Customers forum - Need to monitor and update

I was going through a forum for one of those new age smart watches, and one could see the level of frustration among some users because they felt that their feedback was not being taken. Now, there might be an argument that an organization cannot really respond to every level of feedback that might be posted anywhere, but in this case, this was a user forum that was present on the site of the product, and users have a reasonable expectation that any such forum would be a way to present their feedback and the company does respond on some of the feedback at least from time to time. However, there was a feeling that was developing among regular users on the forum that any suggestions they made were not being responded to. So, even if employees from the company were picking up the feedback, the response loop was not being completed and users were not getting the impression that their feedback was being responded to.
This led to a level of frustration among the users, and even if new users commented on something, they were told by the regular users that there was no point in giving feedback or suggestions since the company did not respond on the forum. This seems like a reputation that is damaging for the company. When you ask any customer representation or product management from reputed companies, they say that users are the source of a number of different suggestions and defects, and these provide the company an invaluable source from which they can iterate further and select future features. Getting such feedback, especially when people are searching for a consumer forum, come to the site and provide their feedback is something that companies should really want, and ideally, the company should train customer support as well as product management to monitor and intervene in customer forums - this helps in getting inputs and keep customers interested enough to come and monitor the forums. In fact, if you look at another angle, many companies spend a lot of time and money to have beta forums that float new features and get user feedback; this is not exactly a beta forum, but is still a way to get inputs.
What should ideally be done ? There should be customer forums where representatives of customer support and product management should be empowered to regularly monitor and post in, and even members of the product team should get a quick training on how to respond in user forums and visit them. Members of product teams in many cases typically have strong opinions on new features, workflows and so on - exposure to customers and their actual world problems helps to make them more open to new ideas and understand user workflows in a better manner.

Supporting previous versions of the software (Part 4)

This is a series of posts on the subject of when an organization decides to drop the support for a previous version of a software. Say, you are working on version 8 of a software and version 4 was released 4 years back, and the management team is trying to make a decision on retaining support for the software version. In a previous post (Supporting previous versions of the software (Part 3)), we had talked about a situation where there is no choice but to drop support, because of a dependency issue. The previous version used a software component that is not working properly and there is no way to fix this; in many such cases, the organization has to take action. It cannot pretend that the previous version is working fine except for a few glitches, and instead would need to declare that the version is no longer supported. When it says that a version is no longer supported, it actually means that there will be no support, no updates, no bug fixes and it is recommended that users upgrade to a newer version of the software.
What happens in the case where the organization has no data metrics about the number of users who are using the previous version of the software. Well, it does get kind of tricky, but these situations have happened in the past. The emphasis on being able to trap user interaction and mine this data for doing all sorts of analysis (including determining usage habits) is something that is of relatively recent vintage, not being emphasized even 4-5 years back. Now, every product tries to capture user interactions, which workflows use more often, and so on; but consider the case when this data was not being tracked and now the organization wants to drop support for a previous version of the software for which they do not have this kind of data.
Just because they do not have this data does not mean that the organization will continue to support previous versions for a long time. There is an increasing heavy cost associated with supporting long back previously released versions of software and at some point, the organization will decide to drop support. If there is no user data, the organization could check with support teams and with user support forums about the amount of queries that come in for these previous versions of the software, and if it seems that there are a large number of users that are active for those versions, then it makes sense to not drop support for some more time. On the other hand, if it turns out that there is hardly any interaction related to that specific version, then it might make sense to take the decision to drop support. Of course, there is some amount of subjectivity involved in this, since forums might not be a totally accurate mechanism to determine whether there are a lot of people using that version, but it is a hard choice. You have no other mechanism to determine the usage levels and you have to use some kind of proxy to help you make that decision.
One way is to make announcement about dropping support in another few months, and then see the reaction. If there are a large number of people who voice complaints and so on, then it might make sense to interact with some of them and determine whether they are really discomfited if support is dropped, how often do they really need some kind of support and so on. Even in such cases, after due discussions and interactions, it may still be possible to drop support (even if there some amount of opposition, as long as it is containable).

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.