Customers Helping One Another

An interesting approach that provides a strong foundation for DIY customers is to establish communication channels that enable customers to help one another. INC. (August, 2005, pg. 36) ran a piece about online peer forums, where customers-to-customer interactions provided a lot of the technical support for a small software company. The forums are relatively easy and cost effective to set up, and they require about an hour a day of moderating (for a customer base of 2,000).

As we mention in our book, this is an example of a company "owning the context" of customer communication and "encouraging articulation" by customers -- especially in the sense of including them as codesigners and cocreators of a service experience.