In your efforts to provide a positive service experience for your internal and external customers, you may be overlooking one of your most important resources - your other customers. Some of the people who know the most about your products or solutions are the experts who use them every day. They are also your best evangelists and your most important viral marketers.

ATG Forum enables your organization to leverage these evangelists by giving them an online forum in which to help one another. With this solution, your customers can answer each other's questions, receive important company updates, and become part of your organization's community. ATG Forum lets you manage multiple forums, moderate ongoing discussion topics, monitor "hot" issues, edit and archive discussions, and create user communities on your Web site.

Enhance your "shift left" strategy with a low-cost alternative to telephone resolution Collaborative peer support enables customers to submit an issue when convenient for them. Because these issues are generally not so time-sensitive, convenience is often a more important consideration for your customer than resolution time. But without a peer support strategy, your contact center will end up dealing with these issues, costing you more money than necessary. With ATG Forum, you can shift these complex yet time-tolerant issues to a lower cost self-service channel. In addition, since peers will resolve many issues for each other, you'll also reduce the total cost of technical support or customer service.

Strengthen your brand with a strong community
With ATG Forum, you give your customers the rare ability to talk to one another. By creating a community where customers can communicate directly, you will also lay the groundwork for customers to evangelize on your behalf. In addition, by meeting customers' service expectations, you will further enhance your brand.

Make announcements to customers without cluttering their inboxes
How does your organization communicate important events to your customers and other constituents? With SPAM filters blocking some outbound e-mail, customers ignoring a deluge of messages, and other channels becoming increasingly expensive, using your Web resources to the fullest benefit is increasingly important.

Using ATG Forum to post important communications extends your organization's reach and enhances your ability to get messages out to your customer base and constituents. Customer postings are a great source of company feedback. Whereas marketing research is often tainted by interviewer bias, postings give valuable insight into existing problems and potential solutions.

When combined with other service and support information, ATG Forum provides valuable feedback which can be used to influence product development, support offerings, and other customer-driven changes.

Extend self-service capabilities with Web self-service solutions
Because ATG Forum can be deployed in conjunction with ATG Self-Service, a customer trying to resolve a problem can extend his search capabilities to community postings as well as company-composed service content.

Open a valuable resource to assisted service agents
ATG Forum gives your contact center agents a new source of expert knowledge to draw upon. Knowledge from forum postings may help agents resolve emerging issues. And, when used with ATG Knowledge's "knowledge capture" capabilities, it often reduces the time and effort required to compose new solutions.

ATG Forum can also be used internally within contact centers as an invaluable tool to collaborate with and tap into experts within your organization, to aid in the resolution of customer issues.

Next Steps

Download the ATG Forum Product Sheet. [PDF, 105Kb]

For more information or a product demonstration, contact your D2C2 sales representative. Or, request that an D2C2 representative contact you.