Communities 2021: Mid-year Update
Greetings from the Communities team. We hope you, your family & friends are staying safe and healthy. As we finish the first half of the year and enter the second, let’s review where we are and also take a sneak peek into some exciting things on the anvil. Our goal is to help you build a comprehensive engagement strategy with your brand community - a vibrant space where your users find answers, develop expertise, share experiences, and in that process build your brand. A brand community that connects across dot com, SEO, social engagement, and digital care. Expanding user engagement: One of the key strategic objectives with the Communities roadmap is powering new and additional use cases for expanding end-user engagement. Last year, we took a big step in this direction with support for Group Hubs. Group Hubs enable creation of spaces within a Community around specific topics and special interests. While continuing to enhance Group Hubs capabilities, we added a new discussion style in Events early this year. Communities and Events go hand-in-hand. Support for a diverse choice of video technologies, Zoom being the latest, means that you can now go live from Communities. Glad to see your enthusiastic adoption of this new discussion style as you make your Communities the home for your brand's events. In addition to ICS support, enhanced Events APIs (1, 2), and Event Analytics released last month, we are currently readying support for Invite-by-email for Events. Events: Now supporting live Zoom events Redesigned with a focus on collaboration and usability, also released earlier this year was content workflow and approval enhancements for Blogs and TKBs. With granular permissions, a new dashboard, article history views, compare versions, internal comments and enhanced notifications, this enables teams of different sizes to collaborate on new & existing articles at scale without getting in each other's way. Nothing differentiates a community more than quality content. Redesigned Blogs and TKBs make it easier than ever to produce quality crowdsourced content in the community without the need for any external tools. Discussions and comments add a spark of excitement and engagement to most content because they can transform mundane browsing experiences into interactive conversations with experts. For example, Comments List Syndication creates a comment box on any external web page. The comments are mirrored in your community, effectively creating a network of interactive conversations across different web properties. In addition, the comment moderation is all handled through the Community Admin capabilities that already exist in the community - making it cost-effective and customizable for all types of pages. First half of this year, we further enriched Syndication capabilities and this continues to be a focus going forward as well. Many thanks for your feedback, ideas and suggestions around these. We are all ears and are looking into further enhancing the capabilities via extending Invite-by-email to Group Hubs, easier ways to administer Group Hubs, more granular permissions for Blogs and the like. Community Management & Security: Another key investment area is enabling easier management of Communities. Recent additions include support for Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA), Self-Serve SAML SSO, new permission controls for Video, Feature logs, and a host of other enhancements. While MFA provides an additional layer of security to help prevent unauthorized account access, SAML SSO is now available out-of-the box as a core product feature, instead of the plugin-based approach used earlier. This simplifies setting up SAML SSO in Communities and reduces the total cost of ownership. Feature logs can be used to generate feature specific logs in components and endpoints to help developers and administrators monitor and debug during Community customisation. Feature logs can be accessed in the Community Admin via Toolbox. We believe that video should be tied exclusively to the community message it was originally part of and these new permission controls are a step in that direction. Over the course of the last few months, we have also been beefing up community moderation capabilities via Engagement Manager (called Manager View earlier). Sporting a new moderation column, Engagement Manager supports an intelligent implementation of bulk processing whereby moderators can select a set of posts and take actions such as Approve, Reject, or Mark as Spam. This year, we also announced a partnership with Samurai Labs, an AI firm dedicated to preventing online violence, to help detect potentially offensive content. Offensive content can be automatically removed from communities without exposing moderators to this stressful material, ultimately creating healthier and more positive communities. Coming very soon is support for Bulk Content Archive. With a variety of filters around age, location, type and activity of the content, this upcoming feature makes it significantly easier to find and archive stale content in a few clicks. Analytics & Insights: With Billing metrics you can now access how your billing-related metrics trend against the contractual tier of your community. This metrics shows the current usage against the contractual tier limits for the metrics subscribed to in your contract. Metrics also shows the timeline view of usage of all the metrics subscribed in the contract. Also added this first half were support for Event Analytics and view upto 12-months at a time. Event Analytics provides key metrics such as RSVP responses, number of unique visitors to an Event page. It helps you measure the success of your community events and improve their engagement. As covered in our June roadmap webinar, a set of new Community Manager (CM) dashboards is in the works. Real-time insights with a bias for action, these new dashboards will include 2 key elements: a community snapshot, a summary view of a set of configurable headline metrics of your community - number of Active Members, Page Views, Unique Visitors so on a community dashboard, a ready reckoner to what has happened/happening in the community - what topics are trending and needing attention, how are key indicators like time-to-first replies faring, how is the user activity shaping up etc While we are working on these, we wanted to share that the beta rollout of the new CM dashboards is delayed by a quarter than originally planned. This delay is due to a change in the platform for these new dashboards. We wanted to fast track consolidation of all community analytics in one single interface, i.e. combine Admin Metrics, Community Analytics and the new CM dashboards into a single tool, over time. We completely understand and share your excitement around these new dashboards and will move forward on this, on priority. We will share further updates, as soon as we have them. Community Management Dashboards: Community Snapshot Voice-of-Customers (VoC) leveraging CX Insights is another key project we are excited about. VoC will help you further to build an actionable view of users to create world-class experiences. More details to come! New Community Experience: The new Community UI service, codenamed Project Aurora, is progressing well. Please watch the detailed breakout-session in our last webinar for a walkthrough of the key elements of this new, transformational community experience. The new community experience offers: a new, modern, beautiful user experience, that is ready out-of-the-box, accessible and optimized for web performance the community managers with simple front-end tools to theme & configure a new admin interface an enhanced developer experience This gives you a community platform that is ready off-the-shelf, with significantly reduced need for customizations (hence cheaper to maintain) and easy to develop against, thus reducing the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). All this without any need for data migrations as the underlying platform remains the same while the front-end is re-imagined. Blog Article View User Avatars New Admin Interface While we will continue to share updates in our future webinars and via discussions on Atlas, do drop us a note if you have any questions or need any additional details. This is a major investment into the future of communities. We would want to work with you every step of the way and look forward to partnering with you as we bring this to life. In addition to these, we are also working on upgrading our back-end Search platform, enhancing Accessibility and improving Performance. Query Builder, our proposed tool for on-demand insights on content & members in the community is also in the works. As part of the mid-year review, we are proposing to move out Community - MS Teams integration and Ghost Authoring & Transfer Ownership for Blogs & TKBs from this year's roadmap to next year's. These remain on our backlog as priority items and we will bring them back to the roadmap as soon as some of the currently active projects such as the New Community Experience and CM Dashboards are close to roll out. This adjustment helps us to focus our energies on a limited number of high profile projects at a time and deliver them with quality. Hope this was helpful. As always, we would love to hear your feedback, thoughts, and suggestions.8KViewsSign in to react to this post8CommentsCommunity vs. Social Network
Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium's Principal Scientist of Analytics, digging into the complex dynamics of social interaction and online communities. He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog. You can follow him on Twitter at mich8elwu. Welcome back from the Memorial Day long weekend! In my last post, I promised that I’d cover some new topics this time, so I am going to share with you a research project that I’ve been conducting recently on the relationship between social networks and communities. Since 2008, “social media” has become a heavily-used buzz word in the corporate world. The question is “what is social media?” Many seem to equate social media to Facebook-liked social networking sites; others seem to think that they are blogs, the Twitter family of applications for micro-blogging, Flickr, YouTube, or similar type of content sharing Web 2.0 applications. Yet, answers to this question may still range from social collaboration sites (like Wikipedia, Delicious, or Digg) to online communities (like those we host for our enterprise clients or Yahoo! Answer). Well, they are all correct to some extent, and these are functional classifications of social media. Author and blogger Brian Solis, introduced another classification of social media, based on the types of conversation. He called it the conversation prism. However, if you want to understand social media from a relational and social anthropological perspective, you will find that there are really only two major types of social media: Social Networks Online communities Human social networks and communities actually pre-date their online counterpart for millennia. Both are very well-established and robust social structures that have survived the test of time. And they have emerged and reemerged as civilizations collapse and rise. Humans are naturally predisposed to gravitate to and desire this type of interaction. For this initial post of the mini blog series, I hope to offer you a perspective that lets you see some basic differentiating features between these two types of social media. Later on, I will show you what we can learn about them from studies in social anthropology. Social networks Everyone has their own social network (whether online or offline). Everyone has friends, families, and people they are acquainted with. An online social networking site simply makes our social networks visible to others who are not in our immediate network. So the single most important feature that distinguishes a social network from a community is how people are held together on these sites. In a social network, people are held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships, such as kinship, friendship, classmates, colleagues, business partners, etc. The connections are built one at a time (i.e. you connect directly with another user). The primary reason that people join a social networking site is to maintain old relationships and establish new ones to expand their network. With this knowledge, it should be obvious why Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn are social networks as opposed to communities. One interesting feature about people’s social networks is that they are extremely unique. It is actually very difficult to fake a Facebook or LinkedIn profile, because your friends (or who you connect to) will collectively identify you. Moreover, because people generally do not compartmentalize their life (unless you are a secret agent for the CIA or some cryptic government agencies), people typically have only one social network. Even for the CIA agents, it could be argued that they have only one social network; it’s just that their network has two or more components that have little overlap. Communities Unlike social networks, communities (both online and offline) are more interesting from a social anthropological perspective, because they often consist of people from all walks of life that seem to have no relationship at all. Yet, as we’ve learned from history, communities are very robust social structures. So what is it that holds these communities together? Communities are held together by common interest. It may be a hobby, something the community members are passionate about, a common goal, a common project, or merely the preference for a similar lifestyle, geographical location, or profession. Clearly people join the community because they care about this common interest that glues the community members together. Some stay because they felt the urge to contribute to the cause; others come because they can benefit from being part of the community. Due to the multifaceted lifestyle of modern living, any individual is often a part of many different communities. Moreover, communities can overlap and are often nested. For example, a geographical community, say a town, may contain sub-communities living in different parts of the town that are connected by a finer geographical granularity. But at the same time, the same town may contain several different ethnic communities that are connected by the ethnicity. Now, do you see why Yelp, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, the blogosphere, etc., are just communities? Yelp is a community of, originally, food enthusiasts; where as members of the Wikipedia community are passionate about cause of the internet encyclopedia project. YouTube and Flickr are nested communities of video and photography enthusiasts respectively, and they may belong to other sub-communities within the YouTube and/or Flickr community. These sub-communities may simply be your friends and relatives, or people are interested in high dynamics range photography (with 61,000 members) or time lapse videos. In Summary Social Networks (see Figure 1) are: Held together by pre-established interpersonal relationships between individuals. So you know everyone that is directly connected to you. Each person has one social network. But a person can have different social graphs depending on what relationship we want to focus on (see Social Network Analysis 101). They have a network structure. Communities (see Figure 2) are: Held together by some common interests of a large group of people. Although there may be pre-existing interpersonal relationship between members of a community, it is not required. So new members usually do not know most of the people in the community. Any one person may be part of many communities. They have overlapping and nested structure. Now that you know the basic difference between social networks and communities from a relational perspective, next time we can discuss more interesting questions, such as the dynamics of tie formation, or what it means to businesses. I haven’t yet decided what I will write, so let me know if there are any interesting topics that you want me to dig into. In the mean time, comments, questions and critiques are all welcomed. Related Blogs Social Network Analysis 101 How Do People Become Connected? Community vs. Social Networks 2 From Weak Ties to Strong Ties: Community vs. Social Networks 3ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsIntrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards (and Their Differences from Motivations)
Before I delve into today’s topic, let me share an exciting announcement. Last week Lithium launched the first feature of our Premium Gamification products. The Badging feature is just the first of many more that we plan to add to our already robust gamification engine. I’m excited to see more of my gamification theory and work being productized in the near future! Don’t’ forget to let me know your comments on the new badging features. Looking for practical examples? Watch this session with Domo, Videotron, and SAS from our Engage Conference in September 2019. OK back to lifting the fog! Last time I discussed motivation and the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Now we can go one step further to talk about rewards and the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. Although motivation and rewards are both very critical to the design and implementation of gamification strategies, few gamification practitioners can articulate the subtle differences between intrinsic motivations vs. intrinsic rewards. Some even treat these distinctive concepts synonymously, which is ridiculously wrong. Since this post builds on the concepts introduced in my last post, if you haven’t read it yet, please take a few minutes to do so. It is critical to understand the fundamental concepts around motivation before jumping into today’s discussion. Review it here: Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Motivation. Rewards vs. Motivation As you may recall, motivation is the reason that drives someone to do something (i.e. a behavior or an activity). Reward is a completely different animal. It is what you get for doing something rather than the reason for doing it in the first place. A simplistic way to look at the difference between motivation and reward is that motivations generally come before the behavior, but rewards come after the behavior. So what is the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards? Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards 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 you helped someone and made their day better. Because intrinsic rewards are intangible, they usually arise from within the person who is doing the activity or behavior. So “intrinsic” in this case means the reward is intrinsic to the person doing the activity or behavior. An extrinsic reward is an award that is tangible or physically given to you for accomplishing something. It is a tangible recognition of ones 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. Because extrinsic rewards are tangible, they are usually given to the person doing the activity; as such, they are typically not from within the person. Therefore, extrinsic rewards means the reward is extrinsic to the performer of the activity or behavior. Here is an important distinction that I like to emphasize. When talking about rewards, intrinsic rewards are those that originate from within the person, and extrinsic rewards are those that originate from something beyond the person. However—as you might recall the previous post—when talking about motivation, intrinsic and extrinsic has nothing to do with whether the motivation originates from within the person or outside the person. Instead, it means whether the motivation is intrinsic to the activity or not. Why People are Confused about Reward vs Motivation Here is the tricky part, so stay with me. Some people may be driven by rewards. So rewards can sometimes be the reason that drives people to do things. Thus the rewards we get, can sometimes be the motivation. However, people do thing for many reasons beyond the rewards, so there are many motivations that are not rewards. Since rewards can sometimes be a motivation, is it an intrinsic motivation or extrinsic? This is an important question and one that has confused many in the gamification industry. You see, I said it was tricky! It’s not difficult to see that doing something for the rewards is just the opposite—at least in spirit—of doing something simply for the love of doing it (i.e. intrinsic motivation). So when an activity or behavior is motivated by rewards, it is always extrinsically motivated. In other words, when rewards become the reason that drives someone to do some activity or behavior, they won’t be doing it purely for its own sake anymore. Therefore all rewards—both intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards—are by definition extrinsic motivations (i.e. extrinsic to the activity or behavior). Conclusion Just because we happen to use the same set of words (i.e. “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”) to describe two different concepts (i.e. rewards and motivation), it doesn’t mean those words mean the same thing. This is an unfortunate consequence of the fact that human language is simply not precise enough compared to mathematics and computer science. This is compounded by the fact that academic research tends to be very narrowly focused, and disparate disciplines often do not have enough communication with each other. When speaking about motivation, the terms “intrinsic” or “extrinsic” means intrinsic/extrinsic with respect to the behavior—whether or not the reason for doing something is simply the love of doing that very thing. But when speaking about rewards, these same terms mean intrinsic/extrinsic with respect to the person—whether or not the reward originates from within the person doing the activity. Next time you talk to a person or company claiming to be experts in gamification, ask them about the difference between intrinsic/extrinsic rewards vs. intrinsic/extrinsic motivation. I guarantee you will be able to spot the fakes from the professionals. I hope the last two posts have removed some of the confusion/fog on this topic. Please let me know your comments or any other clarifications you would like. Related Blogs What Drives Us—Are You Intrinsically Motivated? Gamification Tenet #7: Knowing Your Players—Trigger, Simplify, Then Motivate How to Design for Long-Term Behavior Change—Part 1: New Habit Formation Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium's Chief Scientist. His research includes: deriving insights from big data, understanding the behavioral economics of gamification, engaging + finding true social media influencers, developing predictive + actionable social analytics algorithms, social CRM, and using cyber anthropology + social network analysis to unravel the collective dynamics of communities + social networks. Michael was voted a 2010 Influential Leader by CRM Magazine for his work on predictive social analytics + its application to Social CRM. He's a blogger on Lithosphere, and you can follow him @mich8elwu or Google+.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsCommunity Syndication in the Developer Documentation Portal
As I was working on the documentation for Khoros's Community Syndication Message List component, I kept thinking about different ways I wanted to use Community Syndication in our Developer Documentation Portal. For those unfamiliar with Community Syndication, check out this guide and these blogs. Over the years, folks have asked us why our developer docs are not in Atlas. The simple answer is that some content just doesn't lend itself well to a knowledge base. API reference documentation falls into that category. That said, I wholeheartedly believe in the power of Community, and I wanted a bridge between the Dev Doc Portal and Atlas. We've got a vibrant and active Developer Discussion forum and I didn't want to disrupt engagement there. I also thought about users coming to the Dev Doc Portal from outside of Atlas -- say following a link to them sent from Khoros Support, Services, or a Customer Success team member. How can we guide those users to the Developer Discussion forum and all of the other great content on Atlas? The Community Syndication Message List gave me the perfect solution. I'd like to share how easy it was to implement. Here's what I did I placed two instances of the component on the developer.khoros.com landing page. Both show messages from the Developer Discussion forum. One displays Latest Topics and the other displays Latest Solutions. Here's how I did it I wanted to keep my first implementation simple. I chose to pull content from a single board, but use two separate instances to highlight latest topics vs. solutions. Here's my content definition in Community Admin for my Latest Solutions message list: I played with a Card view vs. a List view as well as some other styling formats in Admin to test what my content would look like. Developer Discussion posts aren't image-heavy, so Card View wasn't particularly engaging. I found the List view more readable. I also omitted the View count from the message because, at this time, the view count includes bot traffic. (We've got this issue in our backlog.) Here's where I landed with my layout configuration. I placed my Common Script snippet in the <head> of my Dev Doc Portal landing page. Then, I placed my Component Code in my <body> where I wanted the component to render. The styling actually looked pretty good out of the box, but I did want to make some minor changes to match the developer.khoros.com look and feel. I made the component title more prominent and I made the message subject text color match the theme colors of the Portal. I also wanted to put my two components (Latest Topics and Latest Solutions) side by side so that both messages lists would be visible "above the fold." Using the instructions in About Message List Syndication, I created a custom version of the Community Syndication skin and made some small variable overrides. My overrides are outlined in red. That took care of basic color styling, but I still needed a few bits of styling in the CSS on my external site. With some help from my colleagues AmyS and RyanPi, I added some CSS classes. .message-list { display: flex; flex-direction: row; margin-bottom: 40px; } .boogie { flex: 0 100%; margin: 0 10px; } .boogie iframe { display: flex; flex: 1 1 auto; } I replaced the body script generated in Admin with the following so that it used my custom Community Syndication skin to pick up my variable overrides and made use of my external CSS. <div class="message-list"> <div class="boogie"> <li:component id="content.syndication.widget.message-list" location-display-id="category:Developer" discussion-style="forums" number-of-messages="6" sort-by="date-desc" component-title="Latest Topics in Developer Discussion" number-of-messages="6" skin-id="devdiscussionsyndication" ></li:component> </div> <div class="boogie"> <li:component id="content.syndication.widget.message-list" location-display-id="category:Developer" discussion-style="forums" number-of-messages="6" sort-by="date-desc" component-title="Latest Solutions in Developer Discussion" number-of-messages="6" discussion-style-attribute="accepted solutions only" skin-id="devdiscussionsyndication" ></li:component> </div> </div> The result was what you see today on developer.khoros.com. How long did this take? Once I got my testing setup in order, the Message List took me roughly a day to implement. This included coordinating with the Atlas team, recruiting CSS help, testing on stage, and pushing to production. I will note that the Message List component isn't intended to be displayed two components side-by-side. The component is designed with responsive design in mind and by default, it spans the full width of the area and then collapses to mobile viewports elegantly. But I knew that I wanted these to be next to each other and I also know that the vast majority of Dev Doc Portal users are viewing our docs on a laptop, not on mobile. You might have different circumstances. I was able to handle the skin variable overrides on my own, but I did need help with some of the other CSS work. I also coordinated with Atlas team members AndyK and LisaI. They set me up to test against our Atlas stage instance. I created my Message List definition in Admin in our stage environment, as well as my custom Community Syndication skin that I would be using for my message lists. I can use this custom skin on any future messages lists that I want to put on the Dev Doc Portal. I added my Dev Doc Portal stage instance domain in the whitelisted section in Community Admin > Content Security. From there, I reviewed the content display in my Dev Doc Portal stage environment to be sure that all looked good on that end. Once I was happy with what I was seeing, I worked with my Community team to push my custom skin changes to production and added my syndication snippets to the production version of developer.khoros.com. Finally, I added the Dev Doc Portal production domain to the Content Security whitelist and added my custom CSS, script, and code to my landing page and header HTML in my Dev Doc Portal production environment. And then it was live! It was delightfully easy. Update: January 2021 Upon the launch of our Developer Blog, I updated the "Latest Topics in Dev Discussions" to include the latest articles from the blog. The component is now titled "Latest Dev Network Content" and includes Developer Discussion forum topics and Developer Blog articles. Here is the updated li-component code I use to render the Message List component embedded on the developer.khoros.com landing page: <li:component id="content.syndication.widget.message-list" location-display-id="category:Developer" discussion-style="forums,blogs" component-title="Latest Dev Network Content" number-of-messages="6" sort-by="date-desc" show-kudos="false" skin-id="devdiscussionsyndication" ></li:component> What's next? In the future, I see an opportunity to evaluate how the Developer Discussion forum uses tags and labels. That would allow me to create separate Message Lists dedicated to Khoros Communities, Care, and Marketing platforms, and even go more granular to topics like FreeMarker solutions, OAuth questions, Modern Chat questions, and so on... The next release in the Community Syndication product line will be a commenting syndication feature that will work with forums. My hope is that we'll make that bridge between the community and our dev doc portal even stronger by bringing the capability to start a topic in a component in the Dev Doc Portal and have it mirrored in Atlas. Can't wait to see what Community Syndication brings next!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsDiscovering Business Value within a Community
It was not long ago that all of us in the Online Community space struggled with how to calculate Community’s Return on Investment (ROI). If a big enterprise brand had an Online Community, everybody and their dog knew it had value, but actually quantifying the dollar figures with any level of credibility was a daunting task. In fact, none of our in-the-trenches employees that should have been talking about ROI with our very own Khoros customers during the years 2008-2012 initiated the subject; instead preferring to be reactive and let our customers come to us with ROI questions that we could barely muddle our way through answering. Our company had a whitepaper or two (one that we commissioned a 3rd party to construct, and another we built from scratch) that were both long on theory, but short on actual measurement instructions. Looking back, I am a bit embarrassed by this, but I am also embarrassed about what I did (or did not do) in high school, so we ought not to dwell on such things. Outside of our company, Forrester Research had about 3 whitepapers (one was so-so, the second was decent, and the third was great) on the subject. The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) had one or two serviceable whitepapers as well. All in all, Community ROI was a fairly bleak thought-leadership landscape until about the year 2012. However, there was no magical switch that was flipped that year, nor was there any one single person that changed the game. Indeed, what happened during the years 2012-2015 was that we here at Khoros started to run standardized plays on how to quantify business value within an Online Community. These are the 4 fundamental Value Levers that we arrived at (below, on the right): Business Value tends to come down to whether something makes the company money or saves the company money. Additionally, the concept of ‘soft value’ (i.e. - valuable assets that are hard to quantify into money) should be acknowledged as well. However, I always start talking about Community business value with the fundamentals that can have money associated with it, and then shift into ‘soft value’ traits. The best way to think about Community value levers is to associate them with a concept I call the “4 S’s”: Savings, Sales, Satisfaction, and SEO. They are all easy to measure if you have both the Community data and can reconcile it with internal business data. Of course, I should not get too far ahead of myself and also make 3 disclaimers about measuring these fundamental value levers of an Online Community. Here they are: Community Business Value is always predicated upon Community Health. If your Community is unsuccessful from a ‘health’ perspective, then the Business Value will be slim to none...and really, attention should instead be paid to fixing the Community rather than measuring it’s Business Value Having Single Sign On (SSO) for your Community is good. However, having a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration is even better. If you do not have SSO, it is still possible to measure ‘Savings’, ‘Satisfaction’, and ‘SEO’, but you cannot measure Sales. With SSO or a CRM integration, you can measure ‘Sales’ Once you arrive at any sort of measurement of any Community value levers, you do not have ROI. You have a gross yield. To measure the ROI of a Community, you need to take the gross yield of the value levers, and then subtract the cost of the platform and the cost of the people that operationally manage it In subsequent articles I will explain how to measure the “4 S’s”. Though not complex, there are two primal considerations before even attempting to measure these 4 value levers. The first of which is to make sure to pick the “S” that is most relevant to your Community’s business objectives, and tackle that value lever first. This means that if you work in Marketing, and your Community initiative is sponsored by Marketing, then you probably do not want to spend a whole lot of time extolling the virtues of how much money the Community saved the company by deflecting contacts to the Support organization. The second factor to consider is whether or not the business has a firm grasp on the data points that are necessary to reconcile with Community data, which will help you arrive at the gross yield. For example, to measure the Savings value lever, you need to know how much a deflected contact to Support is worth to your business. Some of this data is easy to track down internally, and some of it may be challenging to uncover. It depends on your organization, the maturity of your business, and again, what really matters to those that are sponsoring the Community initiative. These things take time, but don't worry. We’ll get there. Next ➡️ How to calculate 'Cost Savings' within a CommunityViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThe single most important KPI of your Community
Why the most important? If you had 5 minutes with your CEO to demonstrate the importance of your Community and how it improves over time, what KPI would you use? Communities are complex - there are many metrics to choose from - and it is often easier to create a dashboard that looks something like this… Seriously, if you have to summarize in a single KPI how Successful your community is, what would that be? I would argue this KPI is the Community Success Rate! Remember from the previous article “What is success rate, and why does it matter? “, in its very essence this KPI does indicate how well Community visitors succeed in achieving their purpose of coming! Good for them, but what is the benefit to the brand hosting the community? Actually, the Success Rate does also indicate the Success for the Brand as well! On top of that, it is easy to measure and can be improved with dedicated best practices. Really? Yes. Let me put that down again: the Success Rate is just a simple, easy and very impactful way to indicate Community Success. That’s why it is the single most important Community Business KPI. Let me explain. Why is it impactful? Every community is different, but all of them serve two basic purposes: a Brand delivering valuable Community services to people Community Users willing to spend the time and engage with those brand services and each other. And that’s the exact insight the Success Rate is providing; how well does it work on both sides? Think about it as an indicator of how easily people are finding the right answers whatever the questions are about (support, products, ideation, sharing, etc) from a service hosted by the Brand. On the Brand Side... Any organization that is running a brand Community strives to deliver a successful Community experience! This sounds so simple, still very often is neglected and the Success Rate is not considered! Let’s illustrate the impact with an example of a peer-to-peer service and support Community use case. It is relevant as it is the largest use case for brand Communities globally. And the Success Rate is sometimes called Resolution Rate or Findability Rate, but ultimately refers to the same concept. In the support use case, the most prevalent method for measuring value and success is by measuring efficiencies, savings from contact deflection, and service gains. Within a variety of methods measuring savings from contact deflection, there is one broadly shared by TSIA practitioners, 3rd party analysts, and adopted by the vast majority of Khoros customers. That method is considering the volume of contacts deflected by taking in account the traffic seeking support that comes to the Community. And then it takes from that traffic how much of it is really successful (Success Rate) and how much of it really does not go to the contact center (deflection rate). This deflection rate depends very much on external factors to the community (how digitally savvy the visitors are, the place of the community in the navigation journey and the very nature of the request itself). The Success Rate is all about the community itself! And increasing it only by 1 point has a tremendous multiplier effect on the cost savings - hence for the organization’s bottom line. An example of that is explained in this recent SAS Kudo, demonstrating a $7M savings from contact deflection in a year. On the Community User side... The Success Rate impacts the overall Customer Satisfaction. Of course, other factors play a role, such as the quality of the products and the services delivered, but from a Community user experience perspective, CSAT is highly impacted by the Success Rate. To illustrate that, in the graph below you can see anonymized and representative Khoros Community data of Success Rates (Resolution Rate) versus CSAT (measured as a percentage of only Satisfied and Very Satisfied users). There is a clear pattern of correlation between both KPIs. For the data lovers, a pretty accurate formula is actually: “Success Rate = 78% of CSAT”. So the higher the Success Rate, the higher is the CSAT! How can you improve it? The first step to improving something is to start measuring it. In the Khoros Community platform, there is an easy and simple feature - Value Analytics survey - that allows you to capture the feedback from the user and determine that Success Rate. Obviously there are guidelines to follow for a smooth and continuous navigation experience with a survey to capture the data in an effective and non-intrusive way. The second step is to consider the Success Rate as an indicator of how the Community delivers on the search/find expectation, which really turns around 2 fundamentals: Does the content (I am looking for) exist? If not it needs to be created! Is the content (I am looking for) findable? If not it needs to be surfaced to the questioning user! By definition, improving the Success Rate is about having more users finding what they are looking for. We have 2 main ingredients for that: what you are looking for is available and, what you are looking for can be found. Based on the 4 cases listed in the Available/Findable content matrix above, we have: Can Find & Available: wonderful, this is what we want for the optimal Success Rate! Can Not Find & Available: if the content is here, how do we make sure it can be found? Can Find & Not Available: the content is not there, but people find it valuable… ok that’s magic, not sure it really exists. Can Not Find & Not Available: obviously the content is missing here and needs to be created. A larger and more complete set of practices on improving it are here for you. Please have a look and share your feedback. Bottom line Hopefully this gives you a good perspective on the importance of the Success Rate of your Community and a good reason to start defining the strategy and tactics to improve it. You can also consider few of the following examples of improvement of Success Rates (Resolution Rates) recently shared by your peers in the Khoros Kudos: Khoros Kudos: SAS sees a Success Rate of 74% Khoros Kudos: Intel improves Success Rate from 38% to 50% Khoros Kudos: Fido improves Success Rate from 34% to 49% Khoros Kudos: EE improves Success Rate by 7 pts Please share with your Khoros peers your experiences, your Success Rate and your plans for improving it. This will help the broader community learn and progress on that key topic. As always, let us know your feedback and comments, and let’s keep the conversation going.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsPractical Strategies To Handle Volume Spikes and Restricted Capacity
With an influx of volume and unpredictable spikes, there are good options to better operationalize your agents in Khoros Care. This article highlights immediate automation opportunities and offers some strategy and guidance on how to proceed. We hosted a webinar where we further discussed this topic. Check it out on-demand! Automation Welcome Responses (Learn more) Before more advanced chatbot and automation use-cases, you should consider auto-responding when you are not staffed and setting engagement expectations when you are. Be transparent, and although customers may wish you to respond all the time, they will feel better knowing you’ve heard them and will get back to them. If there is a spike in volume, letting them know it might be five minutes until an agent is available will help keep them from getting as frustrated as fast. If you have already integrated your own chat-bot into Khoros Care, you may be doing this today with our Automation Framework and Current TAR api. You should have your bot set expectations when it hands over to an agent about when the agent will be able to engage. If you do not yet have a chatbot, Khoros has been planning to add the ability to configure “Simple Welcome Responses” in our platform. And because of the current situation, we are accelerating this work. “Simple Welcome Response” will allow you to send an auto-response when customers initiate new private conversations with you. This will be a free feature and we are starting its Early Access program today with the ability to have auto-responses by language, work queue, and business hours. At the moment, Khoros will need to manage the configuration of the Welcome Responses for you and we expect self-service capabilities by mid-May. To participate in the “Simple Welcome Response” Early Access program and request configuration changes, please contact your Khoros representative. Automation - Triage and FAQ Deflection Chatbots Beyond basic welcome messages, relatively simple chatbots can also have a profound impact on your customers’ experience. We recently released Khoros Bot, a chatbot intended for triage and FAQ deflection, but note that it does take at least a few weeks to put a new bot in place. Please contact your Khoros representative if you’d like to learn more. The key is to always make sure the chatbot is not getting in the way of the customer getting help from a person. The chatbot can gather information to help an agent be more effective quickly, or if it can deflect frequently asked questions away from an agent to give them more capacity. It is worth highlighting again, that a chatbot needs to get out of the way quickly if it doesn’t understand or a customer wants an agent, especially in these times of emotional stress. Workflow & Resourcing With an influx of conversations occurring directly or indirectly about a crisis, update your tagging, routing, and prioritization rules to account for the additional volume. Additionally, configure shared dashboards to analyze the impact and measure the utilization of your agents. If you are an admin that needs help enacting the below best practices, our product coaches are here to help. Click here to book 1:1 time with a product coach to help you manage your increased volume. Book time with a Product Coach Tags Supporting Product Doc: Creating Tag Rules Create a conversation tag with keywords, phrases, and hashtags that specifically mention the crisis. Here is a sample COVID-19 lucene rule for you to use. Create a separate tag(s) for conversations where customers don’t mention the crisis specifically, but are posting about issues or problems related to the it. These can be specific to your company, brand, or industry. (These may be tags you already have in place) When creating the rule, check the option to retroactively apply the tag to all open conversations. Work queues and smart views Supporting Doc: Set Up Smart Views To isolate conversations related to a crisis such as the 2020 pandemic for responding and/or reporting purposes, create a work queue and/or smart view that includes the conversation tags you created above. Use a work queue if you have a dedicated team of agents assigned to respond to crisis issues and assign the newly created queue to the correct team(s); use a smart view and assign to the correct team(s) if these responding duties don’t fall to a dedicated team. Click here to book 1:1 time with a product coach to walk through how Smart Views can be used across Analytics dashboards and widgets, Agent View, and Manage View based on your role and business needs. Priority rules Supporting Doc: Set Priority defaults Consider whether crisis related content should have a higher, or dedicated priority. If yes, change your priority rules and map the newly created crisis tags you created above to the new priority rule. Shared Dashboard & Notifications Create a crisis-focused shared dashboard and configure notifications. Below are several widgets we recommend including on the dashboard. Some of these widgets should be filtered to your specific crisis work queue/smart view, while others should display metrics for all work queues, ensuring you have a full picture of your Care operations: Incoming Conversations - See how volume has increased/spike since the start of crisis related issues. Online Agents - A live view of how many agents are online. You can also this widget by your dedicated crisis work queue, if applicable. Queue Backlog - How is your team keeping up with the incoming volume? Is your backlog staying steady, or consistently increasing? Average TAR, Median TAR, Response Times, and Responses Meeting TAR - These widgets provide a breakdown of your response times. Are you consistently meeting/missing your SLA targets. Agent States - Have your agents been logged in and available to work during their scheduled shift hours? Top Tags - How many customers are posting to you about the crisis, and how do those tags stack rank against your other care issues? Live Workforce Utilization - (coming very soon) This new Analytics widget gives you insights into utilization percentage of teams and individual agents. If your team is fully utilized and still can’t keep up with incoming volume, you should consider adding additional agents. CSAT/NPS - Filter this widget by your crisis work queue/smart view to measure the quality of agent responses. Notifications Volume Alerts - configure incoming posts widgets to act as an early warning indicator when volume crosses your desired threshold with intervals of 5, 10, 15, 30 min or 1 hour. TAR SLA Alerts - Track when you are missing your SLA targets in a specific time period. SHARE - Once your dashboard is created, share it with the appropriate members across your team and organization, including executives and leaders from other departments. Remember, you can share these Shared Dashboards freely, as Dashboard viewer users will not count toward your seat licenses. New Response Templates Create response template(s) for repeatable responses specific to a crisis and share them with your agents. If there are multiple responses, use the header [CRISIS NAME] to organize them Staffing If you have purchased Casual (Flex) User hours, consider using those named users now to help with capacity. Casual (Flex) users are designed to offer flexibility during times of high volume or crisis. They are purchased in bundles of 5,000 hours and calculated cumulatively, when users are active in Khoros Care. Remember, you are not limited in terms of the number of Flex Users -- only the number of hours they are active in Khoros Care. If you wish to add additional Flex User hours, please contact your Khoros representative. Manage View Supporting Doc: Getting around Manage View Views can be created and shared within Manage View that target all conversations about the crisis for visibility and bulk actions Configure Columns - Columns within Manage View can configured to view conversations/posts across specific channels that include keywords, hashtags, and pre-created crisis tags Bulk Actions - Within each Manage View column, users can bulk reassign to a different work queue, change priority, snooze, close, and reopen conversations Share Manage View - Users with the Manage View Creator or Manage View Admin role can share the newly created view with other Manage View users by clicking the blue share icon in the top right cornerViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsGamification 101: The Psychology of Motivation
Michael Wu, Ph.D. is Lithium's Principal Scientist of Analytics, digging into the complex dynamics of social interaction and group behavior in online communities and social networks. Michael was voted a 2010 Influential Leader by CRM Magazine for his work on predictive social analytics and its application to Social CRM.He's a regular blogger on the Lithosphere's Building Community blog and previously wrote in the Analytic Science blog. You can follow him on Twitter at mich8elwu. Welcome back! Apologies for taking a little bit longer to write this post. I have been a little busy recently – and I was in Troy, NY last week, giving a series of lectures about Social CRM at RPI. The psychology of motivation is a broad topic, and I will have to be fairly brutal in my summarization and triaging to cut it down to a reasonable length. Last time I briefly introduced Fogg’s Behavior Model (FBM), and used it to analyze why and how game mechanics/dynamics are able to drive actions. FBM asserts that human behavior is a result of the precise temporal convergence of three factors: Motivation: the person wants desperately to perform the behavior (i.e. he is highly motivated) Ability: the person can easily carry out the behavior (i.e. he considers the behavior very simple) Trigger: the person is triggered to do the behavior (i.e. he is cued, reminded, asked, called to action, etc.) Game mechanics and game dynamics are able to positively influence human behavior because they are designed to drive the players above the activation threshold (i.e. the upper right of the ability-motivation axis), and then trigger them into specific actions. In other words, successful gamification is all about making these three factors occur at the same time. As I mentioned last time, the temporal convergence is the key. Today, I will talk about the first factor in FBM: the science of motivation. This topic is not new. In fact there has been a lot of interest and research in the field of psychology around motivation. Subsequently there are many models which describe what can motivate people and why. Since it would be impossible to cover all of them without turning this into a book, I will talk about three psychological models of motivation and behavior that I believe are useful in the gamification setting. From Maslow’s Needs to Pink’s Drive One of the earliest and best known theories of motivation comes from the renowned psychologist, Abraham H. Maslow. The now famous Hierarchy of Needs was published in 1943. I’m sure most of you have seen the pyramid depicting the five levels of needs, in one form or another. Physiological: air, food, water, sex, sleep, excretion, etc. Safety: health, personal well being, financial and employment stability, security against accidents, etc. Belonging: love, intimacy, friendship, family, social cohesion, etc. Esteem: self-esteem, confidence, achievement, respects, etc. Self actualization Maslow believes these needs are what motivate people to do the things they do. In essence, human behaviors are driven by their desire to satisfy physical and psychological needs. It is easy to understand the lower four levels of needs, and Maslow refers to them as deficiency-needs. But what is self-actualization? If you read Maslow’s work carefully, he referred to this highest level as being-needs or meta-needs, and it is actually a combination of many meta-motivators, which I’ve summarize in a word cloud (figure 1). If you think Maslow is a little old school, you might appreciate Daniel Pink’s more recent book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, published in 2009. Pink hypothesizes that in the modern society where the lower levels of the Maslow’s hierarchy are more or less satisfied, people become more and more motivated by other intrinsic motivators. These intrinsic motivators are precisely the meta-motivators that Maslow is referring to in the self-actualization level, and Pink specifically focuses on three of these: Autonomy Mastery Purpose If you hadn’t noticed, many of these needs and motivators are very similar to game mechanics and dynamics. Zynga, for example, realizes that majority of the population have the gaming personality of a socializer and need a sense of belonging. They created FarmVille to address the socializer’s need for social cohesion/acceptance. Status, achievements, ranks and reputation are some of the most commonly used game mechanics, but they are really nothing more than “esteem in disguise”. The progression dynamics and levels are simply Dan Pink’s mastery. See the parallel? If not, I hope figure 2 will make it more obvious. Skinnerian Conditioning and Learning B. F. Skinner’s Radical Behaviorism is a very different school of psychology. It is actually a full behavior model, like that of B. J. Fogg, and it claims that human behavior is a result of the cumulative effects of environmental reinforcements and learning. However, much of Skinner’s research on reinforcement and operant conditioning (not classical conditioning) can be applied to understand motivation. Skinner’s theory disregards innate needs and uses only external conditions/reinforcement to manipulate and shape people’s behavior. In essence, the conditioned reinforcers (which are usually some kind of points in most gamification settings) are learned, and they become the motivator. Many game dynamics have been developed using the principles from Skinner’s work, because a point system is often core to many game dynamics, including progression dynamics and levels. Points by themselves are not inherently rewarding – in fact, points can be a detraction if used inappropriately. Proper use of points depends on the reward schedule (or reinforcement schedule in psychology terminology), that is, when, how many, and at what rate the points are given (or taken away). Skinner characterized the effects of many different types of reward schedules on the response rate of the subject (the player) and what actions each type of schedule helps invoke. For example, fixed-interval schedule is great for driving increase activity near deadlines. This is the basis of the countdown and appointment dynamic. Both fixed-interval and fixed-ratio schedules are great for learning new behaviors, but the variable-interval schedule is far more efficient for reinforcing established behaviors. The variable-ratio schedule is best for maintaining a behavior, so it is responsible for many forms of game addiction, including gambling. This schedule emphasizes the importance of surprise in gamification, and it is the foundation for the lottery mechanic and other anticipatory motivators. Flow: The Fine Line between Certainty and Uncertainty I wrote about flow in an earlier post. It is a mental state characterized by another renowned psychologist in 1975, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is an optimal state of intrinsic motivation, where people become totally immersed in what they are doing. People experiencing flow often forget about physical feelings, passage of time, and their ego fades away. Despite the fact that flow is an extremely desirable mental state, it is not easy to get into the state of flow. Part of the reason is because there is an inherent discordance in what people want. In a 2006 TED talk by Anthony Robbins, a popular motivation author, he talked about the six emotional needs of humans. The first is the need for certainty, but paradoxically the second is the need for uncertainty, which is in direct conflict with the first need. It may seem that people are not perfectly consistent, but there is actually a very fine line between certainty and uncertainty, and it is precisely Csikszentmihalyi’s state of flow. For the most part, people love to be in the control (overlearning) state, because it gives them a sense of security and safety. But people also hate boredom. However, as we acquire skills over time, we inadvertently move into the relaxation/boredom state if we don’t pick a more challenging task. So as humans, we are also motivated by some challenges, surprises, and varieties, to avoid boredom. In real life, this often pushes us into the arousal state, because it is usually very hard to find tasks with the right level of challenge that match people’s skills exactly. They are either far too easy (boring) or too hard (frustrating). So the apparent paradox of human motivation is really our attempt to find that fine line between certain and uncertainty. Conclusion So let me summarize what have we learned today: Abraham Maslow (and recently Dan Pink) tells us a lot about what people need, and these innate needs are what motivate people. Maslow's need theory is basically the carrot and the stick theory of motivation. B. F. Skinner on the other hand believes that under a proper reinforcement schedule, we can ignore people’s innate needs and just give them points instead, and people will learn and be motivated simply by accumulating points. Surprising isn’t it? But it is all true! However, blindly giving people points (or whatever they need) is not going to work over the long term, because people get tired and bored rather quickly. Successful gamification need to adapt with people’s skill and find that fine line between certainty and uncertainty (i.e. Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow), a state of optimal intrinsic motivation. Alright, we covered a lot of psychology today. Yet I barely scraped the surface of the psychological research available on motivation. There are many other psychological models of motivation, and what I’ve covered is by no means near complete. I just hope this has given you a quick introduction to the science of motivation. Next time, we’ll examine the second factor of the FBM: Ability. In the meantime, I welcome any comments, critiques, kudos and discussion. Stay tuned! Related Blogs #OnAirWithLithium: Gamification Best Practices What is Gamification, Really? An Interview on The Value of Gamification for Today’s Brands and ConsumersViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsEmail Metrics in Community Analytics
Email Metrics in Community Analytics delivers one of the most sought after enhancements in our Ideas board and customer feedback sessions - provide a means to measure the efficacy of emails in engaging and bringing traffic back to the community. With the insights provided by Email Metrics, Community Managers can take appropriate actions to increase member engagement. What are the available metrics? The following metrics are available to track the journey of an email from the moment it gets triggered in the community to the recipient opening and clicking on a community link in the email. Emails Requested Emails Delivered Unique Opens Unique Clicks Emails Bounced Emails Dropped Unsubscribe Clicks The metrics are also segmented by community actions that trigger these email notifications. This includes - Subscriptions, Accepted Solutions, Mentions, Kudos and Private Messages. Any other community event/action are grouped under Miscellaneous (example : user rank change) Below are the prerequisites for a community to benefit from the Email metrics feature: should be on AWS should be using SendGrid as the email platform on Community Release version 20.11 or above *Data presented here is for illustrative purposes only; not to be construed as benchmarking. You can infer the following from the above metrics: Email notifications triggered by community actions 63034 Emails delivered successfully 59161 Number of emails opened at least once by users 24140 (40.8% Open Rate) Number of emails where users clicked on the community link(s) 5169 (21.4% Click to Open Rate) Open Rate measures the percentage of unique opens of the mails by users as compared to the total number of mails delivered. For example: If 100 users receive one email each, and 50 of them opens the email, then the Open Rate is 50%. Similarly, if 50 users receive 2 emails each and 25 of them opens both of them, then the Open Rate is 50% Click To Open Rate measures the percentage of emails where the users clicked on the community link(s) in the email as compared to the total number of emails that were opened. From example 1 above, if out of 50 users who opened the emails, 30 users clicked the Community link(s) in those mails, then the Click To Open Rate is 60%. Why do emails get dropped? As per SendGrid, an email may get dropped due to a variety of reasons. These may include invalid SMTPAPI header, spam content in the mail (if Spam Checker app is enabled), unsubscribed address, etc. How to enable Email Metrics for a community? Email Metrics is currently enabled for all the communities that are on AWS, on community version 20.11 and using SendGrid as the email relay set-up. If your community is not on SendGrid and want to benefit from this feature, open a Support ticket and request to change the email platform to SendGrid. SendGrid is Khoros’ default email relay set-up. SendGrid provides the means to successfully track events like successful email delivery, email delivery failure, and email being opened. These events are transmitted to Khoros using registered web-hooks. Learn more about Khoros email options Who can access Email Metrics in Community Analytics? Any user who could access Community Analytics would be able to access Email metrics as well. To access Community Analytics, a user needs to have either an Administrator role or Analytics role assigned. Questions or Comments? We are working on benchmarks and trends for Email Metrics. Meanwhile, you can contact your Customer Success Manager to provide you with these details, based on your industry. We also welcome any feedback to make this feature better! Thanks for reading!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThe Era of Personalization: What I Learned from Dr. Wu
Personalization has remained imperative in the digital world because each user, consumer and brand has different needs, wants and preferences. We all want a personalized experience, inherently. As the power of digital grows exponentially, there are larger obstacles with how we understand customers and ultimately, how to deliver a unique experience. Lithium’s Chief Data Scientist MikeW & Product Marketing Director UlrikaH delivered a recent webcast about the increased popularity and importance of personalization. To kick things off, they mentioned the transition implicated by big data - where we now we have enough data to differentiate our customers from one another and drill deeper into their user preferences. Too many attempts of personalized experiences – even on our communities – today are still based on generalized grouping of customers, so the opportunity for true personalization is immense. Creating a hyper-personalized experience on a large scale is not an easy feat. As a community manager, I am tasked daily with delivering a personal experience to our users to ensure they are successful with Skype. With the majority of Skype customers using apps across devices and the community encompassing discussions across the Skype experiences, we are constantly striving to guide our members to the content relevant to them. The goal being a more efficient and compelling community visit to convince members to participate and come back again. I’m sure in your community you can find the same examples of members’ interest in topical discussions where masking out unrelated content creates a more relevant community experience. Dr. Wu and Ulrika were able to outline the benefits of personalization to the business and the customer and how you can achieve both in tandem! What a concept… My three takeaways from this webcast: 1. Utilize social as the best way to learn about your customers. Be aware of the cold start problem. To know your customers, you need to rely on behavioral and historical data, which you may not have or have access to. When people use recommendation systems and they don’t have enough information to run an effective search, they get poor results and thus, cannot make an effective connection with a customer. This is where the power of social comes in. It is effective for us to extract social data about a customer because it is usually relevant and accessible. It also allows us to open conversation with our customers rather than just merely digging with no interaction. 2. Personalization is mutually beneficial to both the brand and the consumer. By giving customers a personalized experience, a brand increases the likelihood of cultivating a loyal customer who will go on and share their story. The customer is able to better utilize a product or service and thus, the company will receive a high CSAT from them. Additionally, by providing a personalized experience, customers will convert quicker because they can more easily find information geared towards them. 3. A personalized experience is a rewarding experience. Gamification and extended profile have elevated the user experience on the Skype community. Integrating our Community members’ profiles with their social channels has provided invaluable insights to our customers and their data. With Gamification, we can provide recognition for areas in which the customers have expertise or interest, based on their more extensive and integrated profile. Everyone wins! Personalization is becoming less of an option for brands, and more of a necessity. In order to better deliver a customer experience that is memorable, impressionable, and effective, one must prioritize personalization. Check out the Skype Community! Personally :), I’m looking forward to Lithium’s next webcast Boom or Bust: 5 Social Media Trends Brands Must Invest In. Take a look at the sneak preview. Claudius (Claudius) is the Community Manager for the vibrant Skype consumer community and advocate for modern dialogue communities within Microsoft. Being a former community super user himself he joined Skype in 2011 to turn the old tech forum into a modern community running on Lithium. Throughout that community journey he also became an active contributor to the Lithium Community where he is pushing innovative ideas to advance the platform, thus earning him recognition as a Lithium Rockstar. Besides that, he is an open geodata enthusiast, gadget lover and game explorer.ViewsSign in to react to this postComment
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