Delivering Effective Social Customer Service: How to Redefine the Way You Manage Customer Experience and Your Corporate Reputation

Chapter 5

Using Peer-to-Peer Support in Your Service Strategy

“What happens when we treat customers as part of the company?”

This question is still one of our all-time favourites. It's catalytic and to the point. In fact, you can transform an entire organization just by following through on its logic. It was posed by Lyle Fong, Chief Strategist and Co-Founder of Lithium, one of the major platform providers of peer-to-peer support.

This chapter explores how these communities work, their benefits, how they fit with your other social channels and where the market for peer-to-peer support is heading.

Of course, organizations have been using online communities for over twenty years. In that time, some have matured into major hubs for customer engagement, offering rich insight to a wide range of functional teams. Smart organizations use them as the centrepiece of their VoC (Voice of the Customer) efforts.

Communities allow customers and organizations to get closer. Whatever your position on customer loyalty, communities have proved one of the best ways of nurturing abiding relationships. They exist and endure through the shared interest of their membership. It is they who operationally run the community, source its knowledge, generate its discussions and share its governance with the organization who typically acts as sponsor.

“We found that the more we connected people to each other and connected them to us, the stronger the engagement online, the stronger the brand loyalty became.” ...