A ‘forum’ aka ‘bulletin board’ is a website usually built on popular open source software such as PhpBB, VBulletin, Bbpress and many others. A good list of choices is here and here or just google ‘phpbb alternatives’.
A forum is a great way to get information about your product out there. It is ‘SEO friendly’, it is relatively easy to administer and maintain, and it is a great way to connect with loyal customers. But is it a viable solution for your company? I thought of a number of reasons why and why not:
Pros
- Content is user generated. Unlike a forum or a corporate website, the content on it is coming from visitors to your site, not you. This is the primary reason why I say a forum can be both a pro and a con, but focusing on the Pro, the main reason why this is a good thing is that all the discussion as a whole only helps improve awareness of your product or service. If you back all that organic content with good customer service as well then a forum will be a great PR and marketing vehicle at a fraction of the cost.
- It is SEO friendly. The words ‘SEO Friendly’ have been widely misconstrued because Google’s ability to index websites works so well now it is literally difficult to keep things from it unless you deliberately work to hide content from it. Today it is safe to say anything you put on the ‘net is already ‘SEO friendly’ without doing anything. Bad code work of course can still confuse or dilute content from being searchable, but rest assured if you use any updated popular forum software with a strong developer group behind it like PhpBB or VBulletin, you will likely be using software that is already optimized for search.
- A Great Way To Deal With Clients Publicly. The last thing customers looking for service want is to be ignored so occasionally they will ‘want to go public’. Customers might bombard the company website with their support requests in comments sections as if to say to ‘hey, I need help and look at this company they are ignoring me!‘ to the world. But because many websites do not have the mechanism to deal with these, they can continue looking ignored even if the issue has already been resolved.Whether that is appropriate behavior is not the point. The fact of the matter is it happens and if it hasn’t it will sooner or later. A forum is your way to handle this via:
- All customer requests, suggestions, praises, complaints – Anything – should be forwarded to the forums section. From there it can be dealt with.
- Company admin can either issue a support ticket to that user or that user can login those programs and get one for themselves. This is important so as to keep track of the specific complaint. There are great support ticketing system such as OSticket (free with Cpanel) or Zendesk.
- Because the client chose to ‘go public’ with their complaint via the company forum, the company can in turn use this as an opportunity to publicly display how well they are responding to the complaint. Any and all complaints should be ticketed (via the ticketing system mentioned above), dealt with, and ended appropriately, each time being announced on the forum and therefore ‘in public’. This serves as documentation that everyone can see, including and especially the public.
- Clients can use the forum to support each other. There might not even be need for customer support in the first place if customers are able to find situations similar to theirs and follow the thread in the forum to how it was fixed. This will greatly alleviate pressure from a company’s service and support department as it helps customers get what they want without having to bother them.
To be continued.
Do you think your company needs a forum? Email me at [email protected]. Consultations are always free.
