Building community: Assigning a rating badge or similar marker to frequent contributors in forums

For every organization, there is a need to connect with their customer base. When customers feel that the company cares about them, and is able to resolve their needs, they are more likely to continue using the software product and doing upgrades. For this, they expect that they when they have a query or an issue or a complaint, somebody is there to listen to them, and if a solution is required, to explain to them the next steps. If there is no solution available, but you are able to explain this to the customer, in a number of cases, they are fine with this.
However, it is expensive for a company to hire people to man their support structure - whether this be direct phone support, online chat support, or for reviewing the user forums and replying to posts. What would be ideal would be if you could build an online community where when a customer asks a question, another customer could respond to that question and satisfy the needs of the person asking the question. In such a case, the person asking the question does not care whether the answer has been given by somebody working for the company, or by another user.
In fact, in a number of cases, the users tend to have more information than the support staff. Support staff need to be trained on the software, and they do not tend to be regular users of the software for their requirements. On the other hand, when you get a customer, they are already more comfortable with the workflows that the person seeking information is using, and would be able to explain things in a much better way. There may be workarounds that the customer has developed which the support staff has no idea about and which would work for the person asking the question.
However, building a community is not easy. Why would a person want to be there in the user forums, and why would they want to share their knowledge with other people ? Well, people have different motives, which could be about an innate desire to help other people, which could be about craving recognition from other customers, or could be from a desire to share something new that they know about, or etc. The organization should do its best to encourage people to get into this mode, and one of the easiest ways of doing this in a non-monetary way is by having a system of merit badges.
It is fairly easy to design a system whereby the profile of the user can have additional elements displayed such as merit badges, which are awarded based on a logic system setup by the support staff. It could be based on the number of contributions, about likes from other customers, about the number of solutions suggested, or typically many organizations design a system which uses a combination of all of these to design a merit badge. When a person sees a merit badge next to their name, for a number of people, there is a sense of satisfaction, and this can be a mighty factor that inspires them to continue their participation in these user forums.

Support forums - encouraging users to add their feedback and increase communication levels

In today's world (actually even in times gone by), it was always important for makers of software to engage with their customers. If you build something, you may be secure in the knowledge that you did your best and built your software to meet the customer needs and expectations, but if you are not engaged with your customers, then you might not be on the path to success. What works with customers can be enumerated through marketing and surveys to the highest degree, but customers have a horrible way of surprising even the best laid plans. You may turn out with a very successful software product, or you may turn out with a product that may fail to click with customers. How do you prevent this from happening ? Well, you need to be engaged with your customers, get their opinions, and do so in a way that you are getting it in their natural setting (and not depend entirely on a controlled setting where people representing customers are presented questions and information taken from these answers); and so this before, during and after your product is released.
Why would you want to get information from customers after your product is released ? Well, unless you are there for a one-off product, you need to ensure that your customers are engaged with you, feel that their opinions are taken into account, and if they have any queries, those are answered. And a critical part of that is about ensuring that their opinions and complaints are responded back. However, one major problem that I have seen is that formal customer support is more and more treated as a way to also generate revenue (or also to atleast cover costs). If done well and if you have skilled customer support, then you end up with customers who are satisfied. However, I have also seen customers who are very dis-satisfied with the level of customer support that they are getting and this forms the basis of a bad opinion of the product and of the organization. I was recently searching for some help on a topic related to MS Word, and found a page where users had suggested some solutions, and this worked for me as well. But, when you read about the opinions expressed by many of the users, the common complaint used to be that the customer support was unable to help them, and then they found a solution on a web page, and continued customer interaction on that web page brought such pages to the top of web searches for that particular problem.
And this is where teams and organizations need to be focusing. Formal customer support in the form or chat and telephone may have a certain resolution capability and experience, but it is important to combine this with web pages where users can report problems and get solutions. I have seen teams where team members are encouraged to respond to user problems and suggest solutions (especially in cases where customers are looking for simple items such as looking for a certain feature or a plugin, or some other issue that is not machine or user specific). In the cases I have seen where teams did this kind of interaction, we also saw that other users also started jumping in where they could suggest solutions or where there was a case where they had been given a solution in the past and they could post the same solution for another user. In addition, we had started tagging users with badges which identified them as experts at proposing solutions, and this started to build (pride and the prestige associated with getting recognized in front of other users would make sure that people got into this mode of reporting solutions). Eventually, this got into a self-sustaining mode, but the team ensured that it it did not let up about their interactions with users).
These pages also started getting reported higher and higher on search engines, and as a result, more and more users started landing on such pages when they were running into problems and for most of the users, there was not a need to go to formal customer support mechanisms.