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Why Extensibility Matters for an Online Community Platform

October 6, 2022 By Guest User

As you know, your organization isn’t sitting still. And neither are your community members or
customers. Business goals change and evolve, as do your challenges, and success means adapting,
evolving, and growing as time goes on.

This guest post is sponsored content provided by Verint. Learn more about Verint here.


The same can be said for your online community platform, which isn’t meant to be a set-in-stone tool.
You need a solution that’s a foundation for self-service, customer success, and a better customer and
employee experience that can also expand and evolve in tandem with the growth of your organization
and the needs of the people who’ve come to rely on the community platform.

With Verint Community, we believe you need a “futureproof” community platform that’s built for the challenges and the changing environment that await you in the years to come. When we look at the community marketplace, we see plenty of basic solutions that may look nice at first but lack the ability to expand in functionality and scale. Many of these DIY platforms might be for something like a hobbyist community and rely heavily on a static set of functionalities that likely includes blogs, forums, and articles, but they aren’t very customizable for specific needs.

Then there’s the higher-level, pre-packaged solutions. These often provide a good starting point and have more capability and features but rely too heavily on a one-size-fits-all approach. When it comes to an online platform, this is a significant issue, because a community needs to be flexible to match the brand, personality, and specific customer needs that are unique to each organization. If you’re not able to customize, extend, and optimize your community – you’re not using a futureproof solution.

A futureproof community prioritizes extensibility

Verint Community is an enterprise-level online community platform in that it gives you everything you
need to get started but is also extensible in that it provides limitless customizations and integrations.
The open-API structure of Verint Community means that your organization can add features that meet
its needs and isn’t stuck with a set of pre-determined use cases and functions. This includes integrating
third-party channels, like social media and private messaging, video platforms, enterprise systems,
native mobile applications, workforce management tools, and your company’s customized applications.

Here’s a few ways that customers can futureproof their community and platform strategy by making the most of Verint Community’s extensibility through open API integrations:


Huddles: When users are engaging with private online community, they should be able to have their
conversations within the platform, rather than having to connect on another app. By using a Huddles
plug-in, Verint Community allows for one-on-one calling between users, group calls and meetings, and
special event capabilities that are perfect for influencers. The Huddles plug-in was developed by Verint
partner 4Roads and keeps the discussion within the community, which is especially valuable for
organizations using their community for online events, training sessions, personalized support, and
meeting needs all within Verint Community.

Mobile App: Verint’s partner 4Roads recently developed an easy-to-use mobile app that allows your
users to take your community with them on the go. This app is customizable to meet your branding
specifications, includes push notifications, a dynamic activity feed, and a sleek user interface.

Slack: Slack, of course, has become a must-have for many organizations who use it for project
management, team communication, or maybe just as a chat tool. By integrating Slack into your Verint
Community, your content shares are synchronized between the two applications. The Slack Integration
add-on created by Verint partner Social Edge Consulting features slash commands, allowing users to
interact with Slack by sending messages through a bot. This integration is just one of the ways in which
Verint Community can work with your existing tools, so you don’t have to abandon successful tools, but
rather bring them into the fold of your community.

Again, a futureproof community platform is one that’s adaptable, flexible, and ready for what’s to come on the horizon. At Verint, we see this extensibility as key to a successful community experience for your customers and employees, while also benefitting your bottom line.

Explore Verint Community’s features and get a demo right here.

Lili McDonald on Being Comfortable with Community Technology

April 27, 2020 By Jim Storer

Join the community experts at The Community Roundtable as they chat about online community management best practices with a wide range of global community professionals. Topics include increasing online audience engagement, finding and leveraging executive stakeholders, defining and calculating online community ROI and more. 

Episode #69 features Lili McDonald.

In this episode of the podcast, Lili shares her experience with online community technology platforms, how community managers can streamline community operations, the power of an online form, and how setting boundaries can help you stay sane.

Listen Now:

https://media.blubrry.com/608862/thecr-podcasts.s3.amazonaws.com/TheCRPodcast_LiliMcDonald.mp3

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

Find more episodes of Conversations with Community Managers here.

About Conversations with Community Managers*

To better reflect the diverse conversations our podcast covers we’ve changed the name of our long-running series to Community Conversations.

Community Conversations highlights short conversations with some of the smartest minds in the online community and social business space, exploring what they’re working on, why they do what they do, and what advice they have for you.

These episodes are a great way to begin to understand the nuances of community strategy and management.

Each episode is short (usually less than 30 minutes) and focuses on one community management professional.

Recap: Community Manager Spotlight Webinar with J.J. Lovett, CA Technologies

March 5, 2014 By Jim Storer

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

JJ Lovett - Community Manager Spotlight

In February, Jim chatted with J.J. Lovett,  Director, Online Communities at CA Technologies as part of our ongoing Community Manager Spotlight webinar series. We are always amazed at the different paths that lead our members to community management – and J.J. is the perfect example. A retired US Marine, J.J. joined CA Technologies nine years ago and now is confident he has the best job in the world. He recently published a book titled “Developing B2B Social Communities: Keys to Growth, Innovation, and Customer Loyalty” – which explains how B2B organizations can use a robust online community strategy to survive and flourish in today’s changing economy.

Watch the video below to learn more about CA Technologies’ customer engagement evolution and how J.J. and his team have received an honorary minor in platform management through numerous changes over the past few years. The audience asked a lot of great questions, so many in fact that we didn’t have time for them all. J.J. has kindly sent answers to the questions we didn’t get to and I’ve included them below. Have a question for J.J. on his journey? You can connect with him on Twitter or leave them in the comments below.

https://www.communityroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/CM_Spotlight_Webinar_JJLovett.webm

 

1. What was the main driver to move to JIVE as your platform? Also, how does this integrate with your companies social listening initiative?

We had been developing our own social collaboration tool in-house on an open source platform. Given that it was not our core business, we saw an opportunity to move to a best of breed solution which would accelerate our roadmap by 12-18 months and allow us to shift from a focus on platform management and get more time back to major in community & content management.

We are in the early stages of integrating the communities into our social listening efforts – more to follow on this post-implementation in a follow on phase.

2. Regarding internal collaboration, what company cultural challenges have you come across, and how have you addressed those?

Our team is not the primary team responsible for internal collaboration efforts including community (we work with our company’s external communities). Getting people comfortable with a new way of doing business and engaging beyond the realm of entitled customers to a larger audience has been a primary goal for us. So, we work with the internal community and social media teams to educate on collaboration overall so people are ready, (more) willing and able to go out into the public domain and engage with our customers and prospects. In that regard, it takes a ton of collaboration with internal champions, legal teams, communications and so on to ensure that everyone is armed and ready to head outside of the firewall and engage.  We’ve done this primarily by designing content initiatives by internal role/persona and doing proof-of-concept projects and then advertising the successes & benefits attained while formalizing the activity and then rolling it out to other teams within the business.

3. How has executive support has evolved?

Executive support has evolved over time and it has evolved greatly for the mutual benefit of the company and customer alike. For the online communities, historically we have had one or two executives interested in trying to help the communities along. With the rise of social engagement and the standardization of community interaction enabling software development company innovation efforts, the interest has become more widespread where we can certainly work with executives throughout the organization to work top-down as well as bottom-up to meet in the middle for success and advancement. Combine this with some new executives who have joined the company from other companies who leveraged communities for development, innovation, support, marketing, etc. and it becomes a convergence that has allowed us to advance community efforts within the company greatly.

4. How have you calibrated between content and people interaction? What predominates?

Early on we are content predominant – providing content for people to come consume and then also to interact on. When we start a community, we generally average around 70% company provided content with 30% then provided or contributed by the external membership. It takes a while (and a bit of refinement on the content) to achieve 50/50 parity for what we as a company contribute and what the membership posts/contributes. Once we achieve parity though, it is a rather quick swing on the other side to get to 70% externally contributed content. So the goal is to have engagement/interaction as the goal but it may take varying amounts of time depending on the maturity and stage in the lifecycle for the product/topic we are focusing on, the familiarity of the customer base with social engagement, and so on.

———————————————-

TheCR Network is a membership network that provides strategic, tactical and professional development programming for community and social business leaders. We connect clients with the people and ideas that help them build and grow successful communities with their customers, employees, and partners.

Think of TheCR Network as a hidden coach who makes you smarter and provides you with regular reinforcement as you do the hard work of helping your organization change. It’s likely not many people internally understand what you are trying to do – but your peers in TheCR Network do and they’ll make sure you know if you are on the right track or might be expecting too much.

TheCR Network helps members:

  1. Innovate more quickly
  2. Save time and money
  3. Perform better

TheCR Network is the place to learn from social business practitioners.  Join today.


https://media.blubrry.com/608862/communityroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/CM_Spotlight_Webinar_JJLovett.webm

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | RSS

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