Give Customers Control over How They Participate in the Community
This is the third best practices in the series for improving customer service through community-based collaboration. My previous post treated two industry best practices but if you're yet to read them, you can catch the previous post here:
Enterprise 2.0 Best Pratice 2#:Promote Community Conversations into Knowledge Assets
Enterprise 2.0 Best Pratice 1#:Recognize and Reward Community Contributions
Jason Hekl highlighted a very interesting point in his Conversational Knowledge pertaining to customer control and authority, read along.
The increasing growth of social media has created new expectations for personalization and flexibility in the way people interact with online content. The quest for anywhere access by users has also led to the incorporation mobile access to contextually relevant information through methods of choosing email subscriptions, RSS feeds, shared bookmarks, and many more social media tools.
Customers would like to be on top of their game if given the chance as such 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 users assign email alerts to their content subscriptions to enable them receive notifications when new responses are posted. Extend subscriptions across discussion forums and the knowledgebase, and provide users with the flexibility to subscribe by topic, content category, author, and 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.
Paulette- Beezblog Editor
Link to original posthttp://blog.beezbox.com