Google+ vs. Facebook vs. ... Part 1: The Strength of Bidirectional Connections
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 or Google+. Since its launch in late June, Google+ has been a hot topic of conversation. So before I proceed with either the engagement or the gamification series, I think it is appropriate to take a short detour to discuss Google+. I think by now everyone has most likely had the chance to play with Google+ (or at least know what it is). If you still don’t know, don’t miss the boat. There are already 25+ million people signed up. I am not going to repeat Google’s pitch, so take a look at the demo from Google. What I’m going to talk about today, are some of the network properties and social principles behind some popular social platforms. Of course, I will compare and contrast them to the new kids on the block (i.e. Google+), and talk about their behavioral implications. Facebook Facebook certainly brings great utility to its users by helping them maintain the relationships in their lives. However, people’s relationships in the real world are very complex. Not every relationship is the same, and every friend is unique in some way (see Social Network Analysis 101). By collapsing all the different relationships into one bucket, called friends, Facebook created the problem of conflicting social spheres. Some groups just don’t mix in real life, and some information is not intended for all friends, not even among close friends. Humans deal with this problem by spatial-temporal segregation. We simply meet different groups of people at different time and different places. But on Facebook, we are stuck; we either don’t share, or share to all our friends. Although Facebook has subsequently implemented features that allow their users to put their friends into groups, these features are band-aid fixes that didn’t drive much adoption and are therefore ineffective. This is precisely the problem that Google+ is trying to address with Circles. I am certain that social researcher like Paul Adams, an ex-Googler now at Facebook, has infused much social insight and contributed to the present success of Google+. Unfortunately, he is not allowed to comment on the Google+ project due to his non-disclosure agreement. Before I say more about Google+, let me point out some interesting and distinctive network properties of Facebook. Bidirectionality: A Double Edged Sword Friendships on Facebook are bidirectional. That means both parties need to consent in order connect. Anyone can initiate the connection, but th…24KViewsSign in to react to this post8CommentsTake 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 f…ViewsSign 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 rep…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), Anno…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsSynchronous vs Asynchronous Conversation Priorities
Synchronous vs. Asynchronous conversation priorities In this blog, I am going to answer some questions we get from many of our customers. What is asynchronous vs. synchronous? How do I forecast staff for each type of channel? What does success look like for a best class customer service in each of these channels? Let’s start with the differences between asynchronous vs. synchronous. Synchronous Channels Synchronous channels are session or time-based, which means, as a customer, I start and end conversations in the same session; this is how traditional web chat works. Typically you find this when you are on a brand’s website, and the chat bubble opens in a separate box with some expectation setting of “your chat session beginning.” This requires customers to finish their conversation in a single discussion and expect an immediate response. Many consider this a more old-fashioned way of engaging with customers because it puts the chat owner, or brand, in control of when the conversation starts and ends. Other examples of Synchronous conversations are phone calls, in-person conversations, and video conferencing. Perspective for Staffing Customer Experience: If their session unexpectedly ends or times out due to external factors, it can leave them without resolving their issues. The customer then must rely on the agent to have made notes on the account or chat history (if available) to search for confirmation. Agent Experience: A conversation doesn’t close until it is complete, resulting in fewer conversations since they are waiting for the customer to respond or for the session to timeout to close the conversation. Brand Staffing Needs: You may need to hire more agents to handle Synchronous channels because they cannot handle more conversations at a time. Asynchronous Channels Asynchronous channels are continuous and can happen over time, which means, as a customer, I can start and end conversations at my convenience. This type of conversation is in your everyday life, text messaging, email, Facebook, Google Business Messages, WhatsApp, and other Messenger apps. “Messengers” are often called chats, which causes even more confusion for anyone trying to understand the difference between asynchronous and synchronous chats. Perspective for Staffing Customer Experience: Asynchronous channels put the customer in control of “when” they want to engage with or respond to your brand. They don’t always expect an immediate answer if they ask a question, depending on their urgency. It's the intrinsic nature of the technology and how our brains have been trained based on personal experience. I mean, how often do you expect your friend to respond immediately if your question is not urgent? “What up, girl?” vs. “OMG, you won’t believe this!” Agent Experience: This often allows agents to start and end multipl…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAtlas Series: Modernizing Digital Care
Ready to modernize your digital care program? Allison Fasching, Customer Solutions Director shares experiences and best practices in the Digital Care space. Discover ways to build a new program, optimize your existing program or prepare to grow, while ensuring your teams and tools are focusing on “Customer First” engagement! What’s this all about? Some of the topics we will cover are, Getting Started with your new Care program, Forecasting, Analysis, Optimization, and Growth. We’ll also talk about Change Management, and why you should be prioritizing this throughout your program journey. So, ready to get started? Dive in and enjoy! Don’t forget to drop any questions you have into the comments for our experts to answer. At the bottom of each blog is a link to the next and previous article to help you glide through the series. Part 1) Getting Started or Expanding In this video/blog, we cover a few questions we often get from our customers and prospects about getting started or expanding your Digital Care program. Part 2) Forecasting & Staffing In this session, we will cover a few questions we often get from our customers and prospects about ways to help manage change, forecast staff, and cover multiple channels. Part 3.1) Analyze, Optimize & Grow Knowing how to analyze, optimize, and grow Care programs will be the key to your success. Given the complexity, I have created a 3 part blog to cover each of these topics. In this first section, we will discuss the analysis you should be doing on an ongoing basis. Part 3.2) Analyze, Optimize & Grow If you did your homework from the Analysis blog, then you likely have a ton of answers, and probably even more questions! In this session we will talk about the Optimization of your Care programs, this is something that can benefit you no matter the maturity of your Care programs. Part 3.3) Analyze, Optimize & Grow Now that your team is a well-oiled machine, it's time to grow your Care program. In this session, we will talk about things to consider when growing your Care programs, if you haven’t already please be sure to read and consider the steps in Analyze and Optimize. Part 4) Change Management In this blog, we will talk about some Change Management best practices that can be applied to both expected and unexpected changes. Questions? Comments? Thoughts? If you have any questions on the tips provided, please comment below and I’ll get back to you! If you enjoyed this and want to further explore the subject, please download our eBook, Modernizing your contact center.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsModernizing Digital Care - Change Management
Managing Change in your Care Programs Making a change to your Care program can happen proactively or organically. Proactive changes such as adding a new channel, increasing staff, or a new promotion may be planned but can have significant impacts. If the change is organic, often driven by unplanned events or crises, the impacts require a bit of reverse engineering; even so, you can learn to plan for these types of changes as well. In this blog, we will talk about some Change Management best practices that can be applied to both expected and unexpected changes. For this topic I have asked our Change Management Director, Ramona Maher, to join me. Ramona’s career in change management has focused on leading change management efforts on a large scale as part of cross-functional strategic initiatives. She is well-versed in a variety of tools and techniques to help organizations realize the people-dependent benefits of new ways of doing business. Today we’ll talk about a few fundamental change management concepts and tools that you as a Care Leader can apply. Things to think about when you’re undertaking a change Change can be a complex and difficult process—yet we often invest more in the technical side of change than in leading impacted people through times of change. In contact centers, the people who are using a new technology or process are truly where the rubber meets the road in terms of cost and efficiency gains, yet it’s easy to underestimate that dependency. Investing in change management activities for a project will positively influence the three “people side” factors that impact the return it delivers: speed of adoption, proficiency, and ultimate utilization. Answers to a few key questions will start you down the path of planning change management activities. What is the reason for the change? What’s the business going to get out of it? This is important to know because the Big Why will help drive desire. Generally speaking, people want to know they’re part of something bigger than themselves, and this Big Why is that thing. Articulating the Big Why at the beginning of a change also helps keep senior leaders and strategic thinkers aligned on the vision. It will help you define what success looks like so everyone will know if they are on track and when they have achieved it. This activity is the foundation for all subsequent activity and you will not gain the benefits you’re after without it. Who has to do something different in their jobs in order to make this change successful? Any change will create some kind of impact; that impact can be good or bad. Even if a new process or software is more efficient, and an agent is happy about the new UI, it’s still a change and will take some getting used to. It’s important to know who needs to do something differently so they can be properly prepared. You’ll refer to this list of people and groups throughout the entire chan…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAnalyze, Optimize & Grow - Modernizing Digital Care: Pt 3.3
Welcome to part three of the Optimization & Growth blog, Growth. In this session we will talk about things to consider when growing your Care programs, if you haven’t already please be sure to read and consider the steps in Part one: Analyze and Part two: Optimize. If you followed along on the Analysis & Optimization blogs, you have a better idea of what and how to successfully manage your agents and conversations, you may be asking questions like these: Which metrics should we be measuring that best map to our executive priorities? We want to be more customer experience-focused, but what does that look like on digital channels? Growth There are a lot of things to consider when you make a decision to expand your channels. A lot of information on forecasting and staffing can be found here, but in this session, I want to talk more about the why and not so much the formulas for doing so. Once you have all your stars aligned, you can now begin to determine if you actually needed to add more agents, or if a few adjustments actually improved your efficiencies to a point where you have more agents than you need...what a great time to consider adding another channel! One of the best ways to evaluate the need for channel growth is to consider the Customer Experience. What do you know about your customers? B2B and B2C are very different, but each brand should also try to differentiate themselves from their competitors, based on their customers' needs. At the end of the day, we are all customers, and adding channels just because another brand does, is not always the best decision. Things to consider: Demographics - what are the channels your customers are most likely to want to interact with you? If they are millennials, they likely want to engage on their time or prefer to just search for answers. Channel type - from above, where is your current volume coming from? Most likely private, that tends to be a default for many companies due to privacy. Self-Service - sometimes the best decision is not to add a new channel, maybe you just need a little help from a Bot. Or, if you do not already have a Community, it could greatly augment your staff and supply your bot with all the best answers! Website volumes & trends - how many visits are you getting to your FAQs, Contact Us, and other product/service pages where customers are getting answers? Consider bounce rates: are your customers finding what they need or just leaving? If they are leaving where are they going? Google? Also, where are they coming from? Google? This can be a big indicator that you do not have what they are searching for, or you don’t have an easy way for them to contact you. Social, Messaging, Chat & Community Consider the customer experience in each of your channels. Customers may all have the same questions but your response style should be tai…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAnalyze, Optimize & Grow - Modernizing Digital Care: Pt 3.2
Welcome to part two of the Success Planning blog, Optimization. In this session we will talk about Optimization of your Care programs, this is something that can benefit you no matter the maturity of your Care programs. If you did your homework from the Analysis blog, then you likely have a ton of answers, and probably even more questions! So let’s talk about what to do with all the data you have gathered from your analysis! Optimization Before you consider growing your team, you should optimize your workforce & workflows first to determine where growth vs automation may be the best solution. Using answers from the analysis you performed in the initial section, start grouping observations together to determine your current state: Is your team efficient and effective? Is your team doing well, but can improve? Is your team drowning in work? If you are in the top category and everything seems to be working great, then Congratulations are in order! If you just need some work, this is where most people fall! Start by taking your analysis from above and mapping it to your KPIs, if you haven't already. Then determine where you need to improve, If you are in the last category drowning, contact your Khoros account team!! Khoros can help you to determine the best approach. We also offer a menu of paid services, which include but are not limited to, Strategy, Optimization and in some places an augmented workforce. Queues & Routing I always look at the queue backlog first because it will quickly tell you if there is an issue with routing, tags, priority, or Flush times. Queue backlog is important because your agent KPIs do not really matter if they aren't answering all the questions. Once you get all the conversations going to the right places, then you’re ready for the next steps. Agents Once your Queues & Routing are working in the most efficient ways, then start to look at your agent performance. If you made significant adjustments in the previous step, I recommend you wait at least a month before reviewing agent related KPIs so you have enough data to make an assessment and set a baseline to compare for future analysis. First make sure you have your agent states set up to best fit your processes. Then start by reviewing this Guide to Agent Activity Metrics, and set up your dashboards and reports so you can quickly see your statistics. I like to use the Teams view in your Analytics tab to get a high level view, we talked about this in the Analysis blog, now here are some things to consider. You can sort and filter on a number of different metrics. For supervisors and managers, it's a quick easy way to see how many conversations your agents are handling per hour as well as their current Agent State. Depending on your business model and volume, I like to say an agent should have the capacity to handle 6-10 conversations per hour using…ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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