When you setup a social network for your company, your customers become the primary part of the service.
Their participation in the community is similar to being part of other social networks they normally will use. Recognizing vital contribution impresses on the customer that their views are heard by you the business owner.
Customers are most likely to stay on your network when they are shown their precence is noticed and appreciated by the company. For companies with a large customer-base, you are not likely to know all your customers, but an online collaboration using a social network provides the opportunity for finding high-value contributors.
Contributions made by customers provide key information critical to resolving customer issues. The contribution received has a tendency to adding value to the overall business of the company. Product and service enhancement needs are exposed by contributors within the community. But how best can the community encourage vital contributions?
How can you identify high-value contributions and content? The best way to identify content that bring value to your business will be dependent on the rating system and reputation model that is used by all to rate each contribution made to the community forum.
This way each contributor receives points that accumulate to build a customer reputation with your brand. Customers with high reputation can be complemented for their efforts and participation through a reward program. An effective reward program would encourage continuous participation and keep loyal customers around for a very long time.
Contributions received within a community can be transformed into knowledge assets. As participants reputation model grows within the community more responsibilities may be granted to valued community participants to either recommend solutions that can be utilized or they could be invited to assist in determining which user generated content can be harvested from the within the community into a more structured knowledgebase. Fished out content can then be accessed, analyzed and validated by an in-house team into useful solution information that could be published in the company’s support website.
Discussion forums are used by many companies to trigger communication and knowledge sharing among groups that might otherwise be disconnected. For example, problem escalation can be moved from traditional phone escalation to collaborative forums. Collaborative forum is an open door to having more relevant experts who may not necessarily be part of the support team (but are alerted via topic subscription) or share the same geographies collaborate to resolve an issue. The discussion thread provides the content that can be harvested into a solution article. Participation should not be left unrewarded.
Companies can introduce incentives based on certain variables such as re-use counts of solution, timeliness of solution, to encourage participation.
Jason Hekl highlighted a very interesting point in his Conversational Knowledge pertaining to customer control and authority, read along.
The increasing growth of social media has created new expectations for personalization and flexibility in the way people interact with online content. The quest for anywhere access by users has also led to the incorporation mobile access to contextually relevant information through methods of choosing email subscriptions, RSS feeds, shared bookmarks, and many more social media tools.
Customers would like to be on top of their game if given the chance as such applying granular levels of personalization in collaborative knowledge environments encourages customer participation simply 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.
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 assign email alerts to their content subscriptions to enable them receive notifications 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. Track user participation in the forums and maintain an access history so customers can quickly revisit forums and topics that interested them in the past, and highlight which information has been read, not read, or posted new since the last visit. 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.
By Paulette- Beezblog Editor
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