Part 2 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. In the weeks that follow, we’ll outline a few of these best practices. In this post, the second in our series, we’ll look at the topic of promoting community conversations.

As mentioned in our last post, reputation models are an essential way to nurture the expert contributions that are vital to a forum’s ultimate success. In addition, reputation models serve another function. As participants build a reputation, you can grant them the right to recommend solutions from forum threads.

This is a great way to leverage forum content to improve an organization’s knowledge management resources. In addition, it’s an efficient way to extend the reach of internal company moderators, permitting the most valued participants to help determine which content can be harvested into more structured knowledgebase content. 

This content can then be exposed to the company’s call center agents and published on the company’s support Web sites. The expert-recommended solution would trigger a workflow to ensure the appropriate parties validate the solution information and rework it into the appropriate formats.

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 leveraging forum contributions.