Part 5 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 last in our series, we’ll look at practical approaches to forum moderation.
For those responsible for a company’s brand, customer forums can present a scary picture: an open platform for users to publicly disclose product issues, service complaints, and other “dirty laundry.” Certainly, these concerns are not without merit; influence and control remains a concern for most large organizations. But, the natural response to these concerns—moderating and reviewing every post before it’s published on a discussion forum—is not necessarily the best approach. Not only is this resource-intensive, but it can be counterproductive, undermining the value of a collaborative knowledge environment.
Finding the right balance will vary by company, but in general, we’ve found that moderating by exception is the best way to ensure a vibrant and collaborative community. Moderating by exception means that organizations allow users to post and publish freely, with moderators receiving notices from users reporting abuse, or from filters that identify inappropriate or undesirable behavior, such as mentions of a competitor or the use of objectionable or inflammatory language.
For organizations that take this approach, there are two essential capabilities:
- Reputation models. Reputation models can help companies achieve that balance between freedom and control, by assigning more rights and functionality to users that have earned the trust of both the community and the company.
- Search. Advanced search technology can add more power to filtering mechanisms by allowing moderators to search on specific concepts—so even if there is not a direct keyword or phrase match, semantic analysis will identify discussions that may be objectionable.
Moderating a community by exception, coupled with the ability to ban users, unpublish or edit posts or replies, or close forum topics, creates a positive environment that supports both the customer’s need for fast, easy knowledge sharing, and the company’s need for an online community that reflects appropriate values and behavior.
Review our e-book, called “Conversational Knowledge: Five Best Practices for Improving Customer Service through Community-Based Collaboration”, and learn more about the best approaches to forum moderation.
