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We are submitting our User Forum to the 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards. Based on the influential Forrester book, the awards recognize companies who have made highly effective use of social technologies. Here's our story.
Our Pain Point
In January 2008, the Global Online Group at Pitney Bowes began to consider how emerging social networking technologies could help us meet one of our major business challenges – supporting users though the annual USPS Postal Rate change. Pitney Bowes provides postage meters more than a million businesses across the U.S. and almost all of them have to be updated whenever the USPS changes rates. Such postal events typically generate several hundred thousand customer support calls over a 3-4 week period. Traditionally, we have handled that peak volume by setting up and staffing temporary call centers.
The Solution
We decided to meet as much of that demand as possible with an innovative customer community based on the Lithium Technologies platform. Our two goals were to create a more highly-leveraged support channel and to provide a better user experience for Pitney Bowes customers. We were able to launch our community just three months after initiating this project and had a vital community in place in time for the May 12 rate change event.
Results
As a result of the large number of customers using the online community to find answers to their May 2008 postal rate change questions, Pitney Bowes was able to dramatically reduce the number of incoming calls to its call centers, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead of fielding questions one at a time on the phone, we were able to post answers to the forum, many of which were viewed more than 4,000 times. Users found this to be an easy and effective way to get help updating their equipment.
Community
Customer support is not the only objective for the online community, which now also serves as a key vehicle for a company-wide initiative to improve the overall customer experience. Pitney Bowes management routinely reviews ideas that surface in the online community, as well as other customer insights gained from direct engagement and collaboration with the online Pitney Bowes customer community.
"Engaging directly with our customers in a more open dialogue is a priority at Pitney Bowes from the CEO on down," says Rudy Chang, Vice President of the Global Online Group. "We know that customers are having conversations regarding our products and services, and an online community is a great way for us to host the conversations and an opportunity to participate – and most importantly -- learn from them."
Pitney Bowes' online community provides discussion areas where customers can engage with one another and with Pitney Bowes employees regarding various mailstream topics including postal rate changes, equipment, software, and postal regulations. The online community also hosts "Ask the Expert" forum events where a Pitney Bowes expert hosts a week-long discussion on a specific topic of interest. These events generate enormous buzz within the community, as customers discover new solutions, perspectives, and engage with other community members with similar interests.
Pitney Bowes has also launched a "Think Tank" forum where customers can post and vote for ideas regarding Pitney Bowes products and services. Pitney Bowes management routinely reviews ideas that surface in the online community, as well as other customer insights gained from direct engagement and collaboration with the online Pitney Bowes customer community.
Visit the Pitney Bowes User Forum at http://forums.pb.com
By now, the May 11 USPS postal rate change has come and gone and everybody's system is up to date and displaying the correct rates... right??
This is where social media like Forums really shine. On a phone support line, the customer service representative may give the same answer to person after person, one at a time. On the Forum, our most popular question - How to Update Postage Rates on Your PB Equipment - was viewed over 57,000 times. Talk about "one-to-many"! On average, each answer on the board was seen about 750 times. That's a big lever.
So, when you ask a question on the forum and get an answer, you're not only helping yourself - you're helping a lot of others as well. And it seems to be working: our 2009 USPS Postage Rate Change board has had over 355,000 views since we launched it last December, peaking right around the rate change date itself. Hopefully, those of you who needed help found what you were looking for!
The biggest win for everyone comes when users answer each other's questions. Who can give you a better answer than someone else who has "walked in your shoes"? The moral of the story? -- Share your wealth! You almost certainly have knowledge that someone else needs right now.
I just returned from an annual conference of Forum Admins. There were about 40 companies represented, so I got to see lots of great ideas in action. I also got a sneak peak at the future of our software platform. More on that in a minute, but first...
Forum Factoids:
- Member Communities on the internet are now more popular than email! (Forrester Research)
- At any given time, 90% of forum visitors don't post, 9% post once or twice, and 1% provide most of the content. But... 50% of a forum's visitors will post sometime!
Fabulous Forums:
The Future:
OK. What's coming down the pike? Over the next year, you will see many changes and new features on our forum. A few that I especially liked were:
- Improved search - better display of results and a series of filters to narrow down your results.
- Tribal Knowledge Base - users who promote topics to a formal knowledge base or edit an article get credit for their efforts and rise through the forum ranks.
- Twitter Integration - a widget in the right column will feature a feed of tweets relevant to the displayed topic. Users can respond right from the forum page, link their response to a post, or convert a tweet directly to a forum post!
There's much more & I'll talk about it in future blog posts. In the meantime, use the comment box below to tell me what features you would like to see!
It's time for a little celebration - our User Forum just turned
1-year old! Over that time, we've accumulated 2,300 registered users,
3,300 posts, 
and over a million page views. I hope we made last year's rate change a little easier, gave you a channel for getting product support, and provided some useful new information through our "Ask the Expert" forums. Let me know how we're doing!
So now, heading into year two, I'm setting up this soapbox in my corner to let you know what's going on in the forum and around Pitney Bowes, give you a heads-up about new features and events, and open up some dialogue about things you'd like to see happening here.
To kick it off, here are some questions I'd like to get feedback on:
- What discussion topics are most helpful or interesting to you? Least helpful?
- Can you suggest other topics for discussion?
- What could we be doing better to make the forum work for you?
- What should our next "Ask the Expert" event be about?
Add a comment below -- if you're not a registered forum user, no problem. Anyone can post.
Thanks!
