Part 4 in a 5 part series
Over the past several months, many of our customers have started embracing new social networking approaches—and are now delivering better customer service as a result. Through these customer engagements, we’ve identified several best practices that are instrumental to the success of an organization’s social networking initiatives. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing a few of these best practices. In this post, the fourth in our series, we’ll review how to give customers control over how they interact with the community.
Social media has opened up a world of possibilities in terms of how people interact with online content. In the process, customers’ expectations have fundamentally changed. Today, users increasingly expect to get access to contextually relevant information through methods of their choosing—whether RSS feeds from blogs, Tweets, FaceBook pages, social bookmarking services like Delicious, and more.
Forums can be instrumental in meeting, and exceeding, customers’ expectations for information access, and the benefits of this can be huge. Applying granular levels of personalization in collaborative knowledge environments encourages customer participation by making desired information more accessible. In customer service scenarios, where users are more directed and specific with their objectives, every second saved boosts customer satisfaction with the support experience.
Following are a few tips for making the most of this opportunity:
- Suggest topics to your users, based on the products they use, and interests they have identified in the past.
- Save a “My Topics” list for user-initiated discussions and highlight which threads have been updated since the user’s last visit, eliminating the need to manually check the site for new posts.
- Allow users to assign email alerts to their content subscriptions so they can be notified when new responses are posted.
- Extend subscriptions across discussion forums and the knowledgebase, and provide users with the flexibility to subscribe by topic, content category, author, and discussion.
- Provide custom RSS feeds for each subscription, and for searches containing specific phrases or keywords.
Ultimately, focus not on how to push content to your customer community, but more on how to enable that community to pull the information they need in the way that makes the most sense to each individual participant.
Review our e-book, called “Conversational Knowledge: Five Best Practices for Improving Customer Service through Community-Based Collaboration”, and learn more about giving customers more control over how they interact with your community.
