Hire your customers to do customer support (and pay them nothing)

That’s essentially what Intuit did with its latest edition of QuickBooks.  According to a recent Business Week article, Intuit has created a community of its most active and rabid fans to support other QuickBooks users.  It’s not too different from a variety of product forums across the Web, except in this case the forum is run by the company, not individual customers.

The result?  Intuit claims that 70 percent of customer service questions are now answered by other QuickBooks customers.  These are customers volunteering to answer questions Intuit used to pay employees to answer.

There’s a lesson and opportunity here for your business as well.  How are you harnessing the power and passion of your best customers to help not just your business directly, but other customers as well?  It’ll help your brand, increase satisfaction, likely impact retention, and will save you money.