Here's something to ponder.
One of the things we're doing at Sonos this year is 'multi-skilling' our frontline support teams so that they're not only taking phone calls and emails, but also responding on social and community. Previously this work was all done within our (Digital Care) team, which created a functional silo that made it challenging to create a 'seamless' customer experience across multiple channels.
As we explore this approach, we end up with more people from Sonos responding to questions on the community. It's not always the same names and faces every day - and of course we're still around, posting announcements and responding to superusers, but many of the 'support answers' are coming from a larger pool of people.
What are your experiences with this kind of approach? The multi-skilling of our teams is something we believe in strongly, but we also feel that it can be confusing if there are too many people officially contributing. Do you firmly believe in only dedicated people, or have you worked with larger multi-skilled teams handling transactional responses, and who do more than just community?
Multi-skilled teams working on the community?
In a way and on a much smaller scale, we at inSided aim to do the very same thing, by involving everyone from our Customer Support team to also participate on inSpired, as well as through the Support Desk 🙂 !
We have a dedicated team of 7 agents, I'm curious how you still make sure other departments recognize superusers and the quality of the "non dedicated mods" is ensured. Do you have frequent quality measurements on this? And if so are these standardized?
My dream would be that more product owners and product experts (non customer service staff) are actively engaging. We have some people doing this, but would love to see more of them on our forum.
My dream would be that more product owners and product experts (non customer service staff) are actively engaging. We have some people doing this, but would love to see more of them on our forum.
To add on this... props to @michiel van baak developer at insided(@mention feature would be Nice now 😛 ) since he is active on our community since we migrated and he's experiencing his own product.
Yep that's the key tension area. From a pure community perspective it would be best to have a small number of dedicated people who are proven community experts/specialists and that can nurture superusers, etc... But then you have a functional silo - so how do you make the customer experience seamless across channels? There's a big technology element to that, of course, but I also think a multi-skilled front-line team that's able to help a customer end-to-end regardless of channel (e.g. switching across community, social, phone and email as needed) is a potentially great experience that can leave a customer feeling like they've had 'one conversation' and a consistent experience on every touchpoint.
But like you say, it raises questions around quality and the impact/risk of many names and faces on the community. Our current view is that we'll have our small group of community managers/mods on the community every day, who focus on e.g. superusers, and then the front-line multi-skilled folks taking care of the straight transactional support answers (and taking those customers offline to other channels if / when needed). But it's fresh thinking on our side so we certainly haven't figured it all out yet.
Everyone from our "Digital Care" team came up from the traditional Servicedesk (mail, telephone, chat). Whithin the digital team they still have access to all these former chanels. In that way they can make the experience from digital to traditional seamless when necessary.
The otherway around, from traditinal to digital, we tried to make the barrier very low. Again, the teammembers from digital were once servicedesk, so they already have informal connections with eachother. Also the teams are on the same floor, and fall under the same manager. This makes communication between them very natural.
The otherway around, from traditinal to digital, we tried to make the barrier very low. Again, the teammembers from digital were once servicedesk, so they already have informal connections with eachother. Also the teams are on the same floor, and fall under the same manager. This makes communication between them very natural.
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