Customer Showcase August 2024: José from Acer

jlefebre

Customer Showcase August 2024: José from Acer

Hello friends! My name is José Lefebre, and I am the Community Manager for the Acer Community. We are a small but dedicated team of two: I manage the backend functions of the community, while @ingrid_yost oversees our moderation teams.

The Acer Community was launched in November 2012, and I have been involved for nearly ten of those twelve years. Our community is offered in five languages: English, Spanish, German, Portuguese and French. We strive to provide users with a welcoming space where they can ask questions, share tips, and help each other improve their experiences.

The backbone of the community

We have a superuser program named the Acer Community Experts, or ACEs for short. Our ACE Team contribute most of the content, they are friendly and helpful to others. Their flexibility in being able to explain in a simple, easy to understand way, or go down to the nitty-gritty details when needed, all of this in a courteous way. This is one of the main characteristics of our ACEs that we value, and what I attribute to our community being, as I’ve been often told:

Pretty calm for a support community with gaming forums!

ACE Team members have access to detailed product information and Acer products in order to continue learning about new devices.

To become an ACE, members not only need to contribute consistently and provide solutions in the community, for us it is also essential that they do this in a polite way. Once they start ranking up, the moderators will take notice them being consistent and respectful. We will send them a message thanking them for their participation and informing them about the ACE Team. Soon thereafter they receive the invitation to join the team.

What we track

These are some of the key metrics we use to create our monthly Health Report:

• Users – Google Analytics
• Page views – Google Analytics
• Average time on page - Google Analytics
• New members – Vanilla Analytics
• New topics – Vanilla Analytics
• Comments – Vanilla Analytics
• Contributors – Vanilla Analytics
• Accepted solutions – Vanilla Analytics
• Acceptance rate – Vanilla Analytics
• Service level – Vanilla Analytics
• Avoidance rate – Survey (Voice of the Customer)

We also have a metric called Solution Rate, which we get through the survey we run in the community. While Acceptance Rate covers solutions vs questions asked, Solution Rate surveys all users, visitors and members alike. Our Solution rate is consistently double the Acceptance rate.

I personally like to keep an eye on visits/registrations by country so that I can stay up to date with support processes outside our region.

Let’s talk ROI

While we use other stats that are Our survey also plays a crucial role in calculating our ROI. After asking users “Did you find the answer to your question?”, if Yes = Solved, followed by “If you had not found an answer, what would be your next step?”, if the answer is “Contact Acer Support” = Deflection. We have tried to use other methods of calculating Deflection but found this way covers all users, not only those that asked a question and marked an answer as a solution.

What’s in the future?

All the things AI. We are exploring ways we can leverage AI to help users find solutions faster, ask questions with details the ACEs will eventually require to provide answers faster, and assist moderators with their daily tasks (like handling SPAM: the bane of my existence 😡).

Before I end this post

I have learned so many tips and ways to use tools, widgets, workarounds, add-ons, etc. from y’all (that’s the adopted Texan in me). Also, the validation of knowing that I’m not the only one going through x or y issue is incredibly encouraging!

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask! I’m always happy to discuss all things community… or plants. 😃

GingerAnderson

This is great, José, thank you for sharing! For your support deflection calculation, is there a dollar amount associated with each case deflection? We are struggling with that too and I would love to understand more about how other companies calculate that number.

Thanks!

Ginger from Anaplan

jlefebre

Yes, we take into consideration a dollar amount in the deflection calculation, which considers support contact cost, admin costs, among other things.