Oracle 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 Group owners would leave the company or change roles, and groups were no longer active or responsibly managed, so we ended up with a lot of those.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 …11KViewsSign in to react to this post6CommentsThe 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, …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…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 tha…ViewsSign 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 al…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.&…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsHospitality Brands: Facing the Pressure with Digital Solutions + NEW AUDIBLE VERSION
Don't have time to read? Check out this audio version of our blog, also found on your favorite podcast platform! Everyone has had those horrid travel days. Everything seems to go wrong. You forget your passport, your wallet, or worse still, you forget your headphones. Nothing seems to top off a bad travel experience than a flight getting canceled or having a hotel lose your room reservation Unfortunately for millions of people in recent memory, having a flight canceled is practically baked into the travel plans. The frustrations of dealing with the various customer care teams aren't generally baked into their travel plans. For whatever reason, certain travelers are left on hold for hours, and for better or worse, these travelers are forced to use only a handful of support and engagement channels. Khoros is here to prove there’s much more to customer engagement in the travel industry than Twitter and outdated phone systems. A New Approach It’s clear that travel brands need to expand their reach into new channels and customer engagement methods, but what might be the best path to accomplish this? Thankfully, Khoros’ customer Airbnb has provided a perfect game plan. In 2020 Airbnb was rated best in class for their community using the Khoros platform. A principal reason for this award was Airbnb's ability to empower its community users. The Airbnb community supports five different languages, and hosts and guests can use the community to customize everything about their accounts and experiences. The community is known for organizing meet-ups and idea sharing, and most importantly, guests and hosts can get community-based support whenever there's a problem. While it seems almost too simple to work this well, Airbnb proved that a strong community could increase customer engagement passively. You can read the full Airbnb kudos award here! Customer Engagement Means More than only Care It’s generally accepted that most people will only interact with a travel brand when they have a question or issue they need resolving. However, only focusing on the care side of engagement would be a rather significant misstep. Marketing in new channels to draw in new customers is a delicate dance. It's crucial that you stay relevant with the new customers but in a way that might alienate your current customer base. Irish Airline Ryanair has taken this in stride with their viral TikTok account. For the unaware, Ryanair is a budget airline known for many things but known that it’s the cheapest way from point A to point B in Europe. However, not always the most comfortable. There won’t be a lot of bells and whistles. Countless jokes circulate on Twitter about how there are no windows for specific seats on a Ryanair flight, the landings can be rough, or what have you. A brand could do one of two things. Either they could not engage, or they could …ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsTaking Dr. Micheal Wu’s Gamification Theory into the Real World
Years ago, long before Khoros was Khoros and was simply Lithium technologies, a rather curious and beautiful theory was introduced into the world of digital communities. The idea was that if you added some version of gamification and the proper motivation to community users, the digital community would outperform most of its competitors. Gamification floats through various strategies and online communities, but what exactly is gamification in the context of digital communities? In as few words as possible, it is the process of rewarding users with digital badges and increased access or features in the community. Gamification is a prime example of using extrinsic rewards versus intrinsic rewards to influence more people to use a community page. Former Lithium data scientist Dr. Michael Wu explored this concept concerning gamification back in 2014. All of Wu’s findings are far beyond the scope of this one article, but in short, Wu theorized that you could use both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards in the gamification of a community page. If you are not familiar with intrinsic and extrinsic motivations a nd rewards, Wu said it best in his original article: “An intrinsic reward is an intangible award of recognition, a sense of achievement, or a conscious satisfaction. For example, it is the knowledge that you did something right, or that you helped someone and made their day better. An extrinsic reward is an award that is tangible or physically given to you for accomplishing something. It is a tangible recognition of one's endeavor. For example, it’s a certificate of accomplishment, a trophy or medal for winning the race, a badge or points for doing something right, or even a monetary reward for doing your job.” This theory applies to almost every single human interaction or action. The key difference between the two motivation and reward systems is longevity. Generally speaking, intrinsically motivated people will almost always continue to perform an action or task. A great example of this is the super users of a community page without any game theory applied. The super-users will continuously engage with a community page because they genuinely love to use the website. However, according to the Nielsen group, only 1% of all website users will seriously contribute to the page. For the other 99% of the community, the question that Wu was aiming to answer was what would motivate them to start engaging with the website. His answer was to use game theory to increase extrinsic rewards and motivation. This can be done simply by adding more features, rewards, and badges that you can proudly display as a community user. Khoros customer Pandora did this exceptionally well. So, what exactly did Pandora do? Pandora embraced game theory in a wonderfully organic way. At the start of introducing the Pandora community, users were already looking for ratings. By adding a simple r…ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentThought 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 …ViewsSign 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 th…ViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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