Are you talking to me? Social Media at Amdocs – a B2B social media blog

Recently Amdocs announced the launch of our new Amdocs Product Support Community. This was exciting to me for a couple of reasons. First, because I get excited whenever a group in Amdocs integrates Social into their operations; and second, because I worked with this fine group of people in the Product Support business unit for two and half years, and it is great to see my former-colleagues hit a major milestone.

Looks like a fun community!

And I do mean major. Integrating social support into their product support mix brings Amdocs Product Support (APS) into some pretty exclusive company. There are some very high profile examples of companies using social support in some way or another, from AT&T forums and BTCare help videos on YouTube, to Comcast’s platoon of Twitter support people @comcastcares. But as it turns out it is much less common for big companies to offer any sort of social support. According to the Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), although about 60% of Fortune 1000 companies with a Web site have some form of online community, only 10.6% of these companies are using social media for Support.

So if it is so uncommon, what made our friends at APS decide now was the time to make the move to social? With that question in mind I went down the hall to talk to Shachar Baryamin, APS Community Manager, and sat down for a little chat about the new support community. He told me that in fact the initial impetus for the idea came from our customers. APS has for years been asking customers to respond to a short survey after each case is closed and a few customers used that opportunity to ask Amdocs to make their support more social. One customer from a large North American Service Provider (these survey’s are confidential of course) said: “What about a blog for resources could ask questions, an Amdocs person could answer and everyone could see the response?” Good Idea! Another customer from a large European service provider suggested that “There should be a demilitarized zone and forums around these issues… This forum would bring to vendors and partners understanding of customers’ reality…” The TSIA also helped them make this decision. They encourage their members to create support communities, for a number of reasons – including increased customer satisfaction and increased agent productivity. So, to quote Shachar, “we thought about it and decided we had a great opportunity here to significantly improve the support experience of our customers, and facilitate more collaboration between support and our customers; and our customers among themselves.”

The APS community project was a thorough process including clear definition of our goals and objectives, roles, policies and procedures, technical requirements, design and vendor selection. After a successful implementation APS did a soft launch for pilot users on Aug. 15 and then a full launch on Sep. 27. So far the community has launched with discussion forums and ‘Meet the Expert’ sessions for community members, and I am told that there are new features coming down the pipe, so stay tuned. Response so far has been great! 480 people have registered with 3400 logins in the last two weeks, 133 discussions have been posted to the discussion board with 9700 messages views, so the community is alive and kicking. They’ve already started the Meet the Expert series, and there are two scheduled for the coming weeks:

• Amdocs CES – Portfolio Overview
• Prepaid loyalty – Fact or fiction

Just join the community to participate in the sessions and discussions.  And let us know what you think!