Forums foster community and branding, while providing service: Expert
Social media has given professionals new ways to connect and share information, and the payroll field is no exception
Payroll practitioners can connect with colleagues by joining payroll-related groups on networking sites like LinkedIn or following Twitter feeds of other professionals. But social media isn’t the only opportunity to share information — at least one payroll vendor has set up a forum to allow it customers talk to each other about the issues they’re facing.
When a company hosts an online discussion forum for its customers, the forum becomes an extension of the company’s brand and an easy-to-facilitate form of customer service.
Early online forums date back to the early 1990s, but are still relevant today, says Ernest Barbaric, a Calgary-based digital marketing strategist.
“You’ll find that people that are part of a community through a forum have a certain affinity for it,” he says. “In a payroll kind of a role, being a part of that community gives you an insight and gives you access to information that other people may not have.”
Last November, Toronto-based payroll services provider ADP Canada introduced some of its customers to The Bridge, an online forum where customers can post questions and receive an answer from fellow clients.
“Essentially, it will allow our clients — regardless of their role, company or sector — to be more productive by giving them access to other fellow practitioners who could help them get their answers quickly,” says Cathy Backman, divisional vice-president, service delivery, ADP Canada.
In March, ADP opened it to the vast majority of its clients and The Bridge now has more than 1,500 users. Comparing the platform to Facebook, Backman says the forum can be tailored by the user to make it a more user-friendly experience.
“Quite frankly, it’s sort of open architecture and you can design it in whatever way you deem fit,” she says. “People are really excited about social media in general and it’s just another very cool way for them to get answers to their questions in a different way without having to call up their provider.”
If a company is looking to increase online traffic to its website, Barbaric encourages the use of open forums because it can be indexed by search engines.
But closed forums — like The Bridge — have their advantages, too, he says
“It sort of becomes an exclusive club or sorts where you’re part of this secret club that has access to all of this information that a lot of other people don’t really have,” he says.
Closed forums also achieve what ADP Canada is looking to create — a customer support area, Barbaric says.
“They’re a terrific way, from my perspective, to empower clients to share their knowledge and experience by posting and answering questions,” Backman says. “What we’ve found is when they describe a two-line question other people in the community will actually often times come up with a clever way of answering their question than perhaps the procedural way.”
Keeping the forum closed also allowed for ADP to have ownership over its operations.
“We wanted to control it,” Backman says. “With the huge desire people have to communicate in a variety of different ways, we wanted to show that we were very forward in our thinking, as well. So let’s create this site ourselves.”
Being able to read conversations between clients benefits ADP, as well.
“We find, as a company, we learn from them,” she says.
When initially creating a forum, Barbaric encourages his clients to seed conversations to encourage users to become more active, calling it, “priority number one.”
“You’re going to have to get as many people as you can to get in there and ask questions and have communication between each other,” he says. “When somebody new comes in, they can see that there are things here for me to ask, people to talk to. It’s immediately welcoming.”
When ADP launched its forum, it selected a number of clients to begin initial conversations before opening it up to the rest of its clients. These members have since become moderators for the group.
Moderators are an important part of a forum, according to Barbaric.
“You have the administrator who is sort of the top dog, and then you have your moderators, which are the next level below,” he says. “If somebody says something negative or bad that doesn’t fit into your terms of use, then they have the ability to ban the user or edit their comments. They’re fairly active and their responsibilities are brand management and conversation management.”
Moderators should be knowledgeable and quick with their responses, he says.
At ADP, they refer to their moderators as subject matter experts.
“We actually have someone reviewing the site to say if any question remains unanswered for a period of time, we immediately send an alert to the people on stand-by to immediately answer the question,” Backman says, adding there is a maximum limit of four hours for the question to remain unanswered.
“What we found is we’re actually not answering a lot of questions ourselves, they’re answering them between themselves,” she says.
LinkedIn groups
A common resource for many Canadian payroll professionals is the Toronto-based Canadian Payroll Association (CPA).
With an active Canadian Payroll Association Discussion Group on LinkedIn, it appears as though the organization may have its own answer to ADP’s The Bridge — but looks can be deceiving, according to Janet Spence, manager of compliance services and programs at the CPA.
“Whatever is on LinkedIn is not ours,” Spence says. “We don’t offer comments because we don’t have a social media person, but we do have the info line that our members can send the legislative question and we answer them within four hours.”
They do observe the group to discover any trends, she says.
“We’ll look around to see what’s there, what’s being posted and if there’s anything on there that’s incorrect and needs to be brought to our attention,” she says. “We put our ears to the ground because it’s not just about the CPA — we have to hear what our members say.”
The CPA doesn’t have any immediate plans to develop its social media presence.
The organization would prefer members call the its hotline, which received 38,000 inquiries in 2012.
Canadian Payroll Reporter introduced its own group on LinkedIn in November 2011.
Intended to develop a supportive community of actively working Canadian payroll professionals, discussions have developed around post-employment source deductions, important legislative updates and year-end reporting.
The Payroll Professionals Group is monitored by Canadian Payroll Reporter editors to ensure conversations remain focussed strictly on what members will be interested in — emerging payroll trends, payroll task-related issues and job opportunities.
Readers can join other Canadian payroll practitioners already in the group by going to LinkedIn and searching for “Payroll Professionals Group.”
