Escaping the Rabbit Hole: How to Reduce Community Managers’ Workload with Cognitive Technology

Offline channels are no longer the holy grail for customer engagement, experience, and success. Now, online communities wear that crown.

Sadly, what Shakespeare said in Henry IV Part 2 is super apt even today: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”

However, it is often community managers who bear its burden. Think about it. A typical day in the life of a community manager can be super exhausting:

• Moderating member behavior

• Responding to customer inquiries

• Maintaining knowledge bases

• Providing onboarding experience and much more

All this burden and stress engulf them in a fog of occupational burnout. Fret not! This article covers how you, as a community manager, can vanquish the stress and burnout and tick umpteen items off your list with cognitive technology.

You ready? OKAY! Let's get this show on the road.

Major Online Community Challenges & How to Climb Out of Them

Customers often feel frustrated when in need of support and look for immediate assistance in an online community. But juggling lots of operational tasks and delivering an expectation for instant resolutions can turn out to be a tall order for community managers.

Cognitive technology can remove roadblocks and help community managers to scale virtual communities. Here’s how.

Challenge 1: Lowered Customer Satisfaction Due to Poor Information Discovery

In the era of hyper-digitization, your data keeps growing, the digital infrastructure keeps expanding, and the chatter becomes never-ending. This gives birth to silos that further create a stumbling block for users—poor content findability within your community. This could mean two things for your customers:

1. They embark on a quest to scour every channel for finding the answer that may or may not exist.

2. They find that the answer simply doesn't exist within the community.

It is paramount to resolve these stumbling blocks for the users ASAP!

Solution

Cognitive technology provides a tailwind to fetch the right information at the right time. How, you may ask? Choosing a cognitive technology platform with out-of-the-box connectors that can index disparate repositories enables your community members and visitors to run a search query that scours all of the content repositories to find relevant answers. Hence, no more switching tabs or embarking on fruitless searches. On top of that, the unified view of all self-help content offloads a big chunk of the community manager’s workload as it keeps repetitive and basic query threads at arm's length.

An effective cognitive tech platform may also allow you to deploy an intelligent recommendations widget that displays the most popular queries or frequently searched topics to help the users find what they seek in a blistering-fast manner.

Challenge 2:  Reduction in Footfall Due to Irrelevant Results

Community managers often see users complain about how they can’t find relevant results. For instance, a new taxpayer joins the community and searches for information related to the registration process on the e-filing website whereas an experienced taxpayer searches the same query to know the sweeping changes in it.

The new taxpayer might need a search result on top that contains the basics of the registration. On the other hand, the experienced taxpayer might be looking for just the updates in the process.

But how do community managers ensure that the users get personalized, relevant results? The goal is to provide accurate answers, not just search results, based on their profile, search patterns, history of articles studied, etc.

Solution

Here comes cognitive technology to the rescue by leveraging Machine Learning (ML)-powered algorithms to analyze the user journey across touchpoints and identify intent when they run a search query. Also, it also refines their search experience by proactively identifying and enabling relevant facets & filters.

Challenge 3: Lowered Engagement Due to Poor Onboarding

Online communities play a crucial role in onboarding new customers by creating a hub for knowledge discovery and product recommendations. However, hurdles such as duplicate threads, poor UI, and scripted responses to queries provide a negative experience that drives them away.

Solution

Cognitive applications turn your virtual community into an engagement center. With the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to identify duplicate threads, filter & tag threads, generate granular content consumption reports, and bestow personalized responses without human intervention, community managers can shift their focus towards strategizing and quantifying community impact.

Challenge 4: Delayed Query Resolution Due to Lack of 24×7 Assistance

The upside of an online community is that the user can access it whenever they want, however they want! But the burning questions arise—who will dispel their doubts when community managers are occupied with other tasks or unavailable or off the shift? And will they be able to deliver personalized, contextual responses in a timely manner?

Solution: Intelligent chatbots can act as a customer’s e-buddy that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand intent based on the search behavior, current patterns, and previously searched questions. In addition, chatbots use Natural Language Generation (NLG) to frame a screamingly fast contextual response for real-time assistance. 

Cognitive-driven apps like intelligent bots solve the challenge of helping a member on the other end of the globe by delivering contextual responses on unanswered threads, round the clock.

Challenge 5: Knowledge Gaps Due to Limited Insights

Members of virtual communities are looking for speed, convenience, and efficiency. But are they receiving the experience they desire? If yes, is the desired ROI achieved?

If not, the situation demands community managers to evaluate the efficacy of existing knowledge bases allowing community managers to identify the gaps that might need their attention.

Solution

Search Analytics provides in-depth reports that help make engagement-boosting decisions. They provide a summary of all analytical reports like user click behavior, content gaps, user search behavior, etc., to stay abreast of the community in an immersive and intuitive dashboard. That helps the community leaders to improve the overall experience, thus skyrocketing the ROI.

Ready for More Killer Tips for Community Management Success?

Tune into the on-demand session where the founder of Clocktower Advisors and industry stalwart, Todd Nilson, and I, discuss every aspect of making a community manager's life easier and more. You can watch a reply here:

Or if you wish to explore the realm of cognitive technology to ameliorate your community experience, feel free to request a demo. After all, the proof of the solution is in the pudding. 🙂