Building customer relationships with online discussion20 July 2005
Having a discussion forum on your web site allows customers to post queries about your products and services, and is an easy way of providing them with customer support, and encouraging interaction and feedback. It also boosts the amount of fresh, up-to-date content on your website, something that can encourage search engine spiders to visit frequently and raise your search engine rankings.
Getting started - things to consider
- Your discussion forum needs to be user-friendly, and easily navigable. You need to decide if you want messages to display in chronological order (flat or linear postings) or have each reply assigned to a parent post (threads).
- You may also want to consider a search feature, so your customers can look back through the archives if they have a query about a particular product or service.
- Depending on the level of sophistication you require, some software packages may allow you to syndicate the latest forum postings by RSS (this tutorial tells you how), or enable registered users to get notification by email when their messages are commented on or replied to.
- You need to decide if you will allow people to post messages to your discussion forum anonymously, or if you require some form of registration. Forums usually allow any visitor to read a post, but many require the creation of a profile with a username and password prior to leaving a comment. This is useful, as it allows you to gather customer details.
Hosting the forum
A discussion forum can be remotely hosted, or can be run as part of your own web site, depending on your level of expertise. Remote hosting can be free if you accept advertising on your forum, but otherwise starts at around £10 per month, from organisations such as BulletinBoards.com.
If you wish to create and host a discussion forum yourself, you can choose from free, open-source material such as phpBB.com, which will require some programming knowledge, or software packages such as vBulletin which start at around £85.
Wikipedia has a useful list of online forum software.
Hints and tips
- You need to ensure the privacy of your users, and make sure that your forum doesn't display their email information (forums are often targeted by spammers looking to harvest email addresses).
- You need to consider the level of control or moderation you wish to have on your forum. A moderated forum is one where no message is posted to public view without being checked by you first. If you decide to have your forum completely open to all comments, ensure that you check messages on a regular basis, to avoid spam and unwanted comments.
- A list of posting rules or frequently asked questions can be very useful, to avoid existing users becoming frustrated or annoyed by newer members constantly asking the same questions.
- If you want to encourage customers to use the discussion forum for enquiries about your products and services, ensure that you regularly check for new messages, and answer queries as speedily and thoroughly as possible.
This information is meant as a starting point only. While all reasonable efforts have been made, the publisher makes no warranties that the information is accurate and up to date and will not be responsible for any errors or omissions in the information nor any consequences of any errors or omissions. Professional advice should be sought where appropriate.
