I continue to hear a lot of discussion on the true value of social. I think we are past the hype of social doing everything and more into the fact that social can provide value provided it’s used correctly. I was speaking with some people at Perficient who referenced a self-service customer site. As part of the rollout of their new portal, they also launched a community where customers could answers questions. It’s a great idea and I’m sure many of you have done searches that gives you exactly what you need in these types of communities. However, these communities don’t just appear made of whole cloth in one fell swoop. They need care and nurturing. If given that care, they can be a great way to improve your customer service while deflecting calls from your over-worked help desk.
That said, in this particular example, the company launched the portal and the new communities and promptly left the communities on their own. No one monitored or ensured questions were answered. I saw a graph of new threads each week and saw a perfect example of the results.
Week 1: It’s new. People aren’t used to it. They asked a few questions.
Week 2: Still new, ask the same number of questions
Week 3: Slight increase in questions. Not many threads being closed.
Week 4-6: Huge increase in usage. Lots of excitement by the user community. No threads being closed. Not many questions being answered.
Week: 7-9: Steep decrease in community usage. Users recognize that they won’t get answers there and they probably are now returning to more traditional methods of getting answers. (e.g. an expensive phone call)
The Moral of the Story
Communities can provide great value but that value is derived from a continuing investment by the community owners. Consider the following:
- Identify and empower a Social Champion. This person is the cheer leader. This person does informal training. This person identifies issues across the communities and works with people to resolve them. The Champion identifies community leaders and helps them with setup.
- Look to make the community a part of the process. If you have self-service ticketing, then searching the community as well as the knowledge base will help.
- Don’t forget governance. If a community has questions or forums then someone should monitor them. People should be both responsible and accountable. Doing so will enhance your captured knowledge and cut down on those expensive calls. It will also let you see and address issues before they boil over.
- Think about how you will report on the value this provides. Each case is different but there is value as long as you start with a baseline. In the self-service portal for example, you would track call volume and try to correlate it to community usage. This may involve more than a direct correlation so don’t be afraid of things like regression analysis.
- Think about enablement tools like gamification. They aren’t the only way to solve your problems but they help.
Excellent comments Michael. I will expand on your first action item above. Empowering your Social Champion and any community leaders means they will spend time doing whatever tasks are involved in working in and promoting the communities. This is either in addition to their normal tasks, or replaces something they did in the past – most likely the former. This has to be recognized within the organization, and becomes a critical decision if the people who are the champions are already overworked.
You make a good point Graham. I mentioned governance in a later bullet but if there’s no time for someone to do the actual work of social champion or community manager then it’s a lost cause from the beginning.