Around the same time, tech industry observers were noting that Web 2.0 technologies could be utilized to build customer communities to transparently document common problems. As community-based applications emerged, TI decided to build "E2E," which stands for engineers to engineers. Launched in 2008, is an externally-facing community where TI's staff interacts with engineering customers (and where the engineers could interact with each other).

As a result, TI has reworked a major part of its customer service arm into a transparent portal where customers and TI employees can share best practices that help solve common technical challenges. "It allows us to have a place to publicly share knowledge," says Devashish Saxena, Texas Instruments' (TI) director of global Internet marketing.

The engineers can trade messages with TI's staff for many technical issues. Once a TI staffer answers the question, the thread of comments appear publicly on the E2E site. Moreover, the results come up on Google. So if engineers type the name of a product into Google (and many such searches use specific model numbers), E2E forums will return in the search results page.

"If you think about engineers, when they ask a question in a forum setting, they use the same keywords," Saxena says. "Lots of the site traffic comes from organic search."

According to Saxena, in a short time, E2E has changed the nature of requests the customer support department receives, since engineers were able to access help for deeply technical issues from the community. Now, if they have to call customer service, it's for a more specific question (to their case) that isn't as broadly applicable to the whole community.