Crowd sourcing customer service
Morgan Zuehlke suggests that a customer-to-customer question and answer site is a great way to handle customer support for certain companies, such as Apple:
Apple is unique. Their lifestyle-permeating products cultivate customers who enjoy providing answers to others with no evident reward beyond the satisfaction of shared knowledge. Not many companies are blessed with such dedicated customers. Taking the Apple.com customer-to-customer model a few steps further in the Yahoo! Answers direction, a Q/A system can involve call and response credits. This inspires users to answer each other’s questions in order to earn the ability to ask a question. This is precisely how Yahoo! Answers built up such an active body of users sharing an incredible wealth of knowledge (and lack, thereof)!
Dunder Mifflin is not the best fit. Much like creating a social network, this is not suited for every company. Here are some key questions to ask when evaluating whether or not the Yahoo! Answers model would be a good fit for your company:
1. Do my customers consider my product or service to be a part of their lifestyle?
2. Do we get a high volume of customer service inquiries?
3. If we have a message board on our company site, is it very active?
4. Do my customers have more than just one or two questions about interacting with my products throughout the course of our relationship?
5. Do my customers have things in common with each other?
If you can answer “Yes” to all of these questions, your company would likely be a good fit for a Q/A system modeled after Yahoo! Answers.
But he points out that the model fails unless the customers are passionate about the product, and unless they, for some reason, want to volunteer their time to helping other customers.
For other companies another approach is needed – offering small cash rewards to have customers help other customers. This would be similar to the community that grew up on the tech-support boards on AOL back in 1993 and 1994. Back then, AOL charged $2.95 per hour you were online, but the fee was waived if you volunteered time on the tech support boards.
What most companies need is software that allows for questions and answers, and which makes it easy to distribute small amounts of cash back to users who contribute a lot.