Overview
Message board provides basic bulletin board functionality enhanced by thread management. Messages are grouped in discussion threads. These threads then form basic message board . Several message boards can be grouped into larger, topic oriented discussion boards.
Permission management controls whether visitors or users are allowed to read or post a message.
Message board provides hooks for most recent messages, most recent and most active threads. Administrator may close thread or pin it to top of the discussion (featured thread).
Benefits
- Full-featured and ready to go today - right "off-the-shelf"
- Low Total Cost of Ownership - Low start up & training costs with continuing low operating costs
- Additional search engine traffic = more sales
- Increase customer satisfaction = more sales
- Offload direct customer support = less cost
- Collect research information = future benefits
- Improve customer return rate = more reorders
Revenue Opportunities
- Sell Sponsorships that prominently feature the sponsor in page headers
- Sell targeted advertising
- Charge for Forums participation
- Restrict viewing of forums to paid subscribers
Features
Message boards are very useful tools for building and maintaining website traffic and customer satisfaction. Website users will feel empowered and will encourage them to engage in discussion. This ensures higher return rate as customers will want to follow message threads. Message boards provide additional content for search engines which translates into higher levels of search engine traffic.
In your business, you may be able to leverage message boards as low cost support. Your customers may post questions about your product and either your company or other customers will answer. Once the answer is available, you will need to handle less support calls as some of your customers will be able to find answer on their own.
Should your company provide preview product and would like to receive feedback from customers, you could set up a private message board where the discussion takes place away from prying eyes of public. You can collect a lot more useful information on board that you could when asking to fill in questionnaire.
ROI & TCO
Message board functionality is maintained by ke Solutions, which translates into both lower TCO (either included in your package or available for a small monthly fee), and predictable TCO (no out of pocket expense due to unforeseen problems with message board deployment). On the cost side, this solution provides very attractive overall TCO. Furthermore TCO can be lowered by offloading direct customer support and cutting down on total call durations to customer service.
Message boards contribute to ROI in many ways. If your business sells over the internet, then you already know that more traffic means more potential customers. And more potential customers equals to more money. One of the best ways to obtain potential leads is through search engine traffic. Search engines index your websites continuously and make your information available through keyword searches. Naturally having more content will improve number of times your website shows in the result of any search related to products that you sell. Message boards are a very attractive tool as you obtain quantities of content when your website users post. Once you do have many people posting on your message boards, different keyword phrases will also be triggered in search engines. This valuable traffic can be converted to sales and you don't even have to pay for it.
Once you do sell to users, message boards can make them interested in coming back to your website. If you sell products that are not entirely unique in the market place and are not required for daily use, you know that it is hard to retain customers. Internet makes it possible for your customers to shop at a myriad of competitors and promotes high churn rates. Having users come back over and over stacks the odds for you, that when the time comes, customer will choose you over competition.
You can manage support message boards for those who prefer to read up on issues rather than call customer service all the time. Those customers are your friends because they will make use of the message boards and leave your customer service to serve other clients. This translates to direct savings as you will get by with more customers per customer service representative. Even if your business is small enough that you do not need call center, you will find that even slight drop in customer support calls allows you to concentrate more on your business and you will succeed faster.
Screenshots
Click here for Message Board documentation.