customer service Archives

3 Customer Engagement Tips from Powerschool, Tealium Education, and Acer

December 3, 2020 By Jim Storer

Check out how customer support organizations across industries use online community programs to engage with their audience and improve the customer experience.

You know community is important, but what is the actual impact of a mature, well-resourced community program?

Community programs leveraged as tools to support the customer experience have an out-sized impact, improving everything from engagement rates, satisfaction levels and NPS results.

Consider these three ideas when thinking about how you can use an online community to meet your customers on their journey with your brand.

1. Use Collaboration to Support Customers

“We are currently trending 30% higher in activity since last year.”
Jbid Kissel, Senior Manager, PowerSchool
Community Use case: Customer Support

PowerSchool designed their community to empower and streamline customer experience, bringing a multitude of customer support channels under one roof. Using the Khoros platform, the community supplements a direct business-to-customer support system with a collaborative space that increased activity by 30% over the past year. Learn more.

Think about where your customers want to connect with you? How can you meet them there with your community? By offering collaboration support solutions you not only get your audience connected with the information they need, you empower advocates to share their stories.

2. Start at the Beginning (Every Time)

“We are replicating many community features in our Employee Portal, because of the growth we have seen.”
Kristen Meren, Community Manager, Tealium Education
Community Use Case: Advocacy Programs

Tealium Education recently revamped their community and added two community managers. The update aligned advocacy initiatives with the pillars of their community, identifying three core advocacy tasks: create killer content, drive engagement, and build internal advocacy. The Tealium team focused on welcoming new members and engaging previously passive members. Learn more.

On-boarding is crucial, but also can be a drag on resources. Remember, every time you on-board someone into your community it is their first time (every time). What may be dry and rote to you is new and valuable to new members.

3. Extend Your Reach (and Your Value)

“Our community allows us to provide a level of support and expertise that would be impossible otherwise”
Brad Bliven, Sr. Program Manager Digital Services, Acer
Community Use Case: Customer Support

Acer has been supporting its customers with a community for almost a decade. As a mature community, it has captured and delivered a lot of expertise – but it extends its impact by generating visibility and value for the company via public search engines. The Acer community team can connect its engagement to a range of strategic business goals across the customer lifecycle; awareness and branding, communications efficiency, lower support costs, and customer loyalty. Learn more.

Connecting your community to your wider business isn’t just good for your current customers. Extending the reach of content helps educate interested parties, and keep your employees in touch with the voice of the customer.

How to Build a Community-Based Support Model: A Webinar with Ian White

June 11, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Last week we were lucky enough to have Ian White, manager of support at Rackspace join us for our monthly Community Manager Spotlight webinar. Ian and his team have down amazing things with their support community – you can read more about their recent Stevie Award win here. In the webinar Ian provided a fascinating look at the culture at Rackspace, shared the guiding principles for their community and lessons learned from their early days, and even gave us a sneak-peek at a new launch.

We’ve archived the webinar here for you – it’s definitely a don’t miss if you are tasked with customer service or support using a community model, or if you are interested in how to engage internal users.

We can’t thank Ian enough for sharing his experience with us!

This content has moved inside The Network.

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Did you know that The Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in The Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining The Network can improve the work you do.

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Interview with a Community Veteran – Michael Pace

April 15, 2014 By Jim Storer

By Shannon DiGregorio Abram, Relationship Manager at The Community Roundtable.

Our last interview with a community veteran is with one of our earliest members and most vocal supporters – Michael Pace. Michael has worked tirelessly to advance the ideas and practice of community customer support and has been a great leader in and out of TheCR Network.

You can connect with Michael on twitter, or follow him on his blog: thepaceofservice.com.

1. How have you seen the community management space evolve over the past five years?

Interesting question. Oddly, I feel I have seen two separate paths for community management over the last five years. Path #1: I call this the status quo path. People who still preach and practice exactly the same way they did 3,4,5 years ago. They seem to be adding very little to the conversation, and continually regurgitate the same old same old spiel. Many of them do not believe you should or could quantify the value of your community, and believe in many of the original “isms” of yesteryear. Path #2: I call this the edge of the box path. This is the true evolution of community management. They look at how to leverage the skills, competencies, and tools to push our thought on what can be done. Folks interested in social business have moved down this path, because it is bigger and immensely more valuable than just social media networks. They have operationalized social, their communities, and tools to distill the insights necessary to move forward.

2. What are some of the biggest differences from when you first started out in community management?

The biggest difference (for me) from when I first started is the incorporation of customer service into the social space. In ’09 it was still all Marketing and PR, except for Frank Eliason at Comcast. Finding others interested in social/community management for customer service was very scarce. In a lot ways I appreciate that open range today, because I may have fallen lock step with the crowd if it wasn’t so scarce. It pushed me to find ways to make social work for customer service.

3. What would you do differently in your first community management role knowing what you know now?

Executive champions, executive champions, executive champions! Did I mention executive champions? Without executive championship, you are going to be Sisyphus pushing your rock up the hill each day. I had relatively strong executive championship, but if I was to do it again, I would have made it bigger and more pronounced.

4. Where do you see yourself in five years?

Five years from now, I see myself with my own customer service shop/contact center. But it wouldn’t be your father’s contact center. It was be rich with efficient communication and collaboration.

5. Did you have any community management mentors along the way? Any specific advice they gave you that stood out to you?

Not just saying this for the purposes of this questionnaire, but Rachel and Jim were my primary local mentors. I had a Facebook page to keep track of idiots I didn’t like in high school, and a LinkedIn page to source job opportunities. Beyond that no social training what so ever. They helped me ramp up so quickly that I was speaking about social customer service in front of audiences within a few months. Best advice came from Rachel. She told me my Twitter stream was boring. “Who wants to only hear about email marketing all day. Show your personality. If I am interested in you, I’ll be interested in what you share.” Three months later, I was making Movember shower videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glPko3I-EHc&list=UUZLGMCmn9LcpxOaRwm8vIow

6. What would you tell someone who has made the career leap and is in the early stages of their career in community or social business?

If someone was making the career leap over to social and community management, I would tell them regardless of what you believe this role will entail, you should continue to focus on core business competencies, as well as social networking skills. Core business competencies should include (but might not be limited to) communication, influencing others, analyzing data, teamwork, customer focus, results focus (getting things done efficiently), and people development and management. Odds are is your community management role will be cross functional, and you will need to (continue to) learn how to develop these competencies in order to effectively advocate for funding/people, deliver on cross functional goals, communication activity and vision, and gain insight.

7. If you could go back and give yourself advice five years ago what would you say?

“Hey this Facebook and Twitter thing may actually take off, go get yourself involved.”

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Did you know that TheCR Network members work with all kinds of communities? In fact, about 25% work in either internal or external communities and 50% work with both! No matter what kind of community you work with membership in TheCR Network will save you time and improve the quality of your work by connecting you with peers, experts and curated information. Learn how joining TheCR Network can improve the work you do.

Celebrating Community Success – Ian White (Rackspace)

March 10, 2014 By Hillary Boucher

By Hillary Boucher, Community Manager at TheCR Network.

As community manager of TheCR Network – our peer network of social business and community leaders – one of the things I love is celebrating our members’ successes with them. We know the many challenges our members face as they work to implement community models into their organizations’ infrastructure and it’s great when there is validation for all of their hard work. In this case, we were thrilled to hear that one of our members, Ian White of Rackspace, and his community team was awarded a silver award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service. I caught up with Ian to get more details.

Hillary: Congrats on your big award! Tell us more about the award and why you and your team was chosen to receive it.

Ian: The Stevie Awards are considered the Oscars of the business world, and the Sales & Customer Service awards honor companies across sales, contact centers and customer service. More than 400 nominated customer service and sales executives from the US and several other countries attended.

My team, the Rackspace Community Team was honored for its contribution towards providing Fanatical Support®. One of the tenants of Fanatical Support is proactively serving our customers – providing solutions to problems before customers know they have them and before they even have to ask. The team took home a silver award for Best Use of Technology in Customer Service – Computer Services at the eighth annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.

Hillary: Sounds like your customers enjoy this more modern form of support – can you share some feedback you’ve received from users on the community support model?”

Ian: Our customers are primarily business owners, and they’ve told us that they appreciate the ability to have a library of solutions at their fingertips that is accessible when they want it. They are delighted at the speed and quality of our specialists’ responses in the Community. Additionally, our customers enjoy the access that the Community gives them to have transparent communication with Rackspace leadership about big issues such as security in the cloud.

Hillary: We know it’s a pretty big deal for a community team to win this over traditional support teams. Can you share a little background about your community and how you ended up at this point of achievement?

Ian: We started the Community on February 4th, 2013 with the goal of expanding our Fanatical Support to a digital audience that prefers self-service. In the current market, many people prefer to google an answer to a question rather than speak to a human, so expanding that concept to include support for Rackspace customers was a key objective. It was also important that our Community provide access to specialists in a wide variety of technologies that can address specific concerns. After one question has been answered, it can be viewed and provide insight to other customers who are experiencing similar problems. This allows us to create a comprehensive support experience for our customers with information that is constantly evolving and growing.

Hillary: Thinking back at the process of standing this community up, what was a major obstacle and how did you overcome it?

Ian: The biggest challenge out of the gate was trying to find content that would be valuable to our audience. It’s something we continually debate as a team, and we challenge each other to find the best content, through the right channel, for the right member. Fortunately our customers are very open about what they want, so we have the advantage of learning from them and adapting our processes along the way.

Hillary: What’s next for your community?

Ian: In 2014, our focus is targeted at expanding the self-service options for our customers through a redesigned Community and a unified customer experience for all of our digital portals. The concept of proactive Fanatical Support will continue to inspire any and all projects moving forward. I’m really excited to see how customers react to the updates we are planning, and I hope that they love it. If they don’t, I hope they will tell us so that we can improve it!

Hillary: Great job, Ian! We’re all really proud of the work you are doing and we look forward to keeping up with your efforts inside TheCR Network!

Ian White is the manager of support at Rackspace and has 19 years of experience leading large scale cloud hosting programs and teams. He identifies strategic opportunities and grows them into sustainable business models. He specializes in creating digital self-service channels to connect people with online solutions, knowledge bases, communities, and social learning environments. His passion is creating customer delight.