insided Forums Engage your customers in relevant, interactive dialogues across channels

Transcription

1 insided Forums Engage your customers in relevant, interactive dialogues across channels November 2015

2 insided Forums As one of the core modules of the insided Social Business Platform and the heart of many successful customer communities, forums connect product experts and brand enthusiasts through vibrant peer-to-peer discussions on any topic you choose. Forums create a destination for customer conversations that relate closely to your company s products and services, in an online community on your website. Unencumbered by the weight of unnecessary features and distractions and built upon the best user experience elements of social networks like Facebook and Twitter, insided forums are the evolution of the discussion forums of the 90s. Our forums provide a user-friendly, social experience that places conversations back to the forefront and engages customers through open dialogue with other customers and your company. With their clean user interface, persistent content and deep visual and technical integration into your website, insided forums allow more natural and meaningful discussions to take place, which will increase traffic from search engines and make audiences stay longer. The European leader Key benefits Customer service Sales & marketing Market research Product & service innovation Reduce service costs, expand Differentiate products, increase Increase research quantity Crowdsource customers for product service capabilities (24/7), traffic (SEO) and conversion & quality, improve customer and process innovation ideas, improve performance of (with recommendations, insights and organizational create engagement around products response times and time-to- segmentation & targeting of transparency. (launches), decrease time-to-market. resolution, increase customer users), reduce churn. satisfaction. Brand advocacy Capture brand sentiment and opinions, increase customer loyalty and advocacy. Public relations Make PR more social, transparent, interactive & cost efficient. Social media and engaged community Amplify and consolidate social strategies, increase social media followers & listeners, improve customer engagement. 1 - insided Forums

3 Customer communities In today s business climate where competition continues to increase, margins are shrinking, and core services become commodities, companies are forced to become truly customer-centric. The ability to build a real community of customers - across channels - is a key competitive advantage in this digital age and begins with owning the social customer experience though customer communities. InSided communities are a powerful engine for the creation, capture, discovery and cultivation of conversations - providing a new way for people to truly engage with one another about what s important to them and share their opinions and experiences with brands and products. At the same time, these on-domain customer engagement hubs have created new opportunities for companies to connect with their consumers, develop trust-based relationships, and gain unique customer insights to fuel more effective marketing, sales, and service experiences. Customer communities provide real business value, and are broadly regarded as the cornerstone of any effective social business strategy. KPN Group Several labels of the KPN Group, the largest telecom provider in the Netherlands, are successfully running an insided customer support community, showing a good customer experience goes hand in hand with providing social support. Telfort saves 1 million in support costs yearly and the social support program was internally awarded as the most customercentric initiative Over 75% of KPN Hi customers says the forum is an excellent addition to the Hi customer service channels. A positive business case has been reached within a year and the community continues to grow, outperforming traditional FAQs. Simyo, 100% online discount brand of KPN, achieves 8% lower churn. The support community is now the most important contact channel. For an online brand, it s crucial to deliver service within the online channel. With the support forum, we deliver a proven and measurable ROI on call reduction. Onno van der Poel General Manager Simyo 2 - insided Forums

4 How insided can help To get the best results from your social business initiatives, you ll need a managed service run by experts, using a proven platform with best practice built in. The cloud-based insided Social Business Platform provides an integrated and complete set of applications to create, engage, and manage online communities - including ratings & reviews, product Q&A s, forums, blogs, mobile and Facebook apps, user profiles, gamification and advanced analytics & reporting. Based upon 10+ years of experience building and operating successful communities across channels and devices, our platform and community management services help you to engage your customers, increase brand loyalty and drive sales. Facilitate discussions on your own platform Facilitate customer interaction in different categories and forums. Use the built-in rich text editor to add and edit topics and comments. Use rich media (photos, videos etc.) to improve the customer experience. Include polls to measure community sentiment and opinions. Use tags and categories to structure forums. Rank and sort topics and discussions by various criteria. Highlight important content with sticky topics. Mark answers as correct. Quote comments from other users. Create private and hidden forums for employees or specific user groups. Extend the reach of your forum to your Facebook brand page (optional). Create transparency with user profiles Every community member has its own profile page, including personal information and smart activity streams to highlight new content. Use smart activity streams and statistics for an efficient overview of community activity. Follow users and see who follows you. Browse sent and received private messages. Customize the profile page layout and user account fields. Change user account settings, including avatars, signatures and privacy settings. 3 - insided Forums

5 Offer easy and seamless access to your community Offer your customers a seamless way to use your community with various login and registration options. Share content and user data between your customer portal, community and social networks and make it easy and hassle-free for visitors to participate with the extensive built-in account system and various single sign on and social login capabilities. Log in with Social Sign In (for example Facebook Login). Log in with Single Sign On (for users already logged in on your website). Log in with the extensive insided community account system. Offer registration and login functionality like custom fields, automatic login etc. Integrate your community with your customer portal. Integrate forum content across websites and apps InSided forums seamlessly integrate into existing workflows, websites, mobile apps and backoffice systems. Community content and user profile data can be integrated anywhere, providing exposure to your own and user generated content and infusing your website and apps with social conversations. Integrate community data anywhere in your website and mobile apps. Fully customize content according to your branding guidelines. Promote content and community members with configurable widgets. Build functional extensions and system integrations with our robust REST API. Forum facts & figures 70% of your customers expect your company to offer adequate online self-service and 75% consider a forum an excellent addition to your customer service program. 83% of forum visitors looks for an answer to a question or problem, 60% of answers are given by other customers, 35% found an answer and 54% would have called otherwise. On average, the call reduction realized by implementing a service forum results in yearly savings of 1M - 4M. As a side benefit, forums typically result in a 20-40% increase in website traffic from search engines and forum members show 8% less churn. Source: actual results from insided customers 4 - insided Forums

6 Make your website social and connect it to your community Transform your website into a social hub by integrating social and community features seamlessly into every single page. This way, your website hosts social conversations that relate closely to the products and services you offer and allows customers to engage more fully with each other and your company. Integrate content from external social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Allow users to add comments and search, rate and flag content. Invite users to like, tweet and share content to their social networks. Increase engagement with smart activity streams and status updates. Follow people and subscribe to content updates. Enhance the reliability and credibility of content using user profiles. Show engagement statistics such as comments, views, likes and social shares. Share user generated content with your blog, ratings & reviews and research modules. Send private messages to community members or let them connect to each other. Make content accessible for mobile users Engage your customers anytime, anywhere by offering a mobile-optimized version of your content which is accessible from any modern device like iphone and Android phones and tablets. The percentage of website visits coming from smartphones and tablets is rising dramatically, in many cases up to 50% of all visitors. To make sure this growing group of mobile users can tap into your community at any time and have a great experience, insided communities can be integrated into your mobile website and mobile apps, following the mobile optimization strategy that fits your organization and users best. Engage mobile users by offering a mobile-optimized version of your forum (optional). Integrate your forum into your mobile website or app (optional). Adapt to different devices and screen resolutions with responsive design (optional). T-Mobile On the T-Mobile support community, over monthly unique users discuss topics like subscriptions and handsets. While T-Mobile moderators are active, the community members answer 67% of all questions. The community is running since 2009 and delivers a multi-million euro ROI in terms of cost savings in traditional service channels. We were surprised with the high volume, the serious tone of the discussions and the fact that customers really help each other. Alexander Hamel Director Customer Service T-Mobile 5 - insided Forums

7 Increase community participation with gamification InSided forums combine insights in the motivations of community members with gamification and role-based permissions. This motivates people who only read and view your content to become active participants, rewards top contributors (with social reputation, ranks, and privileges), and identifies and cultivates superfans (who generate up to 50% of community content). Award top contributors with custom user titles and badges (optional). Let users hand out reputation points to each other, based on activity (optional). Provide exclusive super user VIP sections within the community. Create special user icons per user group. Optimize your forums for search engines The up-to-date, user-generated content from your forum makes your website stay fresh and dynamic, which improves its position in search engines like Google and Bing. InSided customer communities use custom domain names, well-structured pages, internal hyperlinking, rich snippets and customized meta data to help them rank well in search engines. All search engine links to community topics are highly optimized for your company name and the natural, organic language that customers are using to ask questions, resulting in higher clickthrough rates. More people will visit your website, stay longer because of the engaging content they find, and come back more often. Use custom domain names like community.your-website.com. Integrate community content directly into your website to ensure searchability. Uniquely structure forum pages and use internal hyperlinks. Use rich snippets and customized meta data to enrich search engine listings. Improve long tail content to maximize the keywords your website will be found on. Improve search engine ranking and traffic with social sharing. Integrate community content in your own website search engine. When it comes to social media, lead generation is one of the trickiest yet most important metrics. It s difficult for companies to turn fans and followers into dollars. And limited data supplied by the big social networks often makes it even harder to show the lead generation value of social media. If you can create a place for discussion about whatever it is you sell, you own that discussion. Therefore, brands should build their own social communities. Adam Popescu, ReadWriteWeb 6 - insided Forums

8 insided communities, the forums of the social age insided Traditional Forums Social Media Business ROI provides real business value for support, marketing, sales, online, product development and market research Customer lifecycle Awareness on company, brand, product and service levels, becoming the preferred interaction channel for brand interaction Traffic comprehensive SEO optimization Engagement intuitive & social interface, social login, commenting, like & share content, gamification etc. Revenue & retention consumer reviews, authentic conversations and social sharing Data & content Structure content structuring, ranking, sorting and highlighting using categories, labels, tags, relevancy etc. Segmentation content personalization using categories, labels, user groups & preferences etc. Relevance topic types & statuses, searching before posting a topic Repurposing content customization and integration throughout websites, campaigns, knowledge bases etc. Persistence content availability and searchability Control edit and delete topics and comments, special privileges and statuses for moderators Ownership community content and user data are owned by the company instead of the community provider Insights comprehensive insights in community activity, demographics, preferences etc. of users Integration Versatile integrates with your channels, processes and systems with minimal reliance on IT Customizable tailor-made templates, design and functionalities and a robust REST API Cross-channel extension of community into Facebook, search, mobile etc. Mobile optimized mobile website, mobile app, or responsive design Implementation & support Enterprise-ready stable, scalable and secure, advanced analytics and workflow, central governance, comprehensive SLA Flexible cloud-based, integrated SaaS platform with an open architecture and various modules Professional services full-service, based on best practices and sound social business strategy 7 - insided Forums

9 Unlock the business value of your community InSided delivers all the fundamental capabilities and advanced tools you d expect from Europe s leading social business platform, providing you with everything you need to create and manage world-class social customer experiences across platforms and user groups from a single unified workspace. Manage your community efficiently and effectively The intuitive, user-friendly yet advanced management tools in our platform put you in control over your customer community. Community managers and moderators can easily manage your community in a dedicated, platform-independent and simple-to-use environment. InSided forums are designed to meet enterprise needs with workflows for multiple team members, efficient moderation tools, role-based permissions, and robust integrations with back office systems. Efficiently moderate content with smart overviews, status reporting etc. Classify and structure content with labels, moderator tags etc. Quickly surface information using customizable filters and data display. Use enterprise-grade workflow and collaboration tools. Export community content and user data for use in other applications. Monitor and optimize your community Understand the performance of your social technology initiatives and make smarter business decisions with the right analytical tools and reporting capabilities. Our social intelligence tools let you easily measure community vitality, identify influencers and top contributors, and monitor relevant conversations across your community. Get an in-depth look into customer behavior trends and user adoption patterns to help you create plans to increase engagement, drive up community membership and optimize your community strategy. Need more? Our open architecture allows you to easily connect your web analytics package to your insided community to quantify the impact of social conversations on your business programs. Use a customizable visual dashboard with key metrics and actionable insights. Identify top performing community content and users based on community activity. Discover information needs and content gaps by analyzing search queries. Export custom reports for use in other applications. Connect social insights with your current analytics software. Incorporate data from your CRM and other enterprise systems. 8 - insided Forums

10 insided Social Business Platform Powerful, flexible, secure, complete. The leading customer interaction platform for a multichannel world As a true software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider, insided delivers a cloud-based social business platform allowing forward-looking SOLUTIONS Social Support Social Marketing Social Commerce Social Insights companies to create thriving communities in efficient and effective ways, with minimal reliance on IT. DELIVERY Multi Device Multi Channel Targeting Designed upon 10+ years of experience building and operating successful communities, the insided Social Business Platform delivers an enterprise-grade end-to-end solution for uniting the MODULES Forums News & Blogs Product Q&A Facebook Apps Ratings & Reviews Mobile Research & Co-creation Reward Management social customer experience across websites, mobile devices, and the social web - enabling organizations to reduce costs, build trust ENGINE Cloud Based API / SSO Users & Moderation Analytics & Reporting and strengthen customer relationships. Services To gain maximum benefits and achieve true customer-centricity, social business initiatives should be an integral part of the way companies do business. Our deep expertise in community development and full-service offering help you to rapidly launch a successful community, integrate it into your channels, processes and systems, and keep it healthy, thriving and trouble-free. The result is a fast impact on your business through an effective implementation based on best practices and sound social business strategy. InSided not only delivers the technology, but can help with every step of the process. Strategy Concept Implementation Support social business strategy, use cases, community development, testing, insights, workshops, quickscan & business case, concept, design, content & systems integration, best practices sharing, community roadmap activation strategy deployment, launch continuous improvement We are insided As the European leader in social business technology, insided believes in empowering your customers in order to reduce costs, improve sales, develop better customer relationships and drive innovation. The insided Social Business Platform powers successful communities - attracting millions of visitors - for companies like T-Mobile, KPN Group, Tele2, Volkswagen, Philips and Sundio Group. We are an experienced team with community building firmly rooted in our DNA, and constantly strive to improve our work and its ROI and make our clients 100% satisfied. InSided is privately held with corporate headquarters in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Leverage our passion and experience to transform customer interaction and achieve your vision of social business success hello@insided.com insided Forums