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Hubbub-An innovative customer support forum

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Publication date2008
Host publicationSocial Aspects of the Web (SAW 2008), Advances in Accessing Deep Web (ADW 2008), E-Learning for Business Needs
EditorsDomonik Flejter, Slawomir Grzonkowski, Tomasz Kaczmarek, Marek Kowalkiewicz, Tadhg Nagle, Jonny Parkes
PublisherCEUR Workshop Proceedings
Pages55-67
Number of pages13
Volume333
<mark>Original language</mark>English
EventSocial Aspects of the Web (SAW 2008), Advances in Accessing Deep Web (ADW 2008), E-Learning for Business Needs - Innsbruck, Austria
Duration: 6/05/20087/05/2008

Workshop

WorkshopSocial Aspects of the Web (SAW 2008), Advances in Accessing Deep Web (ADW 2008), E-Learning for Business Needs
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityInnsbruck
Period6/05/087/05/08

Workshop

WorkshopSocial Aspects of the Web (SAW 2008), Advances in Accessing Deep Web (ADW 2008), E-Learning for Business Needs
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityInnsbruck
Period6/05/087/05/08

Abstract

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.