If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that community works.

A few years ago it was common to hear objections about the idea of using community for customer support. These critiques went something like this:

• Community only works for products with millions of users
• Companies won’t want to air their “dirty laundry” in public, and will refuse to embrace a public venue for support
• Customers won’t like community-centered support. They want private phone and email responses from companies.

Usually these critiques would come from crotchety old software veterans or venture capitalists whom had a vested interest in the status quo. In their defense, at the time there wasn’t that much evidence to refute them. Old-school forums were a big turnoff, and there weren’t yet 600 million everyday people on Facebook.

Boy, have times changed. Sometimes even I am surprised by the mountain of data demonstrating the benefits of community for companies and customers alike. So it’s amazing that we sometimes hear fresh echoes of these discredited attacks. It’s a stance that’s hard not to interpret as ignorance, naked aggression, or both. Thankfully, the facts speak for themselves. This is a great opportunity to review the arguments, and see how they hold up.

“Community support is exploitation”
The central straw-man argument is that it is “degrading” to exploit unpaid customers to do a company’s support work for it. Of course it is! Customers should never be asked to do the job of a professional customer service team. That’s not the idea of community support at all, any more than collecting user feedback is the same as asking customers to actually build the product.

According to this reasoning, a company can either a.) “neglect” its customers in a community, or b.) provide traditional one-on-one support. If you selected option C, you are correct! Community-powered support is often driven by an expert customer service team that responds to customers publicly. For most companies in our own surveys the vast majority of issues (70-80%) are product Q&A and problem reports, ideal for public collaboration. The cost-benefit comes from the dramatic reduction in repetitive inquiries–it is common to see 66-75% decrease in total tickets. How? In a one-to-one support tool there’s extra work every single time a customer asks the same question. In a community, an answer can be served over and over again thousands of times with no incremental support cost. Perhaps most importantly, the customer service team gets to focus on high-touch customer issues–the very things that actually require personal attention.

Community is obviously not about crowd-sourcing unpaid labor. It’s about empowering customers to connect around products and services on their own terms.

“Customers aren’t productive enough”
A follow-on objection, delivered without any apparent irony, is that users just don’t help each other enough, and–ruh roh–the customer service team will have to answer customer issues.

The critique misses the point. “Community” is not the sum total of forum dwellers, and success can’t be narrowly measured in the number of issues that users resolve on their own. Communities on the social web can bring together people around a common interest  wherever users are interacting. On Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and others, companies of every size are seeing their customers talking to each other about their products and services in public. eMarketer recently showed that 55% of small/medium sized businesses see Facebook to be beneficial to their business, out of 67% who use it. Whatever the number of consumers that contribute their expertise to other customers in a given community, a much larger numer of customers are sharing and amplifying the content (and the affection) that it produces.

Still, deeper customer engagement is something that can be cultivated over time. Community management is a practice like anything else, and it can take many months of nurturing to mature a community into a self-organizing space. Amy Muller, our director of education has covered these practices extensively in her webcasts. As she discusses, the real goal is to give customers the space to help each other on topics that they’re uniquely qualified in and passionate about. For instance, how to build a Lego iPad stand.

“Customers don’t want to talk to each other”
The research is quite clear–people prefer to talk to their peers. A recent Aberdeen Group study indicated that 77 percent of people have a greater trust for friends, family, and other consumers than they do for retailers and manufacturers. While transactional customer service issues are a special case, product Q&A is ideal for a community. This helps explain why companies like Yola have reported that their customers prefer the community to other channels by a 2:1 ratio.

The benefits of networking with customers are much more than skin deep. McKinsey & Company released an in-depth study that showed that companies gain significant market share and  profitability advantages “by forging closer marketing relationships with customers and by involving them in customer support and product-development efforts.”

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There are certainly challenges for many organizations to rise to the opportunity. I’m reminded of a conversation that Keith Messick, our VP Marketing, relayed to me. He was talking to the CTO of a federal agency who explained why they’d adopted a feedback collection tool rather than support two-way conversation.

“We can’t use a community platform because people will expect us to be there. We want to appear transparent, but not actually engage. That’s why we went with a voting app.”

It’s a refreshingly honest answer. However, people are getting pretty darned good at telling the difference between appearance and reality.

Because, you know, the Internet makes it so easy to debunk spurious assertions.

[Edited 1:49 1/2/11 *]