Confidence answering forum questions

Oliver Beirne said:

In the survey, I received a couple of comments that indicated some hesitation on participating in a public setting:

• 'Not willing / confident / feel enabled to speak on behalf of Arm.'​
• 'Some people may be unaware of them, or think it is not their responsibility, or they are worried about answering (publicly) correctly, or they don't want their name publicly visible'

Has anyone else encountered this with colleagues supporting their forums and has anyone taken steps to mitigate this?

Yes, and there are a few ways you can approach this. Ultimately the person that you're trying to encourage to post on the Community needs reassurance and that can be given in several different ways depending on the person, a few approaches can help:

- Editorial guidelines can cover tone, formality, and how to approach posting on the site.

- Have them run it past you first, get them to write a draft and run it past you for approval, and then let them post it themselves.

- Remind them that if they want, you can post as them for the first post or any follow-up posts.

I've noticed some companies choose to have "one account" with different people posting as they log in to it. Still, typically this is poor practice of sharing login details and it reduces the authenticity of the post when it could have been from an individual. Reassurance of support and "it's not that deep" or "not that critical" and they're not going to be reprimanded for their posts can help.

Christopher G. Stanton said:

I've noticed some companies choose to have "one account" with different people posting as they log in to it. Still, typically this is poor practice of sharing login details and it reduces the authenticity of the post when it could have been from an individual.

In our case though Chris, team members log in as themselves and then impersonate the account. We also encourage them to add their own name into the sign off even though they're using the customer service profile. Also in the profile bio information for the account they're impersonating, we encourage them to list out the team members that post under that profile to make it feel more personal.

LisaM said:

In our case though Chris, team members log in as themselves and then impersonate the account.

What role does that require? Didn't it require them to be administrators?

LisaM said:

We also encourage them to add their own name into the sign off even though they're using the customer service profile. Also in the profile bio information for the account they're impersonating, we encourage them to list out the team members that post under that profile to make it feel more personal

That is an approach that can work too, and one often taken on social media. In my experience members don't necessarily pay attention to the 'signature sign off' method and it can easily be forgotten since Verint doesn't appear to enforce a signature on posts.

Christopher G. Stanton said:

What role does that require? Didn't it require them to be administrators?

No, we have a custom feature built for us where selected staff members can log in as themselves and then under their own profile they can select a number of other profiles that they are authorised to impersonate. So they don't have administrator access and we can control who they can impersonate as well. 

As for the signature stuff, I have had a play with that and I can make it appear in forum posts BUT it doesn't look very pretty and I can't work out how to make it so (and don't really have the time to dedicate to making it look pretty either... ) 

Christopher G. Stanton said:

What role does that require? Didn't it require them to be administrators?

No, we have a custom feature built for us where selected staff members can log in as themselves and then under their own profile they can select a number of other profiles that they are authorised to impersonate. So they don't have administrator access and we can control who they can impersonate as well. 

As for the signature stuff, I have had a play with that and I can make it appear in forum posts BUT it doesn't look very pretty and I can't work out how to make it so (and don't really have the time to dedicate to making it look pretty either... )