In Before The Lock is a podcast from Erica Kuhl and Brian Oblinger about community, customer experience, and leadership at scale. Listen and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Pocket Casts, and everywhere that podcasts are found.
🔓 10: Back to Failtown
Erica and Brian return to Failtown to tell tales of some of their biggest screw ups. We innovated these failures so that you don’t have to.
#Fail
🔓 9: Everyone wants a cool dashboard
All about community measurement - Part 2: Targeting specific stakeholders, designing effective reports, and telling compelling stories.
Designing Reports:
Telling Compelling Stories:
Erica’s Blog: Story Time
🔓 8: Just say No to Page Views
All about community measurement - Part 1: Building a framework to measure performance, defining KPIs and health metrics, and partnering internally to accelerate your efforts.
Framework for measurement:
What are the business problems (Goals) you’re trying to solve?
“We need to reduce our support costs”
What is the approach (Strategy) you will take to meet those goals?
“We will build a self-service support community”
How will you measure (KPIs) the performance of your strategy?
“Dollar value of community-served support queries”
What data (Metrics) will you need to calculate your KPIs?
“# Visits, Survey Results, Cost Per Case, Community Cost”
KPIs, health metrics, and program-specific measurement:
Sponsored by:
Vanilla cloud-based customer community software. Drive loyalty, grow sales, and reduce service costs
🔓 7: This is not a popularity contest
Building a Superuser program, selecting the right members, and launching it into the world.
Superusers:
Sponsored by:
Vanilla cloud-based customer community software. Drive loyalty, grow sales, and reduce service costs.
🔓 6: So far, so good
Our live session at the 2020 Virtual Comm Chat Summit about our biggest fails unironically ends in failure due to severe weather, Brian pivots to live Q&A, and Bella saves the day.
#BlackLivesMatter
Failure Stories:
The intention of this episode was to swap stories about the biggest fails we’ve made in our careers and share lessons learned. We will publish those as a separate episode. Thanks to the audience for being gracious as the storm wreaked havoc on our plans!
Bella:
Community Books:
Building Brand Communities by Carrie Melissa Jones
Social Customer Experience by Dave Evans and Joe Cothrel
Social Media Marketing by Dave Evans and Jake McKee
Learning vs. Experience:
🔓 5: A whole bag of crap
Understanding users’ motivations, designing community gamification and swag programs, and triggering Erica with U2 puns.
Ranks, rewards, & reputation:
Swag:
Sponsored by:
Khoros software and services help you win, serve, and grow customers across social marketing, digital care, and branded communities.
🔓 4: Somebody’s going to eat your lunch
Defining “customer experience”, cultivating a customer-first culture, and building a program to meaningfully improve across key touchpoints.
#SaveFerris
Customer Experience:
Sponsored by:
Khoros software and services help you win, serve, and grow customers across social marketing, digital care, and branded communities.
🔓 3: Sell the why
Assessing if your company is ready for community, crafting a vision, and building your plan to gain alignment.
Building a vision:
“Community is a numbers game.” - Joe Cothrel
Building a plan:
Resource: V2MOM
Resource: OKR Planning Template
Resource: Plan on a Page Template
Sponsored by:
Khoros Syndication allows you to amplify community content throughout search, purchase, and support in a simple, scalable way.
🔓 2: The next normal
Living in lockdown, trends and predictions for the industry, and how empathy will guide us forward.
#covidlife:
Trends and Predictions:
“The worst time to plan for a crisis is during the crisis” - Brian on Twitter
Okta CEO on their virtual conference (subscription required)
Sponsored by:
Khoros’ Atlas Community is a community for community professionals to connect with peers, share best practices, and discuss digital customer experience.
🔓 1: Join the circus
Navigating a layoff, how to approach looking for a job, and that time Erica didn’t hire Brian.
Brian’s layoff experience:
Looking for a job in community:
Resource: Resource: CV Template
Resource: Leveling template
Sponsored By:
Khoros software and services help you win, serve, and grow customers across social marketing, digital care, and branded communities.