Helpstream Debuts HelpExchange for Customer Service Issues

Helpstream, a vendor of customer service communities, has announced HelpExchange, a community designed to “facilitate sharing best practices for customer service excellence.”

 

It’s supposed to give companies a “one-stop shop” for more than 40 articles on topics such as “Attracting Members and Evangelizing Community” to “Selecting and Deploying Technologies,” according to company officials.

“A customer is a terrible thing to waste. Companies have poured huge sums of money into products that focus exclusively on solving customer problems at the lowest possible cost,” says Anthony Nemelka, CEO of Helpstream. “Unfortunately, these investments have done nothing to help companies extract the true value from its customers. We believe engaging customers using social customer service communities helps companies use customers’ expertise to not only solve problems, but also to identify new market opportunities, defend the brand and stimulate referrals to new customers.”

 

He described HelpExchange as “a first step in stimulating a forum for ideas, success and learning in this area.”

HelpExchange is a customer service best practices community allowing practitioners and community managers to “share experiences and ideas” on how to get the most from customer service communities, company officials say. The site includes original Helpstream Community Best Practices content, a discussion forum, IdeaStorm brainstorming channel, portals to outside community resources, and customer service-focused ideas and blogs, all free and licensed under Creative Commons attribution license.

“A best practices community focused on customer service communities is greatly needed,” says John Ragsdale, VP of technology research for the SSPA, AFSMI and TPSA organizations. “The majority of our members now offer customer service communities, but an understanding of key success metrics, target performance benchmarks, and overall best practices is sorely lacking.”

Recently TMCnet also had the news that Helpstream announced the spring release of its social customer service solution. The new release includes ActivityStream, a Twitter-like feature that allows users to subscribe to and follow their favorite experts in the community, and the first true enterprise application mashup that seamlessly embeds Helpstream communities with Salesforce.com and Oracle (News - Alert) CRM, company officials say.