The Metaverse and Online Communities: Khoros 101
“Metaverse” is a term first coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 science fiction novel Snow Crash, captured the imagination of emerging generations and has gained unsurprising traction in recent years. From fully digital lives in online worlds, like Second Life, to a plethora of movies like Ready Player One, each provide a glimpse into what the metaverse could mean and how it could play a part in our daily lives. As we’ve seen, the mission, vision, and values that we hold for our futures are the premise of how these new worlds emerge. It’s not hard to find media covering the topic of virtual worlds, they are real, they exist now, and yet there is so much we have yet to see as far as technological developments in this area. The current understanding and experience of the metaverse varies. Although Meta (formerly Facebook) is creating its own “Metaverse” it is only one of many such projects. There is Meta, the brand, and there is the all-encompassing term, metaverse, which essentially means multiple worlds enabled through augmented and/or fully virtual experiences, where people can interact, work, play and more. Brands, opportunities and partnerships are ripe across this ever-growing ecosystem — many organizations are currently building out similar and novel virtual experiences for work, commerce, entertainment and more, across a spectrum of centralized and decentralized systems. As it stands, the metaverse is what we would say is in its ‘prototyping’ phase. Thus, there is so much yet to come, and infinite possibilities in which we can partake. Metaverse and online communities You can’t have a metaverse without community. Think of the metaverse as just like our real-life public and private spaces, except augmented / fully digital with a game-like, fantastical structure. Metaverses are narrative driven and hosted for connection between people, groups, and organizations. And the glue that holds these worlds together and enables a new epoch of collective experiences is the community aspect of them. We can see large-scale examples of metaverses with the recent explosion of worlds like Decentraland, Sandbox, and Roblox. Worlds like these will only become more extensive and are increasing in number over time. Here we will dive into the role of communities in the metaverse and how the evolution of key community considerations provide emerging opportunities for Brands: Enabling a greater sense of meaning Rewards and recognition Ownership Scope and collaboration Social media to social experience 1. Metaverses can enable a greater sense of meaning In contrast to other technologies, metaverses are unique in the advanced sensory experiences they offer through augmented reality and full immersion VR. Avatars let people connect through body language, expressing themselves in real time. With so many added layers of connection and exploration, they come ever closer to real-world-like interactions, and also open up new opportunities for unexpected, serendipitous, and fantastical moments between users. The more sensory an experience becomes, the more precise our expressions, rich our personal connections and heightened our personal and collective meanings become. As there is less structure engrained in these spaces, engagement also becomes more fluid. A user feels more empowered than ever to connect with others, find information, explore, shop, and so much more. They can choose their adventure, their personal course of action, and even imprint their own meaning into the world by co-creating spaces, experiences, and/or digital products. The possibilities are infinite. A members meaning can become the brush upon the canvas of the metaverse. Brands and communities looking to build here, will start as all communities do, around a sense of collective meaning. Those that have a clear mission, vision, values, value adds, and embrace co-creation across stakeholders, will be the ones equipped to shape this new frontier. These building blocks will allow brands to host spaces where new and shared experiences are created, where meaning making is an iterative process and where the brand and community experience become one. 2. Rewards and recognition will play a big role The Metaverse takes a lot of cues from the gaming world, so it only makes sense that we would see gamification brought into and reimagined in these virtual realities. New methods of immersion and the addition of a third dimension of space allow people to interact with their rewards in entirely new ways — taking gamification to the next level. Alongside gaming cues, emerging tech around blockchain is also looking to expand our definition of what rewards and recognition means, even further. Rewards can be intrinsic in the form of adventure without limitations and the freedom to meet, engage with, learn from, and support others. They can also be extrinsic with unique avatar fashion kits, modifications, abilities, and access. NFTs are currently being used as extrinsic rewards; for example, the Dallas Mavericks gave away a limited edition retired NFT jersey to those who attended a real world game, providing new forms of rewards and potential financial value for fans. Recognition can also be coupled with reward. People who are awarded, who have created or own artifacts can have them showcased in digital spaces — on VR billboards, virtual exhibition spaces, or mirrored mixed-reality spaces that overlay these artifacts over the people and places we collectively frequent. The modes of expressed recognition are as endless as the spaces themselves. Brands that reimagine their recognition and rewards approaches in the context of the metaverse will themselves be rewarded with highly engaged community members who want to share and create together, enjoying the upside with the brand. 3. The question of ownership in the metaverse The Metaverse is emerging within a new wave of technologies that are expanding the idea of ‘ownership’ at a fundamental level. Some metaverse creators, like Meta, take a more centralized approach to control and ownership, while others, like Sandbox and Decentraland are focusing on semi-decentralised models of ownership built on the blockchain.There are even fully open-source metaverses created from decentralized models, such as Momentum. Each of these projects prototyping over the spectrum of current ownership models, exploring this context for members, partners and brands. New ownership models and processes in these spaces will continue to transform how and what we buy, sell, trade, and rent. The full potential, especially for commerce, remains largely untapped. NFTs represent a superb example of this, as they’re an emerging technology that allows there to be a universally visible and acknowledged “owner” of a real or digital item or limited access experience, on the blockchain, that sits outside of governments and borders — something that was hard to achieve before. Think artwork, music, accreditations, and even real estate. Brands looking to build within the metaverse will almost immediately be faced with the question of how centralized or decentralized the metaverse platform of their choice will be. This foundational choice will set the tone of both their role of building and facilitating the experience and the amount of agency members will have to do the same. This answer will also set the groundwork for all possibilities, strategies and forms of engagement going forward, including the ability for members to own what they contribute & create within the experience. Extending ownership to the community, may seem like a far reach for some communities, although those who have taken the leap, have seen whole new communities, products and markets open up to them. Lego has been doing this within their core offering, products & digital experiences, and with their new focus on the metaverse, we may see the true potential of what this can mean. 4. The scope of collaboration and communities The Metaverse with all of its forms and sizes offers seemingly unlimited opportunities for space, resources, access points, and interaction styles for communities to grow and collaborate. These opportunities extend to brand communities, where we may see customers interacting in more immersed, personal ways, provided brands take advantage of these technologies. In day-to-day business, brands are investing into virtual spaces — constructing offices and spaces in the metaverse to complement remote working with colleagues while also creating unique spaces to host collaborations with partners, artists, community members, and the general public. These spaces also provide a new form of connection with a brand and its community from anywhere in the world. We’re already seeing industries, such as the entertainment industry, be one of the first to capitalize on metaverse experiences in more unique and grandiose ways. For example, rapper Travis Scott performed for a virtual audience of over 12 million people live on the gaming platform Fortnite. Leveraging new interaction styles to captivate an existing artist community, while opening up the experience to millions of new potential members/fans. We will likely see other industries follow suit as virtual worlds present new ways to reach audiences, share work, and buy products, at a scale previously unseen. 5. Social media to social experience The future of social media is evolving in big part through the metaverse — especially virtual worlds built on blockchain technology, i.e., where data and ownership travel with an individual from platform to platform rather than being based or owned by a singular platform. Decentralized digital spaces will elevate the current social media dynamic by inviting more ownership, agency, personalisation, collaboration and co-creation. New forms of social media are focused on enabling individual agency, creation, and the power of community dynamics more so than ever— moving from social media to social experiences. The metaverse is anchoring itself as the malleable immersive landscape in which digital social experiences keep evolving. In the future, social experiences and these virtual worlds may look even more like gaming — resembling social structures, ownership, fluidity, and collective action like guilds in large multiplayer online games, only at a larger scale. We can expect the first adopters to be younger generations like Gen Z, who have grown up digitally native. An example we’re seeing in this burgeoning space is that of Roblox — a collective of user-made worlds to connect, co-create, play, and hangout in, with an average of 200 million active monthly users (in 2022). The potential of metaverses Metaverses have shown to bring novel benefits to industries such as fashion (digital fashion), gaming, and corporate collaboration. The first movers in other sectors have a massive opportunity at their fingertips to curate the future of their industries' experiences. The true potential of the metaverse may be seen as AR (augmented reality) emerges and bridges the gap between real and fully digital worlds; accelerating adoption, the flow of interaction, data and business, across this spectrum of work, play and more. Many large organizations like Meta, Valve, and even Apple are already scoping out and building these worlds, as they see their potential. Metaverses in their current stage are akin to prototypes, the equivalent of the early 90s in internet years. At this time, we are lucky to have the opportunity to prototype and intentionally project our missions, visions, values and goals into this space, together shaping the future that is to come (if we so choose). Choose your mission.8KViewsSign in to react to this post3CommentsOracle Cerner’s Kandice Eckhoff: The Pros and Cons of Group Hubs
When Blake asked me to write about how our community manages our groups, I was not sure what to write about. We have had groups for so long at Oracle Cerner that we assumed everyone else does too. My name is Kandice Eckhoff, and I am the Product Manager for our Khoros platform, Oracle Cerner. I have been with the company for almost 12 years in various roles and in my current position for six of those years. uCern is Oracle Cerner's collaboration platform used for client-to-client and client-to-associate collaboration on our products and services, ideation, and assists with ticket deflection by providing answers to client questions. uCern was started in 2009 on the Jive platform, and at that time, we let anyone create a group. This was not a good idea. I would NEVER recommend this for a community. We ended up with groups like "Cat Lovers," "<Insert College Name> Alumni, "New Moms," and the like. While the intention at first was good, just getting people using the community, it quickly got out of control. We eventually locked down group creation. New groups are evaluated by our team and created based on business needs. By then though most of the damage was done, and our clients were complaining about search results pulling in random information or stale content. Group owners would leave the company or change roles, and groups were no longer active or responsibly managed, so we ended up with a lot of those. In 2018 we separated associate-only collaboration to help with some of the confusion. During this time, we archived groups, spaces, projects, etc. with no created content or activity within the prior year. Subsequently, when we started planning our migration to Khoros, we again started an archiving exercise to minimize the amount of data we would bring over. We were able to purge 55% of our groups because of this effort. When we migrated, we brought over 2,254 groups. That number has since grown as we have weekly requests for new ones. The need for them varies: private collaboration for specific clients and associates, aligning groups with our products, and associates realizing the need for collaboration on certain topics or markets we are in. As you can imagine managing this number is difficult. Permissions are a nightmare, community engagement is difficult to monitor accurately, and the removal of the "old stuff" surfaced older stuff clients have found inaccurate. In turn, the cycle of constantly curating our content continues. We are repeatedly told no other Khoros client uses groups the same way we do, hence being the group hub unicorn. So how do we manage this many groups? It is not easy. We are currently looking at archiving more inactive groups and realigning our community structure based on feedback we have received. Ideally, we will end up with 1:1 product groups and a couple hundred non-specific groups that remain for topics, regions, or are role specific. For those of you that do use group hubs and now have access to manage the group role permissions at the global level…you're welcome. 🙂 That was done at our request due to the number of groups we have and the time it took to update any changes since we had to do them manually. Thankfully, we have a team that can automate processes, and we were able to minimize the time spent making manual updates while Khoros built the functionality we needed. Here is my advice to any community managers planning to implement group hubs: Have a plan - I know it seems like an easy decision, but you need a plan for who will handle creating the groups. Once they are created, who will monitor or curate the content? How do the groups fit into your community structure? Will you have groups at the global level, within categories, or a combination of the two? Plan for quarterly, semi-annual, or at the very least annual archiving of inactive groups. If you are the community manager, the responsibility to monitor the ENTIRE community should not fall on you. If someone requests a group, they need to own all the group responsibilities. That includes answering questions, finding the answer if they do not know it, posting at least weekly to keep the group active, and making sure group ownership is updated as needed. Have a group dedicated to just group owners so you can communicate with them. Take a look at the resources below to learn more about Group Hubs in Khoros Communities Group Hubs Overview and Use Cases About Group Hubs Group Hubs Onboarding Videos Group Hubs Best PracticesViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsExploring AI Use Cases in Khoros Communities
Welcome to the Khoros view on our future with AI! It really is an exciting time for online communities in many ways, but we are just at the beginning of exploring how this technology will impact how we work in communities. At Khoros, we have been hard at work on Aurora, our next generation of online communities. While we have focused on our new technological foundation, natural language processing, and large language models have come to dominate the conversation in tech. Naturally, this has led to plenty of exciting discussions about the future of online communities. With Aurora, we are focused heavily on developing robust API’s, decoupling the UI from the backend of our platform, and building modern app experiences that will enable us to quickly tap into future trends in technology, whether it’s the metaverse or generative AI. What is Khoros working on now to further innovation in this space? There is much to explore with generative AI as it is still very new, but we will experiment and are planning on incorporating new technologies into our products. “One of the biggest initiatives we are working on is an orchestration layer for customer engagement that sits between these services and direct engagement with users offering the ability to control the use and workflows of that engagement. Whether it's easily swapping or testing new services, or putting the technology in front of humans to experiment and refine, we believe this will be a critical component of enabling and controlling the many use cases that these services make available.” - Nick Hill, VP, Product - Communities at Khoros There are some focus areas for us in product development with the application of generative and conversational AI. The most notable is the relationship between community-generated content and self-service / discovery. Five out of the top 10 sites on the internet today are communities of peer content. Communities rely heavily on SEO to index this content and on searches to drive traffic to the community. Generative AI offers a new approach - but it's still heavily reliant on the continuous sharing of user generated content. With the incredible scale of 18M new posts per year and hundreds of millions of solution views across all Khoros communities, the fundamental need for experts to share, and the need for others to find is unchanged. However, the approach of crawling and links will shift to summarization and intelligence responses. Some exciting new capabilities will be to build on your query, or to generate questions where knowledge is insufficient. Another opportunity we have is exploring the improvements for content moderation. Generative AI tools can help us better caption and classify images and text, which reduces the need for manual moderation and helps improve moderator mental health. This addresses spam and inappropriate content in new ways and adds much more to the moderator's set of tools. However, we’ve also seen ChatGPT, among other Generative AI tools, used to increase human-like content spam in communities for nefarious purposes. Consequently, focus on these tools and implementation of guardrails around these tools is paramount to the success of community moderation going forward. Content is key in every community, and the focus should absolutely remain on human-created content. When it comes to the content generation space, brand communities are often specialized knowledge sources and their existing content can help fuel creation of new content such as guides on how to use a product, marketing materials about use cases, value stories, etc. The usage of these tools depends on the expertise and validation of humans. These tools can be leveraged for suggestions on how to improve the content, tag your content for search optimization, and help guide you to follow the community guidelines. Generative AI is better suited to aiding humans in the creation of valuable content versus being used solely to generate the content—especially given how prone to errors it can be at this point. Personalization on the user front is another very important use case to consider as we work toward leveraging AI tools to surface content relevant to the users’ interests. Beyond the end-user impact, we’re also exploring the potential impacts in the community management front. Managing relationships with your community is key to your success. We see possibilities to apply AI to the user onboarding process as well as tracking and bolstering engagement with your most active, loyal users. Imagine being able to derive analytics, insights, and trends all relevant to your query. This knowledge would give you more power in determining your community strategy and help direct you toward your next steps. Understanding your users’ sentiments and challenges, along with surfacing the most impactful tasks you can focus on, will be key to supporting community management in the future. Additionally, we are exploring support use cases with agents. Agent efficiency is a key metric for any enterprise. Therefore, we are seeking to combine knowledge in the community with previous agent responses to better assist agents in resolving cases quickly and accurately. We are investigating suggested responses, incorporating community knowledge to better assist agents, and exploring the ability to summarize a case and transform it into reusable knowledge that could be posted back to the community for self-service. For example, in a marketing use case, we are investigating how to generate content of different lengths and keywords to publish across channels, including recommendations on how to tag and when to publish. We’ve been working on automation, text classification and NLP for a long time and they are key parts of many of our solutions. With that existing framework, there is plenty of opportunity at Khoros to continue to integrate AI technologies in our products, and we are very excited to work to include these tools in Communities. The importance of having a platform, generating content, and strong community experiences focused on engagement with extensible platforms like analytics, metrics API, and firehose all provide us with the right foundation to ensure brand communities and user-generated content continue to play a leading role in the future customer experience. What are you most looking forward to seeing happen in the community platform? What are some challenges you are facing today? Let us know your thoughts in the comments! Join the discussion on these great topics in the Atlas community! Looking into ChatGPT, what types of use cases/ideas are you coming up with? - StanGromer We built a bunch of stuff - Unified search & Zendesk, ChatGPT, and Coda.IO integrations - StanGromer Impacts on Community from AI Chat GPT - akloepfer Check out our podcast episode covering The Future of Conversational AI, with Khoros’ Gijs Van De Nieuwegiessen.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsIt's Time To Update Your Thoughts on A.I.
Humans built Artificial Intelligence to reduce mental work. Khoros built A.I. to reduce customer and agent mental stress. Walking through the halls of history, humans' ideas of what the future might look like is often laughable at best. Most examples show the brightest mind of our past missed the mark by a mile. Once in a blue moon, history's forward-thinking minds make shockingly accurate predictions about how the future will look. Take a look at the painting series ‘En L’an 2000’ (In the year 2000). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons In the late 1800s, a group of French painters was asked to envision what the year 2000 might look like. While we might not have flying firefighters or underwater lawn games, they absolutely nailed one key aspect of our modern world, automation. To be fair, there was no possible way that those old french painters could have imagined how small technology would be or the invention of the computer. Credit where credit is due, their mechanical cleaning robot is oddly similar to what currently sits in roughly 17 million households. A simple artificially intelligent cleaning hockey puck called the Roomba. What exactly is A.I.? Shouted in the news as a frightening new buzzword and strewn throughout pop culture, from Skynet in the Terminator series or HAL 3000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, artificial intelligence has developed an unsettling otherness. This narrative does make for a great science fiction horror story, but it’s a bit off course from the truth. In the simplest terms, A.I. is nothing more than a computer program that completes tasks commonly suited for humans. Take one of the newest models of the Roomba, for example. To those who own one, it can seem like magic that the way it can map out a room and keep your floors clean enough to eat off them. Behind the scenes is an impressive piece of A.I. born out of a simple problem. In previous models of the Roomba, the tiny cleaning robot would spread pet accidents around the house because it couldn’t detect said pet accident. To any human tasked with cleaning a floor, avoiding a messy pet would be child's play. For the designers at Roomba’s parent company, iRobot, this problem was a computer engineering nightmare. How do you teach a robot to see, understand, and avoid pet accidents? A.I. was the most straightforward answer to solve this question. How exactly the iRobot team programmed their A.I. is a closely guarded secret. They were willing to tell CNN that it has to do a lot with image recognition algorithms. The scope of how these algorithms work is sadly beyond the breadth of a single article; however, the layman’s explanation would follow along the lines of feeding an algorithm millions of photos, and testing which version of the algorithm can identify your photos correctly and then keeping that version. But A.I. is brand new. Right? The version of A.I. that we use today is brand new in a manner of speaking. Some versions of A.I. exist in everything from vacuum cleaners to phones, computers, cars, and even your thermostat. Surprisingly, the idea for A.I. goes back to the early 1900s when computers first came to fruition. In his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, mathematician and early computer scientist Alan Turing developed an 'imitation game' for computers. A test to see if a computer could trick a human into believing the computer was a fellow human. In Turing's mind, if humans could store information and then apply that information to solve new problems, why couldn’t machines. The main reason that A.I. is seemingly popping out of nowhere today was the sheer cost of computing. According to the Economist, In 1956, the cost of a single megabyte of data (roughly one minute of MP3 song data) was $99,250 when adjusted for inflation. In 2019 that same one minute of song data cost approximately $0.00002. There’s a lot more to A.I. than fancy robots. As mentioned above, the technologically infused world of today is full of A.I.: Algrothims, deep learning programs, and A.I. running every social channel, streaming website, or service. Airline A.I. programs can detect at which max price point a customer will buy a ticket, and even IBM's Watson doctor program is helping to detect lung cancer in humans. While this is all well and good, one A.I. system has gotten quite the bad rap. The customer support chatbot or automated voice. It’s stuck into an endless cycle of miscommunication jokes in pop culture. This does make for great content but it is far from reality. Today's chatbots are so powerful that Vice News reported in early 2022 that people fell in love with Repilka’s A.I.-powered digital friend chatbot. These chatbots are so prevalent that everyone from banking care systems to yoga mat companies is using chatbots and A.I. in several ways to reduce the time from customer question to answer. At least that’s the theory. Some brands use these chatbots exceptionally well. For example, after six questions in Instagram DMs, you’ll be sent to either the brand's community page, receive your answer via chatbot, or connect directly to a live agent. Others use chatbots to make you answer the same six questions and leave you no closer to a solution. Go with Flow.ai to improve your care system. For many, the use of more advanced technology, especially those built with A.I., is a change not worth making. It costs money to retrain staff, and have several cross-organizational meetings internally, which takes time and money, and the saying “if it's not broken, don’t fix it” is a saying for a reason. The question is, is it still profitable to lose customers repeatedly for poor customer care? Is it the best practice to lag behind and spend money on powerful tools only to not use them to their full potential? One customer here at Khoros cited a 200%+ increase in ROI after implementing custom Khoros’ bots into their Care suite. The most likely reason for this is simple; happy customers. Happy customers will spend more with brands and recommend those brands to people in their social circles. Take a fictional but all too common situation of a customer needing a simple exchange form for a pair of sneakers they bought on a brand’s Instagram page. It’s most likely that this customer is in a younger, more tech-savvy demographic. All they need is a page link to send their sneakers back for an exchange. They are not going to care if they get that link from a chatbot or a self-service page. An important question to ask is, what is the likelihood of that customer continuing to use and recommend that sneaker brand if they can get an answer to their question in under 1 minute? How are the brand’s agents going to perform when they can focus on more complex customer calls and not a customer just looking for a single form? Powerful doesn’t mean one size fits all. Now, the idea of using the full suite of Khoros Care with Flow.ai for every brand is wildly shortsighted. Every brand is different in size, needs, and customer demographics. Some brands have younger, tech-savvy customers who would much rather use self-service, and some brands will have customers still paying their bills with paper checks and would love to just be connected to a live agent. No matter which customer demographic is using a brand’s Care system, it is wise to use Chatbots and Flow.ai to get your customers routed as quickly as possible. If a customer can get their answer in 3-4 questions with the bot, that customer will be pleased. Being mindful of your chatbot routing will be vital in utilizing their abilities. While increasing your call deflection could be appropriate for simple questions, relying on chatbots to answer every customer question could leave your customers frustrated, without an answer, and possibly looking at other options. Before implementing any care system, take a moment to discover exactly who your customers are, and how to best route your chatbots to provide the best possible service. Now that you have a broad understanding of A.I. and Khoros Flow, expand your knowledge and stay up to date on the latest in innovation by heading over to the Khoros resources below. Preview Flow.ai and the onboarding experience by taking a look at our crash course video series Get acquainted with our Flow.ai getting started series Subscribe to the Care Blog for more best practices, success stories, and product roll-outs. Khoros' Introduction to Agent Assist webinarViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsInstagram DMs: A Channel Customers Love
Trust us. You don't want to overlook Instagram. If your brand is wondering whether they should turn on Instagram DMs via Khoros, first ask yourself, "Are your customers using Instagram?" "Many of our clients are on Instagram and we needed to find a more efficient way to respond to the hundreds of inquiries we receive daily. The Messenger API for Instagram has enabled our team to easily resolve queries received via Instagram messaging, comments and story mentions within the platform, providing a seamless experience for the client.” - Hilary Lin, Sephora Source: developers.facebook.com Give customers the private support they need in the channels they love. A key factor in driving positive “voice of customer” brand loyalty and increasing the levels of customer satisfaction is having a plan and process in place to help customers from the get go. A simple IG customer Care playbook will make a massive difference in turning casual shoppers into customers for life. Consider the opportunities that Instagram DM provides to help your customer where and when they need it. If someone is following your brand, they often expect to be considered a customer; this offers an opportunity for personalized support. If you already know they are a customer, they expect you to handle any needs in any channel they are on, especially customer service. Providing excellent support, both publicly and privately is a great way to build loyalty and brand awareness. Whether it’s text, photos, videos, or voice chats, Instagram DM’s “end-to-end” encryption means no one but your care team and your customer can see any data shared. This attention to the protection of privacy not only improves customer loyalty and trust, but ensures your data is equally secure. Customers want to feel valued and are more likely to promote and advocate brands that offer support in their channel of choice. The various forms of social media draw people in from all walks of life for meaningful connection. From liking and commenting on their friend’s vacation to shopping with your brand, Instagram DMs through Khoros could be the missing puzzle piece to providing a customer experience that genuinely fosters engagement. Instagram DM provides opportunities to "get to know your customer" beyond Care. If someone follows your brand, you already know they have some interest. If they have already purchased from you, you can access their style. If you follow them back, it is easy to see what interests they have to offer a personalized buying experience. Why not slide onto their DM and give them a discount code for their next purchase? Based on what you have observed about their interests and past purchases, you could even set up a new marketing strategy for social media with Instagram at its core. With great information comes great responsibility. While you can access all of your customers' public Instagram data at the touch of a button, it’s important to balance your outreach with your customers. While some customers may love to have your brand’s DMs flash in their inbox, some customers might be turned off of your brand. Try to avoid sending a mass DM to all your customers. A better strategy could be using the current customer data to send personalized DMs to only your most engaged customers. Depending on your brand, use call deflection strategies to get your customers the support they need as quickly as possible. Limit the amount of personal data you use to send messages to your customers. Too personalized of a message can easily dissuade a customer as it could increase engagement. In simple terms, everyone loves when their friend remembers their birthday. Few people love when their friend knows how they organize their sock drawer. Support customers in Instagram DMs, even if you have a small Care team. Instagram direct messages (IG DM) could be considered less than ideal for your customer support systems from a business perspective. However, your customers are already liking, sharing, and posting about your brand in IG. If you plan on conducting any manner of business on IG, then chances are that your customer buying your product or service on Instagram will also seek customer support in the same place. At first glance, a tidal wave of volume may overload your team’s capacity to provide meaningful support. Despite the initial frenzy of a thousand messages, a beautifully simple trend will emerge via Khoros. Across your existing channels, you will discover that similar questions or brand topics repeat themselves. While utilizing the right tools for your brand, even a small care team can handle a thousand requests for support when the same six questions constantly repeat themselves. Your agent experience goes a long way in creating a positive customer experience. Having tools and processes for agents to quickly find and use answers will make it much easier for your customers and create a more positive experience! Creating that positive experience can often be achieved via automation, bots and suggested responses, and an online Community. Online Communities with public knowledge bases can significantly improve customer self-service and agent workload! Change is only as complicated as you make it. No matter what it is, change can be a complicated process. The old saying, “if it’s not broken, then don’t fix it” can ring especially true here. Maybe your customer care team is new to Instagram or maybe it’s only been a few months since your brand as a whole created an Instagram page. It can be unnerving to change a working system and adding Instagram to your care system is a prime example of this. However, our world of customer engagement is changing and Khoros is here to help you change with it. Using Change Management planning and optimizing existing processes, you can quickly begin to ramp up the tasks necessary to take on this new channel with as few change friction points as possible. Take advantage of your Khoros tools such as throttling, welcome responses, and priorities to reduce the workload on your Care teams. New to private messaging? Look at your public messages for the best initial strategy. With Khoros's analytics capabilities, you can provide personalized service while measuring response times to derive actionable insights. Based on your other social channels, you can anticipate the types of conversations your current user base will start and will be able to prepare your agents accordingly. It is always a solid goal to prepare your agents for predicted volume, the actual amount of predicted volume for IG DM’s could go one of two ways. It will most likely follow the amount of volume in your channels. However, for a clearer picture examine the number of your engaged IG customers to better predict volume for your IG Care channel. Whether conversations are via social, community, or call center, you can quickly determine your top call drivers and high-priority conversations. Based on this, you can begin to create your SLAs. You will soon notice that customers who receive accurate answers on the first try will create positive sentiment and improve CSAT. This, in turn, makes for a more positive agent experience. You're ready for Instagram DM! Be sure you've reviewed these necessary resources before authenticating an Instagram account. Instagram Messaging API: Phased Access Instagram Messaging: Access Controls Instagram Authentication Checklist Get a jump start on configuring your team flow. Khoros expert and product coach Lindsey will guide you through the various ways to use this new channel in Khoros the most effective way possible. If you are using Marketing Inbox for responding, the following video will help you enable the Instagram Direct Message Channel, add streams, and create Topic queues for Instagram Direct Message.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThe High Cost of Low Agent Retention + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION
Don't have time to read? Check out this audio version of our blog, also found on your favorite podcast platform! Losing and hiring frontline customer care agents can cost more than a few lost customers Can you afford to lose more? Employee attrition is a natural part of any business cycle. People get promoted, change fields or industries, or have any number of personal reasons to take a break from working. Limited attrition can refresh the organization with fresh ideas, backgrounds, and culture. While the 24-hour news cycle is yelling from the rooftops that the "great resignation" is upon us, research data is showing that it's actually beginning to slow. As Marketplace puts it in a July 2022 article: "Now, Pollak [Julia Pollak, chief economist at job site Zip Recruiter] said, the mood might be shifting. While the job market is still quite strong, unemployment claims have crept up and we've seen layoffs in the mortgage industry. Quits fell 41% in real estate and rental and leasing, and that is a sign that workers in that industry, they're going to hang tight and keep the jobs that they've got," she said. This article goes on to explain that people quitting in mass shines a light on two potential key factors. First, there are other more desirable and obtainable jobs opening up. Second, the jobs they currently have are undesirable enough to warrant rolling the dice on the job market. Regarding customer care, recent trends show that agents often find themselves in the latter half of the two options. When your organization is experiencing soaring attrition rates, everything will be affected from NPS scores, employee performance, and your bottom line. Before simply accepting the status quo of hiring, training, resignation, and repeating, look at your customer support agent experience for an in-depth exploration of the who, what, and why agent attrition is a critical factor affecting your organization's cash flow. Here One Day, Resigning the Next Customer care agents are absolutely vital to any business, no matter what industry your organization finds itself in. They handle everything from missing order forms to repeating the same common questions repeatedly for unhappy customers. Even though care agents are part of the business skeleton that enables all matters of customer services, these agents are leaving in record numbers. Salesforce reported that over 70% of care agents have considered leaving their jobs within the past six months. Furthermore, specific contact centers are reporting up to a 100% turnover rate. According to The Center for American Progress replacing an agent can cost roughly 20% of the leaving agent's salary in training and lost time. What does this mean in practical terms? The contact center with a 100% turnover rate that employs 30 people at $33,000 a year will cost roughly $200,000 annually to replace agents alone. The Reality of Working as a Care Agent The C-suite of any organization generally has a vision of the future and stands behind the company's vision statement and purpose. For better or worse, the vast majority of customer care agents will be standing behind their paycheck and not much else. Of course, agents can enjoy their work and take pride in your company, but you have to remember that practically zero care agents believe they will change the world by answering customer questions. This provides context to the top three reasons care agents are hanging up their headsets for good in record numbers. 1. Your customers are emotionally attacking your agents Let's introduce every care agent's worst nightmare, an irate customer that seems incapable of listening to reason. While dealing with these types of customers is, without a doubt, a cornerstone of the job. Unfortunately, these often hostile interactions leave lasting impacts on care agents. Clinical psychologist Guy Winch explains this unfortunately common occurrence in a Psychology Today write-up, saying: "Customer service employees often average up to 10 hostile calls a day and must tolerate personal insults, screaming, cursing, and even threats—regularly. They are required to stay on the line and 'salvage' even the most hostile calls." Again, this is a part of the job, but it is difficult for anyone to "turn off" work after several emotionally taxing support calls. Being called every curse word under the sun or being told that an angry stranger will find where you live or worse will leave a painful stain on your mind. After work, as your agents sit at their favorite watering hole or social gathering, they will undoubtedly question if the abuse is worth their average of $33,000 a year. 2. Burnout is an understatement Khoros' own reporting shows that most contact centers plan on having 2 - 4% absenteeism rates every day. Before even logging into their computers, your care agents are ladened with higher volume and a more stressful day. This absenteeism rate automatically means that a standard work schedule of seven to eight hours has become nine or ten and sometimes up to 12 hours. It doesn't matter if you love or despise your job; having to work additional hours unexpectedly almost always leads to extra stress and work-life balance problems, leading to higher attrition rates and more money wasted. This inconsistency flows both ways. If the agent lead schedules more than necessary, expecting agents to call out, but everyone shows up, the lead will send some people home to save on labor costs. This leads to frustration, exhaustion, and loss of hours they often desperately need for the agent. 3. Increasing pay only solves one piece of the puzzle Across customer support, agent pay has been rising, with some organizations paying up to $30 an hour. However, agent attrition rates haven't fallen much despite these pay increases. To attempt to get to the bottom of this phenomenon, Khoros reached out to former customer support agents on the biases of anonymity to protect both agents and former employers. The emerging trends the former agents reported parroted the reasons mentioned above, but one question stood out in particular. When asked what it would require for them to return to a customer support role, the overwhelming answer was nothing unless hostile customers received some form of discipline, heavily increased pay, clear career development, and set working hours with generous time off and benefits. The Human Element Drives the Bottom Line To some, the reality of the customer agent experience is nothing more than its job description. At the end of the day, this is an entry-level, customer-facing role. There will always be frustrating customers, customer support budgets can only expend so much, and for the majority of people, this is only a stepping stone on their career path. While all of this might be true, all current data shows that you have to focus on the reality for your agents. The actual agent experience is costing businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars that could improve the business for both customers and agents. Agents are frequently emotionally abused, asked to work unpredictable hours, and face disproportionate stress levels. This decreases their willingness to perform and gives them great reasons to resign. Once your agent reaches their tipping point, it will cost more than just the price of replacing that agent. Your customers will have longer wait times to speak with an agent, which decreases your NPS. Your remaining agents will have to take on more responsibilities and volume, which adds to their stress and attrition. The level of detail in your customer care will decrease, further dropping your NPS scores. Former agents will have an unsavory view of working for your company and, if motivated enough, will take their experience to employer review websites like Glassdoor and Indeed. Now, based on one single employee's experience, you have the potential to decrease customer NPS, satisfaction, sales, reputation, and future care agents. No matter how anyone could cut this, this is losing money on all fronts. Ways to Save a Boat Load of Cash With Khoros The reality of working as a customer support agent and the financial implications have been established; what is there left to do? Can your organization maintain functional support channels if customer and employee churn runs at an unsustainable level? The simple answer is to change how your care organization operates fundamentally. Khoros is here to help you make an effective transition. Expectations Everyone touts the importance of "setting expectations.". It's a nice sound-bite to fill space during events, but few are offering explicit examples of what this might mean. In customer care and support, the customer expects that they get the answer to their questions or concerns. Always. However, the expectations for the agent are a bit more challenging to pin down. It's fair to say that for the agent, it's expected that they will get the nice, neutral, and downright nasty customers in need of support. What's not made crystal clear is how the agent's leadership team or the organization will support the agent. Being upfront with how the business or leadership will help the agent with training, working environment, what level or style of work they expect, and others will go miles to limit agent attrition and, in turn, be able to invest in your customer care. Khoros is able to make those expectations crystal clear before your agents even log in to the Care suite. Improved technology and limiting live agent contact Khoros reporting shows that almost every time a customer needs some form of customer support, they rarely care where or how they receive their answers. This is the crux of what can make or break a contact center's NPS. For some contact centers, agents are tasked with answering every question, and every customer will be routed to a live agent. If the customer needs more serious assistance, it makes perfect sense to route to a live agent. For a customer with simple questions about finding a tracking number or opening hours, it could frustrate both the customer and the agent, and your agent bandwidth is now plugged with an unnecessary bottleneck. This is where the Khoros platform comes into play. Our care suite runs chatbots, auto-fill data gathering, and even context-based routing for calls. While context-based routing sounds fancier than it is, this one tactic is a robust tool for limiting attrition and improving NPS across the board. With context-based routing, almost every potential customer interaction will go to the right place. Suppose it's a simple question such as opening hours. In that case, Khoros' chatbots can understand the question, direct the customer to the appropriate site, or even answer the question directly in the app. If your organization utilizes a community and the customer question is more involved than the chatbots could reasonably answer, this context-based routing could direct the customer to a common question that other customers could easily answer. Lastly, context-based routing could go several ways regarding a more serious problem. If the customer's stated problem comes with a neutral or positive connotation, you could happily route the conversation to a front-line agent. However, suppose the customer's stated problem clearly shows anger or even hostility, to save your agent's well-being and keep your NPS sailing high. In that case, this context-based routing can pass up this hostile customer's contact to someone on the leadership team freeing up the front-line agents to deal with fewer aggressive customers and provide better service than run to the break room to choke back tears. Bottom Line: Humans are notoriously bad at long-term planning. Exactly why it is a fascinating mystery still being studied today. One possible reason is what researchers call "Hyperbolic Discounting," or when given two similar rewards or benefits, people generally take the reward that pays out sooner. What does hyperbolic discounting have to do with contact centers and agent attrition? In short, everything. Yes, for the leadership, it is more cost-effective to not invest in new technology or agent health as it will save a small amount of money each month. However, the data proves that no matter how much a contact center saves in the short term, they lose a far more significant amount in the long term in budgets, NPS, sales, agents, and reputation. Before you decide to do anything, ask yourself and your team, are the short-term savings worth the long-term costs? To further your knowledge and better plan your agent retention strategy, please visit these resources below: 5 ways to limit attrition | Khoros Khoros's expert opinion on how to make meaningful change Modernizing your digital care webinar Khoros' Introduction to Agent Assist webinar Real World Case Study | Samsung Benelux If you're interested in learning about a more personalized Care setup, leave a comment below, and we'll help you get connected to the Khoros account team!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsGreat SEO Builds Community, and Great Community Improves SEO
Plant the seeds of a flourishing community with SEO. Just because you built it in the digital world doesn't necessarily mean the people will come. Communities across the digital sphere are dependent on the life-blood of traffic. A thriving community is often based solely on user traffic. Traffic can come from various sources: Twitter ads, Facebook posts, in-app guides, word of mouth, etc. But thanks to the infinite knowledge of Google, chances are high that your customer found your community page through a Google search. According to the website world wide web size, there are roughly 20 billion web pages searchable by google. For reference, if every page contained an average of 500 words, and someone was to read every page at an average pace, it would take them 170,000 years to read every page. 170,000 years ago, humans had only recently started to wear clothing. It's important to remember that roughly 250,000 new web pages are created every 24 hours, according to siteefy. SEO is one of the most rudimentary and genius solutions to cut through billions of pages in this information-dense world. SEO can supercharge your community Ask any digital marketer, social media manager, or even the garage band blogger about increasing web traffic, and you'll hear those three sacred letters; SEO. Search engine optimization is equally complex and simple. There are two types of SEO, on-site SEO and off-site SEO (aka link building.). On-Site SEO is search engine friendly, optimized titles, good descriptions, well-formatted URLs, correct use of H1, H2, and images, SEO titles & descriptions. Off-site SEO refers to actions taken off your website to boost traffic. It could be people sharing your website or getting referred from social media or other services. This aspect of SEO can be slightly troublesome as you will not have the same level of control compared to on-site. However, when it comes to community SEO, if you have done everything right, your users and customers should be working as off-site influencers for your brand. There are a plethora of various SEO strategies in the wild. A great place to start is our best practices article hub here. User content drive SEO more than branding. Community SEO is a massive game of push and pull. You need good SEO to draw new users into your community, and you need dedicated users in your community to continue driving SEO. This idea might feel clear as mud, so here's our Khoros resident SEO and community expert Allison Fasching on why community SEO is vital to success. "The inherent properties of an online community contribute directly to higher SEO value, but it's imperative to understand how search engines work and ensure you are configuring your community in the most efficient way to improve SEO continually. For example, user-created content gets a much higher SEO value than brand-created content because it's a more natural language and happens more often. In other words, when users create content, search engines give that content a higher value than when brands post content." This doesn't mean that brands shouldn't be posting any brand content. That could be a misstep as it's essential to balance the workload on users and brand managers to keep a community alive and thriving. The important thing to remember is that user content will naturally receive a higher SEO score, but that doesn't mean that branded content can't or won't receive an equally high SEO score. ROI's of high SEO scores on communities. Traffic drives sales, questions, answers, and authentic customer engagement with your brand. Almost every aspect of your digital engagement strategy could be improved by having a successful community. Thanks to SEO, customer care agents' volume could be reduced by having engaged community users answering frequently asked questions. The sales team will most likely see massive increases due to community traffic. At first glance, this sale's aspect doesn't make sense. How would high user traffic mean higher sales? The answer could be attributed to basic human nature. Digital or in-person, a community is simply humans connecting around a shared interest or problem. Highly engaged users in a given digital community will recommend various products, generate buzz around a new product or service release, and act as "micro-influencers" for your brand. People will sell for you, and your SEO score will improve as more people talk about your brand online. The bottom line SEO is tricky; the old model of simply spamming keywords for search engines to pick up on is ending. Scores are more complicated, and users are becoming warier of paid placement for brands. Using your community to improve your SEO and using your SEO score to build your community is becoming more vital and, interestingly, more complicated than ever, but Khoros is here to guide you! Now that you know the importance of community SEO, continue your knowledge with these Khoros resources. Best Practices for building SEO in Communities FAQ's on Khoros SEO Connect with Allison Fasching for expert adviceViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsThought Leadership + Outcome Keywords: A New CX Initiative
A common request from Khoros Customers is having more insightful content to drive future strategies in an ever-changing industry. We've heard loud and clear in our recent NPS surveys that you're interested in more thought leadership. The Khoros Customer Engagement team has been hard at work developing content with a fresh outlook on modern solutions and paths to follow as you continue your journey. With these updates, we aim to help you transform theory into practice using the Khoros platform. We will continue to strive to deliver you the insights you need to succeed. Thought Leadership Blogs and Label Outcome Keyword Links Additional Label Tips First, I’d like to highlight our recent content development and distribution initiative. A tool can be used to the extent of the wielder's knowledge. The Khoros platform is no different. The powerful capabilities Khoros offers, paired with the rapid and unexpected shifts in the industry, can feel like going on a fool’s errand trying to stay on top of everything. This is why we launched our unique human-focused thought leadership content to cut through the clutter of vague social tips and misguided strategies. We’re here to bring you the who, what, when, where, and most importantly, the why with all things customer experience and Khoros. We want to ensure Atlas offers our members comprehensive thought leadership and unique content with your future strategy in mind. Stay updated when new content is published by subscribing to the new Thought Leadership Label in the Khoros Insights Blog. You’ll also notice new Outcome Keywords below the labels. Here's how you use these. Labels house the type of content, or in other words - if it’s a thought leadership article, a product update, best practices, or webinars. The Outcome Keywords are used to give you a sneak peek at what that specific content will highlight. For example, an article about how to use TikTok more effectively would fall under the thought leadership label, but its keyword - engagement rate - would highlight the article's focus. You could then explore all other Atlas content that focuses on engagement rate whether it’s an article, forum, webinar, or podcast. In partnership with the Atlas and Enablement teams, we’ve defined all Best Practices and Thought Leadership blogs related to actionable outcomes and included Keywords to help pull together similar content. Each dropdown below contains some outcome keywords that link to similarly tagged content for each Khoros solution. We hope this helps the discoverability of helpful content! Outcome Keywords Marketing Care Community CXI Active platform users Agent Handle Time Accepted Answers AHT reduction Approved and rejected messages Agent Performance Answers Found CSAT Approved and rejected posts Conversations Handled Community Revenue Customer Friction Points CSAT Cost Per Contact CommCSAT Deflection Rate Decreased publishing time CSAT Deflection Rate Increase Efficiency Engagement Growth Deflection rate Ideas submitted Increased Revenue Followers Engagement Rate Minutes to First Reply NPS Increased Revenue Incoming Conversations Engaged CommNPS Reducing Repeat Contacts NPS NPS Posts Posts published natively Resolution rate Resolution Rate Reach SLA Met Returning Users Sentiment TAR Revenue per Member Time saved to pull reports Sentiment SEO Traffic Solution Views Visitors Registering Visits Atlas is more than a website. It’s a living, breathing community full of webinars, forums, articles, podcasts, and thousands of members looking to advance their knowledge. Due to Atlas's impressive size, we recommend utilizing labels listed beneath blog titles to customize your automated Atlas knowledge flow and explore the content most relevant to you and your organization’s goals. Our community labels have been set up to describe the type of information you can expect from blogs, and clicking on them leads to other similar blogs. We recommend subscribing to Podcast, Industry Trends, and Highlights in the Khoros Insights area, as well as Best Practices and Product updates for your Solutions. Marketing Blog Product Updates Best Practices Care Blog Product Updates Best Practices Communities Blog Product Updates Best Practices CXI Blog Best Practices How about letting us do the work finding resources for you? Sign up for Customer Engagement emails to receive blogs and webinars curated for you directly to your email!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAn Interview For Change: Khoros Expert Opinion on Change Management
Change management is complex and could make or break changes in process or strategy. That's why we spoke with our Khoros expert on change management to get the run down on making a refreshing and powerful change. The half-life of knowledge in any given field dictates how long knowledge remains accurate before proven incorrect or outdated. In business, once the half-life of knowledge reaches its tipping point, radical change is often necessary to continue being relevant and functional as an organization. For many businesses and organizations, once they develop a functional strategy, it can prove almost impossible to change to a new strategy, even if the new direction would be more effective or cut costs. We spoke with Ramona Maher Khoros' Change Management Director, to gather a more informed understanding of how to make a change in your organization and, most importantly, why it can be so challenging to execute. Parker J. Hicks: Ramona, can you tell me about your background in change management and your professional life? Ramona Maher: Sure. So I have been a change management practitioner formally for a little over eight years. Before this, I was a people manager; I was an IT Director, I was a business analyst, and I was a project manager. I was in customer service, operations, and technology teams, I did front office and back-office roles. I've been around. A handful of years ago, the then- CIO at the company where I worked introduced the idea of a change management team. He said I believe change management is a discipline that we can apply in the IT world to solve some of the ongoing problems that we have connecting with our constituencies and providing them with what they want and need. He very smartly made ownership combined operations and IT team so that we got really into lockstep. I jumped at the chance to become a change management practitioner and I haven't looked back since. I joined Khoros a few years ago when they foresaw their customers' need for change management expertise in this space and created my position. Why is it so hard for businesses to make changes, regardless of having a change manager or not? So there are a lot of different ways we could answer that question. I've observed a level of disconnect between the people who are making decisions and the people who have to adopt new behaviors to fulfill the goals of those decisions. Without understanding the reasons behind a change, it's hard for anyone to commit to new behavior. In that case, in your experience, why is change so hard for humans? Because human circumstance changes day to day, minute to minute, and one size never fits all. As you know, what works today may not work tomorrow. There are changes that I observe, but they are not the only changes happening in a person's life and world. Maybe I need you to click a button, for example, but if you are also dealing with the fact that your hand keeps cramping up every time you try to click a button, I would have no way of knowing that. Or if you're trying to deal with a boss who sits right over you're shoulder every day, that wants me to click this other button, I'm going to do what they tell me. You know, it's really understanding the complex landscape and all of the possible ways that a person could be distracted from achieving the new desired behavior consistently. One of my big stories to explain this is that I'd love to lose 20 pounds. But it turns out I really love the reward of sitting on the couch watching TV with my husband and snuggling with the dogs, more than I love the choice of getting up to go exercise. There's this sort of thing, and there are decisions happening in the human brain multiple times per second. How do you garner that executive support to spend more money, and take bigger risks, when the requested change comes from the bottom up? At the individual level. It's about finding out what the person cares about and how what you're proposing will affect what they care about. You have to understand the motivations, desires, and goals of those people you're trying to convince. Generally, executives care about EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), you know, whereas generally, contact center agents don't know what that means. Understanding the typical personas of the groups that you're working with really helps understand what to focus on for successful change in a business setting. How do you get those front-line or customer-facing workers to adopt such heavy changes in an executive or leadership role? In my experience, you need to be transparent with people about the things they don't like that will change as well as the things they don't like that isn't going to change. If you work as an agent in a call center, it's still going to suck to deal with irate customers. The job is to deal with customers of all varieties, including the difficult ones. Having a new piece of software isn't going to change that. However, if there is a chance that you answer fewer of the redundant questions that are repeated to you 57,000 times a day because we're introducing a bot, that's going to be appealing. For each change, you have to help people understand who you're asking to do something different and what's in it for them. How are you equipping them, and what does it mean to them if they are or aren't successful?. If there's nothing more than to keep their job great, run with that. Don't sell it to them as it's going to change the world because that's not the case for them. Accurate and honest communication from a trusted source is a vital change management lever. It's one of the things we rely on to facilitate effective changes. How would you deal with resistance to change in lower-level employees? There has to be a point where someone is going to say, is this juice worth the squeeze? For example, I want to lose 20 pounds. That's really important to me. I really don't want to get up and exercise, that's hard for me to choose. I really love cake. All right, well, I'm not saying I never want to eat cake again. Is eating cake once a month still good and exercising three times a week going to work? You know, people that are making these choices all of the time, it's really important to be consistent with enacting a plan and also be willing to modify the plan when it's necessary. I would like to get your thoughts on a quote from Psychology Today magazine about a write-up they put out about a change in human behavior. "A linear progression through the stages is not the norm, individuals tend to move back and forth in the Stages of Change, recycling through them until the changes become fully established." 100%. Yeah, it's totally true. When I mentor younger or new people in the field, there is often a time when they experience the reality of something being really exciting for the impacted people at first, and then when they learn more about it, they're like, oh, I don't want to do that. I desired it for a minute then you gave me the next step, which is knowledge of how to do it, and now, I no longer am aligned with you, so you need to bring me back into alignment. What is your best and worst experience in change management? And what did you learn from those experiences? I don't have a single worst. I can say that there's a common reason that a change is going poorly. It is because of a lack of alignment. It is because the parties involved cannot see their way clearer to a mutual understanding of something of what to expect as the outcome of the change or what to expect in the process of getting there. So every time I have a bad change management experience, that plays a big role in it. My best experience was in my last company. I worked on a project that involved 1000s of team leaders at retail stores needing to use a new program to achieve something new. They had been managing their work on spreadsheets. They had their rhythm down. And when you're in a retail store, and you're customer-facing, the time off the floor is tough like you just need to get back there and knock that stuff out and get back out to the customer because your big bosses are telling you all day long about how customers are most important, but you also have to, you know, write schedules and order things and do tests and you so forth. Introducing a new process in that type of environment is very stressful. And, when you get to the point of the team leaders going, oh, yeah, that was nothing, I'm good. Then I know that whatever the new behavior is becoming so second nature that they just don't even really think about it anymore. Another great experience is when the impacted folks start asking the next layer of questions about the change. For example, no longer, what button do I click? But why do I click the button? What would happen if I click these three instead? Like, that's where for me, the best change management experience comes in. What would you tell people who are struggling to make effective decisions or changes at any level of an organization? Okay, get ready to laugh. You're going to have ADKAR the s**t out of it (Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement). I learned Prosci Methodology formally shortly after having seen the Martian [movie], and when he says he's going to science the s**t out of it to fix his problems, I quickly adapted it to ADKAR. And the reason is that to me, if I have that fundamental, 'hold on, hold on, hold on' moment, let me just back up and see what's going on here, I can figure out what to do. So you really need to understand where a person is in the process, their own experience of change. That way, you can understand how to reach them where they are. The bottom line is that change is hard for anyone to make stick, and when your business outcomes are at risk, it can seem like a fruitless exercise to change a working system. However, the truth of the matter is that companies that wait, listen, and plan effective changes in their business strategy, 99% of the time, come out on top. To expand your learning, visit the links below and reach out to Ramona Maher at the contact information listed below. Modernizing Digital Care - Change Management Managing Your Brand During a Crisis Modernizing Digital Care: Change the Conversation Webinar Becoming a Leader of Organizational Change[Podcast] Contact Ramona Maher at [email protected]ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsDon't Make Ads for TikTok; Make Outstanding Content + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION
Don't have time to read? Check out this audio version of our blog, also found on your favorite podcast platform! The days of ad views equaling positive customer engagement are over. Guerrilla Marketing via TikTok can change that The term guerrilla gives rise to a select series of images. Cloak and dagger tactics, improvised technologies, or a jungle-fighting 1980s action-movie hero. When we apply this term to the marketing world, an idea blossoms that marketers must invent new ways to constantly evolve and remain culturally relevant enough for customers to engage with what they have to say. Much like Mad Men's Don Draper, almost everyone that holds their audience's attention thinks outside the box. Thankfully, the modern world has provided far more than a handful of slick tricks to accomplish this goal. Touted in mainstream media and every conceivable digital marketing blog, TikTok is the popular new kid on the block in the video-sharing ecosystem. Brands have taken various approaches to TikTok content, and many have found success in crafting traditional TikToks rather than ads you might see before watching a youtube video. Language learning app Duolingo and casual clothing company Mango, for example, are finding stunning success on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of followers and over a million total views. Other brands are… well… struggling to achieve their customer engagement goals. So, what sets the great brands apart? Isn't TikTok a silly little app for teenagers to dance on? Why — and, more importantly, how — could any brand generate hundreds of thousands of followers? For anyone that's never used the app, these questions probably seem unanswerable. But those who've already used TikTok know that this app is whatever you want it to be for all ages. Granted, 60% of TikTok users are members of the "Zoomer" or "Gen-Z" generation, which still leaves over 30% of 3 billion users over the age of 25. What does this mean for a marketing team beginning to dive into the magical world of short-form videos? If you want your brand to make a splash and lasting impression, you will need to implement guerrilla marketing tactics on your brand's TikTok page. Good Products Don't Need Ads, Just Good Creatives. Product ads, product videos, product, product, product. Scattered throughout TikTok are thousands of brands selling products with product-selling ads. These ads can be successful and end up selling a lot of products — but that's the exception to the rule. Most TikTok users don't like sponsored content because it disrupts their For You Pages, and they aren't afraid to call out the brands that create this content. The bottom line is that the younger generations, and by extension most TikTok users, have an extremely keen sense of when they're being marketed to, and they almost never like it. An internal poll conducted among Khoros staff showed that roughly 80% of staff members using TikTok stroll away from product ads within five seconds of realizing it's a sponsored ad. The screenshot to the right is the comment section of a telehealth company's TikTok account. While there might be some other struggles with the company itself, their comment section stands as irrefutable proof that TikTok users will call out brands for any and all shortcomings. As market research professor of Ulster University Stephen Brown puts it in his 2004 paper O' Customer Where art Thou, "Today's customers are marketing literate… they can deconstruct advertising campaigns in double-quick time and outmaneuver even the most cunning marketing strategies." This makes it difficult to use traditional tactics, especially on channels like TikTok, where users are so attuned to them. Most of the Zoomer TikTok users have grown up with advertising blasting in their faces all day, every day. In his same paper, Brown deconstructed a type of customer that he called "Corporate Reservists," or what we would call devotees today. This type of customer differs from influencers because the corporate reservists will shout from the rooftops how much they love your brand for nothing more than having formed an honest relationship with your brand. Of course, influencers still exist, but more often than not, they believe in your product or monetary incentives, not your brand. Influencers and these unpaid brand cheerleaders are ubiquitous throughout TikTok. Whether it's a paid sponsorship or simply a good opportunity for a video, pages like Simplysalfinds and the hashtag #tiktokmademebuyit are excellent illustrations of Brown's corporate reservist theory. TikTok users know when they are getting sold to, so why not get someone they are already logging on to watch sell for you? A Brief History of Selling Feelings Before developing your TikTok strategy, ask yourself, "Why are people logging onto TikTok in the first place?" Of course, the specific reason will differ from person to person, but there's generally one overriding reason: to be entertained. To translate cellular signals of pixels and audio waves into positive feelings or empowering knowledge. For decades successful marketers have played on this angle, getting potential customers to associate their products with happy, positive feelings rather than simply touting the products' benefits. Look at the Marlboro Man or Coca-Cola for a prime example. Bonus points for using guerrilla marketing tactics. In simple terms, guerrilla marketing uses non-traditional means to market a company in a way that doesn't automatically tell the audience it's marketing. Rewind for a moment for what could be considered the first example of guerrilla marketing in the United States. Introducing Edward L. Bernays, whom History Today calls "The Original Influencer." During the 20s and 30s, Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to increase cigarette sales among the female demographic. Now, cigarettes or any form of tobacco is undeniable horrid for your health and we are in no way suggesting or promoting smoking, selling, buying, or marketing cigarettes in any way. However, Brenays's method changed everything we know about marketing today and should be studied as a revolutionary idea. At the time of Bernays marketing stunt, very few women smoked and never in public. The social stigma of the 1920s dictated that "manly" men smoked and "dainty" women would never so much as look at a tool of male identity by lighting up a cigarette. The 1929 easter's day parade was the perfect opportunity for Bernays to test a brand new marketing tactic. Bernays enlisted his secretary, Bertha Hunt, to pose as a women's rights activist and recruit nine other women to march up and down Fifth Avenue in New York, chain-smoking cigarettes. Bertha Hunt (upon Bernays instruction) even went as far as to send a telegram to select American debutants stating, "In the interests of equality of the sexes and to fight another sex taboo, I and other young women will light another torch of freedom by smoking cigarettes while strolling on Fifth Avenue Easter Sunday." This stunt set the press ablaze with whichever angle the publication wished to take. However, neither Bernays nor American Tobacco was ever mentioned in any of the press reports by design. Bernays needed people to believe that smoking was a female liberation action, not just a marketing stunt. Bernay's guerrilla marketing stunt worked. According to the National Library of Medicine estimates, smoking rates among the female population rose from 5% in 1924 to 12% in 1929. Capture Purpose, Not Attention Spans Why did Bernays's cigarette girl stunt work? One reasonable deduction is that it was a real "attention-getter" and spoke to the purpose of what kind of lifestyle women wanted at the time. Any marketer will tell you that you only have a few seconds — maybe just a single second — to get someone's attention with any campaign. This idea is repeated, reworked, and regurgitated on college campuses, business seminars, and online courses. It's an excellent introduction to the way marketers could be thinking about how they make content, but recent data supports a more nuanced approach. As Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Open University London, Gemma Briggs puts it, "Average attention span' is pretty meaningless. It's very much task-dependent. How much attention we apply to a task will vary depending on what the task demand is." Therefore, the time you have to capture someone's attention is based on context. In the context of TikTok, remember why people open the app in the first place: a human desire for entertainment, knowledge, or connection. Ask yourself, "how would my brand's content fit into the TikTok tertiary of entertainment, knowledge, or connection wants? Will my brand's content add or detract from prospective customers' entertainment?" Brands that Understood the Assignment One of the most common pieces of advice brands hear about TikTok marketing is "make videos, not ads", this is indeed dynamite advice. You will need to make content that speaks to your audience — and to do that, you'll need to avoid being obvious about advertising or even avoid "advertising" altogether. What does this mean in the context of guerrilla marketing? It's easy to keep this concept theoretical, but a handful of brands provide outstanding real-world examples. Exhibit A: Mango clothing Mango clothing posted its first TikTok video in October of 2020, and at the time of writing, its account has amassed over 212,000 followers and 1.8 million likes. One video they posted stands out in particular: This video was made in partnership with TikTok user Madelaineturner and stands above the rest as it's not an ad — or at least not a traditional ad. Madelaine's page is full of short-form surrealist skits that blend unsettling themes, cinematic flare from the 40s and 70s, and specific energy that must be viewed to be understood. Most of Mango's other TikTok videos feature various outfits at photoshoots, and that's it. As the viewer, you feel like you have a backstage pass to the creation of outfits that you could wear to impress anyone at whatever social gathering you choose. In the Madelaine partnership video, there is zero indication that you're watching an ad until the very end. Upon first glance, all you watch is a regular Madelaine video filled with drain cleaner cocktails, nervous energy, and Mango's new spring collection for costumes. The Mango logo only flashes for 1.2 seconds. The video to date has received over 24,000 likes and 100,000 views, and the comments left on the video speak for themselves. Exhibit B: Redbull Ah, the liquid energy concoction in a can that most people use to study, party, or drive for more than 12 hours. Redbull is synonymous with extreme sports and pushing the human body past its limit. Their TikTok page reflects that; the videos exclusively contain lifestyle and guerrilla marketing tactics. Their first ever TikTok, posted in February of 2021, was literally just one of their social media managers typing on-screen saying: This video is the distillation of what makes TikTok such a popular platform. The video is casual, unmistakably human, and uses a sense of self-aware comedy that general TikTok users know and love. Bonus points for that it's not even an ad at all. The Redbull TikTok account contains zero Redbull ads. Literally nothing about why you should drink Redbull. The only videos featured on Redbull's account are adventure sports and heart-pounding stunts. Their page speaks to the lifestyle Redbull promotes not that you should drink their energy drink. Think for a moment about what problem or desire does your brand solve? What kind of lifestyle do your customers live? Exhibit C: Bed Bath & Beyond Bed Bath & Beyond joined the TikTok ecosystem in September of 2021 with a more traditional product ad style video of a store opening in New York City. It features commonly used elements of TikToks: Text-to-speech voice, a trending song, the works. That initial Tiktoks received a few thousand views, which is pretty good for a brand just joining the channel. However, by using a virally trending sound, Bed Bath & Beyond received over eight million views on a single video. The post was simple and had nothing to do with the brand. It was simply a Bed Bath & Beyond social media manager singing The reading rainbow theme song. When that video was published, that song had gone viral throughout TikTok, but the Bed Bath & Beyond version had one key difference. The social media manager was plainly singing the song because of the varying copyright permissions for brands on TikTok. This worked well for Bed Bath & Beyond, but these borderline copyright infringement cases can too easily go awry and have page-ending consequences. Using the Khoros Platform to Upgrade your Brand's TikTok Strategy The Khoros marketing platform can be used to close the gaps in your brand's TikTok strategy in several key ways, including governance, in-app video creation, and organically derived customer sentiment. Governance Managing the dissemination of information is challenging for anyone working in a cross-team system, and brands looking to craft successful TikTok content face an additional layer of challenge. Relevant content on TikTok moves and changes at a lightning pace. A viral sound or trend one day is old news the next. How is an agile, enterprising brand going to keep up? Using traditional approval ladders, creating one video could take a week or more. Using Khoros's marketing governance tools, everyone is on the same page in hours, not days. In-app creation It's no question that TikTok's native video creation tools are impressive, but from a brand's perspective, having six or more people all huddled around a phone screen is less than ideal. Using the Khoros platform, your brand's social media manager could build out the video with traditional video creation tools and have it sync up on the platform before publishing. This way, brands can more easily ensure content quality, gather analytics, and reduce publishing time. The Bottom Line TikTok is a powerful, easy-to-learn new tool for digital engagement, but it comes to the branding world as a double-edged sword. TikTok users are extremely attuned to traditional marketing tactics and will jump, scream, and shout about brands that employ them. If you are not currently using TikTok, a great course of action would be to make an account and use it for at least 20 minutes every few days. The best way to use any tool is to see how other people use it. In no time at all, you'll see what brands are using guerrilla marketing and what brands aren't. Guerrilla marketing tactics have the data to prove they work on TikTok, increasing engagement and customer sentiment. And these tactics have enormous potential to increase your revenue by TikTok users advertising for you by sharing your content. Remember that the TikTok social ecosystem will harshly punish brands if they slip up or leap before looking. Now that you understand the power of guerrilla marketing on TikTok, it's time to start asking yourself and your team about the next video, not the next ad. Come further your knowledge with our TWO TikTok webinars and case-study at the links below: Talk-walker and Khoros deep-dive Rock the Tok TikTok Strategy How Randstad USA used Khoros to grow their TikTok audience by 30%ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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