Preface
This professional post aims to provide some practical guidelines &
recommendations for integrating a community solution over varied social media
channels. It is based on our real-world experience with a variety of clients in
Germany.
Social media by itself is no fun for business. It’s a world with
zero structure, no rules and no real identities. With that, the massive
adoption of social networks has changed forever people’s expectation of service
and availability. Your customer expects you to be there for them and by fact
would work with businesses that are accessible directly from their social
circles. Even clients of most conservative businesses are spending considerable
amount of time on social networks; exchanging thoughts, ideas, experiences and
suggestions.
The buzz of social media and community oriented websites has
created a false illusion that things are going to work in the speed of “LIKE” but
reality shows a totally different picture. In fact, most businesses that chose
to follow the social-shortcuts failed to show improvement on the most important
measurements: availability, service quality, SEO, brand building and
profitability.
With this post we would try to share our ideas &
recommendations for successful community integration.
About Hiogi GMBH
Hiogi GMBH is a German based company that has invented one of
the world’s most intelligent client
Interaction platforms, we call it “Service-community”. It is a safe, simple and
cost-effective way to promote businesses with better client service, self-expanding SEO
and brand advocacy.
Our Products
Hiogi’s products are fully customizable and are based on solid
work-flow to connect your business securely with clients over any social media
channel. Our Service-Community can work as a service or locally at the client side
as a complete white-label solution. The platform itself supports external
modules integration, single sign-on, multi-level moderator and all the common
social media features. The platform can work across varied social media
channels and consolidate the content on the go.
Business Targets:
All our
recommendations below are aimed to help our clients with achieving the
following business targets:
1. Increase revenues
and profitability of the e-commerce portals
2. Improve pre-sale,
on-site and post-sale client experience with community integration
3. Improve service
quality and availability while reducing related costs
4. Strengthening
brands and corporate image for wider target group over new social channels
5. Capitalize on
genuine user-generated content with service-as-marketing and self expandable
SEO
6. Maintain security,
control and corporate reputation
Suggestions and ideas
Especially in the rapidly changing era of social media, it is
important not to confuse the art of the possible
with the art of the profitable!
Below are some tips and recommendations we gathered while
integrating service-community solutions with our clients:
1. The core infrastructure should be applied to all social media
channels regardless of the underline platform (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and
Etc.). The channels should be centrally managed and the content should flow
through the optimization engine to be reused as an self expandable SEO promotion.
Further, the system should support solid work-flow and priority. It is not a
question of how many admin / moderator are allowed, it is how they can make the
content work-flow effective, simple to use and supportive for the client.
2. The content funnel: the content funnel concept is based on
the idea that any interaction with the client (pre-sale, post-sale and
promotion) has sustainable value. When for example, people are calling or
sending emails, the second the service person answers the clients question, the
value will disappear. In the offered concept, the content will be automatically
optimized, structured and reused to promote your business objectives in a given
stage of the shopping process.
3. On site experience (pre-sale / sale process): the idea at this stage is not only to get the
user to complete his purchasing but also to strengthen the brand, increase
repeated sales, create an exciting shopping experience and build client
loyalty. This can be achieved by a combination of several components and based
on the practice of giving the client tangible value and sticky experience.
There are several elements we experience GOOD results with our clients:
3.1: Shopper club: The
shopper club should be carefully integrated to the community and should offer exciting
value for the client, but at the same time promotes the business objectives.
Some examples include getting VIP support , discount, special birthday deals
and Etc. The shopper club should be based on a virtual currency (like the miles
collection with airlines). Those miles should have good value for the client; promote
client loyalty and repeated purchasing. The value and special offers should be dynamically
connected to the user s profile and shopping habits.
3.2: Contextual widgets: the contextual widgets should automatically
display questions and answers related to the current and specific user
location. Example: when a user is looking on a specific product or area, the
system should display the thoughts and ideas that other members who had
purchased the product before shared. The widgets works on a page level and are
good for the client and for the page ranking.
3.3 Product community rating: When this mechanism is well
managed it shows a high value for clients. Example: when users built a nice
combination of clothes and save it as a specific style, by the product – the
system can display the ideas from other users. Many times, good ideas, will
lead to purchase. Further – user questions and comments about this product.
3.4 Community favorite products and discussions: use the
interlinks between the community members (follow me and “like” functionality)
to offer relevant products. Sometimes users would follow members they like and
adopt some of their shopping habits.
3.5 Questions & Answers: at any point of time, the user
should be able to ask the community a question and get a fast answer from real
people. Static Q&A are a fun killer and users need the personal touch, even
in a virtual world. These questions should go through moderated channels and
with priority triggers.
4. Post-sale & customer service: the direct target of this
stage is to improve service quality, reduce cost related to client service (and
overload on call centers) and increase availability of the company to its client
over new social-media channels. This can be achieved with a well deployed
service-community. Below are some recommendations:
4.1 Supports should be available for clients 24/7 from their
social channels. Clienst should be able to ask the community directly from
facebook, from their email, from their web and Etc. The first golden rule is:
make it easier than picking up the phone and calling.
4.2 Client helping client concept: Allow premium members to moderate the
sessions and answers clients. Offer them virtual mileage for their help. Allow users to comment, but introduce a
2-way-handshake mechanism to ensure the quality of the reply.
4.3 The community moderator should be notified about trends in
real time. In the longer term, this moderator could be a part of the community
and save a lot of money for the call centers and identify problems with
specific products.
4.4 Powerful results: it is critical to offer the user answers
to similar questions as he clicks. Our experience shows that this feature helps
to reduce the pressure of the support center. In our postbank service-community
deployment, this feature shows great results. The golden rule: make it easier
on the client to find answers than to call.
4.5 Content management and indexing: all correspondences should
be collected and automatically organized. Similar questions and answers should
be merged and indexed together.
5. Dynamic FAQ module: this module is important to optimize the
value / appearance and indexing of the content. As the community presents many
interactions over specific topics, it is important to generate best practice /
FAQ. The system should automatically identify the most common questions and
answers and allow the moderator to merge it and generate a single instance of
best answer! This could be as PDF or as a dynamic FAQ on the website. It is
GREAT for the user and wonderful for SEO as well. These Q&A should have
higher priority when displayed to the client.
6. Marketing community / Campaign manager module: with this
module, you can promote specific product / marketing campaign. The idea is to
post pre-defined and well tuned questions and answers as a user generated
content. This method shows GREAT SEO results when it balances well with the community interactions.
7. Thematic communities: as many clients deals with a variety of products, it would be
recommended to create topic based communities. The keywords and tags should be
managed as a tree structure, and with separated optimization. It is important
to isolate the users from the underline differences and allow them to be active
in their community of interest with a single sign on. In some cases, users can
be invited to write blogs and ideas about specific products. These should be
posted on the thematic communities. Every community should have a static
(optimized) part and a dynamic one –
based on user generated content.
Summary
The guideline, tips and recommendation above are based on our
experience with service-community integration. Hiogi GMBH has over 5 years of
hand-on experience with building successful service communities to clients in
Germany. We focus on make social-media profitable for our clients.
We would be happy to provide more information per request, and help
your business with the successful
deployment of such an important project.
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