In a previous blog article, I wrote about a specific feature of the Khoros Accelerated Community Management (ACM) product called Monitor Walls and how it can unlock insights for community stakeholders. Here, I want to take a step back and look at the ACM product as a whole and why it matters to the community category at large.
Just as the assembly line revolutionized the manufacturing of automobiles and helped to scale an entire industry, ACM produces similar benefits for a community management team, and ultimately, helps make for better communities. The same benefits come to mind when thinking about an assembly line: efficiency, automation, scale, speed, quality improvement, and cost savings.
A brief history of Khoros ACM
The Accelerated Community Management add-on is a byproduct of the vision of a company that is now known as Khoros Care. Khoros Care is the result of the acquisition made by Khoros (formerly Lithium) of Social Dynamix. Social Dynamix was a pioneer in the category of social media management with a specific focus on customer care and support.
This is an important detail in understanding just how powerful ACM is for community. With social media exploding and enterprises needing to catch up by rapidly scaling their engagement with customers across social media channels, Social Dynamix created a roles-based workflow engine to help scale operations across all social channels (incidentally, the founders had a background in doing the same thing for call centers).
Benefits and features of Khoros ACM
Now that we have the history lesson out of the way, why does that matter for community stakeholders? The vision is the response to a simple question: if we integrated Khoros Care with Khoros Community, what would happen? Answer: a supercharged community management hyper-tool that provides an automation framework and workflow engine in a single solution.
Khoros ACM is a supercharged community management hypertool that provides an automated framework and workflow engine in a single solution.
While there are too many features to cover in this article, I want to review four main areas that establish ACM as the premier management solution for a community team and really helps set Khoros apart from the pack when it comes to scaling community operations.
- Tagging
- Routing
- Prioritization
- Manage view
Automated tagging
Behind ACM is an enterprise-grade, rules-based language engine that when tuned and configured correctly, classifies and categorizes all community content with an automated tagging framework.
This is different from the tagging and labels a community user sees when interacting with the community. This is a back-end tagging engine that provides the basis for all of the automation magic to happen after content is tagged. This attached metadata can now be used for rest of the automation and reporting that community managers need to scale community efforts.
For example, a community user in a smartphone community asks a troubleshooting question about their device. ACM ingests this community post in real time and tags it with the device type, model, whether the post is actionable or not, and language detection. Furthermore, it can also attach metadata tags to the author of the post for further automation, separating out content tags and author tags.
Routing
Now that the community post is tagged, it can be effectively routed to the right team for review. Does this post belong to a specific support team in a specific region of the world, for example? ACM has a powerful scaling feature called Work Queues, whereby specific content can be routed to these work queues to be reviewed and perhaps answered by an appropriate subject matter expert. The imagery here is to think about an airport hub tagging luggage to specific destinations around the globe. With the right set of tags, the content gets to the right set of eyes for review.
Prioritization
Another automation framework based on having tagging and additional rules in place is the ability to prioritize all content coming into the community. With six levels of prioritization (0-5), each with its own defined Service Level Agreements (SLA's) attached, we can now track and report on SLA achievement by priority. A best practice here is to reserve priority 0 for manual override (not automated), such that if any post has a level 0 priority, you know it's been touched by a human to get that level of severity.
Manage view
Now that content is tagged, routed and prioritized, we can neatly organize content by view or by role (or both) with all kinds of creative license to perform unique, proactive actions. For example, we can separate all first-time posts in a community where we want to be sure some response is given in a timely manner.
Or, we can easily view all priority 0 and priority 1 posts in a single column view to be able to take specific action or even just track the progress towards resolution. We might even take advantage of CRM integration by escalating a post to create a support ticket in the CRM system of record. Perhaps we just want to view all of the content being produced by our super users in community. There are limitless ways to view the community content.
Configuration considerations
Of course, with any automation solution in place, it can't be overstated just how important the tuning and configuration is when setting up Accelerated Community Management. ACM is only as powerful as the rules by which it is governed. This is where iTalent Digital comes in with unparalleled experience in community management and configuration. ACM is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of solution. In order to get the most out of this investment, it's important to have a somewhat regular cadence of audit and re-tuning as the community and company offerings evolve. Setting up the right rules for automation creates a community that can scale rapidly, even with limited resources.
Do you have further questions about Khoros ACM? We at iTalent Digital are happy to help answer your questions. Contact us at khoros@italentdigital.com.
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