Moderation, a key factor for a good customer experience

Moderation, censorship or a necessity for the digital customer experience?

In a world where the number of social conversations around brands is increasing, it is difficult to have an eye everywhere, all the time, and to be reactive when it comes to controlling hundreds or even thousands of content pieces. Facing fake news, false reviews, insults, and other horrors that can be found on the internet, discover why it is important to protect your customers and how it will improve their digital customer experience.

#1 To remove risky content

The internet is a paradoxical space in which you will undoubtedly find the most beautiful things but also the most inappropriate content (violence, hatred, aggression, defamation). To avoid this outburst of passion happening on your spaces and coming to obstruct your users’ journey, it is important to control the content that reaches their screens or to always keep an attentive eye. There are three main types of risky content:

• Texts (comments, reviews, responses…)
• Images (photos, illustrations…)
• Videos (posts, clips, lives…)

Moderating your spaces to reduce the impact of risky texts, images, and videos should be a top priority if you want to offer the best possible customer experience.

Take, for example, a product that a visitor would like to buy on your e-commerce platform and imagine that they are looking at the product photos posted by other users to get an overview. If you are not attentive to the content that is posted, at best, this visitor will come across photos that do not represent the reality of the offer. In the worst case, a malicious individual will have taken advantage of this space to share gory images, child pornography, or racial hatred.

It is in these cases that the work of a moderator allows to streamline the buying process by partially or completely removing content that is likely to shock your visitors.

Even if an internet user is capable of differentiating your offer from inappropriate content, they will make an association between the two, and you will lose credibility. Worse, if they are shocked, they will leave your site without ever coming back.

#2 To improve trust

If we take its definition, in the strict sense of the term, trust refers to the idea that one can rely on someone or something. The verb “to entrust” (from the Latin “confidere”: cum, “with” and “fide”, “to trust”) means that we entrust something precious to someone, trusting him and surrendering to his goodwill and good faith.

Trust must therefore indeed exist in the buyer-brand relationship because it will allow the customer to make their purchase under the best conditions. It’s a good thing because that’s one of the main challenges that moderation addresses.

One should never underestimate the image that you send digitally. On the internet, it’s like in life; we never have a second chance to make a good impression. Moderation, by domino effect with our first point (Removing risky content), makes it possible to protect your social pages from content that could give a wrong image of you and make you lose the trust of your visitors. Moreover, by removing inappropriate content from social or commercial pages on the web, the moderator (or moderation tool) allows exchange spaces to gain clarity, readability, and simplify the overall user experience.

Attention: Moderating the content on your pages improves trust. Censoring negative content does NOT.

It is important to make the right decision regarding the deletion or retention of content. The balance between moderation and censorship is delicate. Consumers are not fools and a variety of positive content on a page will undoubtedly attract suspicion about your honesty. The same goes for feedback on your service.

• 68% of consumers have more confidence when they see both positive and negative reviews.

If you manage to combine the three factors: security, transparency, and quality, you will enable your visitors to experience an optimized digital journey in which an atmosphere of trust will develop.

#3 Access to Information

The third reason why moderation is essential for a good customer experience is that it facilitates access to information with a capital “I”. There are several forms of misinformation that moderation fights against.

Misinformation in the literal sense

There is the problem of fake news, which are commonly referred to as “Fake News”. These fake news stories are a scourge that is very difficult to deal with. As we mentioned in the introduction, the amount of UGC (User-Generated Content) published every day has become uncontrollable due to the advent of social platforms, and users almost freely publish their photos, videos, and comments. In short, this allows anyone to say anything.

Fun fact: If you want to know how many posts are published every second in the world according to the media, take a look at Internet Live Stat, you’ll be amazed.

Each social network implements its moderation policy against fake news, but the threat is still new, not well-defined, and the boundary with censorship is very thin. Before taking radical measures, Twitter has initiated a public conversation with its users to establish guidelines on the issue of online manipulation. Source: Siècle Digital [Should political deepfakes be deleted or not? Twitter hesitates and consults its users]

Moderating your social pages therefore helps to combat misinformation by removing content that does not cite its sources, deliberately attacks without evidence, and attempts to manipulate public opinion. From the user’s perspective, the customer experience is of better quality since each content gains in veracity and therefore in interest.

Misinformation about a product/service

The second type of misinformation that moderation helps to combat is misinformation about products/services.

There are two types of buyers online, the naturally confident buyer and the buyer who needs reassurance. For the second type of buyer, the one who needs reassurance, 4 factors are crucial for a serene purchasing decision.

If you have an e-commerce platform, these four points are the key factors to give access to information about a product. The same goes for a platform for apartment rental services, for example.

As a sales platform, it is therefore important to control/moderate this content to ensure that the products you feature comply with net decency rules. This concerns your digital reputation.

Among these 4 factors, reviews are certainly the one that has the most impact on today’s digital customer experience. Codeur mag has dedicated an article to the question of managing your online reviews. To learn how to identify and manage them, discover their article with all the tips to know. [Google My Business: how to deal with fake reviews?]

The list applies to reviews on Google My Business but you can apply this methodology to several contents and on all your platforms.

The benefits of managing online reviews increase every year, like Net Reviews, publisher of the Avis Vérifiés solution, which raised 32 million euros in early November 2019 to accelerate its expansion in Europe and America.

#4 Listen to your communities

In addition to streamlining the internet users’ journey, giving them access to real information, and strengthening their trust in you, moderation allows companies to:

To be informed 24/7 about activity on its social media platforms and potentially prevent crises, to know what is really being said about them, and to provide simple responses to recurring comments/questions – these are the range of services that we have been offering at Netino by Webhelp for over 20 years.

If you also want to secure, manage, and animate your social pages, we invite you to browse our website and contact us.