Who doesn’t want to make work more fun? Whether it’s for your customers, your employees, or your partners, making their online interactions with your company more engaging, interesting, and rewarding, can pay huge dividends in revenue and retention. If you’re a Service Cloud customer – you now get the Chatter Answers product for free. That’s great news since Chatter Answers is the perfect platform for enabling peer to peer support in your customer base and it has a lot of great reputation and gamification capabilities built in. Here’s a look at some of the great features and what we can expect for the future.
- Points, Points, Everywhere!
- Chatter Answers tracks all community activity (questions, answers, likes, follows, etc.) and awards different point values by activity
- You can keep them as is – or weight them differently to meet the needs of your own community (Note: if you want to use custom weighting – you’ll have to turn off the standard profile hover pictured above)
- You can then use that data to build a custom leaderboard or invite your top posters to a private group and reward them for their participation
- Leveling Up
- Chatter Answers lets you define custom ranks for your community members based on their points. With ranking, new members can easily identify the experts and everyone gets to feel like they’re making progress as they post.
- Pro Tip: I recommend keeping the number of ranks low 5-10 max. Providing perks at each rank is a great way to reward engagement and keep people motivated.
- Multiple Communities
- Have two completely different products or services? Spin up two separate communities – each with its own set of articles and questions. Your customers can access both and have uniquely named ranks in each community.
What’s next? With Salesforce Communities on the horizon – we can expect to see these out of box reputation features improved and integrated into the overall reputation engine for Chatter. There’s no need to wait for Communities however, Chatter Answers is available today and stands very well on its own, so get out there and start leveling up!
