Community Clean Up - Campaign for Unanswered Topics

Hi @Kgastaldo, 

This is a very good idea. I’m going to move the topic into Moderation: Tips and Tricks and make it a sticky topic, so others can find the post and engage. 

I recommend testing the badge functionality in a hidden forum for now with your internal team. 

Discord used to do these sorts of events back in the day on the Discord Testers server, albeit for cleaning up bug reports rather than questions (mostly to clear out dead bugs or to try and get pending reports verified in bulk). They used to work pretty well, especially with some of the incentives on offer for helping out. It was pretty common that hundreds of bugs were updated in some way in just a weekend of one of those events! The system has since changed and there’s none of that anymore sadly, but those were good times.

To be honest, I’m actually pretty tempted to try and tackle the old backlog on here, because https://community.insided.com/search/activity/unanswered is getting huge! It could probably do with someone going in and marking some of those questions as solved though...

@Blastoise186 love the idea of doing a limited time badge or leveraging a campaign for customers to answer backlog questions. How do you incentivize/communicate to your members about things like this? 

Also interested in this as we are currently going through our backlog as well!

Bit late to the party here 

While I’m all for cleaning up and tidying, I do also believe that some topics at some point ‘run their course’ and the customer will either have tried elsewhere, or simply given up on their question - in particular if it’s somewhat time sensitive. (I personally find that a first reply after something like 3-4 months is just a bit… weird.. specially if I’m active in other topics on that community.)

You can still enlist your users for assistance, but I wouldn’t expect them to hop in and reopen a stale topic. I’d start with the tough job of providing a bit of assistance to the topic starter to sort their query or guide them on the right path, and ask them to get back to you if they still need help. (Remember to @mention the user). This way you revive a topic with a positive note and also put it back on the plate for other users to take an interest in.

From that first reply and onwards, give your other users (at most) 24h to step in and provide follow up assistance, but be ready to hop in after that point to help out the topic starter if they get back to you, you don’t want to leave the topic starter on their own once again.

Anything that’s still not had a reply from the topic starter after let’s say a week since your initial assistance reply and request for a followup I’d consider ‘abandoned’ and forget about.

Going forwards make sure you have a filter to catch the topics that go unanswered by other users after xxhours, that way the topic starter still get a reply and some guidance on the next steps.

We have a 96% first response rate and an average response time of <5 hours, thanks to helpful end users, vigilant moderators, and some tactical filters. (First reply is a community health KPI for us)

@Ditte I think you make some really great points here on this and its incredible that your average response time is <5hrs! A few questions on that: 

- If your team provides a first response and its a pretty decent one, but there’s no follow up from the customer, are you inclined to mark your response as the Best Answer and move on so that it doesn’t hurt your metrics? One thing we’re trying to keep in mind is not leaving any response of ours too open ended, because it makes it difficult to mark as a best answer if the topic starter never comes back. 

​​​​​​​- How do you incentivize your users to respond to questions? That <5hr time is incredible, but we find that it’s difficult to get Partners and Customers to chime in, especially if they see our Community team is handling responses. 

Thanks for continually shedding some good insight, Ditte! It’s appreciated when there’s additional perspective to consider! 

Thank you for the praise, @Casstastr0phee! :) 

With regards to marking answers, we'd rather not have a best answer, than an incomplete or 'fluffy’  answer - in which case we remove the question mark. If the topic warrants it, we'll start digging deeper until we get to a solution.

We regularly go through content to see if we can mark a best answer in a topic, or in case there isn't a good answer, or the topic isn't actually a question, we'll remove the question mark. Sometimes we're a bit too quick to mark a best answer, and the topic starter let us know that what we marked didn't work - then we just remove the best answer and ask for more information.

We don't incentivize users to respond to new topics. Our community is 16 years old, and we have some die-hard top users and superusers that just downright enjoy the community and being able to help new users with our products. We try our best to show how much we appreciate them, but there's no regular or specific incentivization going on.

I think you're on the right path about not leaving staff responses too open ended, but it's a fine line to not squash the conversation right off the bat :) If you find that your team seem to be doing ‘all the support’ it would be an interesting test to not have them respond at all for a week. If you have some good users, there's a high likelihood that they'll jump in and cover the holes. Old school metrics was for staff to not respond within 48 hours, but that thinking has shifted a bit to be more responsive, so now we're closer to the “let us reply between 12-24hs after topic start” mark. 

Metrics and KPIs are a huge part of what makes a community successful, but I'd wager that the user experience is what makes a community great. Our users don't really care that we have an impressive <5h response time, or that more than 80% of questions are being answered, if they're the ones that genuinely need help, but unfortunately fall outside of those pretty buckets.

So, long story short: Help the customers as soon as possible within your guidelines, they will appreciate it more than our leadership teams will appreciate our good-looking metrics. With that said, try to see if you can get your staff to hold off on the initial reply a bit longer as a test to see if you have some hidden gems among your users. :)

Hey @Ditte, 
Thanks so much for sharing such a thoughtful and well articulated response! It’s really helpful to hear from you and your experience, and I especially resonate with the idea of testing the duration of response to see how we might identify key users and responses. I definitely think there’s a line between leaving our users to figure it all out themselves, and feeling like a rescuer with the fastest response time. At the end of the day, we want to empower the members that adopt the Community and who use it as a space to learn more from others and, as you say, downright enjoy the community. 

Thanks again for sharing these examples! 
-Cass.

Hey @Casstastr0phee! I have a slightly different take on this, which is only really applicable if your community is un-gated and indexed by search engines.

Regardless of how old a question is - it’s worth answering if it’s likely to benefit your community from an SEO perspective (especially if self-service is one of your OKRs!)

Communities with a support element make your organization more efficient over time, because you’re essentially creating a user-generated knowledge base for your customers. One of our tests for choosing whether to answer an ageing question is whether or not the answer would be useful for future customers. If it would, we answer it for the community in the hope that it helps someone with a similar question in the future - who’ll find it via search. We also do some aftercare with the person who posted the question, because they probably left the community as a result of not getting a response.

As for incentivising - what about running a “knowledge drive” event? 

1. For a limited time, add more points to the “providing an answer” action
2. Make your leaderboard more prominent on the homepage
3. Add “answer bounties” to particularly important questions that carry an additional reward
4. Email your top community members, or even top users of your product, and ask them to share their expertise. Explain what’s in it for them.
5. Celebrate the biggest contributors on your company website

Hope this helps - and the very best of luck!

Michael

Hey @Onomatopoeia! 
Thanks so much for following up on this thread and for offering yet another take with your approach. This is helpful, as we do keep teetering between the best method for driving up Self-Service help, but also making a good experience for the users. I think you also make some pretty fair points on that from an ROI perspective.
The Knowledge Drive is another cool idea as well! Thanks so much for sharing.
(if other folks have different ways they’re driving up engagement while hitting those Self Serve metrics, I’d love to hear it too!) 
Cheers, 
-Cass. 

I’m coming back to this again with a follow up question. How do you guys feel about archiving questions that have NO replies after a certain amount of time. I’m thinking 6 months + - as I doubt those people are still waiting on a reply. 

An answer to their question could help users in the future, but if I’m asking employees to put some time in, I’d rather they focus on new questions, rather than old ones. 

Does anyone archive/trash topics (with a warning to community) that never receive a reply?

We don’t delete/trash anything unless it’s spam or the nasty/irrelevant post can’t be salvaged with a thoughtful edit.

We automagically close topics for further replies after 90 days of no activity, regardless of whether or not the topic has replies.

We also archive really old topics in a gated area that we call ‘Archive’ where the user must be logged in to get access - that way Search Engines can’t see the content, but the user’s hard work is still available to them.

Anything that falls beyond automatic closing, and manual archiving, we just leave be.