Hi All,
After a good start, the expansion of our Soundboard Forum site has ground to a halt! This is partly due to the fact that Tom was IC and is now leaving us and partly because I have neglected the pushing of it.
It is a fundamental part of improving our presence online and needs to be continually fuelled, so we must get article contribution back up and running as a priority.
Every day the sales team in particular respond to customer enquiries with answers that will be of interest to many potential customers. So why limit it to being seen by only one? The more detail you can give in a response the better Forum article it will make. Not to mention how impressed the original requester will be with the fact you took so much time/effort in providing a detailed response to their individual question. In a nutshell, why use 20 words when you can use 100!
Of course there are some enquiries relating to stock availability/bespoke quotes etc. that are not suitable for the Forum and some do not require much detail. However, you should all (Sales) get several tickets daily that could be shared and I want you to start asking yourself 'is this suitable for a Forum article?' every time you open a ticket. If it is, really go to town on your response, write it with Forum conversion in mind and impress the customer......and me! It's also worth noting that the more information available on the Forum, the less enquiries you will get in the long term as people will be able to answer their own questions. Googlers will also stumble across our articles when searching for product info which will hopefully put us in prime position to convert them into customers.
To get the ball rolling again, I will initially take over responsibility for uploading the articles and once we have a system working will find a suitable 'victim' to take over from me.
If you respond to a ticket that you think is suitable for inclusion on the Soundboard Forum then please add the tag 'forum' (without quote marks!) to the ticket (you can still solve it if you need to) and I will review and upload (if I agree). This will also give me chance to feedback on whether you have interpreted my brief correctly.
There should be no reason why the sales team can't send me 2-3 potential articles on a daily basis which then becomes 50+ per week, 200+ per month etc. and if other departments contribute as/when they can it should grow quite quickly.
Please always have the Forum in the back of your mind and let's see those articles coming through, I'll monitor contribution levels to see who is really thinking about it.
GO!
Andy