ParkerH
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Joined 4 years ago
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Taking Dr. Micheal Wu’s Gamification Theory into the Real World
Years ago, long before Khoros was Khoros and was simply Lithium technologies, a rather curious and beautiful theory was introduced into the world of digital communities. The idea was that if you added some version of gamification and the proper motivation to community users, the digital community would outperform most of its competitors. Gamification floats through various strategies and online communities, but what exactly is gamification in the context of digital communities? In as few words as possible, it is the process of rewarding users with digital badges and increased access or features in the community. Gamification is a prime example of using extrinsic rewards versus intrinsic rewards to influence more people to use a community page. Former Lithium data scientist Dr. Michael Wu explored this concept concerning gamification back in 2014. All of Wu’s findings are far beyond the scope of this one article, but in short, Wu theorized that you could use both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in the gamification of a community page. If you are not familiar with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations a nd rewards, Wu said it best in his original article: “An intrinsic reward is an intangible award of recognition, a sense of achievement, or a conscious satisfaction. For example, it is the knowledge that you did something right, or that you helped someone and made their day better. An extrinsic reward is an award that is tangible or physically given to you for accomplishing something. It is a tangible recognition of one's endeavor. For example, it’s a certificate of accomplishment, a trophy or medal for winning the race, a badge or points for doing something right, or even a monetary reward for doing your job.” This theory applies to almost every single human interaction or action. The key difference between the two motivation and reward systems is longevity. Generally speaking, intrinsically motivated people will almost always continue to perform an action or task. A great example of this is the super users of a community page without any game theory applied. The super-users will continuously engage with a community page because they genuinely love to use the website. However, according to the Nielsen group, only 1% of all website users will seriously contribute to the page. For the other 99% of the community, the question that Wu was aiming to answer was what would motivate them to start engaging with the website. His answer was to use game theory to increase extrinsic rewards and motivation. This can be done simply by adding more features, rewards, and badges that you can proudly display as a community user. Khoros customer Pandora did this exceptionally well. So, what exactly did Pandora do? Pandora embraced game theory in a wonderfully organic way. At the start of introducing the Pandora community, users were already looking for ratings. By adding a simple ranking system, Pandora could tap into extrinsic motivation models found in most humans. A simple need to be recognized in a social setting. The following elegant practice Pandora put into place was giving greater access to their super-users. Within the first months of launching the Pandora community, the community manager, Erick Linares, noticed that a specific user was fully invested in using the community. This super-user was already displaying intrinsic motivation to use Pandora. In turn, Linares gave this user a moderator role and seriously increased access and judgment to what can and can’t be published or discussed on the website and other traditional moderator rules. The result for Pandora was an upswing in relationship building between other community users. This technic refers to Michael Wu’s theory on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. Using the community made users feel good. By feeling good, the user set off to build new digital relationships, which made them and their new digital friends feel good, creating a positive user feedback loop of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and bringing people together in the Pandora community. Watch this webinar to learn more about how exactly Pandora built their community with Khoros! How to translate rewards to other styles of communities It is a fair assumption to say that Pandora had a much simpler time energizing its user base. Everyone loves music, and having a place to talk about their favorite artists or events or using the community to solve software issues will naturally draw people in. However, few people will choose to use a community that centers around laundry detergent. If a non-entertainment brand aims to reach the levels of engagement as a brand such as Pandora, this would be a big step. If you are an electronics or household appliances brand, building a well-designed and highly functional community page is still wise. It’s smarter to focus on extrinsic rewards for your customers and employees. It’s vital to focus on the extrinsic rewards of a household appliance community because chances are high that your community base is logging into your website for direct support questions and not much else. So, if your community base is only going to log on when there is a problem, how could you get them to return to the website continuously? According to Wu and game theory, adding something as simple as a badge system for those who give the best answers or answer questions the most could be a good start in giving people great extrinsic rewards and motivation to log back on. To add to Michael Wu’s theory and gamification, video games provide further evidence that game theory could be the missing puzzle piece in increasing community engagement. Originally published in the Computers and Human behavior scientific journal, a group of researchers questioned how reward systems would influence test subjects while playing a simple video game. Their findings speak for themselves: “We found that the high rewards condition (with the greatest amount and diversity of rewards) was rated by players as being the most enjoyable, creating the greatest sense of presence and immersion, and causing them to expend the most effort while playing. Interestingly, the differing amount of rewards did not seem to influence players’ sense of competence nor tension while playing.” While it can be a challenging balance of providing a well-designed community while not making it too much like a ‘silly’ game, the researchers' findings prove that most people enjoy as many rewards as reasonably included. The Khoros Effect Khoros is known for building outstanding communities. Pandora, Samsung, and various travel brands are built on Khoros’ ability to build communities. A complete how-to guide to build your community from scratch is far beyond the scope of this article, but as you sit down with your brand’s team and the Khoros professional service team, keep in mind what Michael Wu and Pandora did by transforming your community user’s motivations. Explore more Khoros Resources to learn more about digital communities! Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards (and Their Differences from Motivations) Do You Even Deserve It? - Atlas Khoros and Pandora Community webinar4.3KViewsSign in to react to this post1CommentAn Interview for Change: How AI and Automation Drive ROI
Digital customer care can meet and exceed your original ROI projects in several ways. However, poorly implementing a digital Care system can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually in wasted time and low NPS scores. Khoros has been a social care leader for years, but a tool is only as valuable as the one who wields it. To get to the bottom of the best ways to use and prove the ROI of Khoros Care, we sat down with Khoros product marketing expert Josh Snider to get an expert opinion on the best and worst ways to use Khoros Care. Parker Hicks What's your background in Product Marketing? And why did you decide to come to Khoros? Josh Snider My background is actually in product marketing, but before that, I was in public relations, and before that, I was in embassy educational policy. I was excited to come to Khoros because I was already working as a player in the space and having a lot of fun creating chatbots and conversational commerce. Khoros offered me to work on use-case solutions, and it was something that just fell into place for me. What has been your experience with the Care platform? My experience has been, most recently, using [the care platform] to create real-world mock-ups for chatbots to send to customers and say, "you guys should get a bot." This is what it would look like within Google's business messages (GBM). In turn, I would build the GBM instance and assign the bot to it. I would pull it up on my phone and simulate myself as the agent within Care, chatting with myself on the phone and recording the whole thing as though I was interacting with a customer bot, so we could help them visualize what it is. The agent UI is excellent. An example would be the proactive web chat we built. It has the ability to create and manage 10 or 15 different chat widgets. Depending on your website and what kind of knowledge base your site knows, you assign different widgets to it. Can you share some of the best and worst use cases you've heard of? Sure. This one's pretty straightforward. A number of companies will want to put a bot on public social media channels. My question has always been, why do you want to do that customer? Their answer is something along the lines of, "Because the brand is getting buried in volume." Sadly, a lot of that volume is bull. A lot of the volume is really easy questions. Obviously, it's the sort of stuff that a bot could handle. However, every time a major technology company has launched a bot on a public social channel, it has immediately melted down or been proven to be useless days upon doing it. I like to ask companies what makes you think you will be able to outperform the big name brands that have tried before. What's the worst way you could use a bot on social media? You don't want to let it train itself, which takes away a lot of your opportunity for very intelligent bots. The amount of effort you'd have to put in through supervised training and optimization of the bots would be an immense effort. You're putting yourself at very high risk for a public high-volume display of your company's customer experience or service excellence. You could spend a bunch of time and money, and you'll end up with a problematic bot, or you can spend a bunch of time and money, and it'll still be unimpressive in the general bot and AI field. The internet is very much “Lord of the Flies,” and as a corporation, you're going to struggle with having a public-facing bot in the divisive world of the internet. You're screaming to the Twitter and Facebooks of the world, look at me, I'm a smart bot, I can help with basic things like x, y, and z, but in reality, you're not. Best case scenario, you're going to get embarrassed, and at worst, it could seriously harm your brand. What's a best use case or real best practice? The real best practice is when the only thing the bot does is a basic routing feature based on sentiment detection. For example, if an at mention sounds high risk or dangerous, the bot can spit out, "please don't tweet us, call 911; otherwise, visit the support portal here for anything else." When a bot gets an at mentioned under certain conditions, the bot should be spitting out a general welcome message and the same welcome message every time. For example, "thanks for contacting this company's customer support. Hit the button if you want to DM a support agent." Boom, you can hit the button. With a good DMS (direct messaging service), you can do all the various bot actions you want. However, you have to be cautious with how you choose your routing options. In the past, I've had companies come to me with something like $500,000 and ask for the sexiest, most fantastic bot. In their mind, they think that everyone is going to love us for it. Next thing they know, they'll solve customer service entirely, and we will go on vacation for half the year. Sadly, it never works that way. Until natural language programming can spit back out something worth anything, you will still need to use humans for more complex questions and be mindful of your bot use and customer routing. Let's say you have a customer that comes to you and says, "Hey, we're gonna get rid of all of our humans. We're only gonna use bots." How long until they return to you, say it didn't work and ask for advice? I've never seen anyone substantially large do that. Any business above a specific size knows that that's impossible to do entirely. Generally, a large company's customer engagement and care systems are convoluted. There will be five or six engagement teams on four plans. Times that companies attempt to go bot and A.I. only happen more often in the B2B sales and marketing teams. They will want to throw web chat on their site's enterprise sales and support sides, but nothing in the consumer business. I might need support to turn on the internet for 10 warehouses and 400 locations. They have chat and support messaging channels open, but the volumes are not there. It's because we're all working in an email on our phones and occasionally, in Slack, if they're a little more of a modern business. You're not going to get the same support chat volume that you would with a $70 a month residential customer. Your two businesses are more integrated. You've got people who know each other emailing each other back and forth. You're not coming in through the top of a support flow and having to get routed around. That department will like to look at web chat after a year or two and realize that they don't have any volume here. So they just turn it off. My recommendation to them is to never just turn it off. Just because you're not doing any volume on this entry point doesn't mean you should turn it off. It's better to figure out where people are having those conversations and if you want to hear them or not. What's the best real-world use case you've seen? The brand uses bots, text agents, and messaging channels in Google, Apple, and WhatsApp is an excellent example of using a bot effectively in Care. SMS is cool, too. When you can figure out how to keep it very simple because looking at a bunch of plain text is annoying after a while. When a bot sends you a text wall on a phone trying to solve a problem for you. It's still just as irritating. My personal favorite use case is automated scheduling. When you're trying to book a haircut appointment, for example. You can schedule your appointment through a bot that gives you a time picker that can immediately add an event to your calendar and reserve that time. It's so simple that if you ever have to go back and ask, wait when my appointment with the mortgage reviewer or home appraiser or whoever is? You can go to that conversation in your messaging center on iOS or Android and text that bot or escalate to a human if you have any questions or need support. It's pretty darn simple and impressive when it's done correctly. One of the most significant customer pain points that keep coming up is that customers are struggling with too many clicks to handle the conversation. What would be your advice on how to deal with that problem? Let me start with Khoros. Our modes of engagement are primitive but not in an unsophisticated way. You'll have to consider how you engage one-to-one customers or one-to-many at a high level. Take time to review a lot of different chats. From there, see how they are built, and you add on a bunch of power or action items. You definitely add complexity that can make it harder for an agent, right? If you want to add routing and tagging, okay, those are additional clicks. An agent needs to say, "It looks like they're a service person. I'll click tag as service route to service." Those processes don't necessarily need to exist. Companies like ours can solve them with elegant UI, enough automation, and AI. We've been advancing that science. To the customers saying this, just know that we hear you, and we're on the same team here. For what customers need to do, you have to have AI and AI-powered automation specifically. If agents have too many clicks, it's likely because there are things that they have to decide or do that a bot or a rule or some other system could easily do for them. A simple solution would be to let bots tag routing and prioritize whatever time or click-heavy tasks you're agents have to do. Take clicks off the agent's plate. Now sometimes, doing this can be expensive or complicated. You have to remember that's the nature of the beast. For a real-world example, I think there was a telco company with 100 Facebook Messenger agents. They saved roughly a million dollars through intelligent automation and routing. I think it was a 13% efficiency improvement, on average, after like two months of it. And over the course of a year, it was something close to $980,000 in labor savings just by using our Push Next automation system. I think it's important to ask yourself if it's worth 100k to save that million. At the end of the day, the Khoros Care platform is immensely powerful and can provide well over 100% ROI. However, as Josh Snider put it you’ll have to know how to use the platform and how to use automation to best suit your business needs and in turn, find record-breaking success in customer care. For additional resources on the Khoros Care Platform, please visit these resources below! Khoros Care Training Videos Connect with Khoros Expert Product Coaches Creating Highly Efficient Teams with Push NextViewsSign in to react to this postCommentCommunity ROI: Embracing Humanity’s Desire to Help
In today’s digital ecosystem, it’s a requirement to have a community page. No matter what industry you find your brand or company in, having a place for your customers to talk about your business, find support, or ask questions is necessary. Long before Khoros was Khoros, the founders deeply understood the importance of digital communities. It’s easy to hark about how much value you can pull from having an award-winning community. However, few articles and resources are diving deep into exactly why brands are finding these high levels of value and success with their digital communities. This article aims to change that. Of course, it would be a misstep not to recognize some essential realities of running a digital community. The initial bottom line is that running a community costs money. There is no escaping or not paying the hosting, designing, security, and general staffing costs. It could cost anywhere from the low tens of thousands to millions of dollars a year. As the intrepid new community, you might find yourself needing to garner more executive support. You have to consider not only why people use community pages but also how you will find value in all aspects of the customer experience by having a highly successful community. Care and Community Utilizes Human Desire to Help one Another Khoros and several of our customers have proven that customers in need of support rarely care where they receive that support. In regard to digital communities, one of the most engaging types of posts is a support question. Even Google’s algorithm will point customers toward a digital community to answer product or service-related questions. This system is adventitious for whichever brand or company owns the community page, but why would any customer spend their valuable time and resources answering strangers' questions on an online forum? For some community managers, this question isn’t of massive importance. It’s extra work and research to understand why customers answer strangers’ questions in digital communities. However, if your community page starts slipping towards inactivity, you find yourself struggling to understand why your page isn’t being used as much anymore. People tend to help one another for various reasons, but it generally breaks down to our evolutionary hardwiring. This will defer slightly from intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, but the rewards are generally the same. One of the most significant motivating factors is that humans are generally socially ousted for being a “freeloader” or “lurker” in communities or social settings. In Sebastian Junger’s sociology exploration book Tribe., this isn't a new concept. He explores how helping your fellow human was quite literally law in most of ancient society, saying - “This [helping in social setting] is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm [Anthropologist Christopher Boehm] found that - in addition to murder and theft - one of the most commonly punished infractions was “failure to share.” Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list.” This concept is the gateway to explaining why humans and, by extension, your customers are beyond willing to help one another. In a digital community, customers are rewarded with likes, shares, and comments when they go out of their way to help their fellow customers. On the flip side, several online communities will punish “lurkers” or people who contribute nothing to the community by deactivating their accounts, ending specific permissions or abilities, or even straight bans for inactivity. Now, as a cunning community manager, you could greatly reward certain users for being the most active or providing the most support in the community. This was best seen at Khoros through the Powerschool community. Powerschool needed to implement several new processes and chatbots in the support side of their community. The most effective way for Powerschool to test and implement their new community processes was to invite the Community super-users or ‘mentors’ to test alongside their development team and make suggestions in real-time. Using Boehm’s theory of ancient humans punishing one another for non-sharing, your community could promote an event to invite the most active user’s to a new digital event or beta test. Powerschool showed that you would most likely see a surge of sign-ups and community engagement by rewarding the users who engage the most with your audience. By the Numbers A healthy, well-used community is almost certainly good for business. In qualitative terms, your new fancy community will improve your NPS scores; your general customer sentiment will improve, and if you do everything right, you might receive some free marketing across the social media ecosystem. In terms of quantitative results, let's look at a care instance. A care instance in the North American region receives, on average, 100 contacts a day. This care team just linked the brand’s community page to their self-service suite. Because the community users and community articles simply solve at least 40% of the care team’s daily questions, your care team’s volume will be greatly reduced, plain and simple. The bottom line is that by simply using a Khoros-crafted community, you should be able to link both your community and care teams together in one unified system to improve almost all aspects of your customer’s experience. For more resources and to expand your knowledge, please visit the links below! Taking Dr. Micheal Wu’s Gamification Theory into the Real World [Podcast] Gamification in the Wild: Giving back to build Brand Loyalty [Podcast] Lurkers vs. Learners: Renaming Community Members Who Listen The Hybrid Future is Here: Let’s modernize your agent's experience SANE Australia case study | KhorosViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAre you There ROI? It’s Me Care: A Cost Savings Series from Khoros
Customer care is convoluted at the best of times. While the customer can use your product or service wrong once, your customer care system has to be right every time. Of course, this is a fool’s dream because of Murphy’s law. In other words, whatever could go wrong, will go wrong, except when they don’t. A few years ago, a Khoros customer found truly stunning success while using the Care platform, even when the odds were stacked against them. This customer had to juggle a massive merger, adoption of the Khoros system, and dealing with a vast influx of volume during a nationwide event and promotion. Previously used Care models suggest that these factors would cause this customer to crash and burn. However, they found nothing but success in their first year of using Khoros. Over the course of a year, this customer successfully handled over 15,000 customer messages per quarter and saw a 13% agent efficiency improvement. During that nationwide event, with hundreds of thousands of people watching, this Khoros customer handled over 25 customer contacts a second. So, how did they do it? Was it the stars aligning? Some kind of holiday miracle? According to Ockham’s razor, the simplest answer is often the most correct one. In this case, the most correct answer is that this specific Khoros customer implemented two incredible and simple tactics to boost their Care efficiency. The first was queue configuration, or how to organize the flow of your customer requests in the most efficient way possible. The second was enabling Push Next into their system. Put simply, Push Next removes extra clicks that need to be made by a care agent by having the platform give the agent the subsequent customer request rather than the agent having to choose which ticket or request to address. Let’s dive a little deeper into how queue configuration and push next can help solve high volume and low agent efficiency by first looking at a care team who has chosen not to implement both ideas into their care system. Queue Configuration How a team routes their customer requests will depend heavily on the type of company setting up their care configuration. For this example, we’ll use a monthly subscription streaming service that recently had a server go down, resulting in the loss of service for thousands across several regions. This streaming service’s customer care channels have exploded with requests and tickets. To add to the problems, a group on social media is fanning the flames of the public reaction. Because of the social media reaction, this team will have to tackle both real customers trying to get answers to why their service is down or cancel their subscription and non-customers and internet “trolls” calling with fake or nonsense issues. This streaming service didn’t use customer sentiment detection to configure its queue in a way to maximize its efficiency and is now stuck with a tidal wave of unorganized customer requests. Not configuring their queue to adds stress and pressure to the care agents and the customers' patience, and unfortunately, adds to operation costs and lowers your total revenue. After all, no one wants to spend money with a frustrating company. Push Next After the streaming service barely navigated their service outage challenge, they decided to change their care system to the Khoros platform. After some time and product coaching, they have their automation and queue configuration set up in a way that works wonderfully. While most customers promptly get the help they need, the front-line agent’s TAR (time to agent response) is far lower than the executive team imagined. Again, the question is, why is this happening? It could be because of several things: agents having to choose which ticket to handle next, wasted time figuring out what the customer needs before contact is started, or at worst, a care agent choosing to not take on a stressful ticket or a customer that is clearly upset. When everything is working out fine, it can seem like having a lower TAR is an acceptable concession. However, let’s take a look at the numbers. Low TAR Team 500 customers helped a day, 5 days a week for a year = 130,000 customers helped in one Year High TAR Team With a 13% Efficiency gain using Push Next 560 customers helped a day, 5 days a week for a year = 145,600 customers helped in one year. Being able to help an extra 15,000 customers a year for the exact cost of using the Khoros care platform can mean only one thing, higher ROI. Suppose, in our streaming service example, they still refused to turn on Push Next and never had their agents trained on the feature. In that case, they could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, wasted labor costs, and potentially a severe hit to their brand’s reputation through bad press. A higher TAR is only one piece of the puzzle, but in many ways, it could be seen as a keystone to crafting and maintaining an exceptional level of customer care. Khoros can be and has been used to craft that exceptional level of service and care across all manners of industries. Before you decide that your current level of service is simply adequate, ask yourself and your team if your existing customer care system is truly the best you have. For product coaching, a deeper understanding of how Khoros care increases your ROI, and to hear some real-world stories, please visit the links below! Creating Highly Efficient Teams with Push Next An Interview for Change How AI and Automation Drive ROI Agent Queue Configuration | Video [Podcast] Stop Worrying About the Channel, Start Thinking About the Customer Leave a comment with the best change in your Care system you implemented and please subscribe to the Thought Leadership label to never miss an article!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentHospitality Brands: Facing the Pressure with Digital Solutions + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION
Don't have time to read? Check out this audio version of our blog, also found on your favorite podcast platform! Everyone has had those horrid travel days. Everything seems to go wrong. You forget your passport, your wallet, or worse still, you forget your headphones. Nothing seems to top off a bad travel experience than a flight getting canceled or having a hotel lose your room reservation Unfortunately for millions of people in recent memory, having a flight canceled is practically baked into the travel plans. The frustrations of dealing with the various customer care teams aren't generally baked into their travel plans. For whatever reason, certain travelers are left on hold for hours, and for better or worse, these travelers are forced to use only a handful of support and engagement channels. Khoros is here to prove there’s much more to customer engagement in the travel industry than Twitter and outdated phone systems. A New Approach It’s clear that travel brands need to expand their reach into new channels and customer engagement methods, but what might be the best path to accomplish this? Thankfully, Khoros’ customer Airbnb has provided a perfect game plan. In 2020 Airbnb was rated best in class for their community using the Khoros platform. A principal reason for this award was Airbnb's ability to empower its community users. The Airbnb community supports five different languages, and hosts and guests can use the community to customize everything about their accounts and experiences. The community is known for organizing meet-ups and idea sharing, and most importantly, guests and hosts can get community-based support whenever there's a problem. While it seems almost too simple to work this well, Airbnb proved that a strong community could increase customer engagement passively. You can read the full Airbnb kudos award here! Customer Engagement Means More than only Care It’s generally accepted that most people will only interact with a travel brand when they have a question or issue they need resolving. However, only focusing on the care side of engagement would be a rather significant misstep. Marketing in new channels to draw in new customers is a delicate dance. It's crucial that you stay relevant with the new customers but in a way that might alienate your current customer base. Irish Airline Ryanair has taken this in stride with their viral TikTok account. For the unaware, Ryanair is a budget airline known for many things but known that it’s the cheapest way from point A to point B in Europe. However, not always the most comfortable. There won’t be a lot of bells and whistles. Countless jokes circulate on Twitter about how there are no windows for specific seats on a Ryanair flight, the landings can be rough, or what have you. A brand could do one of two things. Either they could not engage, or they could own up to their reputation. Ryanair has done the latter. The Ryanair TikTok account is full of videos making fun of themselves. As a result, they have amassed an enormous following on TikTok with (at the time of writing) 1.7 million followers. This is how a brand does stellar customer engagement. It Could Be All Sunshine and Rainbows The brands struggling to meet the above success levels could utilize several tactics available through the Khoros platform. For customer Care, it’s quite simple. Suppose you are an airline, and for whatever reason, your customers are missing flights or luggage or what have you. With Khoros Care, you’ll be able to improve your agent health, NPS scores, and operational efficiency by getting customers help faster through the power of automation and AI. All of these turn directly into cost savings and higher ROI by deflecting calls to your contact center. For the travel brand communities out there, Airbnb shows that it’s clear that by letting your customers have a majority role in the engagement of your community, intrepid travelers are more than likely to enjoy and heavily engage with your online community, reducing the volume on your Care team. Lastly, with Khoros marketing, you can instantly expand your social engagement channels. Some brands will focus solely on Twitter via native publishing. With Khoros Marketing, you could easily make the same Twitter post and publish it on Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok with only a handful of clicks. Customer engagement is constantly evolving, and the brands that evolve with it stay relevant and continue to grow their customer base. The brands that don’t are still only using Twitter. For more resources and stories on how brands are using Khoros visit the links below! - Khoros Kudos Awards 2021 - Khoros Customer Blog - An Interview for Change How AI and Automation Drive ROIViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAn Interview For Change: Digital Community Challenges & Opportunities
Since the start of digital communities, it has been known that they can be powerful beyond measure for brands imploring their use. However, due to their rapid growth, creating the right processes and governance structures can be a serious challenge. To explore digital communities more, I sat down with Lisa Bidder, Customer Solutions Director and former Strategist & Community Manager, to get the inside scoop on the challenges and opportunities brands can find with digital communities. Parker Hicks Can you tell me a little bit about your background and why you chose to come to Khoros? Lisa Bidder Ooh, great question. I didn't choose to come to Khoros, there was no career plan. I got into online communities as a gamer. I’ve been gaming since Chuckie Egg, 1986 I think, I was a little obsessed with it. I was away from it for a while, work, life, being a girl, all got in the way, but got back into it when my children were young, that's when I started using online forums and communities. I wasn't working at the time because the children were young and I found myself volunteering to moderate and administrate, and just very quickly got into [community] managing gaming communities, ended up building my own (XboxGameZone) and found myself, somewhat by accident, consulting others on their communities and how to do it. Long story short, before I knew it I was working in the games industry doing something that I absolutely loved. I’d had a variety of different jobs over the years that paid the bills, but weren’t particularly interesting, it was just work that paid the bills. But there I had a variety of responsibilities, setting up online gaming tournaments, managing the community, and doing some work on their social channels. I was in that role, with a variety of responsibilities for quite a long time when someone I worked with moved to what was then lithium. They knew I’d been looking for something more challenging and said this was the place to be, so I applied for the job and I'm still here because they were right. What were some of your challenges when you were community managing? The challenges I experienced probably all circle back to the result of a lack of process in some way, shape, or form. I'll give you two very specific examples that are vastly different, but both came back to a total lack of processes in the organization, the way it was structured and the maturity of the community, and how it existed within the business at that time. One of them, we were experiencing a variety of problems and as I dug in I realised there was absolutely no governance over access and permissions within the community. So anybody could do anything? The normal community members could do all of the things that they were supposed to do, this wasn’t true for others. It was a very large organization, there were lots of people within the business, who had a need to use the community as well as a large team of volunteer moderators, but when they would say to someone, hey, can you give me access? Somebody, somewhere in the business who already had administrator access to the entire platform, and so could effectively delete the community in one click, would go and give that person the exact same permissions, full admin! So we ended up with 10s and hundreds of people with very high-level permissions and access in the community to do things they didn't need to do, people were accidentally doing things they didn't intend to do, which created a lot of work, and then some people's accounts were being compromised, and used to do things that disrupted the community, things they shouldn't have ever been able to do. It was a huge problem that really ultimately came down to a lack of processes and governance over the access and permissions of the community platform. A very different problem we went through, but again, came down to a lack of process, we were having some issues with a particular member of the community. The moderation team had been managing it, but it escalated one weekend when we realised the member was in a mental health crisis. This was about 15 years ago, the world was a different place, people's attitudes to mental health issues were not what they are now, and the awareness around these issues simply didn't exist. But this member was absolutely in the midst of a mental health crisis, they had threatened to take their own life to a moderator. The moderator came to me and some of the other managers and said, hey, what do I do? And we realized that we had no escalation point at all. We didn't know what we were supposed to do. So we kind of scrambled around, made some phone calls to their local emergency services, and really had very little choice but to then sit back and hope that those phone calls had the desired effect. It was a very long few weeks following that, because the user didn't come back to the community for a good few weeks. Nobody knew what happened. And if they were okay. Thankfully, they did come back. Would you say that having that lack of escalation points or processes to deal with real-world stuff was like a big pitfall that your community was dealing with? Yes. And I don't think it was an exceptional situation. At the time. I think it was true of many communities 20 years ago that were growing rapidly and becoming a bedrock of large organizations, the speed with which these communities were growing and the reliance the business was increasingly having on them, it escalated at such a rapid pace. I don't think the challenges we faced were unique given the speed at which community was growing. A lot of organizations were finding themselves in a position where the communities were bigger and dealing with these kinds of challenges. But there hadn't been any kind of opportunity to really take a step back and question what processes and governance needed to be in place to support the scale and the scenarios that you find yourself dealing with, the situations drove the creation of the processes. If there was something that you could have changed about the way that your former Community was managed and run, what would have you changed? Process and governance 100%. You know, when our teams are launching customers today, what we're often saying is to create this documentation, these processes and policy, we’re telling you to have a crisis plan that we hope you never need. You're maybe gonna question why am I spending this time creating this thing I hope I never need. Hopefully, you never need them, but, there may come a time when you do and it is a great deal less painful to deal with those challenges, if and when they arise if you have done that groundwork. That groundwork saves you as an organization, your members, and your employees, it helps everybody feel in control, and know what they need to do when that problem arises. Focus on addressing the issue rather than having that sudden panic ‘I know we need to do something, but I don't know what we need to do’. What does Khoros do differently in your experience? I think that we bring to the table, the blend of an enterprise-level platform, with enterprise-level experience. We know the scenarios you may face, and we hope you never do. But, we can help you plan and build those foundations into your community strategy. So that you can be successful. We know that problems arise. Those problems in themselves aren't really the issue. The challenge is knowing what to do and how to do it when those issues arise, that we bring the expertise to the table that answers those questions, that address those challenges, and crucially, we're not trying to be gatekeeper to that. We're sharing our methodology and transferring that knowledge and expertise so that the brand isn't reliant on us after they've launched. They're able to take control of those challenges when they arise, although they can leverage our support, obviously, if they need it. What are some of the best and worst ways you've seen a community be used? When I was a community member, about 20 years ago, one of the community members actually was US based, they’d had some medical problems, found themselves in financial difficulty, and were being threatened with foreclosure on their home. The community actually did some crowdfunding before crowdfunding was a thing. We all collected some money together, and were able to collect enough money to cover a few months of their payments, and hold off the foreclosure. That gave them the time to breathe and actually get themselves back to where they needed to be so they didn't lose their home. So that is definitely the best. I think it brings people together in a way that we often see in the real world, but people often don't expect in an online digital environment. The worst, I think, if I'm honest, is when brands don't truly understand the power of the community and embrace it. I saw a community user post on a community some years ago, expressing some frustration with a challenge they were having, not an uncommon situation where you contact a brand and you say, I need to solve this problem. You get sent in one direction, and then they send you in another direction. And before you know it, you're going around in circles, so they went to the community and said, hey, this is rubbish. Come on somebody like someone just needs to help me. Can we fix this? I think it was a really good opportunity where the brand could have said, hey, you know, this isn't great is it let's, let's see how we can solve this for you. Unfortunately, what actually happened is that somebody from the brand posted on the community and said the community is a space for people to share positive stories, so I'm going to lock this thread and if you've got a complaint, please report it on this form. Honestly, I think sometimes when brands know the power of community, they want it to be that positive experience. They sometimes forget that actually, the reason the communities are so powerful for the brand and the users is that everybody embraces the opportunity to be transparent and open about challenges. They become nervous of having those honest conversations, they're fearful sometimes that if we're open and honest, people might say things we don't want to hear. And that fear can lead them to shutting those conversations down. In short, it’s vital that you build your moderation and governance structures at the same pace as your online community grows. Of course, it’s not the simplest thing to build, and every community is different. Which is why Khoros will support you every step of the way in building your digital space. For more information about Khoros communities please visit the links below! Atlas Series: Reward & Recognition Tips & Tricks to Improve Success Rate The single most important KPI of your Community Gamification Best Practices from 3 Leading BrandsViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsGreat SEO Builds Community, and Great Community Improves SEO
Plant the seeds of a flourishing community with SEO. Just because you built it in the digital world doesn't necessarily mean the people will come. Communities across the digital sphere are dependent on the life-blood of traffic. A thriving community is often based solely on user traffic. Traffic can come from various sources: Twitter ads, Facebook posts, in-app guides, word of mouth, etc. But thanks to the infinite knowledge of Google, chances are high that your customer found your community page through a Google search. According to the website world wide web size, there are roughly 20 billion web pages searchable by google. For reference, if every page contained an average of 500 words, and someone was to read every page at an average pace, it would take them 170,000 years to read every page. 170,000 years ago, humans had only recently started to wear clothing. It's important to remember that roughly 250,000 new web pages are created every 24 hours, according to siteefy. SEO is one of the most rudimentary and genius solutions to cut through billions of pages in this information-dense world. SEO can supercharge your community Ask any digital marketer, social media manager, or even the garage band blogger about increasing web traffic, and you'll hear those three sacred letters; SEO. Search engine optimization is equally complex and simple. There are two types of SEO, on-site SEO and off-site SEO (aka link building.). On-Site SEO is search engine friendly, optimized titles, good descriptions, well-formatted URLs, correct use of H1, H2, and images, SEO titles & descriptions. Off-site SEO refers to actions taken off your website to boost traffic. It could be people sharing your website or getting referred from social media or other services. This aspect of SEO can be slightly troublesome as you will not have the same level of control compared to on-site. However, when it comes to community SEO, if you have done everything right, your users and customers should be working as off-site influencers for your brand. There are a plethora of various SEO strategies in the wild. A great place to start is our best practices article hub here. User content drive SEO more than branding. Community SEO is a massive game of push and pull. You need good SEO to draw new users into your community, and you need dedicated users in your community to continue driving SEO. This idea might feel clear as mud, so here's our Khoros resident SEO and community expert Allison Fasching on why community SEO is vital to success. "The inherent properties of an online community contribute directly to higher SEO value, but it's imperative to understand how search engines work and ensure you are configuring your community in the most efficient way to improve SEO continually. For example, user-created content gets a much higher SEO value than brand-created content because it's a more natural language and happens more often. In other words, when users create content, search engines give that content a higher value than when brands post content." This doesn't mean that brands shouldn't be posting any brand content. That could be a misstep as it's essential to balance the workload on users and brand managers to keep a community alive and thriving. The important thing to remember is that user content will naturally receive a higher SEO score, but that doesn't mean that branded content can't or won't receive an equally high SEO score. ROI's of high SEO scores on communities. Traffic drives sales, questions, answers, and authentic customer engagement with your brand. Almost every aspect of your digital engagement strategy could be improved by having a successful community. Thanks to SEO, customer care agents' volume could be reduced by having engaged community users answering frequently asked questions. The sales team will most likely see massive increases due to community traffic. At first glance, this sale's aspect doesn't make sense. How would high user traffic mean higher sales? The answer could be attributed to basic human nature. Digital or in-person, a community is simply humans connecting around a shared interest or problem. Highly engaged users in a given digital community will recommend various products, generate buzz around a new product or service release, and act as "micro-influencers" for your brand. People will sell for you, and your SEO score will improve as more people talk about your brand online. The bottom line SEO is tricky; the old model of simply spamming keywords for search engines to pick up on is ending. Scores are more complicated, and users are becoming warier of paid placement for brands. Using your community to improve your SEO and using your SEO score to build your community is becoming more vital and, interestingly, more complicated than ever, but Khoros is here to guide you! Now that you know the importance of community SEO, continue your knowledge with these Khoros resources. Best Practices for building SEO in Communities FAQ's on Khoros SEO Connect with Allison Fasching for expert adviceViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsServing Customers in the Face of Crisis: Redux + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION
Don't have time to read? Check out this audio version of our blog, also found on your favorite podcast platform! The digital world is no stranger to crisis It started with the .com bubble, Y2K, and any number of brand social faux pas. What effect this has on a brand depends heavily on how robust the brand’s marketing, community, and customer care systems are. In an age when everyone can be a video journalist or digital columnist, a brand’s simple mistake can end up costing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. Even when brands are in crisis and damage control mode, the wheels of business keep turning. This fact is especially true in the diverse world of customer care. For example, a company spokesperson makes a Freudian slip in a viral interview. Next, a group of people, through the power of social media, band together to make hundreds of calls to your contact center and tweet thousands of times to your brand in a day to display their disdain for your brand. This group of people bottlenecks your agent’s ability to help any of your “normal” customers who still need support. Of course, the simplest solution is to unplug your phone system and focus all efforts on damage control. While this might save some face in the short turn, not reinforcing your care systems will affect more than just a few angry customers on Twitter. Look no further than above your head into the world of commercial travel for a real-world example of crisis mode care. Every day, thousands of flights take off and land; unfortunately, in recent times, thousands of flights have been canceled globally. At the time of writing, international and aviation-based travel has exploded to nearly 180% compared to 2021 levels. On top of the increased demand, major airline employee strikes have decimated staffing levels across Europe. It’s fair to say that airlines are in crisis mode currently. How has this crisis mode ended up with major airlines across the globe? Some of the lowest rated NPS score across digital care, the longest TAR, and the poorest agent health. According to the New York Times, some people who attempted to contact an airline’s customer care team reported waiting on hold for 275 minutes. Of course, some airlines nail digital care, and other industries facing backlash can still provide excellent customer care. These brands share a common thread that customer care systems widely center around being digital first. Here are the three fundamental ways they were able to keep their customers happy during a crisis. A Focus on Agent Health with Digital First Many people would argue that being a customer care agent is widely a thankless job. It’s stressful; agents face unpredictable hours, and generally speaking, customers only contact the care team when they are facing problems or issues. Now mix in a time of brand crisis. Using the above example of an angry group of people clogging your customer care channels, your agents will have even less bandwidth to answer actual customer questions. This will lead to a lower NPS, wasted time, lower revenue, and a much higher agent attrition rate. Using digital care first, customers can get their answers handled by chatbots, self-service, and community. When their questions need to be elevated to a live agent, A.I. can auto-fill important information, detect customer sentiment, and be used any way your brand sees fit to improve agent health and efficiency. Unclog Your Care Channels Because of the one mistake by the brand spokesperson, your contact volume across all digital and traditional channels has exploded. As mentioned above, during a crisis, your brand should expect an explosion of volume. Now, if all customer contacts are legitimate customers will depend on the brand and the crisis. However, it’s fair to say that you can still use a digital-first filter the channel clogs versus customers with honest questions. A lot of the unclogging of your care channels can be solved via, queue-configuration or how customer questions and requests filter into your Care instance. A seriously effective method is to enable Push Next. When enabling Push Next in your Care instance, it automatically pushes a new customer request to your agent rather than them choosing what ticket or request they want to tackle instead. The Khoros effect Khoros was built on the premise that digital-first would be the tool that the future of customer care will use. No matter what crisis your brand has the misfortune of stumbling into, the Khoros Care platform can be used to reinforce your front-line workers to defend your brand from the ongoing crisis, your normal customers, and your NPS scores. To explore more how Khoros and help defend your brand during a crisis and improve efficiency visit these Atlas Resources Below! Creating Highly Efficient Teams with Push Next [Podcast] Stop Worrying About the Channel, Start Thinking About the Customer Khoros Care Webinar: Choosing the Right Tool 2021 Customer Kudos Awards: Three Ireland - Best-in-Class: CareViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAn Interview For Change: Khoros Expert Opinion on Change Management
Change management is complex and could make or break changes in process or strategy. That's why we spoke with our Khoros expert on change management to get the run down on making a refreshing and powerful change. The half-life of knowledge in any given field dictates how long knowledge remains accurate before proven incorrect or outdated. In business, once the half-life of knowledge reaches its tipping point, radical change is often necessary to continue being relevant and functional as an organization. For many businesses and organizations, once they develop a functional strategy, it can prove almost impossible to change to a new strategy, even if the new direction would be more effective or cut costs. We spoke with Ramona Maher Khoros' Change Management Director, to gather a more informed understanding of how to make a change in your organization and, most importantly, why it can be so challenging to execute. Parker J. Hicks: Ramona, can you tell me about your background in change management and your professional life? Ramona Maher: Sure. So I have been a change management practitioner formally for a little over eight years. Before this, I was a people manager; I was an IT Director, I was a business analyst, and I was a project manager. I was in customer service, operations, and technology teams, I did front office and back-office roles. I've been around. A handful of years ago, the then- CIO at the company where I worked introduced the idea of a change management team. He said I believe change management is a discipline that we can apply in the IT world to solve some of the ongoing problems that we have connecting with our constituencies and providing them with what they want and need. He very smartly made ownership combined operations and IT team so that we got really into lockstep. I jumped at the chance to become a change management practitioner and I haven't looked back since. I joined Khoros a few years ago when they foresaw their customers' need for change management expertise in this space and created my position. Why is it so hard for businesses to make changes, regardless of having a change manager or not? So there are a lot of different ways we could answer that question. I've observed a level of disconnect between the people who are making decisions and the people who have to adopt new behaviors to fulfill the goals of those decisions. Without understanding the reasons behind a change, it's hard for anyone to commit to new behavior. In that case, in your experience, why is change so hard for humans? Because human circumstance changes day to day, minute to minute, and one size never fits all. As you know, what works today may not work tomorrow. There are changes that I observe, but they are not the only changes happening in a person's life and world. Maybe I need you to click a button, for example, but if you are also dealing with the fact that your hand keeps cramping up every time you try to click a button, I would have no way of knowing that. Or if you're trying to deal with a boss who sits right over you're shoulder every day, that wants me to click this other button, I'm going to do what they tell me. You know, it's really understanding the complex landscape and all of the possible ways that a person could be distracted from achieving the new desired behavior consistently. One of my big stories to explain this is that I'd love to lose 20 pounds. But it turns out I really love the reward of sitting on the couch watching TV with my husband and snuggling with the dogs, more than I love the choice of getting up to go exercise. There's this sort of thing, and there are decisions happening in the human brain multiple times per second. How do you garner that executive support to spend more money, and take bigger risks, when the requested change comes from the bottom up? At the individual level. It's about finding out what the person cares about and how what you're proposing will affect what they care about. You have to understand the motivations, desires, and goals of those people you're trying to convince. Generally, executives care about EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), you know, whereas generally, contact center agents don't know what that means. Understanding the typical personas of the groups that you're working with really helps understand what to focus on for successful change in a business setting. How do you get those front-line or customer-facing workers to adopt such heavy changes in an executive or leadership role? In my experience, you need to be transparent with people about the things they don't like that will change as well as the things they don't like that isn't going to change. If you work as an agent in a call center, it's still going to suck to deal with irate customers. The job is to deal with customers of all varieties, including the difficult ones. Having a new piece of software isn't going to change that. However, if there is a chance that you answer fewer of the redundant questions that are repeated to you 57,000 times a day because we're introducing a bot, that's going to be appealing. For each change, you have to help people understand who you're asking to do something different and what's in it for them. How are you equipping them, and what does it mean to them if they are or aren't successful?. If there's nothing more than to keep their job great, run with that. Don't sell it to them as it's going to change the world because that's not the case for them. Accurate and honest communication from a trusted source is a vital change management lever. It's one of the things we rely on to facilitate effective changes. How would you deal with resistance to change in lower-level employees? There has to be a point where someone is going to say, is this juice worth the squeeze? For example, I want to lose 20 pounds. That's really important to me. I really don't want to get up and exercise, that's hard for me to choose. I really love cake. All right, well, I'm not saying I never want to eat cake again. Is eating cake once a month still good and exercising three times a week going to work? You know, people that are making these choices all of the time, it's really important to be consistent with enacting a plan and also be willing to modify the plan when it's necessary. I would like to get your thoughts on a quote from Psychology Today magazine about a write-up they put out about a change in human behavior. "A linear progression through the stages is not the norm, individuals tend to move back and forth in the Stages of Change, recycling through them until the changes become fully established." 100%. Yeah, it's totally true. When I mentor younger or new people in the field, there is often a time when they experience the reality of something being really exciting for the impacted people at first, and then when they learn more about it, they're like, oh, I don't want to do that. I desired it for a minute then you gave me the next step, which is knowledge of how to do it, and now, I no longer am aligned with you, so you need to bring me back into alignment. What is your best and worst experience in change management? And what did you learn from those experiences? I don't have a single worst. I can say that there's a common reason that a change is going poorly. It is because of a lack of alignment. It is because the parties involved cannot see their way clearer to a mutual understanding of something of what to expect as the outcome of the change or what to expect in the process of getting there. So every time I have a bad change management experience, that plays a big role in it. My best experience was in my last company. I worked on a project that involved 1000s of team leaders at retail stores needing to use a new program to achieve something new. They had been managing their work on spreadsheets. They had their rhythm down. And when you're in a retail store, and you're customer-facing, the time off the floor is tough like you just need to get back there and knock that stuff out and get back out to the customer because your big bosses are telling you all day long about how customers are most important, but you also have to, you know, write schedules and order things and do tests and you so forth. Introducing a new process in that type of environment is very stressful. And, when you get to the point of the team leaders going, oh, yeah, that was nothing, I'm good. Then I know that whatever the new behavior is becoming so second nature that they just don't even really think about it anymore. Another great experience is when the impacted folks start asking the next layer of questions about the change. For example, no longer, what button do I click? But why do I click the button? What would happen if I click these three instead? Like, that's where for me, the best change management experience comes in. What would you tell people who are struggling to make effective decisions or changes at any level of an organization? Okay, get ready to laugh. You're going to have ADKAR the s**t out of it (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement). I learned Prosci Methodology formally shortly after having seen the Martian [movie], and when he says he's going to science the s**t out of it to fix his problems, I quickly adapted it to ADKAR. And the reason is that to me, if I have that fundamental, 'hold on, hold on, hold on' moment, let me just back up and see what's going on here, I can figure out what to do. So you really need to understand where a person is in the process, their own experience of change. That way, you can understand how to reach them where they are. The bottom line is that change is hard for anyone to make stick, and when your business outcomes are at risk, it can seem like a fruitless exercise to change a working system. However, the truth of the matter is that companies that wait, listen, and plan effective changes in their business strategy, 99% of the time, come out on top. To expand your learning, visit the links below and reach out to Ramona Maher at the contact information listed below. Modernizing Digital Care - Change Management Managing Your Brand During a Crisis Modernizing Digital Care: Change the Conversation Webinar Becoming a Leader of Organizational Change[Podcast] Contact Ramona Maher at [email protected]ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsA Tale of Two Teams: Publishing Natively or In-app + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION
Don't have time to read? Check out this audio version of our blog, also found on your favorite podcast platform! Publishing already has enough challenges; switching from native to in-app doesn't have to be one of them When anyone goes to publish a post on any form of social media, there are numerous things to consider: Am I using the proper lighting? Is this joke going to hit the right audience? Is this even the right place to post this type of content? When it comes to brands posting content on their various platforms, they have answered all those questions and still have to answer more. Creating a new social marketing campaign with various teams working at different paces can quickly feel like wrangling cats. Some brands can find a hash dash system to publish their campaigns; using a disjointed system could be ignoring a core efficiency tenant. Centralizing most final processes makes for a smoother publishing experience. Two teams, two solutions, one challenge Let's, for a moment, imagine two social marketing teams. For this example, they are identical in scale, scope, a team size of fifteen people, and budgets. They use the same social media and are launching a new Instagram campaign. Their primary targets are tech-savvy 20-30 years with a high level of disposable income. Both teams decide to run three posts and a reel. Both teams currently use Khoros, but Team A publishes natively, and Team B uses Khoros to publish strictly through in-app. Team A: Publishing Natively Team A could be considered old school, and every aspect of the publication process is facilitated through a mixture of emails, Slack pings, and mobile publishing. The only time Team A uses the Khoros platform is for basic analytics. This process can sometimes work for smaller teams not looking to scale. Brands generally have one shot at fostering positive customer engagement in the sea of social media noise. Given Team A's larger size, this could be viewed as treading a fine line between success and missing the boat. Without even realizing it, the simple act of getting a few Instagram posts published can transform into a confusing web of governance routing, content creation deadlines, and lost analytics. Governance: Saving face is essential for any brand. In our hyper-connected world, all it takes is one mistimed or unsavory post to start a social media firestorm. Team A's social media managers simply post content with limited approval. The upper management team will either leave it up or strike it down if they deem it distasteful to the brand's reputation via pinging the social media managers through Slack. Team A's governance strategy ends in questionable posts going out into the world, and at times the brand's reputation receives intense customer pushback. Content Publication Timelines: Spreadsheets have long been Team A's source for accounting, data tracking, and for to track their publication calendars. When it comes to publishing content on time, spreadsheets and other publication methods plainly show their potential downfalls. Most spreadsheet scheduling issues can be attributed to human error. Instagram's scheduling system makes it possible to plan out a full calendar of posts for a campaign in advance. Team A's social media managers can easily forget to input planned posts on their brand calendar or spreadsheet to schedule a post on Instagram, resulting in valuable publishing time lost. Analytics: Data in today's world is worth its weight in gold. Understanding your campaign without correctly updated analytics is like trying to walk through a hedge maze blindfolded. It is possible to manually keep track of all analytics using Instagram's own analytical tools, but it's also possible to miss a key metric. Team A uses the Khoros platform to track their basic analytics, but most of the team's campaign is published natively. Still, by publishing this way, several of their Instagram posts end up not syncing with the Khoros platform and are left with missing analytics. Communication: Cross-functional communication can be a challenge for any team working in social marketing. Coordinating between the social media managers, the photographers working on the campaign, copywriters, and upper management for approval isn't just attempting to herd cats but instead trying to run a whole feline circus. Team A's social media managers haven't shared the primary brand Instagram account password with anyone but each other. The photographers aren't uploading their photos on time, and posts are getting approved either after the post has gone live or in a Slack thread spanning four users and 50 or more messages. In short, Team A's communication system is disjointed and inefficient and leaves the team open to employees posting without approval or the proper brand voice being shared. Revenue: As an old poker player would say, you never gamble with your own money. Sadly, our hypothetical Team A is not only using their own money, they're actively betting on a losing hand. Finding the right balance of cost to benefit is becoming increasingly difficult in the digital social market. One website or channel is viral one day is forgotten the next day. Team A's "old-school" style of publishing and digesting analytics means their missing key metrics that would better inform their digital strategy and when to tighten or loosen the marketing purse strings. Team A would have lost over a month using an outdated social trend that decreased their customer sentiment and their customer's willingness to buy their product. Now, the original budget for a new campaign is out the window. Team B: Publishing In-App Team B has fully incorporated the Khoros platform in its marketing and publishing process. Instead of having their team's publishing process scattered across six phones, twenty people, and four different accounts, they have one single login for all team members in the Khoros platform. Their governance process is baked into the publishing process of any post published using the Khoros platform. Both the calendar and governance are now centrally operated, and Team B is not beholden to one password known by a single social media manager. Team B's easy access to analytics ensures that all campaigns are tracked correctly, and they are never betting their budgets on projects that may or not work. Instead of waiting for weeks after a campaign has been completed to see the levels of success, their metric tracking from in-app publishing gives them the knowledge to better plan the next campaign and make sure they're putting the right budget to work. In short, while Team B and Team A are identical in size, campaigns, and scope, Team B has centralized its publishing process by using the Khoros platform to its full potential. Now that you have a good overview of the differences between publishing natively and using the Khoros platform, deepen your knowledge with these additional resources and videos. Subscribe to the Khoros Marketing Blog Using Khoros to publish to Instagram via mobile An in-depth guide to approval paths Housing and adding new social accountsViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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