users themselves will answer many of the questions on the community forums (and they do), a dedicated staff monitors the community and ensures that most questions are answered within 24 hours. The moderators also ensure that community etiquette is respected.  Note that the group of moderators has not expanded since the birth of the community: while traffic has increased tremendously, the number of unanswered questions that need answers from moderators has not increased proportionally.

Where Do Savings Come From?

For Linksys by Cisco, the measurable benefits of its community overwhelmingly come from call deflections: that is, many users find answers by visiting the community and therefore do not need (costly) assisted support. Before we delve into these savings, it’s worth pointing out several other significant benefits Linksys by Cisco is realizing from its support community initiative:

Discontinuation of email support. Let’s just cite two examples. A year after Linksys by Cisco deployed its support community the company was able to discontinue email support entirely, with no negative reaction from customers, no increase in phone calls, and an increase in community usage that almost matched email use.

Back-up business continuity. During Christmas of 2006 (a typically busy season for Linksys by Cisco support), call center operations were interrupted temporarily due to an earthquake in the Asia Pacific region. Support traffic on the Linksys by Cisco community went up 50 percent overnight, not only compensating for the loss of the call center channel and minimizing the effects of the natural disaster, but also saving Christmas for many consumers!

Better Analytics. The community moderators provide reports on conversations taking place in the community and much relevant and actionable product information can be gleaned from the reports, especially for newer products.

Call Deflection Savings

At Linksys by Cisco, the key hard-dollar measure of its community success is the savings generated by call deflection. Linksys by Cisco analyzed its call deflection by separating:

Direct Deflection, which occurs when a user who would normally place a request for assisted support instead posts a question and gets an answer; and

Indirect Deflection, which occurs when a user obtains an answer from the community without having to post a question. In other words, the question had been posed and answered already and the customer can use the answer immediately.

Direct Deflection

There is a handy Lithium feature that allows posters to mark a thread they started as answered. Naturally it undercounts successful posts since many users do not bother marking the thread as answered. Nevertheless, it’s a reliable and conservative indicator. At Linksys by Cisco, the average proportion of threads marked as answered is 35%. With over 3,000 new threads per month direct deflection runs over 1,000 cases per month for Linksys by Cisco.

Indirect Deflection

Now for the fun part: the Linksys by Cisco user base is gigantic, so much of the savings occur not with direct deflection but with indirect deflection (or “savings through search” as some call it: users who visit the community forums and find an answer without having to start a new thread.)

Linksys by Cisco counts four million user-sessions each month. A session is a beginning-to-end interaction with the community, not a page view. Linksys by Cisco sets a cookie on users so a user who visits the community again within four hours of the initial session is counted only once. Even so, to be conservative Linksys by Cisco used two million visits in its indirect deflection calculation. 

We then subtracted the number of new threads: clearly users who post a question did not find their answer via searching (although the answer may have been there.) 

Now how about rating success? Since Linksys by Cisco does not require registration for users who browse the community, and in any case does not track customers across support channels, there’s no easy way to measure how many customers avail themselves of the support community instead of using assisted support. So Linksys by Cisco instead uses an online survey with random popups that simply asks users whether they found what they needed in the community. As we know such surveys drastically undercount successful visits since satisfied users may not take the time to respond. For Linksys by Cisco the percentage of successful answers is 6%.

Based on the number of browsing visits and the success rate, Linksys by Cisco estimates that indirect deflection is close to 120,000 cases per month -- vastly more than direct deflection and creating a bounty of savings if you apply even a conservative estimate for the average cost of a support call.

Message Edited by davo on 09-02-2009 08:58 AM