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The Customer Service Wiki

December 17, 2005 by 2 Comments

An idea that I really like is the idea of a customer service wiki.

Riya has implemented one for their site, and it looks to be taking shape nicely.

Their wiki is provided by Wikispaces, and they’ve done a nice case study on a few different support wikis.

My question is, will customers really contribute to a support wiki? Is it just a glorified “knowledge base”? Will it only work for Web 2.0 type of sites? What would happen if ebay put up a support wiki? Would all hell break loose?

Regardless, I think this is a good example of how new technolgies and ways of communicating on the web are changing the way people interact with companies and do business. Bravo Riya.

Filed Under: Web 2.0
  • http://www.wikispaces.com/ Adam Frey

    Pat,

    I think one thing we don’t have to worry about with customer service wiksi is whether customers will contribute. Our experience is that customers will contribute and not neccessarily only in the ways you expect them to.

    The important question is whether you are willing to manage that input, respond, and translate it into useful broadly applicable output.

    If a company views customer service as purely a cost center then wikis might not be a great idea. There’s a lot of work to be done moderating a discussion whether online or offline. The benefit of course is that you become extremely close with your customer community but you have to be prepared to put in the effort.

    I don’t know that an unstructured wiki would be feasible for a customer community as large as, say, ebay’s but you’ll remember that ebay owes much of its early success (at least according to Adam Cohen’s book) to its early message forums. They knew that getting close to your community in a way that made sense to them, not you, was a big deal. Customer service wikis are about the same thing.

    That’s why Riya’s strategy makes sense. They know that at this stage that it’s not neccessarily about building the world’s best knowledge base. It’s about engaging directly with their early community.

    Adam
    http://www.wikispaces.com

  • http://www.conversionrater.com/ Pat McCarthy

    Hi Adam,

    Thanks for dropping by and giving some feedback on people’s experiences. I see your point, for some organizations they won’t be willing to put in that kind of work. For a lot of new companies, engaging the community like that is probably not only good, but extremely helpful.