Helpstream Launches Widespread Campaign to Help Companies Stop Wasting Customers

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA--(Marketwire - June 9, 2009) - Helpstream, the leading provider of customer service communities, today announced HelpExchange, a new community designed to facilitate sharing best practices for customer service excellence. HelpExchange gives companies a one-stop shop for more than 40 in-depth articles on topics as diverse as "Attracting Members and Evangelizing Community" to "Selecting and Deploying Technologies."

"A customer is a terrible thing to waste. Companies have poured huge sums of money into solutions that focus exclusively on solving customer problems at the lowest possible cost," said Anthony Nemelka, CEO of Helpstream. "Unfortunately, these investments have done nothing to help companies extract the true value from its customers. We believe engaging customers using social customer service communities helps companies leverage customers' expertise to not only cost effectively solve problems, but also to identify new market opportunities, defend the brand and stimulate referrals to new customers. HelpExchange is a critical first step in stimulating a forum for ideas, success and learning in this area."

HelpExchange is a customer service best practices community in which practitioners and community managers can share experiences and ideas on how to get the most from customer service communities. The site includes original Helpstream Community Best Practices content, a discussion forum, IdeaStorm brainstorming channel, portals to outside community resources, and customer service-focused ideas and blogs, all of which are available for free and licensed under Creative Commons attribution license.

"A best practices community focused on customer service communities is greatly needed," said John Ragsdale, VP of technology research for the SSPA, AFSMI and TPSA organizations. "The majority of our members now offer customer service communities, but an understanding of key success metrics, target performance benchmarks, and overall best practices is sorely lacking. I think service and support professionals will really benefit from the valuable content that Helpstream will be offering on HelpExchange."

"Helpstream understands that you can't build a customer community in a vacuum," said JoAnne Ravielli, VP of customer service at Infusionsoft, a marketing automation software company. "Infusionsoft is a company that serves small businesses and puts a premium on creating enduring relationships with our customers, so we understand that a good, successful community must be purpose-built. We want to center our community around customer support and service, because that allows us to serve the community and empower our users to better collaborate with one another and with us."

About Helpstream

Helpstream's fully integrated customer service communities help companies reduce overall customer support costs while increasing customer satisfaction and retention. Helpstream integrates social Web technologies with modern customer service and collaboration processes to drive effective customer and partner engagement across all business functions. Helpstream's SaaS design makes it fast to deploy, easy-to-use and affordable. It can be deployed as a complete customer service system or as an integrated self-service and community case resolution complement to existing CRM systems. More than 190 customers and 400,000 users access Helpstream regularly to share information and discover solutions to everyday customer service problems on the Web. Helpstream is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. For more information, please visit www.helpstream.com or follow us on Twitter at twitter.com/helpstream.

Contact Information: Media Contact Jesse Odell LaunchSquad 415.625.8555 hstream(at)launchsquad(dot)com