I’d like to discuss One for One topics: what they are, why they’re harmful and what you can do to reduce the amount of these topics. I’d like to hear your opinions and ideas about this :)
What are One for One topics?
One for One topics are topics that can pop up in every service-oriented community, but especially in the service communities of telecom operators. These topics are started because a customer wants to speak to one service agent and they want support that cannot be deflected and could never be peer to peer. Three general examples of these topics are: “I want a refund”, “I never received my hardware” and “I want you to replace my broken hardware” (e.g. "Can you replace my broken remote?"). A lot of individual administrative and technical hiccups also fall into this category to some extent.
Why are these topics harmful to communities?
One for One topics will give several KPI’s a bump: registered users, topics and posts. However, above a certain threshold these topics will hurt your overall content. It will increase your team’s workload. And if the team can’t keep up with these topics it will hurt your NPS and frustrate your superusers. Why? It will look like your company isn’t capable of giving timely support to its customers.
What can you do about it?
There are a few things you can do to deal with these topics:
- Make sure your team is big enough to address these topics on time
- Offer other service channels such as chat, e-mail and voice
- Employ bots and service tools online to automate simple service actions
These solutions may be controversial, because many companies that start a forum set reducing service costs as their goal. Adding (or keeping) other service channels may steer customers towards the less cost-effective channels, even if in the absence of these channels they would start a topic that can be answered peer to peer. Why would they do this? Besides the slower reply speed of a forum channel, many customers tell us that they prefer the privacy of a chat or e-mail to the publicness of a forum.
What do you think? Do you agree that this is a challenge? What service channel strategy would you advise?
One for One: the ‘Replace my Remote’ type of topic
+3Thanks for sharing @Jurgen , very valuable! I agree with your general thoughts. Most important reason I think they are harmful: community 1:1 topics (that can only be answered by your company and are only relevant to the person that asks the question) deliver a bad customer experience for everyone. The person with the question would have been better off and faster by asking the question eg via chat. And the answered question will never help anyone else. So it's content that isn't valuable for your community and only makes it more difficult to find content that is valuable.
I think the most important thing you can do to prevent those 1:1 topics is to give the customer an easy overview of which channels you provide and with what purpose. So channel 'seduction' instead of channel steering.
And you should always try to turn the content into 1:N. You can do this by not only giving that specific answer / solution but also some background information which will help your super users to understand it and other users to find their solutions. e.g. "Can you replace my broken remote?" -> "because of XYZ we don't do that, but you can buy one here or here" or "yes we can, you can easily order a new one here, but I already ordered one for you, you should be receiving it within 2 days". So even in your answer you can work on channel 'seduction':)
Curious how other community teams handle this!
I think the most important thing you can do to prevent those 1:1 topics is to give the customer an easy overview of which channels you provide and with what purpose. So channel 'seduction' instead of channel steering.
And you should always try to turn the content into 1:N. You can do this by not only giving that specific answer / solution but also some background information which will help your super users to understand it and other users to find their solutions. e.g. "Can you replace my broken remote?" -> "because of XYZ we don't do that, but you can buy one here or here" or "yes we can, you can easily order a new one here, but I already ordered one for you, you should be receiving it within 2 days". So even in your answer you can work on channel 'seduction':)
Curious how other community teams handle this!
We've recently made a blog detailing which support channel you should choose when as a Telfort customer. We'll see if that helps seducing customers to other channels for 1:1 issues 🙂
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