Self-service goes beyond relieving your support team’s workload.
It’s a way to connect with your customers while providing practical ways to find their answers. Give your customers the accurate responses they want while opening up more opportunities for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive “voice of the customer” feedback.
Building brand awareness, increasing CSAT, and deflecting calls all sound great, but the thought of building or managing a community might sound strenuous. Many brands have legal concerns, fear overly negative responses, sometimes even bullying, or dread managing volumes. It is our mission to help alleviate those concerns, and turn them into opportunities with the Khoros Platform.
Previously, I’ve touched on self-service options in previous blogs, specifically community & automation. Today I’ll be expanding on these topics, starting with the advantages a community provides and the benefits of Community Moderation in Manage View.
Effective self-service is the key to success.
No matter what industry you are in, self-service always should be a factor in your customer support plan. But the key to success here is doing it right.
Too often do we see companies stop at a basic FAQ page to get important information out to their customers. Now don’t get me wrong, FAQs are great. But this only serves a select group of customers, which often leads to a call, chat, or search to answer their questions.
Thanks to search engines like Google, people expect to find answers when they search. But if your site doesn't offer the correct answer, your customer could find their answer on a competitor's site. With a branded community, your customers can find answers anytime and have a place to interact with each other.
Combine the power of Khoros Communities with Care to gain efficiencies.
Once you have your community up and running, you may quickly identify that many of the questions will be the same ones that come from your other channels, including Social, Chat, and Voice. Khoros has a great Accelerated Community Management Solution that connects your community to your Care instance. This gives you powerful tools to manage community responses and moderation.
If you already have a Khoros Care team answering similar questions for other channels, routing community responses could improve your response time. Routing through Care helps alleviate manual routing and switching between your community & Care instance to manage responses. Plus, Care provides analytics for your community responses, helping you better manage cross-channel conversations, agent capacity, and response times.
Here is some advice to keep in mind on encouraging your community to be accessible and positive.
- Let your community content be a universal guide. In any community, it is paramount to provide both users and agents with clear self-service direction to find answers in the Knowledge Base (TKBs), Announcements, Discussions, or even Ideas.
- Official brand documentation such as FAQs or instructions should be easily found and identified in your community’s TKBs. It's best practice to ensure your agents provide customers with the same answers/instructions provided in your TKBs.
- A community public knowledge base provides quick and accurate resources for agents to distribute across active channels. Additionally, sending customer links to TKBs will inherently create your community SEO value when customers search for answers on Google.
- Accepted Solutions are a great way to encourage community members to provide answers. Healthy “peer2peer” collaboration reduces the demand for agent/community manager interaction.
- Be sure that Accepted Solutions have been verified for accuracy when needed. This practice varies by community type. Not all Accepted Solutions require verification by the brand but should remain actively reviewed.
Here's the bottom line.
Having a branded community doesn't only increase agent and content efficiency. It goes beyond static FAQ capabilities by allowing customer feedback and providing more opportunities to optimize and utilize resources.
I mean, how often have you gone to an FAQ page only to find outdated, incomplete answers with no way to tell the company that you still need help?
As always, if you have questions or would like to chat live, shoot me a PM @A11ey. I would love to discuss your ideas on how you are modernizing your Digital Care!
If you are interested in best practices for your Care or Community programs, check out these other resources
