Confidence answering forum questions

Hi Oli

Yes we see this all the time with colleagues. Many are really reluctant to participate in our online community for the exact same reasons you mention. They're concerned that they will say something wrong and 'get into trouble' with their manager or they don't want to put their name out there and then get bombarded by follow up questions or get into a conversational situation with someone that they then can't handle. 

Quite often I'll prod a colleague in a particular team for a response to a question in our forum that relates to their role or business area/department but rather than respond to the question themselves, they'll give the response to the community manager i.e. me, to post it in the community under my name.  There's also an underlying attitude that anything that happens in the online community is the sole responsibility of the Community Manager and the Admin team so they don't feel the need to get involved. 

We've mitigated this slightly by providing a profile in our community that others can impersonate. So for example a profile called 'Customer Service Team' or suchlike and then enable members of the team to impersonate that account and post up responses under the 'Customer Service Team' profile. It also helps in cases where staff members leave because the content isn't 'theirs' so it remains on the site and still under the profile if the team members personal account is deleted.  Also means that I can swap out the team members if they change roles or new team members are recruited. 

Lisa

Hi Oli

Yes we see this all the time with colleagues. Many are really reluctant to participate in our online community for the exact same reasons you mention. They're concerned that they will say something wrong and 'get into trouble' with their manager or they don't want to put their name out there and then get bombarded by follow up questions or get into a conversational situation with someone that they then can't handle. 

Quite often I'll prod a colleague in a particular team for a response to a question in our forum that relates to their role or business area/department but rather than respond to the question themselves, they'll give the response to the community manager i.e. me, to post it in the community under my name.  There's also an underlying attitude that anything that happens in the online community is the sole responsibility of the Community Manager and the Admin team so they don't feel the need to get involved. 

We've mitigated this slightly by providing a profile in our community that others can impersonate. So for example a profile called 'Customer Service Team' or suchlike and then enable members of the team to impersonate that account and post up responses under the 'Customer Service Team' profile. It also helps in cases where staff members leave because the content isn't 'theirs' so it remains on the site and still under the profile if the team members personal account is deleted.  Also means that I can swap out the team members if they change roles or new team members are recruited. 

Lisa

That's an interesting solution, thanks for sharing in such detail! Do you find with the Customer Service profile that is hard to track who may have said what? For example, if you want to track how many answers a particular colleague may have provided? Also, how would the notifications work for something like that? Where do they go?

In the back office of the community you can see who has impersonated the profile and when, so that's not a huge problem for us. The customer service profile uses the generic CS email mailbox that they have so all the notifications are sent there. That team can then create rules and filter the mailbox to handle the notifications that come from the community as they see fit

Oh nice, is that a customisation you have set up in the back office?

The whole impersonation feature (not the admin one) is customised and we see who's done what using the events log

Thanks for sharing in such detail, really interesting to note

You're welcome Oli. If you'd like a further chat via Teams or suchlike (with a show and tell) let me know!