Hubbub - An Innovative Customer Support Forum

Internet user forums have been proven to be effective not just as a community meeting place but also as a supporting tool for various business products. Traditional forums are designed with ”browse and read” journey in which users have to select the right sub forum to get into and select topics to read from within. However, we have identified a new trend in forum design toward community question answering systems with an ”ask questions first” user journey, a topic-less organisation, search based information retrieval and social network inspired alerting. Here, we report on the implementation and trial of such a forum, Hubbub, that epitomizes the aforementioned trend. It is designed to eliminate key issues found in current forum technologies and has been fielded as a support channel for a BT Softphone product, resulting in a significant reduction in support costs. We then report on the performance of this forum in practice and speculate on the reasons that forum design is taking this direction. Finally, we conclude the paper with some thought about future direction of forums in the Web 2.0 era.