If I visit the Bose support center and ask a question in search, this is the resulting page:
Not one of the 530,000+ posts in the community will ever show up in the answers here.
The incredible collective wisdom of the community is wasted because the support center doesn’t use a federated search tool. Worse yet, the option on the right doesn’t invite people to ask the community but instead contact support.
Two things here…
First, the amazing thing about a community is that over time it covers so many edge cases which can’t be covered in the relatively small number of articles on the support center.
I don’t know how many articles Bose has created to support its products but I’m going to wager it’s less than the half a million posts the community has created.
Every different way a member might describe or solve a problem has been covered in the community. Being able to search for everything in one place is a win for everyone. Prioritise help center articles if you like, but don’t ignore the community content.
Second, if people can’t find the answer in the help center, they probably have an edge case that should be added to the community. The side button shouldn’t be to contact support, but to ask in the community. Questions that are unanswered thereafter [xyz] hours can be escalated to support anyway.
