Leveraging Online Communities For Customer Support

July 2024

#commenting

#online community

An outside-the box use for online forums is to allow your customers to help each other out. In this blog post, we explain how this can improve your customer service, save money, and more.

There are a lot of obvious benefits to including space for user comments on your site: increased engagement, longer time-on-site, more return visits, and more. However, there are alternative uses for online commenting that some people haven’t considered. One of the most often-overlooked uses for online comments is as a customer-support platform.

Online communities offer several distinct advantages over more-traditional customer support channels, like 800 numbers or a dedicated email channel. Online communities provide 24/7 support availability — which allows customers to ask questions and seek help at any time, and get responses from fellow customers who may have faced similar issues.

In this blog post, we talk about the benefits this approach to customer support can yield for you and your brand, how to set it up in your own communities, and more. Read on:

Case Study: A Guided Tour of Cool Comments: read more.

Benefits of Comments-Based Support

Reddit, the so-called “Front Page of the Internet,” is basically a peer-to-peer advice and support forum on any topic imaginable. With sub-forums called things like “AmIOverreacting,” “Relationships,” “AskLawyers” and more, people are reaching out to the internet as a whole for answers to their questions, and getting answers from real people.

This community of communities was valued at $6.4 Billion in a 2024 IPO, so clearly people place a lot of value on getting advice and feedback from another human being. Adding comment-based support isn’t going to suddenly transform your support page into a multi-billion dollar company, but there are a lot of benefits you can gain from this approach.

Such as:

Cost-Effective Support: The most-obvious benefit of comments-based support is that if your customers are helping each other, that doesn’t cost you anything. Though you will undoubtedly still need a customer-support team, a forum filled with responses to common issues can take care of the easiest questions, freeing your team up to focus on the most-difficult issues.
Efficiency: Having open discussion boards on your pages can help you respond to questions rapidly. And since multiple customers who may have the same problem can see your response, comments-based support can solve multiple customers’ issues at the same time.
Crisis Management: Having that quick way to respond to customer issues (particularly ones that affect a lot of customers simultaneously) can help calm things down before an issue spirals out of control. Giving customers an avenue to find out that you’re aware of the issue and are correcting it can help you keep control of the narrative surrounding the issue.
Transparency: Allowing discussions to happen around product or service issues to happen in the open, on your own website, can help build trust with customers and potential customers. It signals that you’re unafraid of feedback, and that you believe any potential issues with your product or service are manageable.
SEO Benefits: Regularly updated comment sections can improve your search-engine results, by providing a steady stream of fresh content and relevant keywords related to your product or service.
Feedback: If you want to know how your most-engaged customers are feeling about your product and your brand, there are very few better ways to get that direct feedback. This can help inform your future decisions.
Brand Advocacy: Effective handling of customer issues in comments can turn dissatisfied customers into brand advocates. When others see positive resolutions publicly, it can enhance your brand’s reputation.
First-Party Data: As with anything else you’re doing on your site, support comments can be a great opportunity for you to collect more first-party data and cookie-proof your site for the future.

Peer-to-peer support not only reduces the workload on customer service teams, but also helps reinforce your other community-building efforts. Actively participating in an online community can deepen customers’ engagement with your brand. When customers feel heard and valued within a community, they are more likely to remain loyal and even advocate for your products or services.

Cool Comments Moderation supporting graphic

Challenges With Comment-Based Support

Anybody who says they’ve got the answer to all your problems is probably selling something. Now, we do sell services that will answer your problems, but we believe in giving you the full picture so you know what you’re getting into. So with that said, there are some challenges to keep in mind if you try to use comment-based support on your own website:

Volume: Popular posts or articles can attract a large volume of comments. While hosting these issues on a forum allows other users to answer questions for you, many will still require an official touch — and high volume makes it difficult to respond to each one promptly and effectively. That can lead to:
Negative Publicity: If you switch to a comment-based support system, you can’t be seen to be dropping the ball or leaving all the difficult work of customer support to users. Negative comments or unresolved issues can be visible to other users, so it’s important to stay on top of the queue. Customers expect quick responses in online environments. Delayed responses or unresolved issues can lead to frustration and dissatisfaction.
Quality of Information / Trolls: One issue with user-generated support is that they can sometimes give wrong answers by accident — or, in the case of trolls, on purpose. Moderation is needed to stay on top of both misinformation as well as toxic behavior.
Compliance And Privacy Issues: User-generated content also means collecting user data, which can be valuable for your own metrics, but also may subject you to various jurisdictional laws and guidelines about data storage and user privacy. Your moderators may also need to keep an eye on any content that runs afoul of legal issues, like defamation, copyright laws, threats, and more.
Integration: As we said, comments-based support won’t eliminate your need for other levels of escalation, like email and phone support. There still needs to be that next level of customer service for important or complicated problems, or sensitive customer situations.

You may have noticed that the vast majority of these problems can be countered with robust moderation. High comment volume, misinformation, trolls, legal compliance — all of these things can be nipped in the bud with a solid moderation team in your corner. Keep that in mind, as we explain to you how to set up your online community.

Building Your Community

Because engagement is sort of our thing around these parts, we’ve spoken extensively about the history of online communities, and building one of your own. There are a lot of benefits to an online community outside of their utility for customer support — and having a pre-existing online community is the first step towards building one for customer support.

Having a pre-existing comment community on your website can help teach users the basic rules and guidelines for participating in that community. Policies about things like misinformation, salty language, and fighting with other users can all be squared away before they ever start using commenting for customer support. Additionally, it gives customers a lower-stakes way to set up their accounts with your site outside of the stress that might accompany their needing support.

Next, you’ll want to decide where to house your comments. If you’ve got individual product pages, FAQ articles, instructional pages, and other things of that nature, these can be good places to set up user comments. Search engine results are likely to lead to these pages, so customers with questions are liable to end up there, looking for answers. With COOL Comments, you can decide which pages to turn comments “on” or “off” for, helping to corral users into specific sandboxes where they can receive help.

Additionally, your most-frequent users on your comments can also be recruited to help. With COOL Comments, for example, you have the ability to designate specific users as part of your moderation team, giving them specialty flair and abilities. These volunteers can supplement COOL Comments’ existing AI/human hybrid moderation, using their expert knowledge of your products and services to field user questions and complaints with ease. If certain users often give helpful feedback to their fellow users, they can be tagged in to help moderate — at no additional cost to you.

You can also try playing with the settings for your commenting pages. COOL Comments offers the ability to use custom text, emoji reactions, embedded gifs, and videos — but on some pages (like an open forum to discuss tech-support questions) you may want to deactivate those features, to cut down on clutter and focus on the issues at hand.

Supplemented with your own support team — and the backing of COOL Comments’ own moderators — you’ll be in a good position to set your goals and start to facilitate customer engagement.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, though you may have to lay some groundwork, using online communities as a form of customer support can be a great first line of defense in your support funnel, as well as a great way to build a better relationship with your customer base.

If you’re looking to add commenting functionality to your website, Insticator’s COOL Comments is a solution that demands a look. Introduced just this year, it has all the features you’d want or need to set up a fresh new community around your website — and leverage that community to improve your customer experience. Reach out today.!