Social SupportCategory Archive

2012 Kickoff: What’s Happening in KM and KCS

By: David Kay 0 Comments
3 Jan
Checkered Flag on 2011

2011 Takes the Checkered Flag. Photo credit: iStockphoto

I was going to do a “New Year’s Resolutions for Knowledge Program Managers” blog post, but really, it’s the Tuesday after New Years.  Who wants to be nagged?  So I decided to highlight some of the things that we think are new and notable in the world of KCS and KM.

  1. KCS practitioners get industry certification.  Industry certification had been a gap in KCS for many years.  Sure, certification is a part of the KCS practices, but that’s in-house certification, which doesn’t have the same credibility as industry certification.The for-profit arm of the Consortium for Service Innovation has set up a rigorous process by which support practitioners participating in KCS for six months can receive KCS Publisher certification.  Like other serious industry certifications, it’s a big deal: it requires a demonstrated commitment to the practices, and the test is pretty tough.  (Full disclosure:  Jenn on our team contributed to the questions.)From our perspective, it’s about time that KCS practitioners have something to put on their LinkedIn profiles that tells the world they’re proficient at capturing, structuring, reusing, and improving knowledge in the service delivery workflow.  And we think it’s great that program managers have a new tool to motivate and evaluate progress.

    We think this is so useful, we’re building certification in to our customer engagements…and we’re working with the CSI on the next round of certifications, too.  Please comment below if you have thoughts or suggestions, and let us know if you have questions.

  2. Social gets rational.  Last holiday season, it seemed like all the Facebook pages were hung by the stockings with care, and visions of tweets were dancing in people’s heads.  Fortunately, the sugarplum rush seems to have passed and support leaders have settled into a more balanced approach to social.Yes, social support continues to be important (and it always was, of course; it’s just that you have better visibility to it now with new technology.) But most organizations have stopped incenting customers to complainin public by providing better service.  And most organizations realize that social isn’t just another channel.The social tulip mania we experienced for a while was a good reminder that most of the support that happens doesn’t happen in the support center.  It was a good reminder that customers are talking, and that we now have new ways of listening to and engaging with them.  And it paved the way for a more rational strategic approach to social, one that will continue to build on successful support communities and the knowledgebase.
  3. KCS has officially “crossed the chasm” in support.  Next stop?  The enterprise.  Go to an industry event and ask how many people are doing KCS, and watch the hands fly up.  (How closely they’re following KCS practices is another story, but for now, we’ll say perception is reality.) As thought leaders, we miss the early adopter cachet, but as pragmatists, we don’t miss the hypothetical objections about why KCS can’t possibly work.If support has crossed the chasm, it’s time for a new bowling pin, and fortunately, we have a whole lane set up: the rest of the enterprise.  We’re seeing major KCS adoption in professional services, field services, sales, and HR, among others.  We expect that much of our business in the coming years will be helping to migrate and adapt successful KCS practices from support to the rest of the enterprise, accounting for the fact that measures, workflows, and organizational personalities are very different.

What are you seeing?  Please leave a comment and let us know.

ps – consider starting 2012 with a jumpstart in KCS.  We’re offering the KCS Foundations Workshop on February 1-3 in the Silicon Valley / San Francisco area.  Register or find out more, and contact us for discounts for multiple attendees.

 

Six Simple Measures for Community Managers

By: David Kay 1 Comment
16 Aug

Not long ago, it seemed like there weren’t any reasonable measures for the health and effectiveness of communities; now it seems like there are too many!  We often see eSupport and community leaders trying to grapple with page after page of bar charts, line graphs, and tables, unsure what to pay attention to, and unsure what to report up the management chain.

When we look at communities, we simplify matters by cutting things down to six measures—three activities, and three outcomes.  Activities, and trends in activities, will tell us if the community is healthy.  The outcomes let us know if they’re effective—or, more precisely, part of an effective eSupport strategy.

Activities:  Monitoring Community Health

Activity measures tell us if the things we’re planning on are happening.  Good activity measures don’t guarantee success, but poor measures are a good indicator that something’s wrong.  (A cocktail party with 30 guests isn’t necessarily a good party, but one with only three guests is likely to be a bust.)  Community activity measures tell us if people are participating in the conversations.  If enough people are participating, that suggests they’re finding it valuable.

  • Page views.  We’re still not sure whether a tree falling in a forest makes any noise, but it’s a sure bet that a post that isn’t seen isn’t doing any good.  More page views equals more opportunities for value creation.  This is important to trend over time.  It’s also interesting to see where the page views are coming from—your community site?  Self-service search?  Google and other Internet search engines?  This can help you refine your marketing strategy, and perhaps help you fend off those colleagues who want to lock your community behind a paywall.
  • Active contributors.  How many people are not only registered and looking, but actively participating in a discussion (either starting a thread or following up) within the last thirty days?  In the standard 90/9/1 model of community engagement, this measures the nominal 9%—although in the real world, the number is often significantly less than 9%.  Trends are as important as the actual numbers for this measure.
  • Posts per day by forum.  This is what communities researcher Dr. Michael Wu refers to as “liveliness”—is there a good buzz?  Are we at critical mass?  For a specific forum, it takes at least five posts a day to be lively; those with fewer might best be merged with other forums until the topic attains sufficient momentum.

Outcomes:  Gauging Community Effectiveness

Outcomes are the business results we are seeking from our community initiatives…and in fact, from all our eSupport initiatives.  If the activities tell us the “what,” outcomes tell us the “so what.”

A challenge with outcome measures is that no one activity can “take credit” for the outcome.  This is frustrating when trying to justify investment in a specific program, but it makes sense:  wouldn’t it be odd if a self-service program and a communities program were trying to accomplish different outcomes?  Shared goals encourage teamwork, and are a fact of life in the enterprise—no one group gets credit for company profitability, either (not that Sales won’t try.)

If teasing the value created by communities apart from other efforts becomes a paramount consideration, the activity measures at least provide a rough order-of-magnitude starting point.  If there are 100 times as many community interactions as there are live chats, it’s reasonable to argue that the community program is a more significant driver of Net Promoter Score, while if there are ten times as many page views in the knowledgebase than in communities, the knowledgebase might be making a bigger impact.

  • Deflection.  The most easily quantified financial benefit from communities is contact (or case) deflection.  Deflection in communities is measured just like deflection in self-service:  it’s the percentage of people who are successful in accomplishing their goal, times the percentage entitled and intending to open a case, times the number of times people use the communities to resolve an issue.  That is, Deflection = Success Rate x Escalation Rate x Sessions.  While calculating success and escalation rate are worthy of a paper all their own, the quick answer is that you should call your community users and ask them about their last experience—were they successful?  Did they / would they have escalated?  Verb. sap.: escalation rates are lower—often far lower—than people assume.Note that communities deflect contacts by having a customer ask a question and get a helpful response.  But it’s far more common that a third party—a “lurker”—comes along later, sees the exchange, and uses it to solve his or her problem.  Accordingly, if community posts are returned by self-service search or by Google, it makes sense to calculate a blended deflection number across communities and self-service.
  • Satisfied demand for support.  Support is in the business of creating value for customers, not just closing and deflecting cases.  So every successful interaction in the communities provides value.  It’s hard to assign a dollar value to satisfying a customer’s need, but that doesn’t make it less real.  Satisfied Demand = Success Rate x Sessions.  As with deflections, this may be a combined number across self-service and communities.
  • Loyalty.  However you measure loyalty—typically Net Promoter Score, Renewal Rate, or Repurchase Rate—communities should affect this positively.  Look for changes in loyalty especially when community activity measures have changed significantly within a given time period.

Six measures, two slides…and a very telling picture of just how your communities are going.

(Thanks to the Association of Support Professionals, who kindly let me repurpose this piece from a contribution I made to their excellent report Successful Support Communities.)

ps – to our KCS friends who aren’t out on the coasts, sorry if it seems like we’ve been ignoring you!  DB Kay has a KCS Workshop coming up October 5-7, Chicagoland-style.  We hope you can join us there…and please let your colleagues know.

 

 

Resource Roundup

By: David Kay 2 Comments
19 Jan

Sometimes we find so many good things that we can’t help but stand back and let others speak. This is one of those weeks. So, without delay, some links we love.

1. In a recent installment of his Eye on Service blog, John Ragsdale tells a sad story that’s all the sadder because it’s so familiar. Running into technical problems when deploying two Christmas presents, he laments

“I ran into the same problem I have any time I attempt self-help–my problem doesn’t exist in the knowledgebase. It is beyond frustrating. You encounter a problem that many new customers are likely to run into, and there is nothing online to address it. Usually, you can find hundreds–or even thousands–of conversations in a forum about the problem, yet the knowledgebase contains not a single reference to the issue.” (Read more…)

Isn’t it time that we all have a single knowledgebase for internal and external use? And isn’t it time that we use KCS, or some way of making sure it’s up-to-date? This is old news to readers of the DB Kay blog, I trust, but our industry still has a ways to go.

2.  Steve Krug, author of my favorite web usability book Don’t Make Me Think, promised that he’d follow up with a more detailed book on lightweight, DIY usability testing.  Nine years later, here it is:  Rocket Surgery Made Easy. If you have anything to do with a web self-service site, or any other web experience, please buy and read these books immediately.  Oh, and while I’m recommending books about the web, check out the wonderful Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish, who provides practical and interesting coverage of the KCS topic “complete thoughts, not complete sentences.”

3.  Finally, Social Success, our paper on social support, has been published by the Consortium for Service Innovation.  This summarizes several meetings’ worth of insights from Cisco, Yahoo!, Lithium, Salesforce, EMC, and many other Consortium team members.  Read the paper…

“We Have A Policy”

By: David Kay 1 Comment
6 Dec
Woman with duct tape on mouth

Photo Credit: No more words, Katie Tegtmeyer. Creative Commons, Some Rights Reserved

At a workshop I did recently, the subject of customer communities came up.  One participant—who had been making insightful and well-informed comments all day—stunned the room when he said, “Customer communities won’t work for us.  We have a policy that our customers are not to talk with each other.”

He said this matter-of-factly, so I looked for some raise of his eyebrow, or lift at the corner of his mouth, just to let us know he was joking.  It became quickly clear that this fellow was serious as a heart attack.

Sometimes, clients tell me that their customers have no interest in getting technical support from each other, and that’s why they don’t need forums.  Generally, five minutes on Google, Bing, or Yahoo! provides convincing counterevidence.

Yes, your customers want to talk with each other, and they trust each other (maybe more than they trust you?) and no, you don’t get to tell them they can’t talk to each other.

So: do you want to be part of the conversation, or not?