The benefits of self-service online communities are well known. Customers prefer to self-support whenever possible and companies can offer better, faster and more cost-effective service to their users when they have well-managed communities set up.
But communities don’t manage themselves. The only way to coast is downhill, so to keep your community thriving, growing, and value-adding, you need to keep up with updates in technology and security, as well as with the evolving needs of your customers.
That’s why it makes sense to procure community managed services from specialized teams. In this article, we list the top 10 activities that our enterprise community managed services teams perform for our customers.
1. Community architecture
Defining the purpose of a community and mapping out the users’ journeys is critical if you want users to consider your community as a go-to source of information.
Good community managers are able to build all structural elements of a community when needed, such as categories, forums, knowledge bases, blogs, and so forth.
Typically, iTalent’s community management teams build the structure in our stage environments first, working in partnership with our development teams if there is any coding, software development or systems integrations work required before executing in production.
2. Community engagement
This is truly engaging with the community. This may involve things like regular posts in the community to call out what has happened in the last month or what is coming, or behavior-driving initiatives that are tied to a client’s measurable goals, such as MAU (monthly active users), IRR (initial response rate), or SR (solution rate).
3. Community moderation
With our customers, community moderation can entail activities like:
- Spam management – The Khoros engagement platform scans and flags spam automatically. Community managers review each flagged post and take action on them, for example, by unflagging valid content or moving duplicate valid posts to a hidden board so that the platform learns what is actual spam and what is not. In addition, spam content that was missed by the platform can be manually flagged by a community manager.
- Abuse reports – Every post and reply on a Khoros platform can be flagged as inappropriate or abusive. When flagging content, a reporting community member can type a message to community admins explaining why they are flagging. Community managers review each piece of flagged content and decide whether or not a post or reply needs to be edited or removed. The most common reason for an abuse report is that it violates community standards.
- Relevancy monitoring – Sometimes our teams are asked to monitor discussion boards to ensure that questions and posts are relevant to that board’s topic. If not, they can be moved to a more appropriate board.
4. Community maintenance
Community managers are typically the first line of support for community members for any platform-related technical issues; for example, if they can’t create a new post or reply to an existing one, or if they want to update their email or username. If a community manager is unable to resolve the issue, he or she works within the process of that team to seek support from the system engineers.
Most teams have a business team member who is the liaison between our customer and our engineering team. If our engineering team is unable to solve the issue, a case is opened with the platform provider. Our engineering team can also be responsible for keeping the platforms up to date with the latest software versions.
5. DevOps
DevOps is how we refer to our engineering teams. They are responsible for anything that requires coding, systems integrations, or software engineering. Some examples include but are not limited to:
- Platform upgrades
- Any customization to the platform that requires code work (which is a lot!)
- Ensuring that platforms meet the clients’ accessibility requirements
- Integrating the community with other platforms or applications
6. Roles and permissions
Understanding how roles and permissions work on Khoros and what best practices are regarding who can do what can be confusing. Our team has deep expertise in mapping out roles and permissions policies that best meet our customers’ needs as well as quickly resolving any issues that arise.
7. Content management
Communities are dynamic organisms that are constantly evolving. Content needs to be continually monitored to archive obsolete content, make updates, or syndicate content to other communities or cloud platforms to ensure easy access by the right people.
Some content may need to be translated to other languages if it’s relevant for users in other countries. iTalent’s DevOps team has created a number of pre-built connectors for automating many of these tasks, so business teams can focus their man hours on more strategic activities.
8. Accessibility
Whether a company follows WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) or its own set of digital accessibility requirements, our team is experienced in ensuring compliance and resolving issues or working with the engagement platform to resolve them.
9. Compliance
Online communities are subject to the same laws, including data privacy protection laws, as other cloud properties. Our team can help ensure compliance with all prevailing regulations.
10. Cost savings
Bringing in a managed services team like iTalent saves a lot of money, not only because our broad experience enables us to create and deploy solutions without reinventing the wheel, but also because our DevOps team has already built a lot of custom solutions.
These solutions can easily be configured and deployed, without having to engineer a tailored solution from scratch. We also automate a lot of otherwise manual processes, allowing our customers to do more with less.
Case study: How Autodesk integrated its community with Facebook without increasing costs
How iTalent Digital can help
iTalent Digital is one of Khoros’ most established and capable technology partners with more than 10 years of experience working with this platform.
We have a dedicated community managed services team that optimizes the user experience for millions of users around the world, every day. Visit our enterprise community web page for more information, or contact us at community@italentdigital.com to speak with us about your specific needs.
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