ip.board Finding solutions made easier

[Guest IPS News]

 

You’ve got questions, and you’ve got answers.

 

One of the glorious benefits to running a thriving community is its ability to be self-sustainable. We’ve added new Solved features available on both standard and self-hosted plans.

 

While you’re working on growing the community’s presence (and the bottom line), your members are busy connecting and engaging with one another. In addition to you and your team answering questions, peer-to-peer networking is an efficient way to increase support and quickly attend to your members’/clients’/customers’ needs.

 

Invision Community’s previously existing Solutions feature allows a topic starter, as well as community moderators, to mark a reply inside a topic as the solution to the question. We’ve added a green block for the member who started the topic that encourages them to mark a response as the solution. This is only visible to them and not other members participating inside the topic.

 

Quote

 

If any of these replies answered your question, please take a moment to click the 'Mark as solution' button on the post with the best answer.

 

Marking posts as the solution will help other community members find answers to their questions quickly. Thank you for your help!

 

 

 

 

 

Here is what the new Solutions button looks like:

 

 

Not only did it receive a style update, but more importantly the topic starter can now receive periodic emails reminding them to revisit their topic and either re-engage until a solution is found, or mark a previously-posted answer as the solution.

 

Community leaders have the ability to turn this feature off, or set the number of days before an email is sent (the default is set to 14 days).

 

Here is an example email:

 

 

We also added a Solved report in the Statistics section of your Admin Control Panel.

 

The report consists of daily snapshots taken within the community. The platform then records the percent of topics solved, as well as the average time it took to find a solution. This helps you understand pain points in your community, as well as what kinds of questions get answered and how long it took for a solution to come to light.

 

 

 

Benefits of your community using Solutions:

 

• Cuts support costs: Customers help one another so your team can focus elsewhere.
  
• Builds a library: Community answers are easily searchable & shareable for future customers.
  
• Gives props: Reward customers for answering questions with Achievements.
  
• Empowers members: Customers help themselves by asking questions and finding answers.
  

 

The new Solutions features are available in an upcoming update to version 4.7 of our platform.

 

The Solutions option is located in: Admin Control Panel -> Community -> Forums -> Forums -> Select desired Forum -> Edit -> Display Settings -> "Enable Solved?" Toggle + "Allow the topic starter to mark solved?" Toggle

 

Thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments!

 

Continue reading...