Whether it is part of your job description or not, helping users in community forums is always a great idea if you work for a company representing a given technology, product, or service. The key idea is to make sure that users don’t struggle.
But how do you know when and how users are struggling? Well, there are arguably many sources where you can get this information from, such as your support channel, your partners, and your consultancy department, if there is any. Just talk to them periodically and understand where the customers struggle the most. But another one that is becoming fundamental in today’s industry is community forums.
Community forums are full of users desperate for help. While one can see this as boring and tiresome, there are the ones that see this as an opportunity. I like to think in community forums as free feedback that would make my job easier. So the first part is getting to know which community forums users talk more about your thing and then try to provide help as much as you can.
But this is not always easy.
This blog post will describe the top five tips you should use while helping users in community forums. Each tip aims to save you from some known traps, while others aim to make your help really impactful. Let’s start.
1. Discuss before responding
Try to resist the urge to jump straight to conclusions. It usually doesn’t end well. Users don’t always describe the problem in a good amount of detail, and, more importantly, they oftentimes forget to set the right context. For this reason, someone can’t figure out quickly what the problem is.
For this reason, it is important to discuss the details of the problem and its context before offering any solutions. What may trigger you at first might not be what is actually causing the problem. If you read most of the questions asked on Stackoverflow, you will see that most of them turn into a gigantic thread of discussion.
If you are unsure about the problem but still want to provide an answer, post your answer in the form of a discovery question instead of a statement. For example, instead of saying “Please adjust the parameter X to increase the…” you can say — “What happens if you adjust the parameter X?” and leave the outcome for the user. If your hunt were right, the feedback would likely be, “Yay… that works.”
2. Highlight the problem in a few words
Even if you are not a professional writer, you probably have written something in your life, and whatever it was, it always started with a title and then the actual content. This is important in writing because the title drives the content and helps the person write to not deviate too much from what is being discussed. Titles are also important because they work as a quick giveaway about something.
When you jump straight to your solution’s meat without setting what it is about, users often get confused about what they are doing. Some might ignore this and hopefully expect that they will obtain a certain outcome if they follow the instructions provided. In contrast, others might be a bit skeptical of going forward with your solution. For this reason, before writing down the solution steps, try to summarize the solution in one big title.
3. Be empathetic 🙂
I will be a bit bold here and claim that most people trying to help people in community forums want to sound smart. I know I did this in the past, to which I feel ashamed. But if that is your case as well (nobody needs to know), try to do something else while helping: be empathetic.
This is important because sometimes we get so excited about providing answers and sharing our knowledge and experience publicly that we forgot how the person in the other might feel. Sometimes this is done intentionally (like trying to sound smart), and sometimes it is even involuntary because we get so hyped with our own words. Regardless, try to always put yourself in the seat of who is having the problem, and if the mistake is ridiculous, then it doesn’t hurt to joke about having had the same problem. It will help the person to feel just human and remove the “less than” feeling from their heads.
It never hurts to be nice 😇
4. Be as detailed as possible
Remember when you were young at school, and your teachers would come to you with things like, “you gotta be more organized if you want to finish this assignment.” Then you would end up wondering what they actually mean by being more organized. Like, could you be more specific?
Often-times, people throw answers in community forums but don’t give away the proper details. Whether people do this to force users to ask more questions is a mystery, but the reality is that you will create unnecessary work for users to follow your advice if you do this. If you know the answer, then please make an effort to provide the steps so users can achieve what your answer is about. I remember finding the answers I was asking in community forums. Still, when it came to get the answer and transform it into concrete steps of resolution — I would end up doing totally new research about the subject.
5. Follow up in the thread
This is not something you should do all the time, but it is nice to keep following the threads you got involved in. Why? You always learn something new by listening, watching, and reading new perspectives. It is also important to make sure that new people coming into the problem feel served. As the author of the solution, you want to make sure that it works for as many people as possible.
Perhaps the whole thread may get you inspired to write a blog about it, given the relevance and popularity. Following up on threads may be more than beneficial for you in this context.