Traditional support is expensive in terms of cash cost and staff resources, and customers hate it. No one wants to spend hours in a queue for telephone support or further hours sifting through pages and pages of documentation. Conversely, you don't want your staff to be sitting on phone lines or staring at a Twitter page hoping vainly to be there when someone needs them. Brand advocacy requires that when something goes wrong, customers can fix it, fast. They want self-serve tools that they can access online.

Over time, a customer community becomes a constantly evolving and SEO-friendly knowledge base. Your existing brand advocates can add their own opinions, queries and solutions, and the great standards of support create new ones. Crowd sourced support requires minimal intervention and deflects support tickets before they're even made.