hiogi blog

A Forrester Study proves that service-communities, such as ours, are an efficient way of getting customer involved and to reduce support costs, which is exactly why hiogi started offering its clever technologies to corporate customers like ferien.de, Medizinfuchs or Saftfabrik e.g.. The hiogi system that has been running successfully in Germany for over two years with over 80.000 answered questions can be tested in English beta mode here and international companies can get our software-as-a-service communities in multiple languages. Our SaaS includes whitelabeling and domain aliasing, various mobile inbound features (SMS, WAP, Twitter, iPhone web app, skype mobile…) and SEO.

Executive Summary of the Forrester results:
“Consumers are rapidly adopting social media communication technologies and behaviors. Customer service professionals are beginning to look at incorporating these collaborative tools to deliver better customer experiences at a lower cost. This approach seems to have great promise; however, there is little documentation at present on the cost-effectiveness of incorporating social strategies and technologies for businesses. Forrester talked with early-adopter companies and reviewed the solutions from leading vendors to understand the variables to consider for determining the business value of online communities for customer service and support. The early evidence indicates that social technologies are a sound choice because they provide an attractive ROI in a short period of time while delivering better customer experiences.”

Key Benefits according to Forrester:

• Reduce the volume of contact center calls => Effective self-service on the Web site
• Increase first-contact resolution rates => User-based answers that have been proven to work
• Increase agent productivity => Better answers so that agents can answer more questions per hour
• Reduce email as an interaction channel => Better self-service on the Web site
• Improve product ideation => Voice-of-the-customer input to products and services for continuous, measurable improvement
• Improve the Web site’s search engine optimization (SEO) => More relevant content for search engine spiders and algorithms
• Increase customer lifetime value (CLV) => More loyal customers that spread “positive word of mouth”, buy more, and buy more often for longer periods of time

ROI calculation:

Key cost drivers:

References: http://www.forrester.com/Research/Document/Excerpt/0,7211,48002,00.html and

hiogi launched a new software-as-a-service for companies that would like to integrate a proven community solution on their website in order to get customers involved. Social media dialogues are currently gaining big attention in the press and Nielsen, Forrester or IDC see an urgent need for companies to act plus a 99% ROI and a paypack <12 months for community software investments.

For the time being hiogi has mainly been operational with its own community in Germany and gained over 20.000 users that answered more than 80.000 questions so far. However a showcase in the English language has been running in beta for a while. “We got approached by various big companies that wanted to license our innovative Q&A technologies, which is why we decided to launch the SaaS www.service-community.net this year,” says the CEO Björn Behrendt.

German companies can setup their own community-forum within minutes and decide whether they would like to use a simple version for 29 EUR per month or a whitelabel tarif starting at 399 EUR per month. Whitelabeling includes a complete customizing based on the corporate design of the company, domain aliasing, hosting and dedicated mobile channels for the customers to hand in questions, e.g. SMS, WAP, iPhone, Email, Skype mobile, Twitter, Facebook or Web.

The system is setup in a modular and multi-lingual way, which ensures a quick setup process for companies in any country. In case you are interested, please send an email to info@service-community.net in order to receive more information materials.