Guest Post: The Crucial.com Community
In my last post I happened to mention the upcoming Forrester Groundswell awards for "excellent and effective use of social technologies to advance an organizational or corporate goal".
Well I'm deeply privileged today to open my blog to a worthy candidate, the Crucial.com community! So here's Sam Harmer, the Public Relations Manager of Lexar Media, with their entry:
Crucial.com: Enhancing the Customer Experience with Online Community
Crucial.com is an online destination of Lexar Media, a leading global provider of memory products for digital media. As the demand for better memory solutions has increased, so has Crucial.com's customer base and the challenge of maintaining high levels of customer satisfaction. To meet that challenge, the company explored its options for scaling customer service to keep pace with the growing and evolving needs of its customers.
Crucial.com decided to implement a Lithium-powered customer community. On the community, members and visitors share ideas, solutions, and best practices about Crucial memory products. In just two months, the Crucial.com customer network has had more than 1,000 users register to join the community.
"Customer experience is something that is extremely important to us at Crucial.com, and we saw an enormous opportunity in working with Lithium to enhance that experience by making it easier for customers to interact with each other online," says Fred Waddell, general manager of Crucial.com. "Doing so provides an additional, valued service to our customers, but also amplifies word-of-mouth marketing by exposing new customers to potentially thousands of raving fans talking about our products."
Crucial.com's community is positively impacting customer experience and satisfaction in two ways. First, the community gives customers access to their peers, who are a highly trusted source for information and support. Second, the community is easing the burden on existing support channels. Crucial.com has already seen an overall reduction in support call center volume for Crucial products, and a staggering nearly 50% reduction in support chat volume, enabling the company to continue delivering timely and high quality customer service.
In addition to answering one another's questions, community members have also provided valuable feedback to the company. For example, thanks largely to feedback from the community, Crucial.com discovered that 64-bit windows users were experiencing problems using its System Scanner tool. After additional testing and development, the company was able to resolve the issue and make an enhanced 64-bit version of the tool available to customers.
Visit the Crucial.com community: http://www.forum.crucial.com/
Thanks so much Sam! Good luck to you and the Crucial.com community!
