Conversational Knowledge
Five Best Practices for Community Collaboration

Taken one step further, discussion forum threads represent an ideal opportunity to present targeted online marketing or other relevant information, such as available product upgrades. Every customer support agent or customer service representative would cross-sell or upsell a customer engaged on the telephone; online, the same rules can be applied to questions posed to the knowledgebase and posted to the discussion forums.

This level of seamlessness is consistent with best practices for any kind of collaborative knowledge management. The ultimate goal is to deliver a consistent customer experience that spans all interaction channels, from phone support to Web self-service to discussion forums and beyond.

Best Practice #4: Allow customers to self-direct how they participate in the community.
The rapid evolution of social media has created new expectations for personalization and flexibility in the way people interact with online content. Users expect "anywhere access" (including mobile access from devices of all kinds) to contextually relevant information through methods of their choosing—email subscriptions, RSS feeds, shared bookmarks, saved history and more.

Applying granular levels of personalization in collaborative knowledge environments encourages customer participation simply by making desired information more accessible. In customer service scenarios where users are more directed and specific with their objectives, every second saved boosts customer satisfaction with the support experience.

Suggest topics to your users, based on the products they use, and interests they have identified in the past. Save a "My Topics" list for user-initiated discussions and highlight which threads have been updated since the user’s last visit, eliminating the need to manually check the site for new posts. Allow the user to define email alerts to content subscriptions to notify the subscriber when new responses are posted. Extend subscriptions across discussion forums and the knowledgebase, and allow flexibility to subscribe by topic or content category, by author and by discussion.

Provide custom RSS feeds for each subscription, and for searches containing specific phrases or keywords. Track user participation in the forums and maintain an access history so customers can quickly revisit forums and topics that interested them in the past, and highlight which information has been read, not read, or posted new since the last visit.

Focus not on how to push content to your customer community, but more on how to enable that community to pull the information they need in the way that makes the most sense to each individual participant.

Best Practice #5: Moderate by exception.
Even as social media has become more widespread and integrated into popular and corporate culture, brand stewards’ fear of potential damage persists. Influence and control remains a concern for most large organizations. But moderating and reviewing every post before it’s published on a discussion forum is not only resource-intensive; it robs users of the very value of the collaborative knowledge environment.

Finding the right balance will vary by company, but in general, to ensure a vibrant and collaborative community, organizations should moderate by exception—e.g., allowing users to post and publish freely, with moderators receiving notices from users reporting abuse, or from filters that identify inappropriate or undesirable behavior, such as mentions of a competitor or the use of objectionable or inflammatory language.

Reputation models, in particular, can help companies achieve that balance between freedom and control, by assigning more rights and functionality to users that have earned the trust of both the community and the company. Advanced search technology can add more power to the filtering mechanism by allowing companies to search on specific concepts—so even if there is not a direct keyword or phrase match, semantic analysis will identify discussions that may be objectionable.

Moderating a community by exception, coupled with the ability to ban users, unpublish or edit posts or replies, or close forum topics, creates a positive environment that supports both customers’ need for fast, easy knowledge sharing, and companies’ need for an online community that reflects appropriate values and behavior.

Taken together and implemented correctly, these best practices will help you develop an online community that extends a company’s knowledge culture beyond its own walls, and into the domain of customers, improving customer service and reinforcing brand affinity.

Best Practices for Incorporating Social Networks into KM

• Recognized and reward contributions from the user community
• Promote community conversations into knowledge assets
• Integrate discussion forums into a seamless support experience
• Allow customers to self-direct how they participate in the community
• Moderate by exception

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InQuira provides software applications for Web self-service, agent-assisted support, knowledge management and collaboration, built from a common technology platform that makes it possible for companies to provide a seamless customer service experience across Web, phone and community channels.

Featuring tight integration of search, content management, discussion forums, reputation models and analytics, the InQuira platform ensures companies can author and harvest knowledge, make it accessible to the right people at the right time, and measure its effectiveness at resolving customer problems. Blue-chip customers include Nokia, 3M, Juniper Networks, RBS, Pitney Bowes, SprintNextel, and E*Trade.
For more information, please visit www.inquira.com.