Using interactive community functionality

While static and dynamic integrations can serve many use cases, injecting interactive functionality into your online channels takes the customer journey to a whole new level.





Regardless of the type of interface - whether it’s a chat-based search assistant or a customer portal channel - smart and real-time community interactions will enable extensive reuse of your user-generated content, and will even help add to it.

Starting with the essentials

Use case: harnessing search results

An obvious use case with high impact is arranging for true federated search. This means that community answer results will be adopted into your web and app search engines for service questions. Depending on the search engine used, this social layer can be built using either real-time API topic search queries or cached results which are synchronized from the API at regular intervals. Another method could be to apply third-party indexing and listing of community search results, using a service like Google Enterprise Search.

Advanced integrations

Use case: social profiles

One potential interactive integration is merging user accounts with community profile elements, including personal statistics and private messages which are displayed alongside your regular administrative options. After all, for the customer there can be no logical reason for having to visit two of his personal profiles separately, within the same brand.

Use case: comment box

If your organization publishes content for a website or app, it may be blended with community discussions by automatically mirroring articles with community topics and allowing replies to be posted on either. The big advantage of this is that moderating these replies will be done using the optimized moderation workflow in the community’s Control Environment. For the user, the participation threshold will be low because the same account can be used. Moreover, promoting articles within the community and facilitating new discussions from within other channels will have shared benefits related to content discovery.

Use case: conversational interface

The community doesn’t need to look like, or even use the destination’s interface to which you’ve grown so familiar. What about starting service question topics on the fly, perhaps from within your search assistant, for yet unanswered queries? Purely text-based, community content can be embedded and created within a conversational chatbot, powered by the community API. It allows for the remote creation of community objects including users, topics and posts - without the need for the customer to even visit the community. Growing the community and harnessing its problem-solving power has never been this easy.