Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

TI's Web 2.0 success story: better customer service

Texas Instruments uses Telligent's Enterprise 2.0 apps to create a customer community where TI staffers and engineering industry customers help each other solve problems faster.

Back in 2004, Texas Instruments (TI) noticed a problem in its customer service department, one that's typical in companies serving technical customer bases. Some of TI's main customers (engineers) buy and use some of the company's most technical products, such as digital signal processors. TI needed a better way to quickly provide answers to customer questions, without the customer sitting on hold with a call center, waiting for a representative who might not even have the technical expertise to answer the inquiry.

Around the same time, tech industry observers were noting that Web 2.0 technologies could be utilized to build customer communities to transparently document common problems. As community-based applications emerged, TI decided to build "E2E," which stands for engineers to engineers. Launched in 2008, E2E is an externally-facing community where TI's staff interacts with engineering customers (and where the engineers could interact with each other).

As a result, TI has reworked a major part of its customer service arm into a transparent portal where customers and TI employees can share best practices that help solve common technical challenges. "It allows us to have a place to publicly share knowledge," says Devashish Saxena, Texas Instruments' (TI) director of global Internet marketing.

The engineers can trade messages with TI's staff for many technical issues. Once a TI staffer answers the question, the thread of comments appear publicly on the E2E site. Moreover, the results come up on Google. So if engineers type the name of a product into Google (and many such searches use specific model numbers), E2E forums will return in the search results page.

"If you think about engineers, when they ask a question in a forum setting, they use the same keywords," Saxena says. "Lots of the site traffic comes from organic search."

According to Saxena, in a short time, E2E has changed the nature of requests the customer support department receives, since engineers were able to access help for deeply technical issues from the community. Now, if they have to call customer service, it's for a more specific question (to their case) that isn't as broadly applicable to the whole community.

TI built the platform on technology from Telligent, a company that makes Web 2.0 technologies for the enterprise (often called Enterprise 2.0 apps). The Telligent platform allows customers to interact with the company hosting the forum, and each other, to solve problems.

According to Oliver Young, a senior Forrester analyst, apps like Telligent's have become popular for the type of externally-facing forum TI has built. SharePoint, Microsoft's mammoth set of collaboration applications, can be used for external communities, but the licensing is more complex, so companies have more often relied on it for internal purposes.

"Companies buying social software have often been focusing on this marketing side of the house, and tying internal communities with the external," Young says. "Having the seamless ability to surface information from the external communities and take it inside can be very hopeful."

C.G. Lynch writes about consumer and social technologies, and tracks their migration into the workplace. You can follow him on Twitter: @cglynch.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Google, Microsoft, Texas Instruments
References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: customer service, web 2.0
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Sun Blade 6000 Modular System: Power and Cooling Efficiency
    Most IT organizations are struggling with the need to deploy ever more applications in the fixed space, power, and cooling envelope of their data centers, the ability to save even a hundred watts per system quickly turns into more breathing room for future applications and the servers to run them. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Printer Usage and Cost Management Strategies for the Australian Mid-market, an Unrealised Opportunity
    This whitepaper was commissioned to aid senior business and ICT decision makers of medium-sized government and corporate organisations, including marketing, finance, and technology executives to better understand the current use of print devices including copiers, printers and multi-function Page 19 Reproductions in whole or in part are prohibited. This whitepaper also provides insights into how current management practices can be improved to optimise investments and improve sustainability. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • Keeping up With Ever-Expanding Enterprise Data - 2010 IOUG Database Growth Survey
    A majority of respondents report having performance and budget issues due to exponential data growth. Those companies with the highest rates of data growth, in fact, are eight times more likely than slow-growth sites to be seeing significant increases in their storage budgets. New processes and tools are needed to help organizations take control of the massive volumes of information now moving through their systems. The IOUG survey looked at approaches being taken by organizations to manage their growing data stores, and what still needs to be done.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.
Recent comments

HP and IDG news, product videos and resources