By Andrew Mennie and Anand Subramaniam

The premise behind social knowledge is that actual users of a company’s products and services have valuable knowledge to contribute. In fact, it’s not uncommon for “power users” to know more about a business’ offerings than its customer support agents. After all, they are more likely to have more experience using the products on a daily basis than customer service agents.

While community-based knowledge creation is not new, the ubiquity of the web and the explosive adoption of social networking has taken the creation and availability of social knowledge to a whole new level. Savvy organisations know this well and by finding, validating and absorbing relevant user-generated content into their knowledgebase; they are improving the effectiveness of their own contact centre and self-service operations.

Currently more prevalent in B2C sectors, social knowledge is also starting to matter in B2B environments. In fact, I’ve seen that it is the big players in the telecoms sector that are really pushing boundaries in social customer service methods. Social knowledge used for customer service has great potential to add significant value to any business in the form of improved customer loyalty, enhanced brand equity, lower cost of knowledge creation, and reduced customer service costs.

It’s important to remember though, regardless of sector, that it’s the customers themselves that are key to this initiative– both as knowledge contributors and query makers – customer service and marketing strategies must unify people, process and technology to work together to get the right balance of service.

To be successful, companies must ask themselves how they can harvest and leverage the best of social knowledge out there and how can they engage appropriately with social customers? The following five-step plan could help increase the odds of success in harvesting social knowledge for improved customer service.

1. Assess the opportunity

Customer inquiries fall broadly into four categories—informational, transactional, diagnostic, and advisory. Generally, informational and transactional queries tend to be of low-to-moderate complexity while diagnostic and advice-seeking queries are of moderate-to-high complexity. Informational and transactional queries, therefore, are more likely to be resolved by social knowledge. Social knowledge creation has been more common in B2C sectors because it is easier to attain “critical mass” with more contributors and less specialised knowledge. Moreover, industry sectors with younger consumers provide more opportunities for knowledge harvesting and utilization since these customers tend to be more “social” and tech-savvy, and are more active as contributors and consumers of knowledge in social networks.

2. Identify high-value contributors

Social knowledge contributors have varying levels of reputation, prolificacy, and influence, which most social networking tools measure (number of posts, acceptance rate, number of connections, etc.). The Social Knowledge Value™ (SKV) of contributors can be estimated by using a combination of these metrics. Knowledge from high-level SKV contributors is ideal for harvesting relevant content, while that from low-level SKV contributors can be ignored or skimmed.

3. Engage customers as collaborators

Customers are key to the initiative— both as knowledge contributors and posters of queries on social sites. Businesses need to make sure that queries posted on social sites are resolved in a timely manner, especially if they are from high-value customers, whom you usually provide “platinum service” (e.g. proactive offer to chat, rapid service levels, etc.). The risk of non-resolution of customer queries is high on social sites because of broad market exposure and the velocity of social influence. If high-value customers are also high-SKV contributors, they not only present an opportunity for knowledge harvesting but could also play an important role in collaborative product development and social brand management.

4. Harvest, scrub, unify and disseminate

Contact centres need to make sure that social knowledge goes through the same robust quality control processes as internally-generated knowledge, so that it can be made part of a common multichannel knowledge base. Likewise, social customer interactions should be added to other multichannel interactions as part of a unified Customer Interaction Hub (CIH), which consolidates interactions, knowledge, business rules, analytics, and administration in one place for better customer experience, service consistency, and process efficiencies. The hub approach allows agents to view customers’ social interactions, in addition to direct interactions with the business, for full context retention and rapid resolution.

5. Account for sector-specific and legal factors

Social monitoring tools, social knowledge, and robust customer service compliance workflows can help businesses in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products to track adverse incident reports and act on them rapidly in compliance with regulations. Furthermore, businesses should make sure they are not violating copyright laws while harvesting content from social websites.

About the author

Andrew Mennie is Vice President and General Manager, Europe at multi-channel knowledge management vendor, eGain. Andrew joined eGain through the acquisition of Inference Corp. in March 2000 where he held the position of UK Sales Director. He has over a 15 years expertise in the implementation, service, and support of knowledge-based customer service.