Drive customer engagement with intuitive and easy to use community forums in Zoho Desk. Your customers can ask questions, provide answers, or share ideas for the benefit of the larger customer community. While your Support Manager will create forums to organize discussions into units or relevant topics, you can see an overview of the community, view the most recent posts and access the dashboard.
Community Overview
The overview provides you a quick perspective of the activities that took place in your community. There are 6 prominent sections displayed on the overview page:
- Metrics by Topic type
- Activity Graph
- Category Information
- Quick Actions
- Announcements and
- Leader Board
We will look into each of these sections in detail but before that, here is how you could access the Community Overview:
- Click the [Module] Tab from the top bar.( For e.g. Dashboard, Community, etc.)
- Select Community from the Modules menu.
You will land upon the Community Overview page.
Metrics by Topic Type
The Metrics by Topic Type, will help you monitor the various topic types like Ideas, Questions and Problems. You can see how many ideas had been suggested and how many were actually implemented. Likewise, you can also view the total number of questions and problems raised in your community and how many of them were answered and solved, respectively. These metrics will help you monitor the responsiveness of your agents and to ensure you stay relevant in the mind your customers.
Activity Graph
The activity graph is a line graph that compares two variables. It will show the the total number of posts that were created in your forums and the total number of replies, during the last 30 days.
Category Information
This section will list the various categories that are available in your Zoho Desk. It will display the forums that are available under a category and the total number of posts in each of the forums. Also, a separate section called Popular Posts will help you track your most popular forum posts based on their views. The popular posts are typically pulled from across the forums in a category.
Quick Actions
The quick actions menu on the side bar allows you to manage the various categories that are available in your Zoho Desk. You can click the 'Manage Categories' link to perform actions like add, edit, lock, disable etc., on the categories and forums in your community. You can also post an announcement from the quick actions menu.
Announcements
This section will display the most recent announcements that were posted by you in the community. By default, it will display the three most recent announcements and you can click 'See all announcements' to view the rest of them. Announcements are typically pulled from across the categories in your help desk.
Leaderboard
The Leaderboard recognizes the valuable contributions agents make to your community. It shows the top five most active community members based on the number of replies or responses they have made. The goal is to promote participation and some healthy competition, giving credit and visibility to the people who contribute the most in the community.
Recent Posts
The recent posts tab will show an aggregate view of the recent posts that were made in your community. This will come handy if you would like to respond to forum posts as and when they are received. By default, the recent posts view will display the articles from across all of your forums in a category (read as current department). However you can sort and filter the topic types, forums and categories to view posts specific to them. You can also find additional information about an article like, the number of upvotes, working status and the number of responses etc,.
The recent posts tab will also display a couple of other contextual information on the side bar. They are:
- User Actions (control panel to view posts/comments pending moderation, reported spam, inappropriate, trashed and moderated)
- Forums (the forums that exists under the current category)
- Announcements
- Most Discussed (stacked based on the number of replies received in them)
- Most Popular
- Sticky Posts (posts marked as sticky, will show up in this section)
- Leaderboard
Here is how you could access the Recent Posts in your community:
- Click the [Module] Tab from the top bar.( For e.g. Dashboard, Community, etc.)
- Select Community from the Modules menu.
- In the Overview page, click Recent from the left panel.
You can view the most recent posts on the following page.
Community Dashboard
Zoho Desk provides some in-built interactive dashboard for your community based on the metrics that matter most. You can view five different kinds of dashboards for your community. One, for the entire community and the other four for each of the topic types like, questions, problems, ideas and announcements.
Each of your dashboard will contain up to 6 different kinds of graphs and charts that will help you provide better support to your customers. The dashboards can be viewed for pre-defined time periods like the last 7 days and 30 days or over custom time periods. The different types of graphical representations on a dashboard are given below:
- Portal Usage: This widget will display the total number of topics that were created in your community and the number of replies posted in it. Besides this, you can also view the number of posts created under individual topic types like Discussions, Questions, Problems, Ideas and Announcements.
- Topic-Response Trend: This trend is plotted on a line graph that compares two variables. It will show the the total number of posts that were created in your forums vs the total number of replies posted in it.
- Responsiveness: It is a pie-chart that will display the percentage of topics that received a reply and those that didn't incite any reply. Alongside the chart, you can view the system generated response rate displayed on a 5-point grading scale and its associated feedback. This will help you track how often your agents engage your customers and how your customers view the community.
- Topic-Types Trend: This trend will display the number of posts that were created under the individual topic types on a line graph. It will help you to know what is trending in your community and also to monitor spikes in the topic types, if any.
- Topic Types Overview: The overview will display the percentage share of your individual topic types against the overall topics that were created in your community. Each pie slice depicts a topic type and its size corresponds to its percentage share of the whole.
- Unique User Participation Trend: This graph lets you know how many unique users are effectively engaging in your community. If the number of users visiting your community does not drop down (measurable using this dashboard or from WebAnalytics tools), but the participation levels have gone down, then possibly users are finding their queries answered – just the nirvana you want to achieve through your community.
- By Status: You can track the percentage of posts created under the various topic types by their working status. The pie-chart will let you know the rate at which your questions are answered or the ideas are implemented. Please note that the status graphs are available for the dashboards related to questions, problems and ideas.
Note:
- Administrator profile permission is required to access the community dashboard in Zoho Desk.
- The dashboard for Announcements will display only the Topic-response Trend.
Here is how you could access your community dashboard:
- Click the [Module] Tab from the top bar.( For e.g. Dashboard, Community, etc.)
- Select Community from the Modules menu.
- In the Overview page, click Dashboard from the left panel.
You can view the primary dashboard on the following page.
You can access dashboards specific to the topic types from the right panel.