Your Customers Deserve an Online Community—Not an Algorithm

Providing service where and when your customers need help is a must in today’s digital-first world. When your customers are looking for your help in social channels, you need to meet them there, too.

Social media has long been a place for companies—from the smallest mom-and-pop operations to the Fortune 100—to engage with customers, provide information, and allow them to interact with other fans of the brand.

The problem, however, is that many brands are leaning too heavily into public communities and have realised they’re left with little control of their customer interactions. They’re often at the whim of the platform, especially when it comes to their customer data, privacy, and security.

This is why companies are turning to private online communities such as Verint Community to provide a personalised, asynchronous, customised experience that is completely within the brand’s control.

To see the effects of leaning too far into public social media platforms, we don’t have to look beyond what we’ve seen play out at Facebook in recent weeks. First, the social media giant experienced an extended outage to both its namesake platform in addition to Instagram. Then, a former employee appeared on Capitol Hill to testify to the Senate about the inherent dangers of the algorithms used by the company. And now, we’re hearing a buzz that Facebook is expected to announce major changes, including adopting a new name altogether.

When companies give up control of the customer experience and customer data to a public platform, they can’t be sure that the social media outfit has that company’s best interests—or those of its customers—in mind. Rather, your brand’s content is affected by algorithms aimed at pointing the user to the content the algorithms deem most pertinent.

This leads to company’s content appearing in a newsfeed with a homogenised look that doesn’t allow them much, if any, brand differentiation. Also, there’s nothing stopping your company’s content from appearing in the newsfeed next to polarising or otherwise problematic content such as political extremism or misinformation.

Verint Community gives a brand full control of the look and feel and functionality and a direct line to their customers with forums, articles, messaging, self-service and many other features such as ideation and gamification that just aren’t available on something like Facebook. These features allow for the brand to be in control of the channel. Not to mention, you’re not left wondering if the platform itself is going to go offline, change layout, or maybe cease to exist altogether, as we’ve seen happen with social media channels in the past.

Brands can assert their values and goals within Verint Community—part of the Verint Customer Engagement Platform—while guiding the customer journey in the way the company knows best. And, unlike on a public community, all the user data and meaningful conversations it has with its customers is owned—and, most importantly, protected—by the brand. So, rather than worry about your customers’ data being in the hands of an outside platform, you can use that data to learn more about your customers to better serve them in the future.

With the extended functionality of Verint Community, including blogs, calendars, media galleries, wikis and messaging abilities, companies aren’t only providing a better customer experience—they’re also building better business outcomes.

The features found in Community deflect more calls from the contact centre than a third-party social media platform through a more focused exchange with brand experts and other customers that are heavily invested with the brand. This results in significant time savings for your employees and money savings for the business.

In a way, this represents a “taking back” on the part of enterprises, which are relying on their own expertise and knowledge of their customers to deliver great engagement. Verint Community personalises service by creating an entire service ecosphere—rather than merely filling in the blanks that social media channels can restrict you to and relying on fleeting measurements such as “likes” and emojis to gauge customer satisfaction.

To learn more about Verint Community, request a demo today.