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.

Part One in a Five-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. In the weeks that follow, we’ll outline a few of these best practices. In this, the first of our five part series, we’ll focus on recognizing and rewarding contributions from those outside the company.

Like pulling the dead weight of a freight train, forums can be a challenge to get moving at the onset. Especially early on, they require a lot of time and effort: a lot of prodding to get people to visit, and perhaps most challenging of all, to get them to come back regularly, participate, and contribute. Exacerbating matters is the fact that, early on, these initiatives can present a chicken and egg scenario for organizations: until people start participating, the dialog and useful content won’t be generated. Until that useful content is there, new users won’t start getting engaged.

However, once some momentum has been achieved, the cumulative efforts of a community can keep things moving with very little effort on behalf of the sponsoring organization. How can organizations get through this difficult early phase of a forum’s development and expedite the process of getting a community actively engaged enough to become its own self-propelled, content contribution engine?

The initial success of a forum will have to do with a lot of factors, but one of the more critical aspects lies in how contributions are recognized and rewarded.  Finding high-value contributors, recognizing their efforts, and encouraging continued participation is essential in leveraging user-generated content for customer service.

The challenge, of course, is volume. Many discussion threads will yield few insights that can be repurposed. How can a company embrace the community and realize value from it, without exhausting human resources?

The answer lies in reputation models and rating systems that allow community participants, including company moderators, to rate or otherwise identify high-value content and translate those ratings into a points program that builds a reputation for each contributor. As points accrue and reputation grows, “experts” are recognized and granted additional responsibility on the forums. Over time, valued contributors are promoted to higher status levels.

Review our e-book, called “Conversational Knowledge: Five Best Practices for Improving Customer Service through Community-Based Collaboration”, and learn more about some keys to effectively recognizing and rewarding forum contributions so expert users are encouraged to keep actively engaged.