The Community Roundtable

Empowering global community leaders with research-backed resources, training, and tools.

Community Conversations – Episode #91 – Catherine Hackney on Community Tools

By

Community Conversations is a long-running podcast series highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #91 of Community Conversations features Catherine Hackney, Principal at Confident Communities Consulting.

On this special State of Community Management 2022 episode, Catherine and host Anne Mbugua explore:

  • How does thinking about tools affect community work?
  • What does the SOCM 2022 report tell us about community tools?
  • How you can better understand your audience’s needs and expectations.
Catherine Hackney on Community Tools

Listen to Catherine Hackney on Community Tools

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

CommunityConversations-Transcript-91Download
Catherine Hackney on Community Tools

About Catherine Hackney

Catherine Hackney is the Principal at Confident Communities Consulting, LLC, a Higher Logic Certified Partner. She is a reliable online community management consultant with nine years of experience. Cathering demonstrates expertise in increasing member engagement and of the Tradewing and Higher Logic platforms. Catherine was the recipient of the Higher Logic MVP award in 2016-2022. Learn more about Catherine.

About The State of Community Management

Now in its 13th year, our annual State of Community Management report provides strategic ideas and tactical benchmarks for global community management professionals.

The State of Community Management 2022 explores the state of the community management industry through the lens of the eight competencies in the Community Maturity Model™.

Each section includes data, ideas, and expert practitioner perspectives to give you new insight into the community management industry. 

Kelly Munro on Content and Programs
Download your free copy of the State of Community Management 2022.

Community Conversations – Episode #88: Adam Ballhaussen on Technology Integration and Optimization

By

Community Conversations is a long-running podcast highlighting community success stories from a wide variety of online community management professionals.

Episode #88 of Community Conversations features Adam Ballhaussen, Senior Director of Customer Education and Advocacy at Docebo.

Adam shares a look at how Docebo leverages Insided’s community solutions alongside other internal systems and offers advice for creating holistic community initiatives. We also chat about using online community programs for support, knowledge base, and product outcomes.

Adam Ballhausen

This episode is sponsored by Insided. Learn more about Insided.

Adam Ballhaussen on Technology Integration and Optimization

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Adam Ballhaussen on Technology Integration and Optimization – TranscriptDownload

About Adam Ballhausen

Adam’s approach to building Customer Education and Advocacy programs that get results is to be an empathetic leader, a diligent student, and an inspired visionary – in that order.

He’s a seasoned CEd & Advocacy leader, passionate about building communities and creating intuitive learning experiences that delight customers. As a lifelong learner, he has a knack for making complex concepts easy and fun to learn. With a background in marketing strategy and design – and an immense, admittedly geeky, love for technology – he builds learning experiences that work.

About Docebo

Docebo is redefining the way enterprises leverage technology to create and manage content, deliver training, and understand the business impact of their learning experiences. With Docebo’s multi-product learning suite, enterprises around the world are equipped to tackle any learning challenge and create a successful learning culture within their organization.

Check out more podcasts from the Community Conversations series:

Three Ways Verint Community Drives Success

By

Online community case studies from Sage Software, Olympus Cameras, and Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

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

More and more companies understand that support communities can play a key role in their self-service and customer success strategies. Many customers view the online support community as the most powerful, convenient, and responsive place to turn to when they have a question, concern, or need about a company’s product or service.

The problem, however, is that organizations often don’t fully recognize the full value, capability, and potential of their online community. That’s why at Verint, we realize that a community needs to be customizable so that it not only fits the look and feel of the brand but also reflects the organization’s values and business goals.

Verint Community is designed to meet your specific business goals, and we’ve had years of experience building customized communities across a myriad of use cases and industries. Verint Community’s capabilities range from delivering instant information for customer service to building brand loyalty to making life easier for employees.

Here are some of the different ways Verint Community meets the diverse needs of our customers and employees, as well as some success stories from our customers.

Instant Customer Support

One of the most useful and popular elements of an online community is delivering immediate, instant, and around-the-clock customer support – whether that’s through forums, FAQs, articles, or other avenues of information. We’ve seen firsthand how organizations have used their community to deliver a better customer experience, and higher CSAT scores, increase call deflection and save on contact center costs all while placing the information their customers need in one centralized place.

To see this in action, look no further than Verint Community user Sage. Leading companies around the globe trust Sage to deliver software solutions for everything they need to manage accounting and financials, operations, people, payroll, and payments. In North America, Sage offers 22 different solutions for customers, and with such an expansive portfolio, meeting customer expectations and providing agile customer support is a major priority.

Three Ways Verint Community Drives Success

That’s why they chose Verint Community to create their customer-facing community, which they named Sage City. After launching this platform, they reduced licensing and maintenance costs by consolidating on a single community platform, increased customer engagement to more than 20,000 visits each weekday and grew return visitors to account for two-thirds of total traffic. Here’s a case study detailing the success of Sage City.

Elevating the Voice of the Customer

One of the most rewarding results of launching an online community is that it allows for the brand to see the people who use their products or services turn from customers to devoted fans. By bringing together likeminded customers, a brand can use their community to build the sort of loyalty that drives real results – especially when prospective customers see the energy and excitement happening on the community forums.

This is how Olympus Cameras used their Verint Community to create MyOlympus, which has driven an array of positive results across Europe. They’ve evolved their services to meet changing customer needs while also growing their platform. Currently, they’re engaging with more than 400,000 European users for more than half a million monthly page views.

Three Ways Verint Community Drives Success

Here’s a case study that shows how MyOlympus has delivered real results with Verint Community.

Enhancing Team Productivity

An online community isn’t solely a customer engagement tool. At Verint, we’re seeing more and more organizations using their community to build relationships, give workers the tools they need to do their job, and create a virtual watercooler and collaborative space at a time when more people are working remote.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) is the professional body for HR and people development with more than 145,000 members across the world. CIPD provides thought leadership through independent research on the world of work and offers professional training and accreditation for those working in HR and Learning & Development (L&D).

Three Ways Verint Community Drives Success

For more than 18 years, CIPD has been using Verint Community to connect members and employees. They’re currently seeing more than 200,000 users stop by their community at some point during the year, including a significant increase in mobile users in recent years.

Learn more about CIPD’s experience with Verint Community here.

Save the Date: Customer Community Summit is June 15th

By

After a two-year hiatus, we are thrilled to welcome our community audience back to Boston for a one-day, exclusive customer community summit. This all-inclusive experience will take place at Convene Boston on Wednesday, June 15, 2022.

This event is designed for community professionals working with external communities – including customer or partner communities focused on support, product innovation, and marketing/brand awareness.

We’ll combine live product demos featuring new features and functionality from leading customer community platforms, with expert panels and case studies from some of the top customer communities today.

What: The Customer Community Summit is a one-day immersive learning experience for customer community professionals.

Why: Launching, maintaining, migrating, and managing online communities can be overwhelming and, without an experienced team, can lead to expensive and time-consuming mistakes. Learn from solutions providers and online community professionals who have been in your shoes.

Who: Anyone responsible for launching, managing, and evolving online community initiatives. Community managers, project managers, stakeholders, IT professionals, and more are welcome!

We’ve also built in a lot of time for networking with community peers, and connecting with community technology providers to help you get the information you need when selecting a new community platform, or migrating an existing community to a new solution.

The Customer Community Summit will take place at Convene Boston – which means the food will be amazing, and there will be unlimited coffee, drinks, and snacks all day.

We’ll cap the Summit off with a casual cocktail party and head to a series of dinners hosted by our community partners. This is a the perfect event if you’re looking to learn more about the customer community landscape, are currently evaluating a new community platform, or just want to connect with community professionals facing similar challenges.

You can view the agenda and learn more about registration here.

Welcome to the 2020 Connect Technology Track

By

This is a guest post by Technology Track Chair, Jillian Betjlich.

If there was ever a year for technology to demonstrate its reach, 2020 has been that year. Amidst chaos and confusion, technology has been a common denominator allowing us to connect, engage, and collaborate with individuals around the world. It has allowed us to transition to virtual workplaces and educational institutions, get the information we need instantly, or simply just spend time with a familiar face and voice.

We knew technology had changed how we work, play, and interact, but this year it has truly proven its immense impact on how we live and thrive. Technology is here to stay. (The pandemic and 2020 are not. Phew!)

Some of the sessions at the Technology Track 2020.

Behind the scenes of all that chaos, confusion, change, and transition are community professionals harnessing the use of technology to bring about the environments we need and want. We’ve created digital worlds, changed behaviors for the better, dug deep into code and data, and leveraged every last drop of functionality. And we’re so ready to share our experiences, lessons learned, best practices, and more with you.

This year’s technology track will feature live demos, interactive panels, and practitioner-led case studies on can’t-miss topics, covering everything from online community platforms to community analytics and vendor roadmaps. Whether you’re a full-on techie, community nerd, or just getting started, this year’s track is sure to leave you feeling like a platform expert.

We look forward to nerding out with you!

Jillian Bejtlich
2020 Technology Track Chair

Lili McDonald on Being Comfortable with Community Technology

By

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:

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: 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.

Webinar: Best Practices for Evaluating Online Community Platforms

By

Best Practices for Evaluating Online Community Platforms

Each month our community manager extraordinaire, Kelly Schott, shares a behind the scenes look inside TheCR Network.  She’ll explore the research, programming and professional development available exclusively to Network members and highlight best practices for community management excellence.

November’s webinar focused on best practices when evaluating community and engagement platforms.

Are you evaluating and assessing community or engagement platforms? You are in great company – a lot of people are. This is being driven by shifts in the vendor space, the growing importance of these technologies to organizations, and the maturity of current programs.

Watch Kelly as she shares five tips for evaluating online community and engagement platforms.

Watch the Webinar Archive:

Watch more webinars.

Evaluating Community and Engagement Platforms

By

Are you evaluating and assessing community or engagement platforms? You are in great company – a lot of people are. This is being driven by shifts in the vendor space, the growing importance of these technologies to organizations, and the maturity of current programs.

At The Community Roundtable, we think about and break down these platforms in the following way:

Each of these layers – the engagement layer, the management layer, and the administrative layer – are important for a mature engagement platform. This structure reveals why community strategy is critical to a successful community or engagement ecosystem – it informs how each of these layers is structured so that the user experience, management tools, and administrative governance are aligned for optimized performance. This structure also helps reveal why a sole focus on the user experience limits the growth, maturity, and value of a community program.

My recommendations for starting your platform evaluation projects:

  1. Start with Strategy: if you do not, the complexity of these platforms will confuse you, your community management team, and your members. A good strategy will help you prioritize and identify the key behaviors that you need to enable – giving you strong guidance as you look at and configure platforms. Without that alignment, the conflict will at best keep you from efficiency and at worst, hamper engagement and value.
  2. Evaluate Analytics & Reporting Next: no matter what your members are doing, if you cannot see it in the data, segment it, compare it, and measure its value and influence on business outcomes, you will not be able to optimize the system. Additionally, the ability to easily get tactical, operational, and strategic reports will impact your ability to manage the community and communicate progress to stakeholders.
  3. Platform Architecture Bites Back: if you do not evaluate the permissions structure, the way in which new communities are provisioned, and the integration and indexing of content, audit options, and ecosystem governance you may be left with a tool that severely limits growth.
  4. Last, Evaluatee User Functionality: if your key behaviors are available in the platform but difficult to use, that will be problematic and it will constrict engagement rates and value. Additionally, design and in particular how graphics and faces are exposed, matters in social systems. Faces are critical to online communities feeling like communities instead of a static website, a content repository, or a transactional ticketing solution.

Are you in the process of looking at these solutions?

TheCR Network offers exclusive in-depth information and unbiased user advice, including our Community Platform Requirements Library & Vendor Comparison Tool and platform-based cohorts for learning and sharing. Learn more.

Lisa Allison on Migrating Community Platforms

By

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

Episode #60 features Lisa Allison, Community Strategist and Enterprise Community Manager at Analog Devices.

Lisa and Shannon Abram discuss best practices for completing a smooth community platform migration on this short community-focused podcast.

This episode of Conversations with Community Managers is sponsored by Telligent.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Stop the Technology Madness – Organizational Cultures Are Decades Behind

By

By Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of The Community Roundtable.

technologyRecently the term ‘Digital Transformation’ keeps popping up as the latest buzzword bandied about by analysts and vendors and every time I hear it, I twitch just a little bit. We’ve been here before. Remember the dot-com craze? The term Digital Transformation got batted around a bit then too.

The biggest problem for me is that we haven’t even learned to effectively use the technology we already have. In fact, we haven’t even learned – at the organizational level – to use technology that is three decades old. Witness email. Email’s CC feature has reinforced passivity in our organizational cultures around decision-making. Instead of deciding, we reply and copy five people who have some involvement in the topic. Everyone has an opinion but they often complicate the issue rather than adding clarity, which makes it even harder to actually make a decision. So the decision sits there and everyone moves on to the next email. Email’s BCC if even worse – it encourages passive-aggressive covering-my-ass behavior, instead of forcing people to respond directly and learn how to express disagreement constructively. Unfortunately, organizations never stopped to really think about how that technology was going to affect they way work happened in their organizations. Should we blame the technology? Not entirely but it certainly makes this destructive behavior very easy and that does affect our collective behavior, and culture.

We are getting slightly smarter. These days with things like social media and internal social networks, we have paused to consider that it may not be just about technology. Change and adaptation happens slowly though. It’s frustrating and we seem to eventually get bored of the process or find it too complex to take on. And oh look, there’s SOA! and BIG DATA! and Mobile! and Digital Transformation! There MUST be a technology that can solve this problem, right? So we move on before we’ve really fully digested that last wave of technology – and there are vendors and analysts aplenty to help convince us that a new technology is the answer, because their revenues depend on it.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m a technologist and product manager by training. I love technology and it’s come a long way in helping us create new opportunities for our organizations. But technology is moving much more quickly than our organizational’s ability to change or take advantage of it. I tend to think it might be wiser if the CIOs of the world partnered with COOs and focused on structure, management and process change before skipping on to the next shiny object. Our IT infrastructures are such hairballs at this point that people literally cannot get work done – let alone take advantage of collaborative environments and the sharing economy. We have a lot of work to do and only a small part of it is on the technical side.

So, you want digital transformation? Spend most of your budget and time on management and leadership issues.