Communities are becoming a key aspect of work life and customer communications.
One of the strangest experiences of my life was attending community college. I was fresh out of the military and unsure of what to do with the rest of my life, other than get out of the service, so I enrolled in the local community college in my hometown of Redwood City, Calif.
Community colleges have been around since 1901, but really took off in the 1960s as a two-year alternative to the first two years of university study. The cost of a community college education is about one-quarter or less the cost of a university education, which was ideal for me because I was putting myself through college with the GI Bill and a part-time job. Community colleges are also a great place to explore different areas of academia if you’re not sure of what you want to study.
Community colleges are called what they are because they are meant to serve the community—specifically those who are in geographic proximity of the campus. They are open to anyone who has graduated from high school and they provide educational programs and services to those who otherwise would not or could not have enrolled in a college or university.
Back when I enrolled in community college, it was commonly referred to as a “high school with ashtrays,” since in those days you could find desks with ashtrays in each classroom. If you smoked, you could sit in the back of the classroom during class time and smoke down a ciggie with impunity. Looking back from today’s vantage point, that whole smoking thing was kind of bizarre, but that wasn’t the primary reason why community college was such a strange experience for me. The strangest thing was seeing some of the cool kids from my high school years still sitting in community college classes rather than living the glamorous, successful lives I was sure they would all lead after high school.
There was the popular blonde cheerleader who looked—how do I put this delicately—like her glory days were definitely behind her. There was the hot chick, who was so far out of my league that I knew I’d never have a shot with her, looking like she could have starred in a “Don’t do drugs” commercial. There were other high school heroes I stumbled across who I imagined would still be living a life as fabulous as their high school lives had been. But they weren’t. After four years in the military, I thought I had put high school in the rearview mirror, but seeing some of these people brought back memories that had the effect of motivating me to transfer to a state university posthaste. While the community college had its purpose in serving the community at large, high school was a community that I had hoped to never cross paths with again.
Fate was kind to me in that I obtained my bachelor’s degree within four years of my leaving military service and a few years after that, earning my MBA at Santa Clara University. Being in the middle of the high-tech mecca of Silicon Valley after graduation naturally led me to a career that involved technology. This was where I first discovered professional communities, more commonly referred to in those days as forums or message boards.
Forums actually predate the ubiquity of the Internet in businesses with some of the first bulletin boards appearing in the late 1970s, but web-based forums didn’t take off until about 1994. These early forums, the forerunners of today’s communities, were places where people with similar interests held conversations in the form of posted messages. Moderators and administrators ensured that participants stayed on, or close to, topic, which could vary with the interests of the forum members. Each new topic, or thread, was open to all members.
These forums or message boards eventually morphed into what we call communities today. I can see why. The word “community” sounds so much more inviting to my ears than “forum,” which sounds like a nerd hangout. Communities often have more of a social bent to them than forums ever did, but the members of the online communities always have something in common. In the contact center industry, communities today are often comprised of customers of a particular company, or users of a specific product or service. In fact, an entire industry has grown around the concept of Internet communities.
Evidence of the growing importance of communities in the customer service profession was Verint’s acquisition of community platform provider Telligent in 2015. Verint has continued to invest in contact center communities, expanding from supporting customer communities to including employee engagement communities. According to Jon Allen, vice president and general manager at Verint, “Using fragmented solutions to engage with customers and employees is a thing of the past. Having forums from one vendor, blogs from another, activity streams from yet another and so on can result in a disconnectedness—the very thing those tools were individually designed to prevent. A community platform where all of these separate applications are available via a single interface helps enable connectedness around the common interest.”
Allen adds, “Having a community in the contact center—whether it’s customer- or employee-facing, or even both—is an excellent way to help improve communications, deflect calls, locate expertise and resources, improve efficiencies and gain insights about those integrations. Let’s take into consideration the next-generation consumer and employee—the millennial. Millennials have grown up in a world of convenience. They have a yearning to be different, yet still want to belong to something greater. When they research something, they ask a friend or go online. They even go online to ask a friend. And, when that friend is not immediately available, they find and gravitate to those with common interests that can help. If companies want to keep the interests of millennial consumers and employees, online communities provide a great answer.”
In the workplace, millennials are likely responsible for the pressure that industry executives are feeling today to establish and support employee communities. To better understand the interest in communities with the next generation of workers, I turned to one of my favorite millennials, Janine Stephan, communications coordinator at Verint. “It’s no doubt that millennials are a social generation, and many of us want to engage with our coworkers to help promote and improve our connectedness across the virtual enterprise,” she said.
“Community solutions are important because they are real-time and always available when we need information from others with the same interests,” Stephan continued. “The tools that really resonate and gain traction are usually equipped with modern advancements and capabilities that mirror what we are accustomed to on social media channels—outdated systems that don’t embody fresh, trending features just won’t cut it. I generally see a great deal of compassion among my generation for the work we do, and this translates into how we feel about the companies we work for. Having an employee community platform to magnify that sense of belonging provides an easy avenue to fuel job satisfaction levels. Companies without employee communities may be missing out on further ways to engage today’s workforce, keeping them invested and loyal to their work, customers, colleagues and more.”
In the years since I finished grad school and began my career, my attitude toward community colleges has improved. In fact, in recent years I’ve taken evening classes in music theory and classical guitar at my local community college and have enjoyed being in class with other working adults. If there were any high school heroes in those classes, I couldn’t tell.
My attitude toward communities in the workplace has not changed. I believe communities will be an increasingly important aspect of work life in the future, and an equally important customer communications channel in the contact center in the years ahead.