This ebook looks at increasing agent efficiencies to deliver better return on investments in the Contact Center and Customer Service by using communities. The ebook has detailed calculations of the savings. The study was conducted by talking to customers and studying dozens of case studies and client results. www.DrNatalieNews.com www.Twitter.com/DrNatalie www.GetSatisfaction.com

1. a publication of
Reduce Support Costs With
a Customer Community:
Increase Agent Efficiency
eBook II in a series of III

2. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 1
Contents
INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Customer Community: The Basics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Reduce One-Off Requests. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Empower Your Support Champions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Community-Based Support
Compliments the Contact Center . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Community as the Canary in the Coal Mine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Close the Loop. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Saving Time is Saving Money. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Saving Time & Money Through
Improved Agent Efficiency. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

3. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 2
Introduction
We love our customer support agents. Friendly, helpful, and patient by nature, these folks spend more time talking to your customers than
anyone else in your company. They truly understand the pain points of your business, and they’re the ones putting in long hours to resolve
them for your customers. It’s important, then, to ensure they have the tools and resources necessary to be truly effective.
This isn’t just a good idea from a warm and fuzzy perspective. Agent salaries are the most expensive part of a support center. By ensuring
that they’re using their time efficiently—helping people solve complex, technical or individual problems, not responding to the same basic
questions over and over again—you can do a lot to maximize the value of your support agents, the satisfaction of your customers, and
minimize stress and pain points for both.
This eBook is the second in a series of three explaining how customer communities can help companies realize significant savings and
revenue sources, along with the metrics and calculations to measure the results. The first eBook focused on customer community as a
valuable resource for customer self-service support. This book focuses on the way companies can leverage community to improve agent
efficiency. Stay tuned for the final, which will discuss community as a means to improve customer retention and acquisition.

4. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 3
Customer Community: The Basics
Since this eBook is all about how you can leverage a customer
community to improve agent efficiency (and reduce costs as a
result), we figured it makes sense to give a quick refresher course
on what exactly a customer community is, just to make sure we’re
all on the same page. If you’re a seasoned community expert, skip
ahead to the next section, “Reduce One-Off Requests.”
So what is a community platform? It all started with some of
the first technology that emerged on the web—the forums and
message boards of the 80’s and 90’s. These technologies were
built to create online spaces where users could have threaded
conversations about the topics, products, and services that
interested them. To have an identity across conversation, users
typically created a profile with a nickname, so that they could build
their reputation. This primordial community technology worked
well for engineers, developers, and early adopters, but it was not
designed to be easy-to-use by a mass audience.
A lot has changed in today’s community platforms, but the
core conversational functions have remained the same. At Get
Satisfaction, we have a strong point of view that, for a community
to be most effective and beneficial for customers as well as
companies, it should have the following:
❑❑User-friendly interface with a simple way for even tech-wary users
to browse and search for relevant conversations
❑❑Technical flexibility that allows business to embed community
content and functionality across customer channels … on websites,
social networks, in digital campaigns, and on mobile and tablet
devices
❑❑Business features and tools (topic moderation, content curation,
etc.) that allow for successful community management
❑❑Ability for the community to be branded by the company that owns
or sponsors it
❑❑Content that is highly indexed by search engines (through SEO) and
naturally appears in top search results
❑❑Analytics tools that allow business users to assess community
health and performance, determine the most relevant content, and
identify the community members who are mostly likely to become
brand advocates
❑❑Formal Champions program that allows you to identify, recognize,
and allocate simple moderation capabilities to the customers who
act as informal leaders in your community
When equipped with these features and moderated and curated
effectively, communities are great assets for customers to research
products, find answers to their questions, and act as resources for
others. These conversations drive customer satisfaction and brand
loyalty, while helping companies deliver great support, gather
feedback to build better products, and acquire more customers.
Effectively, community allows you to deliver a better customer
experience, while reducing costs and bringing benefits to multiple
departments across companies.

5. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 4
Reduce One-Off Requests
Your support agents are knowledgeable about every aspect of your
business. They have extensive knowledge about your product, your
processes, and policies. So it’s an ironic twist of fate that (especially
as your business scales) they spend most of their time answering
simple, one-off questions.
Don’t get us wrong—it’s important that your customers are
supported as they purchase, set up, and begin using your products.
You want them to be as successful as possible, so they have a
positive experience and brand association. But does this mean your
support agents have to hold the hand of each and every customer
as they look for the “on” button? Absolutely not…at least not
anymore.
As you scale your business, you need to make sure that you’re
doing everything you can to reduce the number of simple,
repetitive questions your support staff is answering. A branded
customer community is ideal for this. It acts as a living, breathing
conversation library, hosting all the questions, answers, praise, and
ideas that have come before, while constantly being updated with
the most current topics of conversation.
Because community is designed to facilitate engagement around
the topics your customers care about (as opposed to Facebook or
Twitter, which are optimized for engagement around recent content
only), all conversations, whether they began two years ago or this
morning, are easy for search engines and hence people, to find.
Get Satisfaction customer communities take this archive capability
a step further. They search the entire community to see if an
answer may already be tucked away somewhere in the ghosts
of conversations past, before allowing a new topic to be posted.
This means that customers are automatically exposed to existing
questions and answers before they can open new issues.
This is beneficial for all concerned parties—your customers are able
to self-serve their own answers quickly and easily, which is what
most consumers prefer these days. And your support agents don’t
have to answer the same questions over and over again, because
there is a huge repository of content that exists already.
Empower Your Support Champions
Increasing agent efficiency is really a fancy way of saying reduce
agent tickets, calls, emails, and instances, freeing them up to
put their support super powers to work on more complex issues.
A great way to do this is by identifying the customers who are
naturally knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and vocal about your
product, also known as brand advocates or Champions.

6. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 5
It may seem unlikely that there are actually people out there who
are excited to speak up on your behalf, answer questions, and act
as impromptu support agents, but anyone who works in social
media will tell you that there absolutely are! Your job is to identify
them, incentivize them (even with a simple web badge—these folks
love a little recognition!), and connect them with prospects and
other customers. A customer community, with its wealth of people,
content, and analytic capabilities, is a natural place to do just that.
Get Satisfaction offers a Champs program, which allows you to
publically designate champions so the community knows who they
are. You can even give them special abilities so they can moderate
and curate as you see fit.
Champions are not the only ones who can help alleviate
the load on your support agents. The people interacting in your
community naturally bring with them varying experiences,
perspectives, and skills. From highly technical developer
communities, to those of companies that sell basic consumer
goods, bringing your customers and employees together to share
experiences and solutions is a solid base to build on for innovation,
development, and collaboration.
Community-Based Support Compliments the Contact Center
Community-based, social support doesn’t have to exist in a
bubble—it’s a great way to complement and complete agent-based
support strategies. Let’s say, for example, that your software
product is acting a little buggy when it’s used with a certain
operating system. A customer can’t figure out what to do, so he
calls in and gets an answer. A couple weeks later, someone else has
the same issue, but they post in the community instead. This might
be a younger or more tech-savvy customer who prefers to reach
support online, or maybe they just did a quick Google search and
were brought to the community that way. The customer who called
support originally sees the post and reports what the phone agent
told them as a response to the community topic.
Now the answer exists in the community as a resource for
everyone in the future who has this problem. They can discover it
through search or by going there directly. Each person who sees
the answer is equal to one fewer call to an agent.

7. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 6
Community as the Canary in the Coal Mine
Until recently, support was strictly reactionary. With the adoption
of community as a key support tool, we’re seeing entire support
organizations evolve from reactionary “fixers,” to agents working
collaboratively with community members to identify bugs and
issues before they come become widespread problems.
When your agents are on the front lines, getting real-time feedback
about the things that aren’t working, they can be prepared to
address them fully and effectively with others who are likely to be
experiencing the same issue. This saves the agents time and stress,
as they have deeper, more immediate insight into where things
are breaking down before they get on the phone with an angry
customer. And the fact that the agent is already aware of issues and
possible solutions before they take that call means the customer is
more likely to get off the phone feeling like they’re in good, capable
hands.
Close the Loop
As any good support agent knows, it’s not just important to provide
customers with immediate assistance, but also to close the loop
and keep them updated about new developments as well. This may
be when a bug has been fixed, a new feature has been released or
rolled back, or a work-around has been uncovered.
A customer community makes it fast and easy to provide your
customers with the most up-to-date information. What previously
would have required individual emails, Tweets, or status updates,
now can be accomplished with one simple community update. You
can post a company update for big notifications, or just post an
“official reply” to a topic, so everyone who has expressed interest
in that topic will get an email notification of the update. That also
means that when the next person who experiences that issue
comes to your community, they will find the answer waiting for
them there. How’s that for efficiency?

8. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 7
Saving Time is Saving Money
Get Satisfaction Customers Save Agents
Time & Tickets with Community
Customer: Mint
Reduced Support Tickets 75%
Customer: Kiddicare
Increased First Call Resolution by 38%
Customer: Ustream
Reduced Support Tickets 55%
Customer: Springpad
Reduced Support Emails 80%
Customer: VolunteerMatch
Reduced Support Emails 40%
Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, social business expert and the CEO of Social
Business Builders, analyzed dozens of Get Satisfaction customer
case studies to understand how much money on average these
companies are saving with a customer community. Here is what
she came up with:
Dr. Petouhoff found that, by proving customers with easy-to-find,
real-time information and keeping agents up to date about the
issues that are affecting customers with community, companies
were able to:
❑❑Decrease the time agents spent on a support call by an average of
2 minutes
❑❑Handle more customer support requests (scale), without adding
staff
She took it a step further and calculated exactly how much money
those results were saving the companies she examined on average
each year. The results are on the next page.

9. Reduce Support Costs With a Customer Community: Increase Agent Efficiency – eBook II in a series of IIII 8
Average savings based on companies studied by Dr. Petouhoff
Total # of
Interactions/
month
Total # of
Interactions/
year
Average time
to resolve a
call before
GS
Average time
to resolve a
call after GS
Time
reduced
by Get
Satisfaction
Savings by
using Get
Satisfaction
30,000
interactions
360,000
interactions
6 min
(36K hours yr)
4 min
(24K hours yr)
12K hour
Reduction
Agent = $15/hr
Savings =
$180,000/ year
Therefore, by reducing the average time to resolve a call from 6 minutes to 4 minutes, your company on average can save $180,000 a year!
Saving Time & Money Through Improved Agent Efficiency
So there you have it. Leverage a customer community to reduce
one-off, simple support requests, connect your customers to one
another for social support, identify issues early, and make updating
your customers a quick and simple task. This will help you save
your agents time, and will allow you to scale without adding agents
or sacrificing customer satisfaction. Just saving your team a bit
of time can help you realize big savings (who knew that reducing
support calls by two minutes can save you $180,000 a year??).
But the best benefits you realize from improving agent efficiency
are not so easily quantified. When your support agents are free
from dealing with simple, repetitive questions, they have more time
and energy to focus on complex technical problems (you know,
the ones you hired them to take care of). Their morale is higher
because they feel like their time is being well spent. This has a
positive impact on your bottom line, your company culture, and
(most importantly) the satisfaction of your customers.