Every day, consumers are faced with frustrating barriers to purchasing. They come close to making a purchase decision, but get stuck trying to get critical questions answered in order to feel like they are making a well-informed, confident purchase.

With the pace of today’s consumer marketplace, product marketing, product documentation, customer support, and channel marketing frequently fall short of consumer needs and expectations. Filling these gaps is Ask & Answer’s sweet spot.

If you’re an Ask & Answer client, there is a great opportunity ahead of you – but you need to know how to make the most of it. Many clients like JCWhitney are reaping the rewards. The questions your customers ask are a clue toward what they care about prior to purchase. The frequency of particular types of questions will highlight areas of pent-up customer demand, whether business is successful or lacking.

Every unanswered question is a plea from the customer for help. If you can provide that help – and encourage the community to participate – then you not only solve that person’s problem, but you solve it for everyone else who has the same question for the life of the product. That’s powerful.

But how do you get from here to there? Over the next few weeks, these series of blog posts will show real client examples of evolution through the Ask & Answer stages of maturity, as well as the challenges faced, and the unique lessons learned along the way. By the end, you’ll be familiar with these stages and how to attain success at each level:

Level 0: Before You Deploy
Level 1: Deploying on Category Pages
Level 2: Deploying on Product Pages
Level 3: Cross-departmental Participation
Level 4: Engaging Manufacturers and Vendors
Level 5: Advanced Programs and Integrations

Creating a successful Q&A community isn't rocket science. But it does take commitment, an understanding of how to measure success, and the discipline to follow through. It demands commitment from the company, not just the Web team. Turbo-charging your Q&A community does take effort, but the payoff is huge – increased conversion rates, reduced product returns, decreased customer support volume, and brand loyalty.

Are you taking full advantage of your Q&A community?

For more information, request "Harnessing the Power of Community Q&A: A Practical Guide for Boosting Revenue and Increasing Customer Satisfaction." And stay tuned to our blog for examples of clients who are making the most of their online Q&A.

Our French client roster has had some great additions and accomplishments in the past few weeks, and as the Community Manager for France, I am very proud to see us launch and sign so many of the top French brands.

One of the most recent accomplishments, and the one I am most proud off, is the success of Ratings & Reviews, and the launch of Ask & Answer, on our premier French site – Mistergooddeal.com. Mistergooddeal.com is one of the leading online sellers of home equipment and furniture, and was our very first retail client to launch in France with Ratings & Reviews. When Ask & Answer was launched, Mistergooddeal.com  took the opportunity to spread the word further on their pages, and created new social commerce features on their site.

For instance, Mistergooddeal.com revamped their informational splash page to include guidelines on both Ratings & Reviews and Ask & Answer, making it easier for their customers to contribute both types of content. In addition, the new splash page also promotes the current top rated products. This splash page receives visibility from some “customer reviews” links above the fold on the homepage and in the footer of all site pages.

Simultaneously, Mistergooddeal have also started promoting the top-rated products on their homepage with a banner that redirects to the splash page as well.

Showcasing products on the home page is a great way to call attention to your most successful items, usually driving additional sales. We always encourage retailers to highlight their Top Rated Products are research shows that customers buy more from Top Rated Categories than any other category, including Best Sellers.
Finally, and very successfully too, in the run-up to Christmas, Mistergooddeal.com sent regular email promotions to their users that included customer reviews alongside discounted products.

I am very proud of all these latest developments on Mistergooddeal.com’s side: the run up to Christmas has traditionally generated so much traffic on retailer’s sites, it was key to make as much use as possible of the UGC content to drive more sales and energize the community growth and voice.  With both Ratings and Reviews and Ask & Answer driving this sort of engagement, look to Mistergooddeal.com as the leader in the French market for innovative user generated ideas and experiences.

I came across the results of a recent Retail Systems Research study where over 50% of the retailer respondents identified “keeping product information and availability up-to-date” as the largest challenge retailers currently face.

The interesting thing about this problem is that, as a retailer, your customers and vendors/manufacturers are in a great position to help solve this for you organically, but you have to provide the means for them to do so.  Our clients who have enabled Ask & Answer throughout their site are experiencing this first-hand. Every time a customer asks a question that exposes a gap in product, the manufacturer can step in to close the gap. As a retailer, getting manufacturers signed up to answer questions provides mutual benefit to all parties. In addition, this represents a chance for manufacturers to connect with the customer.

Our friends at The Home Depot Canada have assigned special badges to manufacturers so all of their answers are called out.  Here are a few examples at the left.

As retailers, make sure you’re taking advantage of this opportunity to scale your social-support efforts.  Your vendors and manufacturers have answers that can influence the hundreds of thousands of shoppers viewing your products. As manufacturers, recognize the huge opportunity that you have to help your retail channels’ customers make faster, more confident purchase decisions.

It’s a mutual win all around.

Macro trends like this one are hard for advertisers to ignore, given the open-ended and highly interactive nature of Q&A web sites.  Within minutes, a consumer's request for help with a product can easily yield a few to a few dozen highly detailed responses chock full of brand names, model numbers, and emphatic end-user endorsements or criticisms.  Just now, I checked the Yahoo Answers home page and found the question below at the very top of the unanswered questions list: 

The question reads: "Micro SD Lock Switch?  How does it work. [sic]  I tried using it but nothing happens!  I have a Kingston adapter with the SD [sic]" 

Literally, on my first try, I find a question that contains a brand reference to Kingston, the memory maker (Full Disclosure: Kingston Technology is a Bazaarvoice client, although my finding them was completely random).   I haven't asked the folks at Kingston, but I'm 99.9% positive that they would relish the opportunity to be the source of the answer to this consumer's question.  While that might not be the best (or desired) experience for the consumer, that's not really my point.    

Already, Q&A sites are monetizing traffic and queries through the usual arsenal of sponsored links, contextual ads, and banners.  Ho hum.  In all fairness, not all consumer-submitted questions offer an opportunity for meaningful brand engagement (in the form of an educational response, not a sales pitch).  Some questions, like this one (my very own), offer little more than good fodder for your next round of bar trivia, although Smucker's would probably pay good money to resolve my confusion, with a branded answer of course, over the differences between jam and jelly, preserves and spreadable fruit, and marmalade and all of the above.  

What Q&A sites do offer brands is an opportunity for meaningful, transparent, and authentic conversation with consumers and the opportunity to observe consumer conversations in action.  If you aren't already searching Q&A sites for references to your brand name and product/service names, you should be.  It may not be appropriate or wise to enter the fray just yet and not all Q&A sites are ready for advertiser-contributed or branded responses, but that shouldn't stop you from listening to what consumers have to say.

Yet another opportunity is to make your own web site the place for consumers to ask and answer questions.  Bazaarvoice clients like The Home Depot Canada, Shoes.com, and Canadian Tire are using our Ask & Answer solution to enable authentic customer Q&A to occur within the context of their branding and shopping experiences.  Not only are these companies directly tapping into the conversation, they are equipped to contribute helpful responses at the appropriate time.  We encourage Ask & Answer clients to trust in their customers to ask and answer to each other, but if a shopper poses a question about a product warranty or return policy, a timely and authoritative response from you – the manufacturer or retailer – may be just what the shopper was hoping for.  

We are beginning to document the behavior and impact of consumers that ask and answer questions on retailer web sites and our early findings are exciting.  For one, there is minimal overlap between the segment of customers that post product reviews and the segments that post questions (just 4%) or answers (just 25%).  By offering Q&A on your own web site, you are providing value to a very specific and valuable group of customers – those that question before they buy!  In addition, products that contain at least one answered question convert at an 18% higher rate.  That number rises to 22% when the product contains at least two answered questions.  Our research findings make the Hitwise numbers quoted above make a bit more sense – when consumers discover something of value, they want a lot more of it. 

In summary, you shouldn't watch from the sidelines while Q&A portals like Yahoo Answers and Answerbag.com continue to grow at triple-digit rates, siphoning shoppers away from search engines, shopping portals, and other sources of information about your brand, products, and services.  Your business, if you sell to consumers, is about solving problems for those consumers.  Your products or services do half of that job, but consumers will want more of both if you help them answer the questions that precede their purchase decisions!