People Who Need People

"We have problems with people going in [to the forums] andthinking the advice is coming from a [K2] technical rep whenin fact it might have come from a 13-year-old," says AliWise, Internet services manager at K2. She worries that if acustomer gets bad advice on the bulletin board, he willquickly become a former customer.

Employees in the marketing department read the postings whenthey had time. They addressed bad advice by starting newthreads. But this was very labor intensive.

K2 put a disclaimer on the sign-in page reminding users thatthey were not getting information from K2representatives. But now K2 is going further, accepting thefact that it has to be more careful both with theinformation customers glean from the board and with itseffect on K2's brand.

The Tech Forum still exists, but in a different form. It'snow an archive of troubleshooting guides, instructions andtechnical FAQs all in PDF format that owners can print outor save on their hard drive. Customers can e-mail questionsnot listed in the archive directly to the company. To makeit easier for the marketing and customer service departmentsto handle all the inquiries, Wise implemented a Web-basedCRM application. The application routes customers' e-mailinquiries to the proper department, does keyword searchesthrough a database of possible answers and thenautomatically composes a response that a K2 employee cancustomize.

Wise has temporarily shut down the bulletin board while sheimplements this new CRMCRM system. She says the company intendsto relaunch the board in the first quarter of 2002 as aforum where people can share their experiences on K2 bikesand where the company can promote new products and demos. Alles zu CRM auf CIO.de