1:30 – Andy Sernovitz introduces Nestor Portillo — Microsoft’s Worldwide Director of Community and Online Support.
1:32 – Nestor: We’ve been doing community for the last 15 years. He describes Microsoft’s strong communities on old technology: News groups — and how they use different communities for different groups.
1:35 – Nestor: People are talking about us “out there.” How we listen is going to tell us if we have problems, even if people aren’t telling us or the call center.
1:37 – Microsoft built a series of databases to merge and organize ongoing conversations. They harvest data from online to see what the top issues and early warning signals are regarding their products and services.
1:39 – Microsoft uses freely available tools (social bookmarking, etc) to measure the influence of different talkers.
1:44 – Through Microsoft’s MVP influencer program, they have members of their community out there. They speak the technical language of the company, as well as the language of consumers in their areas.
1:47 – Nestor’s story: Microsoft had a glitch in a code in one of their products. He woke up at 6 AM and immediately saw a spike of conversation on Twitter. By 8 AM, there was a worldwide conversation. It was December 31st, nobody was available on the product group team. Nestor was able to quickly escalate the problem and fix the issue — thanks to their monitoring of social media.
1:48 – Microsoft’s social media strategy: 1. Listen; 2. Identify actions required based on what the community is saying; 3. Escalate issues within the enterprise; 4. Resolve issues; 5. Close the loop by ensuring customer needs are met.
1:50: Q&A
Q: How are you finding — in terms of accuracy of information — of what your MVPs are putting out there? What is your approach if you find one of your MVPs are putting out inaccurate info?
A: The community is self-policed. The biggest moderator is the community itself. As soon as someone makes a mistake, a spike in conversation occurs and Microsoft is able to see issues as they arise. The team then engages the MVP, if necessary, and resolves the issue.
Q: You mentioned you have a lot of employees that blog, and we’ve seen a lot of issues with the SEC… what’s your policy? How do you enforce it?
A: That’s one of the benefits of joining the Blog Council, I met a lot of people with the same issue. Microsoft has one rule: Blog smart. Like the MVP communities, Microsoft’s bloggers self-police one another. Microsoft also asked their legal team for initial guidance.
Q: What expectation did you set for resolving individual customer service issues?
A: We are looking to be pro-active. We are trying to identify the potential problems before they become epidemic. There are a million conversations, and we can engage only so many. We try to make the content relevant and easy to discover.
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{ 2 comments }
Hello, I read the post and found several errors:
- We’ve been doing community for the last 15 years instead of 50 years
- It was December 31st, nobody was available on the product group team instead of Customer service team
- We try to make the content relevant and easy to discover instead of conversations
Could you fix it?
Thanks
Nestor,
Updated! Thanks for the follow-up clarifications!
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