Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! How a
Tech Pubs Team Took Ownership
of the User Support Forums
Michael Torok

Mine! Mine! Mine! Mine! How a Tech
Pubs Team Took Ownership of the User
Support Forums
Michael Torok

Who am I?
 Michael Torok
michael.torok@solarwinds.com
@MickTorok
Director of Community at Solarwinds
formerly and not so long ago
Director of Information Development
 Why is community important to me?
» Helps the business
» Helps your department
» Helps you do your job
» Helps you grow and expand
» Helps you gain experience that can only help you
secure another position when necessary
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 3 -

Where does ID fit in the post life cycle?
Reach out
Problem
to
or Idea
Community
Moderated
and
Reviewed
by ID
Customer’s Internal and
idea External
heard/problem Help Found
solved by ID
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 4 -

Who needs to be on board?
 Support
 Product Management
 Development
 Sales
 Your Management, if you aren’t the lead or
manager
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 5 -

Support needs to be on board
 Your biggest advocate, initially, will probably be
the Support org.
» Why?
• They are on the hook, whether directly or indirectly, for
supporting questions in the forums.
• Support, in almost every company I’ve been in, does not
refer as often as they could to the documentation.
• Our release schedule requires constant support training
• They are rarely staffed any better than ID departments
» Working with Support, you can show both your own
business impact and cost savings. We will get to that
in a later slide, but this is very important both as a
motivation and a justification.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 6 -

Product Management needs to be on board
 Product management
» At SolarWinds, the Product Management team uses
our community site to more fully engage with the
needs and wants of our varied customer base.
» PM will need to trust your judgment and your
interaction level.
• You may well find yourself proving this for a while. We
did.
• Double team with the PMs on their own threads.
Ensure you are over checking, rather than under
notifying about posts that seem important.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 7 -

Product Management needs to be on board
 There are forum threads specifically targeted at
pulling feedback from customers and to
communicate development’s next steps back to
them.
» These threads are included in the regular user forums,
and you can imagine how some inquisitive, angry, or
helpful customers don’t self-edit.
http://tinyurl.com/7vrq2pa & http://tinyurl.com/8xmmo3h
» Posts can be found all over the forums that lead to PM
interaction. Does the product do XYZ? When will the
product do XYZ?
» Why make them search? We help them find and identify
these posts, then we help move posts to the appropriate
places.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 8 -

Product Management needs to be on board
 What do we gain?
» We see where the product is heading and why.
» We can become better user advocates for features.
» We can also see what might have been missed in
documentation by monitoring the “Does the product
do xyz” posts.
» We can get input into the product roadmap as the
trust in our interaction and knowledge of customer
wants/needs grows.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 9 -

Development needs to be on board
 Development
» When things get out of your depth on the boards, you
will need someone to contact.
» Dev is key to successful engagement on the boards,
they lend you the ability to get the right answers from
the technical source.
» Dev must be on board, as there will be many
questions that you cannot answer.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 10 -

Development needs to be on board
 What do we gain?
» Become the facilitator for the community.
» Strengthen the bond between yourself and your
audiences, both dev and the end user.
» We gain knowledge and can possibly answer the
same question next time without dev help.
 You continue to provide a buffer between dev
and the end user.
» Though, in the best case scenario, this wall begins to
crumble.
» We have numerous developers now that are active in
the community, directly interacting with customers.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 11 -

Sales/Technical Sales needs to be on board
 Sales Engineers
» Maybe they are not called SEs in other businesses,
but these are the technical sales people.
» When a person is running into a licensing limit or if
the person is pre-sales and testing a product out,
these are your go-to folks.
» Yes, if the sale is big enough, this might warrant post
sales development involvement, but usually you start
here with a technical sales person.
» These may also be the people you reach out to
instead of support in the case of pre-sales.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 12 -

Sales/Technical Sales needs to be on board
 What we gain
» Valuable insight into the way a product might be
used or is going to be used in someone’s
environment.
» Are we documenting to the situation customers are
trying to put the product to use in? Offering
everything we can? http://tinyurl.com/7n4thmq
» Scenarios, use-case based doc… SEs are a
panacea of information about the users and uses of
your products. How is the software used in highly
restricted networks? How is your online help made
available? Is your web console being made publically
available? Was it made to be?
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 13 -

What is the role of Information Development?
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 14 -

Why be involved?
 Community is a huge influence generator
» You can drive customer engagement
» You can drive customer satisfaction
» You can add another avenue to your education
routes, documentation, videos, training, and
knowledge base.
 ID teams can only gain from what they invest
 Real interaction with a large cross section of
your customer base
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 15 -

Why be involved?
 Metric answered questions as support ticket
avoidance
» Metric incoming How To tickets against forum
interaction/posts
 Customer interaction allows for ID teams to learn
what it really is like in the field without having to
engage in costly customer visits.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 16 -

What can you expect from the community?
 Feedback
» You will hear whether you are doing a good job or
not
» You can expect criticism to be immediate and, at
times, abrupt – be wary of verifying versus
suggesting answers
» You will also be surprised by how many people, if
you have a healthy community, defend your brand.
http://tinyurl.com/7cbxtdo
 Issues will be found. No quality assurance team
can do the job and cover the many different
ways in which your product will be used.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 17 -

What can you expect from the community?
 If you are responsive, they will be also
 I have found the SW Community incredibly
responsive to calls for polls or requests for
opinions.
» They drive many of the features added to our
products.
» The community can lend you opinions and credibility
around other changes: should doc be online only?
Do you need more videos or graphics or
walkthroughs? Where can you get scenarios?
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 18 -

What do you have to know?
 You need to understand what you are trying to
do in and with your community
» Is it a marketing initiative?
» Is it primarily a support alternative?
» Are you raising brand awareness and creating
advocates?
 You need to know your material and have a
clear escalation path.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 19 -

What do you have to know?
 You need to have guidelines. If you do not have
a community manager or director, you may well
help create these.
» What is considered offensive behavior? There is a
difference between criticism, even harsh criticism,
and being a bully or threatening.
» Need to have clear rules about language and SPAM.
» Need to make it clear that certain behaviors will have
repercussions. We have a zero tolerance rule for
SPAM. It is deleted and the user account is also
deleted.
» Even some of our MVPs on the SWI Community site
have had to be reminded about professionalism.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 20 -

Who are your customers?
 This is one of the most important things you
learn. You will find you have many and your role
will expand.
 All of the people you need to enlist for
escalation/help/advice are also your customers.
» End users
» Development
» Support
» QA
» Product management
» Sales
» Usability/Ux/UI Design
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 21 -

What do your customers gain?
 End users gain a vocal advocate in your
company.
 Development will want to see the feedback you
are seeing about features and what is or is not
working.
 Support will want to know when they are being
called out on the boards and will hopefully work
to defuse some of those posts.
 QA needs the same information as
development. They may see scenarios they
never thought of writing test cases for. They
may get the backing to hire to fill testing gaps.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 22 -

What do your customers gain?
 Product management will definitely want to
engage with customers wanting more from your
products.
 Sales will want to know of people having demo
issues or requesting demonstrations.
 Usability/Ux can use the community as a place
to easily recruit customers for walkthroughs.
You can make the bridge between feature
requestors and new feature wireframe and
paper testing.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 23 -

What do you gain?
 Job growth
 Job satisfaction
 Defense against “nobody reads the doc”
 A group of people you can call on for feedback
and help
 You gain another avenue through which your
skills and knowledge help others to succeed.
- Slide 24 -
Mine Mine Mine Mine

What do you gain?
 You gain a solid role in a growing area of
interaction for many companies. One that is not
going away and can only expand.
 You can expand your own knowledge of how the
audience uses your product or services which
can only help you succeed in writing to them or
designing documentation sets for them.
 You gain visibility in your company.
- Slide 25 -
Mine Mine Mine Mine

How do you take control?
 Take the initiative.
 Split your team up and have them spend time in
the boards.
 Start posting answers or referring people to
your other materials.
 Become a recognized knowledge source within
the community. (http://tinyurl.com/7y6mrq7)
 Don’t just give people doc links. Engage with
them and make sure that you circle back after
providing information. Close the loop.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 26 -

How do you take control?
 Help the community change product plans,
become an advocate for your users and show
management that the community can help with
difficult decisions and priorities.
 Help your community feel like they influence
your decisions as a company.
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 27 -

ROI
 Incoming support case drop
 Knowledge base case increase
 One group that acts as the grand filter and
knows the boards very well
 One group that becomes well known both
internally and externally for both knowledge and
interaction (something we are not always good
at conveying)
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 28 -

ROI
 Really become a user advocate with the
data and proof to back up the claim.
 Track posts your ID team interacts on.
 Track the number of posts that avoided
support calls (answer provided and customer
happy).
 Track customer suggestions
 Track features driven from community
Mine Mine Mine Mine - Slide 29 -