Collaboration Meets Community Platforms

Community 3.0

Get Satisfaction, a provider of online community platforms that integrate with social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and HootSuite, has seen more interest from B2B and B2C marketers looking to segment users based on their degree of participation in community groups.

Because communities are a knowledge-rich gold mine of user-generated content, companies are increasingly interested in the search-engine optimization aspect of the community. For instance, AvidXchange has access to a contextual search engine, which can drum up anything from a file to a Wiki page or forum article through a simple search, McDonald says.

But be forewarned—search should not be limited to the four walls of the community, Leggett warns. "It can't be a silo," she says. A community must be properly moderated and marketed. "It has to be a part of your customer ecosystem. So, for example, if you do a search on a Web site, does it bring up community content as well as FAQs? You have to think through all of these integration points from a business process perspective and make sure that a community isn't an island all on its own."

With vendors eyeing ways to unite communities with the rest of the channels in customers' support environments, the key to success will be to connect agent workflows, ensure customer communications do not slip through the cracks, and begin to introduce analytics that bridge the gap between social sites like Facebook and Twitter and the support community.

Questions to Ask Before Deploying a Customer Service Community

Who will be the engager? According to Salesforce.com's Alex Bard, companies want to be able to help people understand who they're having a dialogue with inside of a community. It's important to consider points such as "Who is the subject matter expert on the particular question you have?" or "How is this person rated by [his] peers and other people inside of the community?" to weigh the value of the person's responses versus that of an anonymous user.

Have we thought about governance? Companies should make every effort to clearly publish their governance rules and be "explicit" about their social policy, Forrester's Kate Leggett advises. "One company that does this very well is Best Buy," she says. "They have very strong, precise guidelines about what they will and will not answer."

What will our community be used for? A logical first step, according to AvidXchange's Tom McDonald, is to know your audience. "You have to know what type of business you are, who you're appealing to, and what it is that the people do on a day-to-day work [basis] and what you're trying to offer them."

Will jobs change? With customer service collaboration, a product manager and research and development professional may be working side-by-side with a salesperson or support agent. This requires companies to address what Bob Furniss, director of the service cloud practice at CRM consulting group Bluewolf, calls "a change management, adoption, and training issue." When email was brought into the call center, "everyone was worried about allowing an agent to write an answer in black and white," he says. "Yet, today, in the contact center space, we see it as part of the normal contact. It's just part of what we do. I think communities and social interactions are following that path."

Associate Editor Kelly Liyakasa can be reached at kliyakasa@infotoday.com.