Updates from Kate Leggett RSS
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07:00:36 am on August 7, 2008 |
We all understand the benefits of integrating community content into a customer service offering – It helps you with product development by turning your customers into resources for innovation. It helps you with product support by letting customers to help one another via customer generated knowledgebase content. It helps you in your sales cycle by letting you identify enthusiastic customers and having them persuade prospects in purchasing your product. It can also yield a real return on investment. Check out my last blog post to find out how to measure this.
Here are two sites that I think do a really good job with community content.
http://www.dellideastorm.com/ - This is a great forum for gathering product insights. Look in the top corner to see the size of the online community – its really big! They also use a reputation model for top participants “idea makers”. You can see and post product suggestions, vote or comment on them. What is beautiful is that you see that Dell is listening to their customer voice. Many of these suggestions are tagged as under consideration by their product management.
Dell brands itself on user customization. This is a great way for them to understand what customers really want and tailor their offering for their customers. This ultimately translates into profits for Dell as if customers get the features that they are most passionate about, they will buy, and buy more….
http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/ideas/ideaList.apexp - Starbucks also uses a discussion forum to gather product and service ideas from their customer base. You can see their popular, top of all time and recent ideas. You can vote and comment on ideas. There are almost as many comments from baristas (coffee servers) as there are from customers – ideas about recycling, environmental friendliness, product and service improvements, cost cutting measures. Starbucks listens and responds to these comments. And every time they take action on any of these ideas, they make their coffee, pastries and service experience more appealing to their customers.
It doesn’t stop there. Community content also allows you to understand the demographics of who uses your products and this information can give you cross-sell or upsell ideas. You may even be able to glean actionable information about your competitors.
So don’t underestimate community content. What are your plans to use it? If you don’t have any plans, you gotta start thinking about it….
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07:00:11 am on July 15, 2008 |
Corporations must embrace community content. Your customers are talking about you right now, and you need to be part of this conversation. If you don’t, you won’t understand what is going on and this lack of knowledge will hurt you. You will also be surprised to see a quantifiable return for investing in community content
What does this community content do for you?
- It will help you with product development by turning your customers into resources for innovation. Your customers can vote on product enhancements, suggest pervasive issues to fix, and in this way influence your roadmap. The result is a product that is more in-line with your customer’s requirements
- It can help you with product support by allowing customers to help one another via customer-generated content for knowledgebases, wikis and discussion boards. Jupiter reported in 2006 that “Customer report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail”
- It can help you during a sales cycle. Communities allow you to identify enthusiastic customers and you can use them to persuade prospects in purchasing your product
- It can help you in your marketing efforts. You can use the online buzz and conversations with customers to promote your brand or products
More importantly, community content has a real return on investment (ROI)
- It reduces the cost of creating content for your corporate knowledgebase – and in translating it into all the languages that your customer base requires. You should calculate the internal documentation, and localization costs for generating this content and compare it to the costs of harvesting community generated content
- It reduces the need for customers to call in for answers, shifting them to cheaper channels
- It ensures that the majority or product questions that customers have are addressed. What is the opportunity cost of an unhappy customer who repeatedly doesn’t find the answer that he is looking for in renewal or repurchase revenue?
- It ensures more satisfied customers. Compare your scores on customer satisfaction surveys before and after leveraging community generated content. Look at answers to questions like “would you recommend the products”, “would you repurchase products”, “how satisfied are you with support”, “what is your impression of our image or brand”
- It ensures that pervasive product defects are addressed, lowering the cost of support calls and patches. Calculate the number of patches before and after leveraging community advice on product direction and issues to be addressed
Are you thinking about the ROI of community content? How are you calculating its impact to your business?
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07:00:42 am on June 26, 2008 |
Many customer service organizations make irrelevant knowledge-base entries available to their customers because authoring is done by someone who is not on the front lines, interacting with customers. The content is written without an understanding of the language that the customer uses in explaining their problems.
Adopting a “just-in-time knowledge management” strategy or a KCS (knowledge centered support) approach can help bridge this relevancy gap. If a customer service agent is unable to find the right solution to a customer’s question within a knowledge-base, he or she is able to author a new solution on the fly, right after having helped a customer; the solution is captured with the customer’s point of view in mind, and in his exact words. In this same model, agents can modify existing solutions to make them more in-line with their customer’s words and phrases. The end result is that the knowledge-base entries are easier to find by customers in future searches.
Solutions are not subjected to an arduous review process, but are reviewed as they are reused by other agents. This ultimately focuses the agent’s energy in perfecting only the solutions that are the most frequently used and ensuring that they use the language and expressions that are best aligned with customer’s needs, while maintaining the knowledge-base constantly updated.
Another benefit to using your customer’s voice and words is to augment the company-generated taxonomy with an organically developed folksonomy – or collection of tags (think of the flickr tag clouds, for example). Users can tag useful content and the user community can browse these tag clouds. These folksonomies do not preserve the intrinsic relationship between objects, but they echo more closely how users interact with knowledge that they come into contact with. And, these tags help in making relevant content easier to find.
Are you using just-in-time knowledge? Folksonomies? Is it working for you?
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09:50:27 am on June 19, 2008 |
Customers today pull information they need to make purchase decisions and for customer support from web sites, expecting higher quality of information. Unfortunately, support organizations have been caught unprepared. Researching how to better adapt to this new world led me to try to understand what has worked for other companies:
- Wikipedia’s success rests with its user community taking collective responsibility for the accuracy of the content
- eBay realized that users trust the collective voice when rating suppliers
- Amazon understood that purchase decisions where based on customer reviews and their reputations
- Facebook, saw their success tied to an ease for forming communities
We can use these principles to help shape successful customer service interactions.- Think about loosening the strings around your content. Let your agent community take collective responsibility for the accuracy of knowledgebase information. Let agents flag inaccurate content or author new content
- Reach out to your user community and integrate your knowledgebase with discussion boards. Let users recommend information to be added to the knowledgebase, ensuring that it organically grows with customers changing demands
- Expert users who know the product as well as their customer service agents exist. Let these experts post content directly to your knowledgebase, and use ratings and reputation for author ranking
- Let users rate solutions, vote on important content, append comments and use their feedback to optimize the information delivered during the service experience
- Let users subscribe to content and receive it in the format they prefer
- Be proactive with communication to your users. Push knowledge and alerts out, even before customers experience a problem
All these strategies help you engage in a two-way conversation with your customer base and your agents. Which ones do you think work best for you? Can you tell us why? Do you use other strategies?
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07:55:04 pm on June 12, 2008 |
I think of relationship content as the content generated in discussion boards or blogs which bring like minded users together to exchange ideas. Typically, these users can be categorized as 70% lurkers (those that read posts but never contribute) and 20% joiners; 9% are regular contributors and only 1% can be classified in the elite category. These are your MVPs – your user group leaders, your super-contributors.
Knowing what your distribution looks like is key to knowing how to use them. You want to see whether your elite users represent the voice of your entire community, or whether their contributions apply only to their line of business or specific situation.
If your elite are a good overall representative sample, working with this elite set is easy – you can listen to them for feature requests, you can bounce ideas off them and you can monitor their posts to ensure that their goals are aligned with your business.
However, if your elite contributors do not represent the opinions of the community you need to identify which ones are your advocates and which ones are severely dissatisfied. In all cases, you need to reach out to them, and cultivate a relationship with them of openness and transparency. Your greatest contributors can be your best advocates and your dissatisfied elite can give you insight on what processes may be broken in your organization and give you an opportunity to turn around these individuals.
With over 60% of our customers having plans to offer discussion boards, the question is figuring out how you want to work with your elite contributors. Perhaps you want to create a sub-discussion group of only your elites to explore topics that are not suitable for general consumption – like finding out the specifics of how they want to see a capability implemented, or delving into the real problems that they experience when they interact with your company.
How do you, or what are your plans on leveraging your elite community? Do you have tips that you can share? Do you need help in figuring this all out? Let me know…
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07:20:38 am on June 4, 2008 |
Emotional content on websites is all the rage these days as customers want to have a voice – they want a venue to easily express an opinion, critique an answer, rate a vendor or a product, or append a comment to an article. They also want to be able to story-tell, like for example, to share their insider information on how to best utilize a capability of your product.
This emotional content is very valuable as customers of today trust information from peers more than information from companies. By allowing this content on your site, customers can pull information that they need, on their own terms, in order to make purchase decisions and for customer support. By being vocal, customers can also impact the type and quality of information being delivered. This, in essence, puts them in the driver’s seat, allowing them to influence the relationships that they have with the companies with which they do business.
You need to let go of control and allow emotional content and you should unobtrusively monitor these posts. This will help you engage in a two-way healthy conversation with them, and will also allow you to pinpoint the ardent supporters of your brand. It will also help you validate product roadmaps and strategies making sure that your offering stays in line with customer demand.
Emotional content allows customers to influence the relationship that they have with companies. Yet companies will have a greater success in creating a loyal customer base if they listen, respect and use the voice of their customers.
What type of emotional content are you allowing on your site? How do you monitor it? How do you use it- do you use it for improving service or for product development or for something else? Share your best practices with us! Or ask me for advice.
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08:48:39 pm on May 23, 2008 |
With all the web 2.0 solutions available, you need to determine what part of community generated content you want to adopt, and how you want to leverage its voice during the sales cycle.
I bucket community content in several categories – There is emotional content – like the positive or negative impressions of your products, ratings, as well as the storytelling about your product. Think of the youTube videos that showcase the accomplishments that users have had with your product. There is learning content – like user generated FAQs that augment product knowledge on your site, or add to your training material. There is relationship content – like discussion groups or forums which bring like minded users together to share ideas and best practices.
Community generated content as a learning tool is a good place to start. You will never be able to write all the content that your users need yourself, and have it available in all the languages that you support. If you are comfortable with giving up a little control, the ROI that you gain by giving users authoring rights is quickly seen. You’ll also be surprised by the quality of contributions. You’ll quickly see who your brand advocates are, and how the user community puts peer pressure on itself to create very useful content.
How many of you are letting go of control? And how have you implemented it?
