Especially that only 1 in 5 questions require an official response. That’s the beauty of the community – it saves effort and can often be faster, as well as sometimes truly coming from the customers’ point of view.

Not everyone may be willing to take the calculated risk that Vodafone have. I have used other semi-open customer service tools (like rightnow.com) which direct queries to the appropriate employee and build up a knowledge base over time. They worked well while still providing some corporate control. However, they can lose the ‘discussion culture’ of an online forum – you have to wait for a reply and it is a Q+A format, rather than a discussion with multiple points of view.