Why Customer Service is Ripe for Enterprise Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is very often cited for the execution of simple tasks as part of larger jobs, but less frequently is it taken into consideration for the execution of activities of complex, continuous, critical enterprise core business processes. But it is being proven that this becomes a real and immediate option if the crowdsourcing process is able to compete with the outsourcing option that enterprises have.
Let’s take into consideration one of these processes, probably one of the most critical for enterprises and, at the same time, one of the most intriguing for the contest between crowdsourcing vs outsourcing: let’s analyze the potential transformation of customer service with crowdsourcing.
With the social web in place, traditional customer service is in need for some major changes to keep up with customers’ needs.
In the traditional customer service model, internal agents or outsourced operators manage the customers’ requests; but, today online communities and social networks play a great role in customer service.
The reality is when most people face a problem with a product/service they ask their friends or look online for solution. However, not many companies take advantage of this fact.
With the right crowdsourcing solution in place, it is easy to provide tools for companies to leverage this opportunity and reach out to their customers online to facilitate peer-to–peer support, effectively crowdsourcing their customer service.
This is one move you should expect to benefit from...
One of the most important reasons for using crowdsourced costumer service is reducing the cost while providing a better service.
How is this achieved? By reducing the number of unnecessary calls to the call centers, thus reducing the cost of operation, deflecting the requests originated by customers towards crowdsourced agents, most of the time experts hired in the customers' community.
One might think what is the difference between the crowdsourcing customer service approach and forums used by many companies today?
Well, with crowdsourced customer service, companies can invite highly skilled members of community, existing customer base or any other online community, to provide support to other customers for rewards. In such a way a crowdsourcing approach to customer service can grantee A+ customer support simply by handling all requests through crowd or internal agent at all time.
As you have realized by now, crowdsourcing in customer service is different. Service-level agreements and quality-of-service require smart crowdsourcing.
What do we mean by smart crowdsourcing? Smart crowdsourcing is skilled-based, and where the assignment of tasks is not based on first come-first serve model but established on the skills of the each crowdsourced agent. To grantee the quality of service, the crowd must be profiled based on their skills and expertise.
The skills database and skill-based routing will be used to match the requests with community members according to their availabilities online.
We believe crowdsourced customer service will lead to happy customers, happy contributors, and happy companies.
To learn more about crowdsourced customer service, come see Gioacchino speak on behalf of CrowdEngineering at Crowdopolis.