Companies are always looking for ways of better servicing their customers, as well as reducing customer support costs and overhead.  Recently companies have been finding that they can achieve both by adding community Q&A to their websites, as it provides higher quality answers to inquiries while also reducing the resources used to provide that support.

Community Q&A is a user driven question and answer platform, where customers are able to easily ask questions and receive answers.  The advantage community Q&A software has over the traditional support ticket systems is that not only can company staff answer incoming questions, but it also gives thousands of enthusiastic and knowledgeable customers the opportunity to help support each other as well. This community driven support helps ensure that customers get the best possible answers from the best possible sources, whether they’re employees of the company or not.

As a leading supplier of community Q&A software, Answerbase.com is seeing this play out as their customers take advantage of community Q&A for their support needs.

“Sometimes the best people to answer questions about a product or service are the ones actually using the product or experiencing the service on a daily basis.  That makes community Q&A a perfect tool for companies to be able to provide the best level of support to their customers while still being able to maintain control of the conversation.” says James Arnold, Co-Founder of Answerbase.

On top of having questions addressed by product evangelists so customer service representatives don’t need to respond to all the inquiries, the right community Q&A software can also reduce the number of questions that are asked in the first place.  For example, the Answerbase.com platform has advanced recognition software built in that reads the text of the question being asked and searches the database of already answered questions to see if there is a match.  When it finds a similar question, it alerts the user that an answer is already available and allows the user to see that answer immediately.  This technology satisfies the customer’s needs since they don’t have to wait for a response, and it also reduces the overall number of inquiries coming in which saves company resources.

Customers report positive feedback as they add community Q&A to their portfolio of tools to help improve their customer support efforts online;

“We’d been using another service for years, and I greatly prefer community Q&A through Answerbase. The Q&A platform makes it so easy for our members to interact, and for us to give answers to our frequently asked questions in a visually pleasing way. It’s a great service for everyone” says Meredith Dougherty, Vice President of Technology at the International Safe Transit Association

As if better quality answers and reduced inquiries weren’t benefit enough, the system also gives companies the opportunity to better control the message around their products posted the internet.

Every company is interested in controlling the conversation around its products, especially given that customers often go to search engines to find solutions.  Those same customers are often finding answers on sites not owned or monitored by the company that owns the product, and this creates a demand for having more control over what their customers are seeing in that process.

Since the community Q&A system allows customers to ask questions, and those questions are posted publically, it produces public Q&A content that other customers are naturally searching for as well.   As others go to search engines with their questions, the public Q&A content pops up in the search results where they find answers monitored and controlled by the company. This process gives companies much more control over the value of that support experience.

As the internet and search engines becomes the preferred way for people to find answers to questions about the products they own, companies are finding that adding community Q&A to their site is a critical component to a quality customer service experience.

Setup a Q&A site today and start seeing similar results for your site.