21 Replies Latest reply on Dec 6, 2016 8:13 AM by Adam Arrowsmith

Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?

heatherausmus Mar 29, 2016 1:11 PM

This topic has come up quite a bit recently and it's been communicated that we should do this, so I wanted to get an idea of how many people train and make support roles (i.e. customer support, product management, etc.) within your community mark answer as Correct a requirement. Do you? Did you introduce it at launch of your community or after you've seen steady adoption of the community internally?

I personally haven't required this of support roles in my communities because I think it should be something adopted by those asking the question, not answering the question. However, I do train those supporting the community that this feature is available to them should they see a question where there is a correct answer and it hasn't been marked - it's optional and best practice. I also think that someone receiving a response and it being a quality response is far more important than a reply being marked as Correct, while having the support roles read / scan the replies for accuracy is a better use of their time than locating the specific correct answer. Yes, this makes it a little harder to measure and communicate, but layering administrative tasks on individuals in these support roles doesn't seem right when they have more than enough work.

What are your thoughts? What do you do in your community? Has making this a support role requirement worked?

Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?

Emilie Feb 17, 2016 8:04 AM (in response to heatherausmus)
I like this question. Of course there's no right or wrong. Just a matter of what works for your organization and community culture.

At National Instruments, the online support forums worked as follows:
Anytime a new question was asked, it was assigned to a support engineer as a new ticket. Didn't matter what the question was or who as asking it. Any new question automatically opened a ticket.
We'd intentionally allow a certain amount of time to go by before the support engineer would be assigned the ticket. (This is because the online support forums were an open, public, free mechanism for product support. So if customers needed faster, more reliable SLA, they paid for premium support.)
Once the ticket was assigned, the engineer would review the question and see if there were any answers already provided by the community members. In many cases (in fact, 58% of the time, thanks to gamification and reputation management), the community provided an answer. In these cases, the engineer was responsible for confirming a clear and correct answer, marking the community member's comment as "Correct" and closing the ticket on the back end system with an "Answered by Community" designation. In other cases where no answer was provided, or there was no correct answer provided, the engineer handled it like any other support case, investigating and eventually closing out the issue as "Provided Answer" or "Bug Filed" or whatever other outcomes there might have been.
In this regard, it was the support engineer's responsibility to either mark a community answer as Correct or provide a correct answer themselves. The former is obviously better for the business at large because A) it saves the engineers the time of fully investigating the issue themselves and B) it always ensures that every question in the community gets a correct answer, no matter who is providing it. And what's great is that if you start tracking how many correct answers are provided by the community, you can start calculating how much time that actually saves the support engineer, which translates into cost savings, which translates into future investment in your support community. #win

But like I said, no right or wrong. Just what works for you. Hope this helps!
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- Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
  
  socketz Feb 17, 2016 8:18 AM (in response to Emilie)
  
  Excellent post Emilie Kopp
  
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- Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
  
  heatherausmus Feb 17, 2016 9:47 AM (in response to Emilie)
  
  Thank you for response and share your process, Emilie Kopp!! It helps a lot.
  
  How do you handle questions that may not have one response that is a correct answer (i.e. multiple replies lead to an answer)? Do your SMEs / system engineers leave it open and / or is helpful answers an okay "close" of the question?
  
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  - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
    
    Emilie Feb 17, 2016 10:08 AM (in response to heatherausmus)
    
    Well, that kind of ends up being up to the engineer. They are trained that there should be a clear and correct answer, which I suppose can be interpreted differently by each engineer. Even if there were several replies, which if you were to combine, one might surmise the answer, the engineers were coached to circle back and clarify the "correct" answer. And to be quite honest, I'm not sure how we ended up marking that on the back end system. I served in that role myself and I want to say that I still marked it as "Answered by Community" as long as I didn't have to do any actual troubleshooting; I was simply clarifying something somebody else provided.
    
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    - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
      
      heatherausmus Feb 17, 2016 10:15 AM (in response to Emilie)
      
      Thank you, I like that approach too. It's not as dictated and allows interpretation based on the question and response to best fit the situation.
      
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  - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
    
    socketz Feb 17, 2016 12:15 PM (in response to heatherausmus)
    
    We have a process internally which is similar to what Emilie described (15,000 users/developers), but the entire process is more or less driven by the community manager (myself).
    
    In addition, I am normally the one that decides which response to mark correct as well, but I come from an applications engineering background, so I understand the responses provided by the team and can typically make the call regarding their correctness.I also extend this capability to technical leads on the team, but I find that they are not as diligent in closing out the discussions. Users rarely mark anything correct. I believe their reluctance in doing so is based on their lack of interest in creating new discussions for other issues; they essentially think that they can use the same discussion for all of their support needs. This is where the "branch" function is golden :-)
    
    Since the Community Manager role is evolving, I'm curious to know how many others come from a technical/product background as opposed to a social media/marketing based background?
    
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    - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
      
      heatherausmus Feb 18, 2016 6:02 AM (in response to socketz)
      
      I don't come from a technical / product background, so I unfortunately can't mark the answer as correct. However, I'd love if our team grows and more people come from a more technical / product background.
      
      Matt Laurenceau is in community and comes from a technical / product background though.
      
      Thanks for sharing how you handle questions too!! My experience is that users rarely mark answers too. However, I have seen when I reply to a question where the author question posts and update on their issue being resolved or a thank you and I reply with a response (either thanking them for sharing an update or something saying how I'm glad their issues is resolved) and then say I'll mark User Name's response as correct that users pick up doing this activity more and even remind others to do it. Back channel requests reminding people to do also helps, but that can take a large chunk of time out or your day when there are a lot of questions and large membership as it probably wouldn't be good to remind to do this more than once.
      
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      - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
        
        socketz Feb 18, 2016 7:21 AM (in response to heatherausmus)
        
        Agree that responding to and thanking users that report their success back to the forum is key. I also have a small group of non-company power users that actively respond to questions, and I try to extend other professional courtesies to these guys as well.
        
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        Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
        
        Emilie Feb 18, 2016 12:22 PM (in response to socketz)
        
        So another dimension to the National Instruments support model that might be relevant here:
        Using reputation/points tracking, we surfaced up technical super users (called them Knights of NI...Monty Python reference). These were non-employees that had answered on the order of thousands of questions. We started giving them the ability to mark questions as Correct as well, since, in some cases, they probably knew more than some of our younger, less-experienced engineers just joining the forums. We didn't open the ability to mark questions as correct to just anyone, because these questions were very technical in nature but we did want to leverage the community to help us curate the good answers from the non-helpful comments. Once a community member had proven himself/herself, we gave them the authority to start helping (and also rewarded them with more points, obviously).
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        Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
        
        socketz Feb 18, 2016 2:42 PM (in response to Emilie)
        
        This is an interesting approach Emilie Kopp
        
        This is an example of what I referred to above as "professional courtesies".
        
        I think the most effective means to build loyalty with any group of users is to extend a series of these courtesies as a reward for the desired engagement behavior.
        
        Early access to development boards and software
        Roadmaps/Webinars that focus on new products
        Soliciting feedback on new product ideas and features (leverage the ideas module for such)
        Swag like t-shirts/jackets
        Special Badges and privileges online which indicate proficiency
        Etc.
        
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Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?

Toby Metcalf Mar 29, 2016 11:58 AM (in response to heatherausmus)

Sorry I am late to this discussion, but it is an excellent one.
I prefer to have the Original Poster mark the answer correct and do not encourage my engineers to act right away. If there are multiple answers within a discussion, we ask the original poster to indicate which solution helped them the most.
I believe if we provided all the answers, we would actually lose thought leaders as they would not get the opportunity to participate.
We are focused not on the Correct Answer metric, but creating the behavior where community members take action and inform each other.
Best,
Toby
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- Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
  
  heatherausmus Mar 29, 2016 1:31 PM (in response to Toby Metcalf)
  
  Thanks Toby Metcalf, I usually tend to follow this approach too. But, I feel like I need to mark questions as correct this time as case deflection is a main KPI for my upcoming new community and I'm a little stuck on whether showing behavior change in marking answers supports it and / or that views alone are enough of an indicator for case deflection. I just don't think it's going to build a strong enough case of return for the community... however, over time I do plan on reporting more on behavior changes and educating stakeholders, but I think it has to come after I've already demonstrated community business value. I do see us not doing this for the lifetime of the community and I do plan on asking the authors of the questions to mark the correct answer from day one to encourage that behavior.
  
  Related (and not sure if I mentioned it above, but I've also heard of some community teams that do an audit of X number of new questions, or X% of total new questions, in a time period as a way to report on quality of answers, % of questions answered (without being flagged correct) and the breakdown of who (employee vs. member) are answering questions. I've contemplated this approach too, but the time to do this remains a big question and concern for me. As the lone wolf it may be too much as this time.
  
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  - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
    
    Toby Metcalf Mar 30, 2016 6:45 AM (in response to heatherausmus)
    
    Good day Heather Ausmus
    I do track answer rate and even have a formula for $ saved due to correct answers, but focus on driving the behavior rather than the metric. I also do not have a promised time to resolution in my community :-).
    As you mentioned in your 2nd paragraph above, I do track: New Questions, Correct Answers, Responses, and Engagement Rate. 80% of answers come from my customers.
    Cheers,
    Toby
    
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    - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
      
      heatherausmus Mar 30, 2016 12:46 PM (in response to Toby Metcalf)
      
      When you ask the authors to mark the correct answer, do you post it as a public facing comment, send them a personal direct message or a combination of both depending on the author / question?
      
      I've done the combination, but I was just curious to hear what you do and if it works well.
      
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    - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
      
      Adam Arrowsmith Dec 5, 2016 6:51 PM (in response to Toby Metcalf)
      
      Hi Toby Metcalf,
      
      Answers by customers vs. internal...I'm very keen to start tracking that. I've not seen an CMRs that really address that aspect so can I assume you craft the report yourself? What approach do you use for doing so? Do you just pull data out via the REST API or DES? Have you assigned all internal employees to a special security group? Thanks!
      
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      - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
        
        Toby Metcalf Dec 6, 2016 5:47 AM (in response to Adam Arrowsmith)
        
        Good day Adam,
        To pull this data (Who is providing answers), I use a tool called Hyperion - although it is very powerful, it is not the easiest tool to use.
        Analytics and measurement are things I would like to see Jive improve so third party tools are not needed.
        Best,
        Toby
        
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      - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
        
        Caton Guilbault Dec 6, 2016 7:44 AM (in response to Adam Arrowsmith)
        
        Hey Adam,
        
        If you have access to the database you can query for this, here are a couple of threads on the topic:
        Re: Using Postgres SQL queries and Excel to determine non-employee answers
        Re: Re: Has anyone been able to query ideas/discussions?
        
        I'm sure you could pull similar data from the DES if you don't have access to the DB directly.
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        Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
        
        Adam Arrowsmith Dec 6, 2016 8:13 AM (in response to Caton Guilbault)
        
        Thanks Caton. I'm on Jive-X cloud so can't go direct at the DB, but DES and REST API are certainly what I'll be looking at.
        
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- Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
  
  gbrettmiller Mar 30, 2016 6:10 AM (in response to Toby Metcalf)
  
  Toby,
  
  That is an interesting distinction between "correct answer" and "which answer helped them the most". We have often found that the "right" answer according to technical / process documentation isn't always the "best" answer for the person asking the question based on their specific situation.
  
  Like most here, we prefer to have the person who asks the question to mark a reply as correct since they are really the only ones who know if the answer is correct for them. But some (many) questions are so generally applicable that if the (officially) correct answer to the question goes unmarked as correct, we do have a member of the support team mark it correct.
  
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  - Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?
    
    Toby Metcalf Mar 30, 2016 6:50 AM (in response to gbrettmiller)
    
    Agree G. Brett Miller : you can take a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink (mark an answer correct).
    In my case, my team makes the request for the original poster to take action and if nothing happens after 3 weeks, we mark it correct. Not for the metric: to make answers easier to find.
    Best,
    Toby
    
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Re: Do you train and require that company support roles within your community mark answers as Correct?

biray Dec 3, 2016 5:31 PM (in response to heatherausmus)

This is a great discussion. Thanks for prompting this, Heather Ausmus.

We've also been trying to understand this data to learn if it has any significance in user engagement.

To add another layer... how does "Assumed Answered" play a role in your interpretation of this behavior? There are times when a correct answer isn't as obvious. And the discussions that take place offer enough variety that marking 'assumed answered' makes sense - of course, either the author of the question or an 'admin' can mark 'assumed answered', but the one catch - assumed answered is also triggered in jive (System > Settings > Structured Outcomes) where Min # of 'helpful' replies automatically marks a questions as "assumed answered"? So, how does this impact your #min?

Looking forward to continuing this discussion.
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