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Strategic Services Global Trend Round Up: 25th July 2024
Discover the latest TikTok trends and world events on this week's trend report!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsTake a tour of our Accelerated Community Management solution
One of the most effective channels for self service is a brand-owned online community. Communities are engines for matching people with needs to people with resources; questions with answers, experts with novices, and emotional needs with those who have the capacity to give However, managing a community is equal parts art and science. Messy peer-to-peer interactions cannot be fully automated by algorithms and human managers cannot handle a large volume by themselves. Without operational tools to accelerate moderation and management tasks, a community cannot grow efficiently. With Khoros Accelerated Community Management, our customers can say goodbye to manual routing and switching between their Community and Care instance to manage responses. And with community response analytics built into our Care product, our customers can confidently manage cross-channel conversations, agent capacity, and response times. Take an interactive product tour of our Accelerated Community Management solution to see how our comprehensive moderation and management tools provide faster and more flexible customer support operations. Check out these resources to learn more about Accelerated Community Management Community Self-Service + Accelerated Community Management The Hybrid Future is Here: Let’s modernize your agent's experience Getting started with Community Moderation in Manage ViewViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsCreating Highly Efficient Teams with Push-Next
Ready to see what a highly efficient Care team can accomplish? You already spend a lot of time configuring the appropriate priorities and routing rules to have conversations filtered and sorted. It’s a part of your job to optimize your agent's queues to meet SLAs for responding to and resolving customer issues. Why not automate some of that process? By enabling this push-next queue configuration option, you can better control the conversations that are available to agents and ensure that all users receive a response in a timely manner. Push-next is a powerful tool to prioritize inbound items and help create a steady pace for your agents. Using this queue option hides the “available queue” and prevents agents from reviewing conversations before claiming them, ensuring that conversations are responded to in the prioritized order you have set up. As part of the team-level settings, you can define for routing for each of your customer care teams, improving your customer's experience and conversation resolution time by turning a manual process into simple automation. Check out this short video to quickly understand the different types of queues. Khoros Customer Success Story Instant gratification dominates digital engagement, and customer support teams are on the front line. The job can be daunting, and in some instances, agents can cherry-pick issues from the available queue that look easy or that they have answered before in order to improve their TAR numbers. This can hinder the agent's performance growth, burn out other agents handling all the difficult conversations, and make your customers wait even longer. It’s up to managers to equip agents with the right tools to take care of customers— including a conversation management strategy to represent the brand as well as they can. Efficiency is the name of the game in the digital contact center. The more efficient you are, your agents, customers, and leadership will be happier. For example, a current Khoros Customer wanted to reduce the number of agent clicks throughout the day by automating their workflow. They took an eight-week snapshot of their care team’s performance metrics at the end of the year. Then, after onboarding a Push-Next configuration, they compared another eight weeks to the previous measurement. They saw a 13% increase in agent efficiency throughout the weeks. This allowed agents to keep up with an influx of messages, peaking at 25.53 cases per second. You could save an average of 25 clicks a day per agent using push-next. Proving immediate gains in productivity and efficiency. The question you might ask yourself now is, “how do we know if this queue configuration will work for us?” The first thing to understand is that Push-Next should help cut down/eliminate the "inactive time" accrued by agents. Inactive time accrues when there's work available in Assigned to Me, or Available, but the agent chooses not to take the following conversation, whether it’s because they're not ready or they're talking to a colleague. In the case of customer experience, success starts when you understand your team’s performance baseline. A powerful tool in your arsenal is the Agent Performance widget which can give you a complete view of Agent or Team performance. We recommend including the following metrics: Utilization shows what percentage of the agent’s work time is true "helping customers" time. Response and Average Response Handle Time shows the total number of responses sent by an agent and how much time an agent spent viewing a conversation before a response has been sent (response handle time). In-focus and Out-of-focus Active & Inactive Time In-focus time is an agent's time looking at the Khoros tab. Out-of-focus time is the amount of time an agent spends looking at another tab that is not Khoros. Inactive time is the amount of time an agent spent with no conversation in view in the agent tab when there were conversations available for them to take action on (i.e., not working when they're supposed to) Active time is the time an agent spent viewing a conversation in the agent tab. Team Performance To track volumes of responses vs. closed, as well as handle time. Can be used to quickly compare and identify underperforming agents. Together, these metrics provide a holistic view to see average performance and identify over or underperforming agents. For example, If you see an agent who’s accruing unusual amounts of Responses Assisted, this could indicate that they are “cherry picking” by deciding not to respond to the more difficult conversations they are assigned. Not sure if Push-Next is suitable for your team? Here are a few questions you should consider about implementing Push-Next How much do you want to depend on your agents to decide what is important? When configured optimally, your agents should predominantly be routed to conversations that need to be responded to. How much do your agents decide on how to structure their workday You can calculate Utilization very robustly using Agent Activities and Agent States metrics. Would you and your agents like to try a pilot program for a Push-Next configuration? The pilot program setup process is simple to begin, complete, and compare. Customers will not be negatively affected during this trial. You should see immediate gains in productivity and efficiency. Talk to your CSM about a Push-Next Configuration today! Customers should review their Agent States when implementing Push Next. They may need to add more states to accommodate Push-Next or tweak which states should allow agent actions. A key training point: Once Push Next is enabled, agents will either need to Close a conversation, or Click the X button in the top-right corner of the conversation view to "Clear" it (typically after sending a response to move the conversation to Pending), and then the next conversation will be pushed. Prior to Push-Next, the “Clear” functionality was more of a workflow option. To learn more about Push-Next and other queue configurations, check out these resources below Join an Agent Activity Product Coaching Session Use tags to populate agent queues Tag Routing for Work Queues examples Set up team-specific settings for agent queues Using Claim Next and Push Next queue configurationsViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThe Hybrid Future is Here: Let’s modernize your agent's experience
While chat-bots, self-service, and community answers are key tools in your customer care playbook, the collective experiences of your agent team aren’t something to overlook. On the surface, improved agent experience may include one or two things listed above. However, pairing some out-of-the-box thinking and the wide range of capabilities found within Khoros can make the difference in your digital contact center. In the past, it was commonplace to have your care center on the second floor of your main office building. In those days, it was easy to get your finger on the pulse of your agents’ experiences and performance. All that was required was to walk into your call center and ask your managers. Today, your agent’s office has turned into bedrooms, kitchen tables, different floors of your headquarters, and for the larger brands out there, different nations. Working Remotely has changed everything and we as brands have to change with it. This isn’t to say that WFH is detrimental to customer satisfaction or agent performance. The rise of WFH environments has been a broadly positive shift in the workforce according to a study done in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo Medical University. To quote the study directly, “The multivariate logistic regression analysis demonstrated that remote work was associated with the reduction of psychological and physical stress responses independently of changes of job stressors, social support, sleep disturbance, and total sleep time on workdays.” While this is a key indicator of a more positive experience for those who work remotely, it has presented an interesting challenge for brands. With our teams now spread out across the country or the globe, we need to understand how our teams are performing and what we can do to improve their in-app experience. While your specific KPIs may differ widely depending on your brand, your agent experience should always be included in your list. The simple truth is that happy agents make for satisfied customers, which in turn, creates an overall more positive customer experience. Regardless of your team’s size, a primary factor in improving your customer’s experience is understanding not only how your agents are performing but also ensuring that they have the right tools to serve their customers in the best way possible for your brand and customer care goals. Like any tool, Khoros’ Care Platform can best serve your brand when it is implemented to its full potential. Let’s take a look at the seemingly unconventional methods that Khoros can help your agents across the board. Analytics A foundational step to modernizing, the ability to recognize and understand what your team needs to perform at peak levels is wholly dependent on your analytics. Without clear data, you may find yourself struggling to make meaningful changes or better design your care strategy. Alongside your monthly key reports, a best practice would be to run an Agent performance report. What exactly this means for your customer care team will, of course, differ on your KPIs, care strategy, and chosen industry. However, you should consider the following metrics and how they fit into your care system. Average Response Handle Time Total Inactive Time In-Focus Inactive Time Out-of-Focus Inactive Time For more information about how to fit these concepts into your care strategy, take a look at this step-by-step series exploring Modernizing Digital through Care Analysis, Optimization and Growth. Automation Improving both Customer and Agent experience is simplest with the addition of Automation. Skip headaches on both parties by providing customers with an easy way to get answers prior to routing to your agents. For agents, it can be integrated with your KB to provide instructions to internal-only information that can help customers resolve their issues. Our Agent Assist feature reduces the time to handle customer inquiries, deliver accurate resolutions, and even the time needed to train new agents. Powered by Natural Language Processing (NLP), Agent Assist delivers agents real-time recommendations for troubleshooting Guides and Community Knowledge articles. Combining Agent Assist, our current automation systems, Welcome Responses, and even the simple act of listing Business hours can equal up to a significantly improved CST/NPS. Community In the case that you have an active and flourishing Community, directing your customers' support requests to your Community is the best solution for both your agents and your customers. It’s a way to connect with your customers while providing practical ways to find their answers. Give your customers the accurate responses they want while opening up more opportunities for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive “voice of the customer” feedback. Best Practices Utilize your Community’s super users with self service and off-loading Q&A’s to decrease the workload for your Community managers and agents. Allow peer to peer responses and enable super users to provide answers. Meet your top KPIs by increasing engagement & resolution rates, improve your CSAT/NPS, reduce cost per contact, and improve agent performance(link to Atlas Agent Performance). Suggested Responses Time is money and the less time your agents spend getting your customers the answers they need improves your NPS for more than just your quarterly metrics. Suggested responses cut down on the repeated questions bottlenecking your agents' contact channels. Best Practices Provide agents with repeatable answers that they can easily access and provide to customers, easily cutting down their handle time and TAR. (TAR is a customer experience metric link to TAR in Atlas) Meet these following KPIs: % of SLAs, Deflection/Containment, AHT, TAR, Cost per contact & Agent performance. Resolution Rate Welcome Responses Welcome responses built into your initial contact system can provide a big relief to your agent to increase the amount of call deflection in one fell swoop. Best Practices Setting expectations on time to respond Ask preliminary questions and even refer to Self Serve Main KPIs: Improve TAR , CSAT/NPS, Handle time, % of SLA and initial incoming engagement. While at first this can seem like a complex puzzle of various systems, by putting all of this together you will rapidly see a happier, more efficient team emerge that are more equipped to meet your brand’s SLAs and improve your CX overall. As always, if you have questions or would like to chat live, shoot me a PM @A11ey. I would love to discuss your ideas on how you are modernizing your Digital Care! If you are interested in best practices for your Care or Community programs, check out the other blogs in the Modernizing Digital Care Series.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsCommunity Self-Service + Accelerated Community Management
Self-service goes beyond relieving your support team’s workload. It’s a way to connect with your customers while providing practical ways to find their answers. Give your customers the accurate responses they want while opening up more opportunities for customer satisfaction, loyalty, and positive “voice of the customer” feedback. Building brand awareness, increasing CSAT, and deflecting calls all sound great, but the thought of building or managing a community might sound strenuous. Many brands have legal concerns, fear overly negative responses, sometimes even bullying, or dread managing volumes. It is our mission to help alleviate those concerns, and turn them into opportunities with the Khoros Platform. Previously, I’ve touched on self-service options in previous blogs, specifically community & automation. Today I’ll be expanding on these topics, starting with the advantages a community provides and the benefits of Community Moderation in Manage View. Effective self-service is the key to success. No matter what industry you are in, self-service always should be a factor in your customer support plan. But the key to success here is doing it right. Too often do we see companies stop at a basic FAQ page to get important information out to their customers. Now don’t get me wrong, FAQs are great. But this only serves a select group of customers, which often leads to a call, chat, or search to answer their questions. Thanks to search engines like Google, people expect to find answers when they search. But if your site doesn't offer the correct answer, your customer could find their answer on a competitor's site. With a branded community, your customers can find answers anytime and have a place to interact with each other. Combine the power of Khoros Communities with Care to gain efficiencies. Once you have your community up and running, you may quickly identify that many of the questions will be the same ones that come from your other channels, including Social, Chat, and Voice. Khoros has a great Accelerated Community Management Solution that connects your community to your Care instance. This gives you powerful tools to manage community responses and moderation. If you already have a Khoros Care team answering similar questions for other channels, routing community responses could improve your response time. Routing through Care helps alleviate manual routing and switching between your community & Care instance to manage responses. Plus, Care provides analytics for your community responses, helping you better manage cross-channel conversations, agent capacity, and response times. Here is some advice to keep in mind on encouraging your community to be accessible and positive. Let your community content be a universal guide. In any community, it is paramount to provide both users and agents with clear self-service direction to find answers in the Knowledge Base (TKBs), Announcements, Discussions, or even Ideas. Official brand documentation such as FAQs or instructions should be easily found and identified in your community’s TKBs. It's best practice to ensure your agents provide customers with the same answers/instructions provided in your TKBs. A community public knowledge base provides quick and accurate resources for agents to distribute across active channels. Additionally, sending customer links to TKBs will inherently create your community SEO value when customers search for answers on Google. Accepted Solutions are a great way to encourage community members to provide answers. Healthy “peer2peer” collaboration reduces the demand for agent/community manager interaction. Be sure that Accepted Solutions have been verified for accuracy when needed. This practice varies by community type. Not all Accepted Solutions require verification by the brand but should remain actively reviewed. Here's the bottom line. Having a branded community doesn't only increase agent and content efficiency. It goes beyond static FAQ capabilities by allowing customer feedback and providing more opportunities to optimize and utilize resources. I mean, how often have you gone to an FAQ page only to find outdated, incomplete answers with no way to tell the company that you still need help? As always, if you have questions or would like to chat live, shoot me a PM @A11ey. I would love to discuss your ideas on how you are modernizing your Digital Care! If you are interested in best practices for your Care or Community programs, check out these other resources Modernize your Digital Care Series Product Overview: Accelerated community management Interactive Product tour: Accelerated Community ManagementViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAtlas Series: Secure Executive Support for your Community
Does your community have executive support? If not, we are here to help! Regardless of the industry, we have found that Community Managers regularly need a business case with quantifiable projections (or results!) to present to their leadership team. When calculating the value of a Khoros-powered Community, our experts can provide guidance on your journey. We recommend that you get started by enjoying our series of blog articles written by the experts. At the bottom of each blog is a link to the next and previous article that will help guide you through the series. The Value of Knowing Your Community’s Value This article explains our new Business Value framework with links to the white papers and calculators for more in-depth knowledge and your own experimentation. Discovering Business Value within a Community Measuring Business Value within Community has never been as easy as it is today with the help of the Khoros Platform! 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. How to calculate 'Cost Savings' within a Community Calculating how many contacts to your Support Center have been deflected by Community is easy! There is a standardized formula, and you can apply the formula via a basic survey and a few simple Community metrics. How to calculate 'Member Spend' within a Community Community Members do spend more than non-Community Members! Although it can sometimes be arduous to prove this particular Value Story, the excitement it can ultimately generate within a brand's senior leadership team makes it worth the effort. [Webinar] How to Choose and Promote Metrics for Success Success is different for each community, but Khoros experts are here to help you define the metrics for success. In this On-Demand webinar, we cover: The challenges that come with metrics Overall health KPIs Metrics by community strategy Additional examples via Q&A Questions? Comments? Thoughts? If you have any questions, please comment below and we'll get back to you!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsCMAD Resources You Can Use
January 24th will soon be upon us, and with it, the ever-awesome CMAD. As community managers, we’re always on and immersed in the communities we moderate. The threat of burnout is real, and so is the need for time to rest, recover, and (most of all) put ourselves and our health first. That’s what makes Community Manager Advancement Day so important - because while these practices should happen daily, it’s important for us as a group to focus on advancing ourselves first and foremost. In recognition of the amazing work you do day-in and day-out with your own communities, we at Khoros have once again gathered up-to-date resources you can use - today, right now - to advance yourself. Use them to grow your community management skills, while giving yourself some inner peace and calm. Getting Started Read the Community Manager Burnout blog, with some time-management tips that every social media and community manager should know. Our Favorite Strategy Guides & How-Tos The High Cost of Low Agent Retention + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION [Podcast] Becoming a Leader of Organizational Change Khoros Expert Opinion on Change Management Starting Out on the Community Journey Unlocking Community Engagement Planning for the Future & Growth of Your Community Inspiration & Case Studies How the SAP Concur community team used customer input to pivot fast How we use Khoros Bot to increase leads and community registrations How Jawwy doubled digital care volume, cut costs, and raised CSAT 4 Examples of Great Online Communities and What Makes Them Work 4 brands who drive real value with their online communities Taking Care of Yourself How to avoid burnout as an “always-on” community manager Avoiding holiday burnout for community managers I'm a social media marketer — Here's how I avoid burnout Brands and Mental Health: How to show authentic advocacy online Industry News & Insights Strategic Services Weekly Trend Report Reviewing Foundations (Atlas Login Required) Community Learning Articles Training Videos Social Media Learning Articles Training Videos Finally, if you get a moment, don’t forget to check out the latest articles from the CMX team, who are putting together their own resources for CMAD. Is anything missing from this list? Please let us know, and share your favorite CMAD resources below.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThe Health and Wealth of your Online Community - Part 2
The concept of ‘wealth’ from one person to another tends to change very little. Most people equate wealth exclusively as the accumulation of money and/or assets. But there are some of us who think that the deeply personal things in our lives (family, friends, etc) are also part of our ‘wealth’. In my opinion, things that we are grateful for should be classified as wealth. That broad way of defining ‘wealth’ (i.e. - 'things we are grateful for') conveniently emerges as my own way of talking about 'wealth' as it pertains to Online Community. In our world of measuring Online Community, it is imperative to measure both the quantitative and the qualitative. Community wealth is not just about saving money or making money, Community wealth is also about those things that we cannot conveniently monetize, but that we are nonetheless grateful to have received. Speaking of something we cannot conveniently monetize, lets talk about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Now here is something that definitely has money associated with it. Just ask any employee of Google, or better yet, just ask anybody in Marketing that has ever had anything to do with a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) budget. The challenge that our Business Value Consulting (BVC) team runs up against here at Khoros is when we’re asked whether or not a Community’s SEO value should be classified as a ‘savings’ or a ‘yield’. It may sound cowardly, but I always let the brand decide. If they want to cut their SEM budget a bit because they are getting lots of search engine referrer traffic hitting their Community, and then that traffic subsequently spreads out to the rest of the brand’s digital properties, well, that is their choice. But I also will tell brands that it might serve them best to not even think of those valuable SEO hits to their Community as a monetary savings or a yield, but instead to (temporarily, at least) value those SEO hits as a ‘soft benefit’ until the business can figure out how they want to calculate the value. ‘Soft Benefit’? What the heck is that? A ‘soft benefit’, my friends, falls into that concept of wealth that I mentioned earlier. It is something personal that we hold dear that can not easily translate into a dollar figure, but we are certainly grateful to have it. Probably the most boorish (but adept) way of articulating a soft benefit is to use the words of Gary Vaynerchuk; “What is the ROI of your Mother?” Here are the most common Online Community ‘Soft Benefits’ that I like to explore with brands: Increased Customer Satisfaction Amplified Positive Sentiment Real-estate to place advertisements / offers for additional products and services Helps to establish trust and fellowship among customers Increased Customer Insights Each of these items above might be measured in dollars, but it could be a stretch to get there and in some cases the credibility of the figure would be dubious. The wealth that you yield from your Community should be measured first in dollars. On that point I do not compromise. But it is foolish to think that wealth begins and ends with just money. We do not measure wealth that way in our personal lives, so why pretend that we cannot do it in our professional lives? Benjamin Franklin was the son of a candle-maker that had 17 children. He grew up extremely poor and started working when he was 12 years old. I started this series of two articles with his maxim, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”, because it makes perfect sense to look at both the health and wealth of an Online Community. However, I learned more about Franklin on the way and also gained greater exposure to a long list of his proverbs, two of which have stuck with me because I like to keep an open mind whilst simultaneously staying laser-focused on my goals. The first, “Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones”, is something that we can apply to our personal lives as we strive to do better. The second, “They that will not be counseled cannot be helped”, is something you and I can apply to ourselves when reading the works of wise people throughout history. It is also a perfectly appropriate observation to consider when reading my blog articles as well. Read Part 1ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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