Resource Management
Although resource management is of clear benefit to a moderation specialist in cases where moderation is outsourced, there are still benefits to be gained for organisations undertaking their own moderation. The more time that is dedicated to moderation activity, the more vital it becomes to understand when users post, in order to ensure that moderation is structured around times of peak usage.
Some types of message boards get as high as 86% of their posts in the evening, meaning there is little point allocating resource equally throughout the day as the daytime moderators will have nothing to do most of the time, whilst the evening ones will be permanently behind.
Understanding the posting pattern for each message board stops this happening. Ideally a basic model of when users post should be drawn up, and this applied to the monthly prediction [Figure 1].
Figure 1 - Above is a model drawn up for one of Chat Moderators’ clients based on data collated manually over a period of time. The pink line shows that there is a clear peak late morning/early lunchtime, followed by a lull, followed by another, smaller peak. Such data was put to good effect by Chat Moderators, as it was then applied to the predicted number of posts (Figure 2, row 35) to produce a moderation pattern (further below, vertical coloured columns).
Figure 2
Figure 3 - As each column represents a moderator (and each colour a board or set of boards that the moderator is working on) it can be seen how important statistical information can be, as in this example being 10% out can mean, in effect, paying 2 people to do nothing.
Although this level of detail is nothing like as important for clients with smaller sites, an overview of this kind of information is important for editorial reasons. This is simply because the sooner an offending post is removed, the less people see it, and the less chance there is of a full-blown argument breaking out, or of significant damage being done.
So even if you were only to be moderating for 3 hours a day, rostering those 3 hours around peak times will serve to reduce the problems that occur outside of these hours, enhancing the overall user experience. This of course applies whether the moderation is outsourced or in-house.
Chat Moderators currently provide human moderation services to brand owners across Europe and North America.