The differentiating advantage for users is that the forum
might contain the answer to a question so esoteric that the knowledgebase has no
record of it.
3. Direct, constant access to the customer mindset: The value of this cannot be
understated. Company moderators can read discussions in the deepest threads,
introduce new threads with important announcements, perform searches on specific
products to see what people have said about them, and much more.
Forums tend to grow at exponential rates. Once enough users become part of the system,
more users will hear of it, and then it will grow more, and then even more people will hear
about it, and then it will grow even larger. The larger it gets, the richer the information
becomes. See Figure 10-5 for a forum that encapsulates this organic knowledge growth.
Figure 10-5. Forum content grows organically as members slowly feed the
system posts over a long period of time.
CUSTOMER SUPPORT
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Forum platforms
Thankfully for developers, webmasters, designers, and the rest of the website team, there
are plenty of forum software platforms to choose from. Most are free, some are add-ons
to current CMSs (e.
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