Crowned the Guinness world record holder for the “Most Content Ingested by an Online Video Service” in June 2011, online video broadcast provider Ustream is no stranger to viral content. When Ustream set its record, the company had logged 37.05 million hours of content at 70.5 hours per minute—in comparison, YouTube was averaging about 48 hours per minute during the same time. As Ustream grew to host more than 60 million visitors per month, managing the volume of support tickets associated with this massive traffic became a challenge. The company turned to Get Satisfaction for a solution.

Ustream boasts more than 15 million registered users, ranging from NASA and the Library of Congress to some of Hollywood’s biggest names—and the list is growing. The company needed to implement a customer support system that would rely primarily on self-service support supplemented by agents, rather than on agents alone. 

“We were drowning in support tickets,” Ustream CEO Brad Hunstable told CRM in February 2013. Before the company deployed Get Satisfaction’s solution, Ustream customers in need of assistance were advised to contact the company directly, either through email or by filling out an online form. “This required individuals [at Ustream] to respond and…we couldn’t get to them all,” Hunstable said. After building a social support community with Get Satisfaction about a year and a half ago, however, the problem quickly became a thing of the past. 

Get Satisfaction manages more than 70,000 social communities for a variety of companies and designed a support forum for Ustream and all 11 of the company’s products. The support community enables customers to communicate with each other as well as with employees, according to Scott Hirsch, vice president of product and content marketing at Get Satisfaction. Get Satisfaction’s tool also optimizes content for search engines, enables direct messaging and private conversations, and offers integrations with different CRM tools, including Salesforce.com.

Get Satisfaction’s community tool lets Ustream users ask questions, share ideas, report a problem, or give praise. It also has other capabilities, including trend spotting. In April 2013, about 25,600 people were using the community to generate roughly 12,000 posts. By January 2014, however, those numbers jumped to 32,000 and 14,600, representing increases of 25 percent and 21 percent, respectively. 

Users can rely on the vast database of troubleshooting content to pull up material relevant to their question, Hunstable explained. 

“By providing a means for customers to troubleshoot their problems on their own or with the help of fellow users, [Get Satisfaction] slashed the number of support tickets Ustream received by over fifty-five percent,” Hirsch says. 

Though the community has made Ustream users more self-sufficient when it comes to support, the company still encourages them to submit a support ticket if their questions remain unanswered. Customers with free accounts can file their ticket online, but paying customers might be privileged to more personal support, such as a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, or online support from Hunstable himself. 

Implementing Get Satisfaction’s solution was straightforward, according to Hunstable. Ustream started with a gradual introduction and took time to train its employees and ensure “full exposure across the whole company,” but once Ustream was ready for its full rollout, “we were up and running in about a week,” he said. As employees got more comfortable with the new technology, they were encouraged to participate in the community and contribute articles that address potential problems before customers notice them, or troubleshoot common issues. Even with a commitment to employee involvement, Ustream hasn’t had to add any staff. “We’re just being so much more efficient now,” Hunstable said. 

Ustream hopes to expand its social communities by creating separate groups for broadcasters and viewers. The company also hopes to eventually set up subgroups to sort similar types of users by shared interests and create better pathways to content for its growing number of customers.

As of January 2014, Ustream and Get Satisfaction’s efforts have been paying off. Not only have the numbers of community users and posts grown significantly overall, but the community also sees about 10,000 regular monthly visits and a revisit rate of 15 percent. “Customers are happy with the service and support this community is delivering,” Hirsch says, “and over fifteen percent of customers are returning to get more value.”  —Maria Minsker