Having your forum can add great value to the customer experience. It can also be a cool branding tool on your Freshdesk support portal. Of course like any other segment of the website, on the onset development of the forum requires a lot of efforts, whereas later on it’s usually limited to moderation duties and maintenance. However, such routine can be not only ineffective but also boring.
Let’s have a look at how it can be improved.
Develop a plan and establish goals
Knowing the original purpose of the Freshdesk support portal’s forum like any other element of your business can help you create a plan and set the right goals. One of the most popular goals is creating a community which can also help people find answers to the questions on their own and when your agent is unavailable.
It can seem like this goal is rather practical than social, but as many surveys show, many customers like finding answers themselves.
Consider the main parties
When developing a Freshdesk support portal’s forum it’s important to consider the main parties or the key community participants who will contribute and use the forum the most. Your staff, mobile users, desktop users are the main influencers. Some people will access from mobile and will be searching for the simple answers, others will access from different devices, whereas your staff should be able to make announcements that will be visible to everybody.
In other words, it is important to treat your Freshdesk forum like a customer help center because many people would prefer seeking the answers there instead of calling or emailing directly.
Develop task- or topic-centric structure
The better the menu of your Freshdesk support portal’s forum is indexed and sorted by topics, the easier it will be for your customers to find the information. For this purpose, it will be much easier to use threads and layers too.
Encouraging users to create new discussions and in the right threads might be a challenge in the beginning, but it’s important to keep threads in order. Your moderators should be active to check either a newly created topic has been already created or not. If yes, they should integrate the discussions into single threads.
You should also think about fun, entertaining, “off-topic” discussions. Go ahead and create a special fun segment too.
Customize community forums
A user-friendly Freshdesk template that can insert pictures to the content along with customizable profiles can create a stronger community bond among your customers. Also, an ability of adding motto to the signature, links to social media profiles and pictures can magically “break the ice” and let people get to know each other much better.
Encouraging your moderators doing the same will also be welcomed by your consumers.
Create interconnections between forum articles and posts
Fresh new content is always welcomed. Your staff should work on harvesting fresh new pieces of news. However, focusing on just adding a new content is not enough. Ideally, your moderators should build links between the forum topics, posts and new articles in order to make forum’s life a lot more resourceful and interesting.
The final result that has to be reached should be a creation of the flow of links that lead from one topic to another, then to the knowledge base article and so on. This practice is particularly useful for the popular and helpful topics.
If you can manage to create this viral flow of links, you will keep your customers a lot longer on your Freshdesk support portal.
At the same time, the forum has to be user-friendly. It should be smoothly integrated with your Freshdesk support portal. Freshdesk templates and customization from Breezy Themes can help you ensure a pleasurable experience along the way.