Chapter 8 – Support | Lee Horton's Blog

Chapter 8 starts out with ‘tugging on our heat strings’ with a sad story that turns into a joyous one of how new parents achieved effective communication and support from their families in hard times with “CarePages”, a brilliant invite only blog-type application intended for patients to stay connected to their friends an family when they are receiving medical attention. I can just imagine the worries that the friends and family would be going through when their loved one is in the hospital. But lucky this application lets them communicate and give updates. I would say that is safe to day that the emotional support that CarePages gives patients is a big contributing factor in their healing. This was a nice introductory story about how SUPPORT is needed in more that in way in the groundswell…(Li & Bernoff, 2011)

Helping the groundswell can be costly if done wrong, for example a call center for support for a company products can cost millions. But if done right your company can support its own groundswell with a fraction of that cost. Mountain Equipment Co-op has done an excellent job of this by creating their “Ask and Answer” functionally of their website. For every product on their website you can ask a question and the either someone from MEC will answer it, or if you as a customer know a lot about the product and you can answer the question you can leave an answer. This is great because it cuts down on the cost of employing a whole bunch of people at MEC to just answer question on the phone and online all day and you are getting more input from more people. Below is a Screen shot of the Ask and Answer portion of the web store. For this one water filter there have been 24 question asked so far, all with good quality answers both from the MEC community and MEC staff. It’s hard to calculate how much money this functionally on their web is saving them year, but I think that it’s safe to say, “a lot” (said in a British accent)