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Crowdsourcing Customer Service and Support

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Crowdsourcing Customer Service and Support
Peggy Carlaw , January 8, 2012

If you’re not already crowdsourcing your customer service and support, it’s time to consider doing so. Why? Smart businesses are always looking for ways to help their customers. And when you can help your customers and minimize expenses, why not? What is Crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is using your “crowd” of users as the “source” to help other users. It allows the number of customer issues you can handle to grow without your needing to incur additional labor costs. By letting users participate in the customer service and support process, it puts them center stage, engages them with your company, and increases loyalty. And by monitoring the crowd, you get new ideas. Who’s Crowdsourcing Customer Service and Support Today? Pretty much any company with a user forum. Here are just a few: Have a Blackberry? Maybe you use Crackberry. Kevin Michaluk launched this user supported site and according to MyCompete, Blackberry.com traffic increased 49% in 2010 while Crackberry.com increased 107.4%. Intacct uses crowdsourcing to encourage customers and partners to create, refine, and vote on ideas for improvements to the

Intacct system through their Customer and Partner Portal. Their fall release included 31 new features that were crowdsourced from the 8,000 users who participated. Have you bought anything from Best Buy? Then you probably know about the Twelpforce, a user supported community for all things tech purchased at Best Buy. There were over 80 postings the day I checked. But What If We’re Not a Big Company? You may notice the companies referenced above are larger companies. However the cost of software has come down making crowdsourcing customer service and support more affordable for the SMB market. Check GetSatisfaction, NapkinLabs, or UserVoice for affordable software to help you get started. How to Use Crowdsourcing for Customer Service and Support In addition to providing a forum for customer service and support, you can consider some of these ideas from NapkinLabs: Brainstorm new opportunities collaboratively with customers, employees, vendors, and partners Get focused feedback on your products, services, promotions, etc. Run photo contests with user-generated pictures and videos to use in your marketing materials Post challenges to get new designs for packaging or feature updates

Collect “voice-of-the customer” testimonials to help your sales team close business Check out the Success Stories from GetSatisfaction customers for more ideas. For example, Intuit’s Mint, a leading online personal financial site, used GetSatisfaction for crowdsourcing and within 90 days, saw a 75% reduction in support tickets. What to Expect When Crowdsourcing When you start? Not much. You’ll need to promote your community to your users just like you’d promote your product or service to your prospects. And you’ll need to assign someone to moderate the community and answer questions until you get enough users actively participating. It will take 1,000 or more users to get a community active because according to the 90-9-1 principle, 90% of members will be lurkers logging in now and then to ask a question, 9% will contribute on occasion, and 1% will be power users. According to John Bernier, a Manager within the Emerging Platforms group at Best Buy and former lead of Best Buy’s Twelpforce initiative, when they started Twelpforce in 2009, they weren’t sure what to expect. However, they found that with some good foundational guideposts and training tools, the crowd began to organize and govern itself. Leaders popped up as coaches or mentors, and pretty soon they had a really good support network in place. Crowdsourcing can reduce the burden on your staff, save money, and engage your customers. Will you be part of this growing trend?

Summary
Crowdsourcing is using your “crowd” of users as the “source” to help other users. It allows the number of customer issues you can handle to grow without your needing to incur additional labor costs. By letting users participate in the customer service and support process, it puts them center stage, engages them with your company, and increases loyalty. And by monitoring the crowd, you get new ideas.

Description
Here are some ideas from NapkinLabs on how to use crowdsourcing for customer service and support:

*Brainstorm new opportunities collaboratively with customers, employees, vendors, and partners.

*Get focused feedback on your products, services, promotions, etc.

*Run photo contests with user-generated pictures and videos to use in your marketing materials.

*Post challenges to get new designs for packaging or feature updates.

*Collect “voice-of-the customer” testimonials to help your sales team close business.

Tags: Crowdsource, Crowdsourcing, Knowledge, Open innovation

Posted by Tim Satterthwaite

Jan 10, 2012 09:08 pm GMT Viewed 1741 times

Author: Peggy Carlaw Source

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