As Lionel mentioned in an earlier post, much of Dell’s community roots have proudly been in the support and resolution of tech support issues. Since 1996, we have had a forum for user-to-user support. With over a million users resolving each others’ issues on a regular basis, our users have had great success. With the launch of accepted solutions in February, which is the ability for the person who has asked the question to choose which response best answered their question, we have continued to evolve our tools to provide enhanced functionality for community in helping each other. With the new community launch, we continue the journey. Forums become more robust and we introduce wiki.
Forum will get some cool new features as well as continue with the great functionality that has made it a home to many of our community’s super users, or known to us as our VIPs. Here are just a three of the new enhancements:
- Regardless of where the accepted solution lies in sequence in the thread, it will always appear in 2nd place, beneath the question. This will make it easier for other users to quickly spot the solution, without having to go through many pages of posts
- Users will be able to create polls in their threads. Whether it’s a question to the rest of the community on which laptop a mom should buy for their gamer son, or recommended configurations or parts for their older systems, we have a feeling this new functionality will be used for many different questions
- Many new emoticons for inserting into user’s text
We are excited to introduce wiki into our portfolio of tools. Wiki will allow users to create content and articles to continue to share the knowledge and great how-to’s that they have been sharing over forums for many years. To share just a few of the wiki features:
- Version browsing, allowing users to see all versions of the wiki article, who changed the article, when it was changed and what they changed
- Ability to make a new article a page under an existing article or its own
- Rate each article as useful or not useful, so other users can assess the quality of the article
Forums and wikis can be powerful tools in any community by greatly empowering users to help each other and answer questions. We look forward to seeing how our community continues to use them to support and help other users.