A few weeks ago I bought a trailer hitch for my 2010 Prius. It turns out that standard hitches don't work on Priuses. When a new model of the Prius comes onto the market, custom hitch makers like Curt design and manufacture hitches that work with the model. Thus figuring out a hitch that works with a new model turns into a hassle as the buyer needs to look into multiple blogs, forums and the like to get very specific questions answered before he/she can confidently move forward.
The process would be a lot easier if exactly the right information would be available on a manufacturer or eTailer site. For a small manufacturer or eTailer, compiling and maintaining such information is expensive. To answer all the variations of questions that get asked either requires very skilled people manning the phones/online-chat-rooms or a comprehensive and well curated Q&A in an online database that needs a fair bit of investment as well.
An alternative is to let prospects ask questions of other users at large in a somewhat centralized fashion by connecting users coming to a eTailer or manufacturer site with a back-end general purpose Q&A system such as Yahoo! Answers. The missing piece then is an easy to "copy-paste" piece of code that allows a small online company to accomplish this integration.
The same idea can be applied of course to any small "publisher site" that could benefit from being connected to a large "repository of knowledge".
Friday, July 16, 2010
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