The ROI of Customer Service Communities: New Research Released

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - April 28, 2009) - Helpstream, the leading provider of fully integrated community-driven customer service solutions, today announced availability of a new research report, "The ROI of Community Based Customer Service." This report explores the direct ROI benefits of different approaches to implementing customer service communities. The company created the report to help enterprises understand how to analyze the potential cost savings and ROI when evaluating different types of customer service communities.

Customer service communities have been rapidly evolving over the last several years. In this study, Helpstream collected and analyzed data from multiple companies, each taking a different approach in deploying their customer service community. Comparing and contrasting the ROI data of different deployment approaches provides new insights for companies looking to understand the potential business benefits of customer service communities.

"In today's business climate, companies must thoroughly understand the direct ROI they can achieve from new technology deployments, including Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions," said Jeffrey M. Kaplan, managing director of THINKstrategies, Inc. and founder of the SaaS Showplace. "This Helpstream report gives executives a comprehensive framework for carefully evaluating the potential ROI of web-based, customer service communities."

The ROI of Community Based Customer Service report notes that solutions offering the biggest return on investment involved a tight integration of mix of business processes across community, knowledge base and case management. Key findings from the report include:

--  The customer support model with the highest ROI is a combination of
    Integrated Business Process with Community, Knowledge Base and Case
    Management
--  In this model, incidents requiring agent assistance are reduced from
    65% to just 14% of overall customer inquiries
--  The Integrated Business Process model produces higher ROI by
    encouraging active participation in the customer service community
    

"This study clearly points out that deploying any form of customer service community provides positive ROI benefits," said Bob Warfield, EVP of Products at Helpstream. "Companies looking to maximize ROI should take a very close look at solutions that tightly integrate business process with community, knowledge base and case management."

The report can be downloaded free here: http://info.helpstream.biz/ROI-whitepaper.html

About Helpstream

Helpstream's fully integrated community-driven customer service system helps companies reduce overall customer support costs while increasing customer satisfaction and retention. Helpstream integrates social Web technologies with modern customer service and collaboration processes to drive effective customer and partner engagement across all business functions. Helpstream's SaaS design makes it fast to deploy, easy to use and affordable. It can be deployed as a complete customer service system or as an integrated self-service and community case resolution complement to existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems. More than 150 customers and 300,000 users access Helpstream regularly to share information and discover solutions to everyday customer service problems on the Web. Helpstream is headquartered in Mountain View, California. For more information, please visit www.helpstream.com or follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/helpstream.

Contact Information: Media Contact Jesse Odell LaunchSquad 415.625.8555 hstream(at)launchsquad(dot)com