Outsourced online community moderation

Jan 6, 2015SHORE Blog

With the constantly widening market for games over different channels played by millions of enthusiasts, companies strive to reach out to their gaming audiences through social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, online forums and gaming communities. This has spurred the need for online community moderation.

Online community moderation involves teams of people continuously monitoring and managing online forums, social media and game sites, paying attention to community interaction, and ensuring that the online community is free from offensive, unlawful content and people who propagate these.

Online community moderation would achieve the objectives of promoting a safe and entertaining experience for community members, as well as protecting the community from explicit, threatening, and even pirated content.

Some companies resort to using software management and monitoring tools, but human management of sites is more effective than these tools. Online community moderation is very time-consuming and this is why companies outsource the task to competent offshore providers. Not only does outsourced community moderation enhance customer experience, it comes with other benefits such as brand promotion and protection, improved subscriber take-up, increased revenues, and reduced operational costs.

Online community moderators improve customer engagement and retention by doing a variety of tasks:

  • Ensuring child safety and monitoring.
  • Determining the appropriateness of content based on customer’s guidelines, and removing content as necessary.
  • Logging and reporting improper usage and user names for further regulation.
  • Explaining guidelines and answering users’ questions.
  • Ensuring postings and comments are properly categorized and posted.
  • Troubleshooting customer complaints and communicating resolution to customers.
  • Escalating concerns to supervisors and managers.
  • Monitoring, logging and reporting any technical issues within the site.
  • Monitoring the community’s feedback that serves as valuable customer data.
  • Mediating among community members when there are contentious topics or issues.
  • Encouraging community members to participate more and be active by promoting and organizing events, contests and other activities.