How to Infuse User-Generated Content Into Customer Service
Bringing user-generated content into your customer support organization results in better-quality support at a lower cost. Get started on infusing UGC into customer service with these three tips.
Let your customers tell you what their big questions are – and let them answer these questions themselves. That’s the main takeaway from T-Mobile’s impressive results with user-generated content.
A few factors combine to make peer-to-peer support highly effective. As we discuss in Part 1 of this two-part series, user-generated support provides answers that are more relevant and more useful. Plus, because search engines love UGC, user-generated help content is easier for customers to find.
There are multiple benefits for brands, as well. Because it helps users solve problems more quickly, peer-to-peer support improves customer satisfaction. It lets organizations build a knowledge base on the fly, instead of having to craft one from scratch. And it saves money – millions of euros annually, in the case of T-Mobile NL.
How can you begin leveraging UGC in your customer service organization?
Employ a UGC-friendly platform
First and foremost, you need the right technology in place. T-Mobile uses the inSided platform for self-service and commerce to infuse UGC into its FAQs – the “secret sauce” that helps it deflect thousands of support calls per year.
inSided isn’t an FAQ platform. Rather, it powers customer communities and conversational website integrations.
At T-Mobile, customers can go to the community to ask and answer questions, or simply browse the FAQ page to find the solution they’re looking for.
Plus, there’s no need for T-Mobile to create an FAQ from scratch. All its community managers have to do is identify the best answers from within the community and link those to its FAQ.
Less effort and fresher help content – with inSided, T-Mobile enjoys both.
Integrate the different elements of your online service matrix
What’s also key to T-Mobile’s success with UGC is the depth of its community integrations.
To improve the reach of user-generated answers, the company integrates community content into the search tool on its main website. That means when customers search for an answer, they’ll see not only “official” T-Mobile content but answers that the community created.
The inSided platform’s API makes this integration possible. The API also enables T-Mobile to pull key data into its FAQs, including responders’ avatars and usernames. This information “humanizes” the content that customers see inside the FAQs – while also signaling that there are more answers to be found on the standalone community.
Engage customers and incentivize activity
The dynamic elements within T-Mobile’s FAQs help drive traffic to the T-Mobile community, facilitating a virtuous cycle. The more visits the community receives, the more people sign up and post answers. That, in turn, leads to better, more relevant content that other customers can use.
In addition to leveraging the tools within the inSided platform to boost engagement, T-Mobile leans on a cohort of “super users” to post and edit much of its community content.
These super users are critical to the company’s UGC-oriented service strategy. They create about a quarter of the content in T-Mobile’s customer community, acting as a kind of human knowledge base that other customers can tap into.
T-Mobile keeps these expert customers engaged by not only giving them a dedicated space on the community to interact but inviting them to its HQ for in-person strategy sessions.
T-Mobile’s holistic approach to building community is paying big dividends. Today, roughly 10 percent of T-Mobile customers are community members – and they answer nearly two-thirds of the questions posted on the community.
