Online communities unfiltered: 2025 trends, challenges, and opportunities
We won’t sugar coat it — managing an online community is hard work. But the payoff of getting it right is unmatched. In this unfiltered guide, you'll get real-world insights and practical strategies from over 15 different industry experts on how to help your community thrive. In this guide, you'll learn: Trends shaping online communities — from tech shifts to evolving member expectations. The challenges community leaders are facing and how to navigate them without burning out. Actionable steps to drive engagement and business impact. Read the eBook here!529ViewsSign in to react to this post0CommentsState of Community Management 2023 Report: Biggest Takeaway
In today's dynamic online community landscape, staying informed about the latest trends, challenges, and best practices is crucial for community leaders who seek lasting success. Discover the valuable insights and recommendations in The Community Roundtable's 14th annual report, The State of Community Management 2023, tailored specifically for community leaders. This report is a goldmine of tactics and strategies to enhance your strategic community planning and ensure your online community remains effective. We highly recommend you take a dive into the full report to get all the best insights, but here we’ve provided the top takeaway to help your community thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape. Harness the power of evangelism With the myriad of responsibilities shouldered by community managers, internal evangelism often takes a backseat. However, simply advocating for the value of a community may not be enough. It's imperative that the community manager isn't the sole voice singing the praises of the community within the organization. In The Community Roundtable’s research, 90% of best-in-class communities surveyed reported positive perceptions from executives. So how do you foster this support from leadership? Start by coordinating efforts and identifying team members who can act as champions to get support from middle management and executives. Holding the interest of stakeholders is essential to the long-term success of any community program. Why is internal buy-in so important? To start, building a thriving community is difficult. Not every business considers it a necessity, and some stakeholders may view it as a nice-to-have rather than a mandatory investment of time and resources. Tailoring your communication to different teams within the organization is key. For example, marketers tend to care about how a community can grow its audience or generate positive sentiment, while product teams care more about how the community will help them receive feedback from customers and further innovation. When each department understands its role in community building, they can allocate the necessary efforts and resources for a healthy and successful community. Above all, never stop evangelizing — seize any opportunity to speak to others within your organization about your community program. Although this can be challenging with the growing prevalence of remote work, make sure to communicate your message whenever and wherever possible. The more community evangelists who understand the language of community, the easier it becomes to promote the program throughout the organization. Take advantage of The State of Community Management 2023 to stay up-to-date on community management best practices, trends, and strategies. Download the full report here to learn how to navigate impending challenges and lead your online community to thrive in the months and years ahead.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 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 postCommentsThe 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.ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsCommunity ROI: Embracing Humanity’s Desire to Help
In today’s digital ecosystem, it’s a requirement to have a community page. No matter what industry you find your brand or company in, having a place for your customers to talk about your business, find support, or ask questions is necessary. Long before Khoros was Khoros, the founders deeply understood the importance of digital communities. It’s easy to hark about how much value you can pull from having an award-winning community. However, few articles and resources are diving deep into exactly why brands are finding these high levels of value and success with their digital communities. This article aims to change that. Of course, it would be a misstep not to recognize some essential realities of running a digital community. The initial bottom line is that running a community costs money. There is no escaping or not paying the hosting, designing, security, and general staffing costs. It could cost anywhere from the low tens of thousands to millions of dollars a year. As the intrepid new community, you might find yourself needing to garner more executive support. You have to consider not only why people use community pages but also how you will find value in all aspects of the customer experience by having a highly successful community. Care and Community Utilizes Human Desire to Help one Another Khoros and several of our customers have proven that customers in need of support rarely care where they receive that support. In regard to digital communities, one of the most engaging types of posts is a support question. Even Google’s algorithm will point customers toward a digital community to answer product or service-related questions. This system is adventitious for whichever brand or company owns the community page, but why would any customer spend their valuable time and resources answering strangers' questions on an online forum? For some community managers, this question isn’t of massive importance. It’s extra work and research to understand why customers answer strangers’ questions in digital communities. However, if your community page starts slipping towards inactivity, you find yourself struggling to understand why your page isn’t being used as much anymore. People tend to help one another for various reasons, but it generally breaks down to our evolutionary hardwiring. This will defer slightly from intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, but the rewards are generally the same. One of the most significant motivating factors is that humans are generally socially ousted for being a “freeloader” or “lurker” in communities or social settings. In Sebastian Junger’s sociology exploration book Tribe., this isn't a new concept. He explores how helping your fellow human was quite literally law in most of ancient society, saying - “This [helping in social setting] is clearly an ancient and adaptive behavior that tends to keep groups together and equitably cared for. In his survey of ancestral-type societies, Boehm [Anthropologist Christopher Boehm] found that - in addition to murder and theft - one of the most commonly punished infractions was “failure to share.” Freeloading on the hard work of others and bullying were also high up on the list.” This concept is the gateway to explaining why humans and, by extension, your customers are beyond willing to help one another. In a digital community, customers are rewarded with likes, shares, and comments when they go out of their way to help their fellow customers. On the flip side, several online communities will punish “lurkers” or people who contribute nothing to the community by deactivating their accounts, ending specific permissions or abilities, or even straight bans for inactivity. Now, as a cunning community manager, you could greatly reward certain users for being the most active or providing the most support in the community. This was best seen at Khoros through the Powerschool community. Powerschool needed to implement several new processes and chatbots in the support side of their community. The most effective way for Powerschool to test and implement their new community processes was to invite the Community super-users or ‘mentors’ to test alongside their development team and make suggestions in real-time. Using Boehm’s theory of ancient humans punishing one another for non-sharing, your community could promote an event to invite the most active user’s to a new digital event or beta test. Powerschool showed that you would most likely see a surge of sign-ups and community engagement by rewarding the users who engage the most with your audience. By the Numbers A healthy, well-used community is almost certainly good for business. In qualitative terms, your new fancy community will improve your NPS scores; your general customer sentiment will improve, and if you do everything right, you might receive some free marketing across the social media ecosystem. In terms of quantitative results, let's look at a care instance. A care instance in the North American region receives, on average, 100 contacts a day. This care team just linked the brand’s community page to their self-service suite. Because the community users and community articles simply solve at least 40% of the care team’s daily questions, your care team’s volume will be greatly reduced, plain and simple. The bottom line is that by simply using a Khoros-crafted community, you should be able to link both your community and care teams together in one unified system to improve almost all aspects of your customer’s experience. For more resources and to expand your knowledge, please visit the links below! Taking Dr. Micheal Wu’s Gamification Theory into the Real World [Podcast] Gamification in the Wild: Giving back to build Brand Loyalty [Podcast] Lurkers vs. Learners: Renaming Community Members Who Listen The Hybrid Future is Here: Let’s modernize your agent's experience SANE Australia case study | KhorosViewsSign 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 ranking system, Pandora could tap into extrinsic motivation models found in most humans. A simple need to be recognized in a social setting. The following elegant practice Pandora put into place was giving greater access to their super-users. Within the first months of launching the Pandora community, the community manager, Erick Linares, noticed that a specific user was fully invested in using the community. This super-user was already displaying intrinsic motivation to use Pandora. In turn, Linares gave this user a moderator role and seriously increased access and judgment to what can and can’t be published or discussed on the website and other traditional moderator rules. The result for Pandora was an upswing in relationship building between other community users. This technic refers to Michael Wu’s theory on extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. Using the community made users feel good. By feeling good, the user set off to build new digital relationships, which made them and their new digital friends feel good, creating a positive user feedback loop of both intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and bringing people together in the Pandora community. Watch this webinar to learn more about how exactly Pandora built their community with Khoros! How to translate rewards to other styles of communities It is a fair assumption to say that Pandora had a much simpler time energizing its user base. Everyone loves music, and having a place to talk about their favorite artists or events or using the community to solve software issues will naturally draw people in. However, few people will choose to use a community that centers around laundry detergent. If a non-entertainment brand aims to reach the levels of engagement as a brand such as Pandora, this would be a big step. If you are an electronics or household appliances brand, building a well-designed and highly functional community page is still wise. It’s smarter to focus on extrinsic rewards for your customers and employees. It’s vital to focus on the extrinsic rewards of a household appliance community because chances are high that your community base is logging into your website for direct support questions and not much else. So, if your community base is only going to log on when there is a problem, how could you get them to return to the website continuously? According to Wu and game theory, adding something as simple as a badge system for those who give the best answers or answer questions the most could be a good start in giving people great extrinsic rewards and motivation to log back on. To add to Michael Wu’s theory and gamification, video games provide further evidence that game theory could be the missing puzzle piece in increasing community engagement. Originally published in the Computers and Human behavior scientific journal, a group of researchers questioned how reward systems would influence test subjects while playing a simple video game. Their findings speak for themselves: “We found that the high rewards condition (with the greatest amount and diversity of rewards) was rated by players as being the most enjoyable, creating the greatest sense of presence and immersion, and causing them to expend the most effort while playing. Interestingly, the differing amount of rewards did not seem to influence players’ sense of competence nor tension while playing.” While it can be a challenging balance of providing a well-designed community while not making it too much like a ‘silly’ game, the researchers' findings prove that most people enjoy as many rewards as reasonably included. The Khoros Effect Khoros is known for building outstanding communities. Pandora, Samsung, and various travel brands are built on Khoros’ ability to build communities. A complete how-to guide to build your community from scratch is far beyond the scope of this article, but as you sit down with your brand’s team and the Khoros professional service team, keep in mind what Michael Wu and Pandora did by transforming your community user’s motivations. Explore more Khoros Resources to learn more about digital communities! Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Rewards (and Their Differences from Motivations) Do You Even Deserve It? - Atlas Khoros and Pandora Community webinarViewsSign in to react to this postCommentAn Interview For Change: Digital Community Challenges & Opportunities
Since the start of digital communities, it has been known that they can be powerful beyond measure for brands imploring their use. However, due to their rapid growth, creating the right processes and governance structures can be a serious challenge. To explore digital communities more, I sat down with Lisa Bidder, Customer Solutions Director and former Strategist & Community Manager, to get the inside scoop on the challenges and opportunities brands can find with digital communities. Parker Hicks Can you tell me a little bit about your background and why you chose to come to Khoros? Lisa Bidder Ooh, great question. I didn't choose to come to Khoros, there was no career plan. I got into online communities as a gamer. I’ve been gaming since Chuckie Egg, 1986 I think, I was a little obsessed with it. I was away from it for a while, work, life, being a girl, all got in the way, but got back into it when my children were young, that's when I started using online forums and communities. I wasn't working at the time because the children were young and I found myself volunteering to moderate and administrate, and just very quickly got into [community] managing gaming communities, ended up building my own (XboxGameZone) and found myself, somewhat by accident, consulting others on their communities and how to do it. Long story short, before I knew it I was working in the games industry doing something that I absolutely loved. I’d had a variety of different jobs over the years that paid the bills, but weren’t particularly interesting, it was just work that paid the bills. But there I had a variety of responsibilities, setting up online gaming tournaments, managing the community, and doing some work on their social channels. I was in that role, with a variety of responsibilities for quite a long time when someone I worked with moved to what was then lithium. They knew I’d been looking for something more challenging and said this was the place to be, so I applied for the job and I'm still here because they were right. What were some of your challenges when you were community managing? The challenges I experienced probably all circle back to the result of a lack of process in some way, shape, or form. I'll give you two very specific examples that are vastly different, but both came back to a total lack of processes in the organization, the way it was structured and the maturity of the community, and how it existed within the business at that time. One of them, we were experiencing a variety of problems and as I dug in I realised there was absolutely no governance over access and permissions within the community. So anybody could do anything? The normal community members could do all of the things that they were supposed to do, this wasn’t true for others. It was a very large organization, there were lots of people within the business, who had a need to use the community as well as a large team of volunteer moderators, but when they would say to someone, hey, can you give me access? Somebody, somewhere in the business who already had administrator access to the entire platform, and so could effectively delete the community in one click, would go and give that person the exact same permissions, full admin! So we ended up with 10s and hundreds of people with very high-level permissions and access in the community to do things they didn't need to do, people were accidentally doing things they didn't intend to do, which created a lot of work, and then some people's accounts were being compromised, and used to do things that disrupted the community, things they shouldn't have ever been able to do. It was a huge problem that really ultimately came down to a lack of processes and governance over the access and permissions of the community platform. A very different problem we went through, but again, came down to a lack of process, we were having some issues with a particular member of the community. The moderation team had been managing it, but it escalated one weekend when we realised the member was in a mental health crisis. This was about 15 years ago, the world was a different place, people's attitudes to mental health issues were not what they are now, and the awareness around these issues simply didn't exist. But this member was absolutely in the midst of a mental health crisis, they had threatened to take their own life to a moderator. The moderator came to me and some of the other managers and said, hey, what do I do? And we realized that we had no escalation point at all. We didn't know what we were supposed to do. So we kind of scrambled around, made some phone calls to their local emergency services, and really had very little choice but to then sit back and hope that those phone calls had the desired effect. It was a very long few weeks following that, because the user didn't come back to the community for a good few weeks. Nobody knew what happened. And if they were okay. Thankfully, they did come back. Would you say that having that lack of escalation points or processes to deal with real-world stuff was like a big pitfall that your community was dealing with? Yes. And I don't think it was an exceptional situation. At the time. I think it was true of many communities 20 years ago that were growing rapidly and becoming a bedrock of large organizations, the speed with which these communities were growing and the reliance the business was increasingly having on them, it escalated at such a rapid pace. I don't think the challenges we faced were unique given the speed at which community was growing. A lot of organizations were finding themselves in a position where the communities were bigger and dealing with these kinds of challenges. But there hadn't been any kind of opportunity to really take a step back and question what processes and governance needed to be in place to support the scale and the scenarios that you find yourself dealing with, the situations drove the creation of the processes. If there was something that you could have changed about the way that your former Community was managed and run, what would have you changed? Process and governance 100%. You know, when our teams are launching customers today, what we're often saying is to create this documentation, these processes and policy, we’re telling you to have a crisis plan that we hope you never need. You're maybe gonna question why am I spending this time creating this thing I hope I never need. Hopefully, you never need them, but, there may come a time when you do and it is a great deal less painful to deal with those challenges, if and when they arise if you have done that groundwork. That groundwork saves you as an organization, your members, and your employees, it helps everybody feel in control, and know what they need to do when that problem arises. Focus on addressing the issue rather than having that sudden panic ‘I know we need to do something, but I don't know what we need to do’. What does Khoros do differently in your experience? I think that we bring to the table, the blend of an enterprise-level platform, with enterprise-level experience. We know the scenarios you may face, and we hope you never do. But, we can help you plan and build those foundations into your community strategy. So that you can be successful. We know that problems arise. Those problems in themselves aren't really the issue. The challenge is knowing what to do and how to do it when those issues arise, that we bring the expertise to the table that answers those questions, that address those challenges, and crucially, we're not trying to be gatekeeper to that. We're sharing our methodology and transferring that knowledge and expertise so that the brand isn't reliant on us after they've launched. They're able to take control of those challenges when they arise, although they can leverage our support, obviously, if they need it. What are some of the best and worst ways you've seen a community be used? When I was a community member, about 20 years ago, one of the community members actually was US based, they’d had some medical problems, found themselves in financial difficulty, and were being threatened with foreclosure on their home. The community actually did some crowdfunding before crowdfunding was a thing. We all collected some money together, and were able to collect enough money to cover a few months of their payments, and hold off the foreclosure. That gave them the time to breathe and actually get themselves back to where they needed to be so they didn't lose their home. So that is definitely the best. I think it brings people together in a way that we often see in the real world, but people often don't expect in an online digital environment. The worst, I think, if I'm honest, is when brands don't truly understand the power of the community and embrace it. I saw a community user post on a community some years ago, expressing some frustration with a challenge they were having, not an uncommon situation where you contact a brand and you say, I need to solve this problem. You get sent in one direction, and then they send you in another direction. And before you know it, you're going around in circles, so they went to the community and said, hey, this is rubbish. Come on somebody like someone just needs to help me. Can we fix this? I think it was a really good opportunity where the brand could have said, hey, you know, this isn't great is it let's, let's see how we can solve this for you. Unfortunately, what actually happened is that somebody from the brand posted on the community and said the community is a space for people to share positive stories, so I'm going to lock this thread and if you've got a complaint, please report it on this form. Honestly, I think sometimes when brands know the power of community, they want it to be that positive experience. They sometimes forget that actually, the reason the communities are so powerful for the brand and the users is that everybody embraces the opportunity to be transparent and open about challenges. They become nervous of having those honest conversations, they're fearful sometimes that if we're open and honest, people might say things we don't want to hear. And that fear can lead them to shutting those conversations down. In short, it’s vital that you build your moderation and governance structures at the same pace as your online community grows. Of course, it’s not the simplest thing to build, and every community is different. Which is why Khoros will support you every step of the way in building your digital space. For more information about Khoros communities please visit the links below! Atlas Series: Reward & Recognition Tips & Tricks to Improve Success Rate The single most important KPI of your Community Gamification Best Practices from 3 Leading BrandsViewsSign 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 own up to their reputation. Ryanair has done the latter. The Ryanair TikTok account is full of videos making fun of themselves. As a result, they have amassed an enormous following on TikTok with (at the time of writing) 1.7 million followers. This is how a brand does stellar customer engagement. It Could Be All Sunshine and Rainbows The brands struggling to meet the above success levels could utilize several tactics available through the Khoros platform. For customer Care, it’s quite simple. Suppose you are an airline, and for whatever reason, your customers are missing flights or luggage or what have you. With Khoros Care, you’ll be able to improve your agent health, NPS scores, and operational efficiency by getting customers help faster through the power of automation and AI. All of these turn directly into cost savings and higher ROI by deflecting calls to your contact center. For the travel brand communities out there, Airbnb shows that it’s clear that by letting your customers have a majority role in the engagement of your community, intrepid travelers are more than likely to enjoy and heavily engage with your online community, reducing the volume on your Care team. Lastly, with Khoros marketing, you can instantly expand your social engagement channels. Some brands will focus solely on Twitter via native publishing. With Khoros Marketing, you could easily make the same Twitter post and publish it on Facebook, Instagram, or even TikTok with only a handful of clicks. Customer engagement is constantly evolving, and the brands that evolve with it stay relevant and continue to grow their customer base. The brands that don’t are still only using Twitter. For more resources and stories on how brands are using Khoros visit the links below! - Khoros Kudos Awards 2021 - Khoros Customer Blog - An Interview for Change How AI and Automation Drive ROIViewsSign in to react to this postCommentsAre you There ROI? It’s Me Care: A Cost Savings Series from Khoros
Customer care is convoluted at the best of times. While the customer can use your product or service wrong once, your customer care system has to be right every time. Of course, this is a fool’s dream because of Murphy’s law. In other words, whatever could go wrong, will go wrong, except when they don’t. A few years ago, a Khoros customer found truly stunning success while using the Care platform, even when the odds were stacked against them. This customer had to juggle a massive merger, adoption of the Khoros system, and dealing with a vast influx of volume during a nationwide event and promotion. Previously used Care models suggest that these factors would cause this customer to crash and burn. However, they found nothing but success in their first year of using Khoros. Over the course of a year, this customer successfully handled over 15,000 customer messages per quarter and saw a 13% agent efficiency improvement. During that nationwide event, with hundreds of thousands of people watching, this Khoros customer handled over 25 customer contacts a second. So, how did they do it? Was it the stars aligning? Some kind of holiday miracle? According to Ockham’s razor, the simplest answer is often the most correct one. In this case, the most correct answer is that this specific Khoros customer implemented two incredible and simple tactics to boost their Care efficiency. The first was queue configuration, or how to organize the flow of your customer requests in the most efficient way possible. The second was enabling Push Next into their system. Put simply, Push Next removes extra clicks that need to be made by a care agent by having the platform give the agent the subsequent customer request rather than the agent having to choose which ticket or request to address. Let’s dive a little deeper into how queue configuration and push next can help solve high volume and low agent efficiency by first looking at a care team who has chosen not to implement both ideas into their care system. Queue Configuration How a team routes their customer requests will depend heavily on the type of company setting up their care configuration. For this example, we’ll use a monthly subscription streaming service that recently had a server go down, resulting in the loss of service for thousands across several regions. This streaming service’s customer care channels have exploded with requests and tickets. To add to the problems, a group on social media is fanning the flames of the public reaction. Because of the social media reaction, this team will have to tackle both real customers trying to get answers to why their service is down or cancel their subscription and non-customers and internet “trolls” calling with fake or nonsense issues. This streaming service didn’t use customer sentiment detection to configure its queue in a way to maximize its efficiency and is now stuck with a tidal wave of unorganized customer requests. Not configuring their queue to adds stress and pressure to the care agents and the customers' patience, and unfortunately, adds to operation costs and lowers your total revenue. After all, no one wants to spend money with a frustrating company. Push Next After the streaming service barely navigated their service outage challenge, they decided to change their care system to the Khoros platform. After some time and product coaching, they have their automation and queue configuration set up in a way that works wonderfully. While most customers promptly get the help they need, the front-line agent’s TAR (time to agent response) is far lower than the executive team imagined. Again, the question is, why is this happening? It could be because of several things: agents having to choose which ticket to handle next, wasted time figuring out what the customer needs before contact is started, or at worst, a care agent choosing to not take on a stressful ticket or a customer that is clearly upset. When everything is working out fine, it can seem like having a lower TAR is an acceptable concession. However, let’s take a look at the numbers. Low TAR Team 500 customers helped a day, 5 days a week for a year = 130,000 customers helped in one Year High TAR Team With a 13% Efficiency gain using Push Next 560 customers helped a day, 5 days a week for a year = 145,600 customers helped in one year. Being able to help an extra 15,000 customers a year for the exact cost of using the Khoros care platform can mean only one thing, higher ROI. Suppose, in our streaming service example, they still refused to turn on Push Next and never had their agents trained on the feature. In that case, they could lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue, wasted labor costs, and potentially a severe hit to their brand’s reputation through bad press. A higher TAR is only one piece of the puzzle, but in many ways, it could be seen as a keystone to crafting and maintaining an exceptional level of customer care. Khoros can be and has been used to craft that exceptional level of service and care across all manners of industries. Before you decide that your current level of service is simply adequate, ask yourself and your team if your existing customer care system is truly the best you have. For product coaching, a deeper understanding of how Khoros care increases your ROI, and to hear some real-world stories, please visit the links below! Creating Highly Efficient Teams with Push Next An Interview for Change How AI and Automation Drive ROI Agent Queue Configuration | Video [Podcast] Stop Worrying About the Channel, Start Thinking About the Customer Leave a comment with the best change in your Care system you implemented and please subscribe to the Thought Leadership label to never miss an article!ViewsSign in to react to this postCommentServing Customers in the Face of Crisis: Redux + 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 digital world is no stranger to crisis It started with the .com bubble, Y2K, and any number of brand social faux pas. What effect this has on a brand depends heavily on how robust the brand’s marketing, community, and customer care systems are. In an age when everyone can be a video journalist or digital columnist, a brand’s simple mistake can end up costing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. Even when brands are in crisis and damage control mode, the wheels of business keep turning. This fact is especially true in the diverse world of customer care. For example, a company spokesperson makes a Freudian slip in a viral interview. Next, a group of people, through the power of social media, band together to make hundreds of calls to your contact center and tweet thousands of times to your brand in a day to display their disdain for your brand. This group of people bottlenecks your agent’s ability to help any of your “normal” customers who still need support. Of course, the simplest solution is to unplug your phone system and focus all efforts on damage control. While this might save some face in the short turn, not reinforcing your care systems will affect more than just a few angry customers on Twitter. Look no further than above your head into the world of commercial travel for a real-world example of crisis mode care. Every day, thousands of flights take off and land; unfortunately, in recent times, thousands of flights have been canceled globally. At the time of writing, international and aviation-based travel has exploded to nearly 180% compared to 2021 levels. On top of the increased demand, major airline employee strikes have decimated staffing levels across Europe. It’s fair to say that airlines are in crisis mode currently. How has this crisis mode ended up with major airlines across the globe? Some of the lowest rated NPS score across digital care, the longest TAR, and the poorest agent health. According to the New York Times, some people who attempted to contact an airline’s customer care team reported waiting on hold for 275 minutes. Of course, some airlines nail digital care, and other industries facing backlash can still provide excellent customer care. These brands share a common thread that customer care systems widely center around being digital first. Here are the three fundamental ways they were able to keep their customers happy during a crisis. A Focus on Agent Health with Digital First Many people would argue that being a customer care agent is widely a thankless job. It’s stressful; agents face unpredictable hours, and generally speaking, customers only contact the care team when they are facing problems or issues. Now mix in a time of brand crisis. Using the above example of an angry group of people clogging your customer care channels, your agents will have even less bandwidth to answer actual customer questions. This will lead to a lower NPS, wasted time, lower revenue, and a much higher agent attrition rate. Using digital care first, customers can get their answers handled by chatbots, self-service, and community. When their questions need to be elevated to a live agent, A.I. can auto-fill important information, detect customer sentiment, and be used any way your brand sees fit to improve agent health and efficiency. Unclog Your Care Channels Because of the one mistake by the brand spokesperson, your contact volume across all digital and traditional channels has exploded. As mentioned above, during a crisis, your brand should expect an explosion of volume. Now, if all customer contacts are legitimate customers will depend on the brand and the crisis. However, it’s fair to say that you can still use a digital-first filter the channel clogs versus customers with honest questions. A lot of the unclogging of your care channels can be solved via, queue-configuration or how customer questions and requests filter into your Care instance. A seriously effective method is to enable Push Next. When enabling Push Next in your Care instance, it automatically pushes a new customer request to your agent rather than them choosing what ticket or request they want to tackle instead. The Khoros effect Khoros was built on the premise that digital-first would be the tool that the future of customer care will use. No matter what crisis your brand has the misfortune of stumbling into, the Khoros Care platform can be used to reinforce your front-line workers to defend your brand from the ongoing crisis, your normal customers, and your NPS scores. To explore more how Khoros and help defend your brand during a crisis and improve efficiency visit these Atlas Resources Below! Creating Highly Efficient Teams with Push Next [Podcast] Stop Worrying About the Channel, Start Thinking About the Customer Khoros Care Webinar: Choosing the Right Tool 2021 Customer Kudos Awards: Three Ireland - Best-in-Class: CareViewsSign in to react to this postComments
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