In 2013, EMC launched its first Support Community on the ECN containing product support content entirely in Japanese. Since then, the Japanese Support Forum has performed very strongly, and is now one of EMC’s 5 multi-lingual support communities (including Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese and English).
The Japanese forum received around 30,000 page views and 7,000 unique visitors per month in Q4 2014. The total number of content posted to the forum averaged over 2,900, including discussions threads, downloads, and video content. Some companies are struggling to run their support forums in Japan. How have we achieved such great results? It is because we’ve had lots of great forum users! There is no doubt about it.
But how have we come to have such great Japanese forum users?
Is it because we’ve kept up a 100% response rate to all the 1,800+ questions posted in the forum over the last two and half years? Or because we’ve promoted the forum through some powerful social media channels? Even though both probably contributed to the success of our Japanese support forum, the most important key to the success (we think) was our attitude towards posted questions: “We don’t face forum users, but instead look in the same direction as our users.” This is our motto.
What does it mean? If we face forum users, we probably try to “answer” a question.
On the other hand, if we look in the same direction with forum users, we try to “find” an answer for the users (with the users).
They may appear like similar points of view, but this shift in perspective actually generates very different outcomes, which lay at the heart of our community atmosphere/culture. We believe our motto gradually formed a cozy atmosphere in the Japanese support forum which brought lots of great users in the forum, and encourages them to stay, participate, and return again and again.
Our next journey is to “find” lots of great answers in the 3rd platform with our valued forum users. I am sure we can make it together!
Yutaro Uehara
IT Social Engagement
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ueharaus