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, absolutely have encountered this and to me this seems to be ongoing.. This is really about educating them/getting them familiar with the online community world and that responses don't have to be perfect but just helpful can already be enough. Every time a new person, who might be able to reply to forum posts in the community as he/she has knowledge, is onboarded in the company the community manager will have to spend time in guiding those colleagues to learn about the companies' community, when and how to reply, dedicate time to the community as part of their daily work and getting the joy of helping people.

Some people will pick it up quickly and easily, others need more time, and others might never be activated and interested to do so. Just spend time on the first two groups of people
What I tried for a while is having montly catch-up meetings with all product groups in our community, showing them the progress in their groups, some numbers, asked what they needed from me as the overall community manager and tried to keep them active, informed and interested. I had to do my best, so yes, absolutely get what you mean

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... ) 

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?

How were the monthly catch ups received?

I've been thinking education and guide style content may help to mitigate, so thanks for sharing that line of thought.

Due to time zone reasons I want to avoid having anything run by me so I think the route of reassuring content and guidance is the way to go.

In addition to all of the great feedback in this thread, I wanted to add that getting team managers (or higher) to advocate for community participation is a huge help. We have a few managers who are very active in our community and their team members tend to be the more active individual-contributor-level employees. If they see their manager participating, and, even better if the manager shows and encourages that participation, the team members gain more confidence.

I know in one support manager's case, he tries to push his team to participate and explains to them that they will help raise their own profile within the company, and getting their name more "out there" helps a lot for things like annual reviews, promotions, etc. 

I've also set up some roles within the community for some team managers so that the manager (who has reporting access) can report on their team members' participation and activity. These are used to praise the active members and create a small sense of competition but are not used with any negative connotation (as participation is just "extra credit," not "required").