Utilizing Couto Solutions’ Paid Support Building Block for Telligent Community Server 2008.5 can really improve your organizations ability to offer robust paid support packages. This added benefit can be achieved without increasing your management team’s workload or the complexity of providing support. To illustrate how you can use Paid Support in your organization let’s start with an example where we would want to offer three levels of support: bronze, silver, and gold.

The Packages
Our first tier of support, Bronze Support Package, will allow access to our Bronze Community Support forums where community members as well as staff members will answer questions at their leisure. This package will have an SLA (Service Level Agreements) that assures the client that if their question isn’t answered by the community in 7 days, that a internal support rep will answer it. This package can be offered at an affordable cost, but still assures clients that they will eventually get the answer they are looking for.

Our second tier of support will be our Silver Support Package which will have an SLA that guarantees that Silver Support clients will get a response to their inquiries within 24 to 48 hours of posting them in our Silver Support Forum. Silver Support members will also get the standard access to the Bronze Community Support forums. Our Silver Support Package will cost more than our Bronze Support Package and is ideal for those clients that can’t wait a full week for an answer.

Our final tier will be our Gold Support Package that will have an SLA that guarantees a response within 24 hours of the Gold Support client posting their question in our Gold Support Forum. Gold Support forum members will also have access to our Silver and Bronze offerings.

You could continue to add more support tiers that might include phone support, a newsletter with additional tips, a magazine subscription, or anything else you can think of. Each tier you add could be at a higher cost, all of this being managed by our Paid Support Building Block for Telligent Community Server 2008.5.

Another option you have is to add support tiers with various durations for each support contract. For example, you could provide monthly, 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year support options at each level.

In addition to offering support contracts for individuals, you could offer support contracts for groups. Group options are great for families an business where one entity will take care of payment. This type of group support could include any number of sub-members, for example, 2, 5, or 10 sub members. Each sub-member under the support contract would receive their own login as well as a personalized support experience.

As you can see, with just three levels of support, you have the potential to create as many as 60 different support contracts. More if you wanted to! The options are limitless. And once you’ve created your support contracts, Paid Support will handle the rest for you. Remember, purchases, renewals, even upgrades are all automated!

Couto Solutions’ Paid Support for Telligent Community Server 2008.5 makes it possible to provide comprehensive support packages to your clients through an easy to manage web based support system. Give it a try today: Paid Support for Telligent Community Server 2008.5.

Couto Solutions' Paid Support Building Block for Telligent Community Server 2008.5 is built on top of our Advanced Membership System that was designed specifically to manage subscription products or services. Paid Support is a robust plug-in for Telligent Community Server 2008.5 that is ideal for all organizations providing professional support services.

Paid Support has many features, such as the ability offer hierarchical level support each offered at different price points. In addition, with Paid Support you can offer support contracts with or without guaranteed response times. You can actually completely customize every aspect of the support contracts you offer. For example, you can determine the cost and duration of a support contract as well as which resources will be included with a support contract.

With Paid Support, you can create and manage an unlimited number of support contracts for individuals and groups. With group contracts, a single entity or person can purchase the contract that has any number of members underneath it. The feature allows you to offer support contracts for families and businesses. This multilevel support offering allows each member underneath it to have unique sign-in information and a personalized support experience.

Furthermore, Paid Support makes it easy for you to manage your support contracts. Purchase and renewal of support contracts is fully automated. Once you create your support contracts, users can purchase, renew, and even upgrade support contracts on their own.

Paid Support also has a rich communication layer that automates email interaction with your support clients. For example, you can send automatic email notices to support contract clients through the course of the support contract. Email notices can be used to provide customers with renewal notices, special information and to allow you to request feedback on how you are doing. The automated email communication in Paid Support can really help streamline your support efforts.

Finally, with Paid Support you’ll receive tools to gauge the success of your community. Paid Support provides you with the ability to generate a variety of reports on active support contracts, expiring support contracts, support contract renewals, and so much more. All Paid Support reports can also be exported to CSV file for additional manipulation in Excel. Paid Support is a great solution for those organizations that want to streamline their online and offline support efforts.