How Chat Moderation Services Enhance Omnichannel Brand Trust
Chat moderation is the management and supervision of online chat discussions to ensure they comply with guidelines and foster a safe environment for users. Companies can outsource chat moderation services with contact center BPOs to monitor all communication channels, enhancing trust between customers and brands.
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Table of Contents
In today’s hyper-connected digital landscape, maintaining trust and safety across every customer interaction is more important than ever. As online communities grow and communication channels multiply, businesses face mounting pressure to moderate conversations effectively and in real time. This guide explores the critical role of chat moderation in omnichannel customer experience (CX), offering practical strategies to protect your brand, foster positive engagement, and build lasting customer trust.
Key Takeaways
- Moderation is essential to omnichannel CX because it ensures consistent, respectful, and brand-aligned communication across all customer touchpoints, building trust, protecting users, and enhancing overall experience.
- Human moderation vs. AI highlights the need for a blended approach: AI offers speed and scalability, while human moderators bring empathy, cultural nuance, and context-aware decision-making that automation alone can’t replicate.
- Strategic benefits go beyond compliance, including reduced PR risks, stronger customer relationships, deeper community engagement, and valuable insights that inform business and branding strategies.
- Choosing the right outsourcing partner means looking for 24/7 availability, multilingual support, proven experience with high-volume platforms, a balanced human-AI model, and transparent reporting for continuous improvement.
Not Just Filters and Flags: How Chat Moderation Services Enhance Omnichannel Brand Trust
Online communication can seem as untameable as the Wild West, but moderators perform the heavy task of reviewing and removing potentially harmful content online—evolving from the simple task of filtering profanity to comprehensively enforcing appropriate standards of behavior and communications in chats, forums, and social media groups. Sixty-five percent of online communities rely on moderators to enforce rules, and 85% of platforms use community moderation with professional moderation to review potentially harmful content.
Communities put safety first by moderating 10,000 actions per day on average on a large social media platform, reviewing and acting on flagged posts in 6 minutes and most commonly removing hate speech at 30% of removed content. The work pushes the global moderator industry into one worth billions as of 2023, helping communities preserve trust in our increasingly online world.
Learn how to do the same in your community. Follow these tips for enhancing brand trust through automated and live omnichannel moderation.
What are chat moderation services in omnichannel CX?
Omnichannel customer experience is a customer’s interaction with a business via phone, text, chat, video, and social media interactions. Ideally, customers receive consistent high-quality service no matter the channel or platform, but nuances in communications from medium to medium can alter the experience, creating a pressing need for moderators to help guide a uniform experience in appropriate messaging on both sides of the communication aisle.
Businesses turn to chat moderators to review all content, enforcing rules and community guidelines to create a safe space for customers and agents to interact across various touchpoints in the customer journey.
Get a clearer picture of the scope of chat moderation services through these basic tenets of the process:
Who: Live agents, or chat admins, manually moderate content, allowing for greater contextual understanding but often overwhelming the individuals reviewing unhealthy or harmful content. Gitnux reports 55% of moderators experience burnout.
To ease the burden, automations use Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to understand human language and filter harmful content in automated moderation.
What: All posted content should be scanned for adherence to your company’s guidelines, including messaging, images, and even videos and audio. Work with developers and chat moderators to control the types of images shared across chat apps.
When: Pre-moderation removes content before it reaches the recipient. Post-moderation screens and removes content after a user reports or flags it.
Why: Building trust with your audience allows for an equal exchange of information, helping customers feel valued and safe as they can expect to be treated with respect in all channels of communication. Moderation protects users and your brand from harmful content, keeps conversations on-topic, cultivates positive relationships, helps your business understand customers better, and increases customers’ engagement with your company.
How: Chat moderation requires communities to set standards for brand regulations to ensure that the subject, language, and sentiment of messages rightfully align. Through a mix of automated and manual moderation, admins can navigate specific challenges (voice moderation is particularly tricky to regulate), giving warnings to reported users or blocking specific features or users.
Types of moderated channels
Chat moderation services of course apply to more than just chat. Regulate your customer interactions in these main channels of communication:
- Text messaging apps. Whether your audience uses WhatsApp or Messenger, you can monitor text communications and proactively address potential issues before they escalate.
- Web chat. Keep your website’s live chat professional by equipping it with automated moderation tools that filter inappropriate and irrelevant messages. You can also protect your chat messaging in your app’s communications and in live event chats.
- Social media. In the age of virality, a social media crisis can spiral out of control faster than wildfire. Monitor comments and messages via Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, and more to accurately portray your company’s messaging and values.
Why brand trust depends on real-time moderation
Cultivating your audience’s trust in your brand requires more than just a quality product. It also demands a high-quality customer experience. Your forum represents your company’s values, directly communicating to your customers what behavior and treatment they can expect from your brand. Carefully and mindfully manage this messaging by proactively addressing issues and fairly enforcing guidelines.
Ultimately, real-time chat moderation ensures your business removes anything that could inaccurately represent you, helping customers connect more authentically and safely engage in your services.
Customer perception and brand safety
We always want customers to perceive our businesses in the most positive light, but that also requires stepping up and taking responsibility for the community space you’ve created.
The more you demonstrate to customers that you stand by your values and consistently enforce rules, establishing a tone of respect in all communications, the more customers will perceive you as not only an authority in the group but also as a business leader worthy of their respect and engagement.
Customer perception and brand safety go hand-in-hand. Protecting your customers means protecting your business.
But what happens when moderation fails?
Automations can mistakenly flag content, limiting your engagement. Subjective split-second judgments can introduce room for human error or misinformation.
Our fixes involve a mix of these important strategies:
- Simplify prompts and specify trigger words.
- Continuously test and fine-tune your models to adapt with changing behaviors.
- Implement a customer feedback loop to improve the quality of reports by users over time.
- Combine AI learning with human judgment to increase trust and reliability.
Impact across channels
It can be all too easy to focus on one channel of communication as you test your strategies. While gaining your chat moderation footing will give you a vital boost, one slip in one channel can significantly tank all your efforts. An error, however seemingly small, reflects on your entire organization.
Customers gather up pieces of evidence one by one to form their picture of you, giving you little room for error as you moderate up to thousands of communications every day in a variety of online places.
To combat the death by a thousand cuts, implement these best practices.
- Engage with your community. Get to know your customers and create or help them create meaningful, long-lasting positive experiences.
- Rely on your team. Implement healthy communication practices. Respect boundaries and workloads. Share advice for shouldering the burdens that come with moderation to reduce burnout.
- Use your tools. Manage the volume and frequency of content up for review by setting limits on how many messages a user can send within a certain timeframe or limiting certain requests to users with specific permissions. This applies to manually moderated content and automated moderations.
Beyond bots: The case for human-led chat moderation
As artificial intelligence takes the contact center industry by storm, it’s more important than ever not to neglect the role of human emotional intelligence in customer experience and chat moderation. Automations can solve a host of problems human moderators face, but they can also introduce more room for error, proving nothing is a one-and-done solution.
Where automation falls short
While AI technology is getting better at understanding human tone and conversational context, it still relies on human validation to learn cues, including regional slang and even sarcasm. AI tools struggle to understand false positives and negatives that comes naturally to humans, leading to misclassifications and inaccurate reviews and scoring of flagged content.
Correcting these mistakes takes additional time, resources, and efforts, including any clean-up required to set things straight with your users.
Benefits of human moderation
As stressful as manual moderation can be, customers rely on the nuanced understanding of living, breathing agents to handle escalations with empathy and care. Human moderators can also make more informed decisions based on context and cultural understanding, ensuring a higher level of quality control in your communications.
Human moderators can also set unique, positive, creative tones for reviewing content. Theme your messaging around your business to encourage interaction from and community with your audience.
How outsourced moderation strengthens global compliance and cultural sensitivity
Outsourcing your chat moderation services is a smart way to leverage the expertise of moderators from around the globe at affordable costs. Find agents ready to work in your field in the languages and cultural backgrounds you require by partnering with a company that tailors solutions to you.
Global Response offers multilingual support in 8 global locations and technology integrations to help you strike that balance between artificial and emotional intelligence.
Meeting standards like GDPR, COPPA, and PII
Our compliant teams also strictly adhere to all relevant regulations and guidelines, shielding you from the legal exposure that unmanaged chats can often face. Reduce errors and escalations with a team experienced in your industry’s guidelines.
Multilingual and regional context matters
Outsourcing also helps you avoid cultural missteps by supplying you with relevant localized teams well-versed in your industry, the language, and your audience’s needs. Trust in your dedicated agents to pass on their specialized knowledge and newly gathered insights from your community’s communications—possibly better than you ever could’ve imagined.
Case study
The proof is in the pudding: Chat moderation can prevent a major PR crisis for companies of all industries. Fusion CX helped a global eCommerce company struggling with fraudulent product reviews by implementing 24/7 moderation support, reducing fraudulent content in the first month.
Global Response implemented social media monitoring for Rack Room Shoes, helping the business customize the customer care process and expand coverage, streamlining escalation decision trees and tracking comments. The strategy offered the company a high-level look into branding strategies, saving 84% on monitoring and increasing coverage by 110%.
Choosing the right chat moderation partner for omnichannel support
Contact center BPOs offer chat moderation services for your omnichannel support, giving you plenty of options to choose from. Keep these core qualities at the front of your search to find the right chat moderation BPO provider for you.
- 24/7 availability: Your partner should be ready to collaborate and answer questions or requests on your schedule.
- Human + AI blend: An expert knows that sacrificing either human or artificial intelligence will hurt your strategy in the long-run. Find an outsourcing provider experienced at finding the sweet spot between all types of intelligence.
- Experience with high-volume, multilingual platforms: Read case studies demonstrating their approach to meeting unexpected volume surges or engaging customers of all backgrounds and languages. Determine if their strategies align with your values.
- Transparent reporting: Ask what metrics they track, how often, and what are their strategies for continuous improvement.
Global Response customizes strategies to suit each business. We offer access to cutting-edge technologies to empower agents to do what they do best: enrich the customer experience while delivering responsive, scalable, white-glove service.
Final thoughts
Moderation is a pillar of trust upholding the relationships between company and customer, not just a tech feature. Smartly moderating your omnichannel experiences helps your business not only live by your values, but also show customers that you respect and align with theirs, as well.
Ready to enhance customer trust at every touchpoint? Talk to our chat moderation experts.
