Case Study: Yola.com
Yola goes social for their primary support channel
Yola.com is an online Web site builder that allows anyone to easily create, publish, and host a Web site. Yola brings Web site building to “small business, groups and organizations, nonprofits, your Aunt Martha, the guy in the next cube. Everyone.”
With such a broad target market, Yola realized early that dedicated e-mail support resources would get expensive if e-mail were the primary support channel. At the same time, they realized that their technically challenged target market would be in great need of high-touch personal support.
What Yola needed was a rapidly scalable support solution that wouldn’t rapidly become expensive. Yola realized that the best way to deliver cost-effective, high-touch customer support was to become a social business—to bring the social Web into their customer relationship management practice. By making their Get Satisfaction community their primary support channel, Yola cost-effectively leveraged its own customer base to provide the high-touch personal support that was needed.
A Community Kick-start with Employee Contributions
Like many new networks, the Yola Get Satisfaction community needed seed members and content to get the community going. They turned to their employees to make it happen. Their goal was not to create an exhaustive knowledgebase, but to start conversations around their product. Here’s how they did it:
- Yola customer support staff created a series of common questions and answers and posted them in the Get Satisfaction community.
- E-mail questions handled through the help desk were posted back to the community.
- Business stakeholders, management, marketing, and product development staff were enlisted to contribute to the community as subject matter experts.
Soon they had a meaningful framework of questions, answers, topics, and discussions that could be leveraged for instantaneous customer support.
Pumping Up Community Participation
While laying the foundation for the community support database with employee contributions, Yola started steering customers toward community first for support through a number of channels. They invited customers from their Web site support page and the help menu in the application itself, they announced their Get Satisfaction support community in blogs and other company announcements, and they included a reference in the signature lines of all support e-mails.
When customers then came to the community and began to participate, Yola made sure to reward all contributions with public “thank you” messages.
Once the community got going, Yola’s service team then slowed down its own response times for questions that could easily be answered by the community, encouraging customers to turn to community first. Customers soon learned that the community provided not just adequate support, but better and faster support.
The Benefits of Social Business
Since becoming a more social business, Yola has not only grown its user base while maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction, it has also done so with an impressively lean support team. The many benefits Yola has seen since putting community first in the support mix include:
- The ability to deliver superior customer support to 2 million customers via e-mail, community, and support documentation with only six full-time customer-service employees.
- An estimated 60% to 70% reduction in e-mail-based trouble tickets.
- Much-improved crisis management with marked increase in Net Promoter Scores.
- A stated customer preference of 5-to-1 for community as the primary support channel
About Yola
Yola offers a free Web site creation tool that empowers small businesses, nonprofits, and everyday users to easily create professional quality Web sites. Yola's intuitive drag-and-drop technology enables users to easily incorporate a variety of content including YouTube videos, Google Maps, PayPal shopping carts, and many more without needing any technical skills. Privately held, Yola (backed by Reinet Fund) is the recipient of numerous industry accolades including The Industry Standard 100, a Fast Company Fast 50 Reader Favorite and BusinessWeek's 50 Best Tech Startups. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, Calif.
For additional information, please visit www.yola.com or call 415-227-0250.
